Gravity Rush 2 is a bad game. Gameplay consists of boring mission after boring mission, with little to no clever use of its fantastic mechanics, which continuously hinders rather than improves it. It's a great concept that the developers clearly have no idea what to do with it.

That said, there are not many games I've had this much fun just messing around. I have little idea what the story is about, combat is a nightmare and missions range from frustrating to forgettable, but I've probably spent more time just aimlessly throwing myself (and people) into the sky than anything else in this game, and I had a lot of fun with it. When you're not feeling like throwing the controller at the wall it's a pretty comfy game.

It's an interesting experience that couldn't work in any other medium, but paradoxically enough, it doesn't work because it's a videogame. The moment I realized the things I was doing were morally wrong and still the game forced me to do them, I started feeling detached, and for good reason — I wasn't playing anymore but being played. I was being told a story instead of actively participating in it, preached about what the game wanted to convey. And I realize that's the whole point, that it is satirising war games and the possibility of choice would ruin the story, but at the same time, not being able to choose ruined the game side of it.
It's not about linearity, either. Videogames are all about goals. A game with a heavy focus on narrative and no choices like God of War works because the goal of both the player and the developer is the same: to aid Kratos and get to the end of the story. Same thing for Gone Home or Edith Finch, in which the players wants to merely be told a story.
In Spec OPS, their goals eventually start to drift apart: the developer wants to keep telling the story, while the player wants it to stop. And that's when it lost me. The degree of interactivity videogames allow when compared to movies and books, in which we are merely consumers that don't take an active part in any moment, makes it hard for me to simply accept moral quandaries whose outcomes are imposed on me. It's one of the reasons I didn't quite enjoy the direction The Last of Us 2 took. It's a great story about violence and revenge, but it loses its meaning when it forces us to do bad things and then try to make us feel bad for it. I didn't choose to kill all those people: the game made me do it. Instead of being moved by it, I feel cheated.
Maybe I'm being old-fashioned and I'm just not used to games trying to attain an emotional response this way, but there's gotta be a better way to tell those same stories without detaching the player's will from it.

This is legit better than the base game and pulled me back after it had completely lost me. Almost everything that sucked with it was fixed here. Characters in dialogue don't act like robots anymore, sidequests blend nicely with the main content and don't disrupt the pace, almost everywhere you go feels distinct and beautiful to look at, the story is actually good and managed to give Aloy some personality that's not just being perfect, the side characters are interesting and actually make you care for them, and it has the best quest in the entire game (which is a sidequest). Cheers to my mate Gildun

Carrion; or, the adventures of danger spaghetti

Pretty good. It's indeed short as I heard, but I think it was just long enough to not overstay its welcome. The game never gets too creative with its mechanics, as fun as they are, and each room doesn't give all that much freedom to tackle obstacles as you want. The length worked well in this case, even if the price tag might sound a bit steep for what you get.
Except for some bullshit sections which you can bullshit your way through, it's not very hard, and the game is very forgiving, with a checkpoint near every significant battle.

Spoilers ahead. I tried being vague.

Nier Automata is a good sci-fi story concept with some great ideas that gets hindered way too often by the fact that it sounds like it was written by a precocious teenage boy full of angst, like most of Yoko Taro's stuff; or it might just be his JRPG background's fault, as the same can be said for about 99% of JRPGs, although his games really border on that edge. The dialogue feels especially painful when heard in english. I have to try the game in Japanese when I have the time, though the little I played felt just as bad.

The characters are pretty forgettable. It relies so much on the plot and what happens to them to make us care that he neglects to give them any meat. 2B and 9S have their moments, but depends mostly on their relationship and the plot to keep us intrigued. Adam and Eve were cut off from the story just as I was forming any kind of interest in them. A2 lost me the moment she opened her mouth.

A lot of the sex and violence allusions also felt very heavy-handed and done for the sake of it, a throwback to that edge I mentioned before. I thought that maybe I was being harsh in my judgment and there was something I wasn't seeing, but after playing a bit of SINoALICE I realised that this constant, over the top and often pointless edginess is just a trademark of Taro's writing.

I also don't see the point of multiple playthroughs. They felt like just different chapters of the same story. It was interesting when it was first introduced in Drakengard and it served a purpose in that game, and kinda in the original Nier as well, but by now it feels pointless and self-serving — a common sin in works that are obsessed with being 'meta', such as Taro's — and just a choice in style rather than something that contributes in any relevant way to the narrative. It isn't as heavy-handed as Drakengard 3, but it's close.

Frankly, I feel like I would have "enjoyed" Automata far more if, instead of playing it, I had just watched a summary of it as I did with the rest of the franchise games. Both Drakengard and Nier were fascinating in my eyes, and Automata at its core had just as much potential (maybe even more) but seeing it through its entirety made me rather disappointed with the whole.

One thing I have to admit, however, is that it plays one of the tropes I hate the most (which I won't mention, because it's a big spoiler) in a brilliant way, and I can't remember any other work that made me feel that way.