shadsy
A terrifying anti-adventure game that rips your agency away in front of you. Rather than give you the illusion of freedom, the game drags you unwillingly through suspicious doors and unnatural conversations, deep into an abyss of conspiracy where you're the target. Artfully nightmarish and hostile to the player in a way few games will commit to.
2022
I really, really wanted to like Frogun. The finicky, gimmicky movement is true to the early 3D platformers from the 90s that this game was inspired by — in a positive way that reminded me of the fiddly charm of Bomberman 64 and Ape Escape — but whether this was intentional or not, Frogun also mimics the rough, imprecise design that makes those games difficult to enjoy today. I was having fun for a while collecting all the hidden gems and coins, but by the midpoint of Frogun, when I was repeating the same section of a level over and over, trying to nail a single awkward jump, the charm was gone.
2010
Bungie achieved something special here: a bleak, bombastic standalone prequel that makes the prologue to Halo feel like the end of the story. It's filled with so many half-realized, go-for-broke ideas — Wildlife? Civilian squads? Space combat?! — that you can tell they were getting restless and ready to move on.
1997
An all-time classic and a watershed moment for video games as spectacles. Operatic in scope, tone, and emotion. It would hold up if not for a string of baffling mid-game twists that upend the first half of the story for little benefit.
1998
It may be bad but it's also really sexist.
1999
Originally I loved this game because it's absolutely nuts from start to finish. It stayed with me because it has a big heart. Even though FFVIII is an absolutely batshit maximalist soap opera about a ragtag group of amnesiac, hot dog-obsessed, time-traveling child soldiers who are hired to kidnap the president, it's also an achingly emotional game about an anti-hero who learns how to overcome his trauma and open his heart.
Replaying this game 20+ years later, I was struck by how unrelentingly sincere it is and how deeply it bares its soul. Then in the next scene, you get shot into space out of a giant cannon.
Replaying this game 20+ years later, I was struck by how unrelentingly sincere it is and how deeply it bares its soul. Then in the next scene, you get shot into space out of a giant cannon.
2002
My lasting memory of The Sims Online is that the only way to advance was to grind your Sim's stats by using equipment like exercise machines, or making money by playing minigames. Instead of people building dream houses, they would turn their homes into dystopian experience farms. An unintentionally dark inversion of the wish fulfillment of The Sims.
1991
Inexplicably long and tedious but in a way that resembles Dante's Inferno, forever climbing deeper and closer to what you hope is the bottom.
1999
Hunter S. Thompson once wrote about the "high-water mark," the peak of momentum "where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
Donkey Kong 64 is the high-water mark of the collectathon platformer genre, where the form was pushed to its extreme and left nowhere else to go. Intimidating on paper, dizzying in execution, and when all is said and done, tiring. This was enough.
Donkey Kong 64 is the high-water mark of the collectathon platformer genre, where the form was pushed to its extreme and left nowhere else to go. Intimidating on paper, dizzying in execution, and when all is said and done, tiring. This was enough.
1990
While it doesn't rise above the same aggravating back-and-forth item juggling that plagues this series, it DOES have a scene where Dizzy makes a deal with Satan and stabs a guy in the heart with a trident, which is pretty cool.
1996
Pure mood. It's a collection of interactive music loops and psychedelic backgrounds that you navigate as a 3D dolphin (which looks surprisingly beautiful for a PlayStation 1 game). Just delightful to experiment with different sounds and zone out. The perfect 2am video game.
2008
16 years on, it feels like a 2008 idea of what an important game is supposed to be. The wide-open world is a work of massive scope and detail, and while it's fun to play around in this sandbox, the emphasis on total player freedom comes at the cost of focus. There's a lot to do, but not enough of it is meaningful. Your moral choices mostly boil down to whether to kill someone or not. After 8 hours of creeping around stealing cigarettes, I felt like I had done nothing but had also seen most of what this world had to offer.
1994
A fiasco. This high-production attempt at a Gothic mystery adventure in the vein of Tim Burton's Batman gets derailed by an unsympathetic cast, a directionless story, and an edgy sensibility that spills over into sadism. On the bright side, it's consistently gorgeous and terrifically scored by composer Ron Saltmarsh, who gives a pulse to the game's seedy underworld.
2007
If you like Halo, this is what you like about Halo. Giant tapestries of combat waged from the ground to the air. Heart-racing setpieces scored with Gregorian chants. Stealth-action sequences that feel like chipping away at a block of granite. It's all here in peak form. A cathartic trilogy-capper that plays like a greatest hits album of the entire genre.
2019
Galaxy brain puzzles. It rewired my brain so hard that for a few days, I had trouble looking at words the same way, which is the best outcome for a puzzle game.
But then there's a moment that happens midway through the game. If you know what it is, you know. It's like tripping a mental circuit breaker and starting the game over from scratch. It puts Baba is You over the top from being just a clever puzzle game to being a masterpiece of its genre.
But then there's a moment that happens midway through the game. If you know what it is, you know. It's like tripping a mental circuit breaker and starting the game over from scratch. It puts Baba is You over the top from being just a clever puzzle game to being a masterpiece of its genre.