I've always envied those people who love a game so much that they can play it for hundreds of hours and still have fun. I'd never been able to find a game like that for myself, unless you count league of legends, which I consider to have been an addiction, rather than something I enjoyed playing. My favourite games are generally self contained 20-30 hour single player adventures. The games that are largely considered replayable, on the other hand, are either competitive, grindy or sandboxy. I rage too much in competitive games, find grinding a boring waste of time, and don't really consider myself creative enough to come up with things to do in sandboxes. So it seemed like that infinitely replayable game in my life would forever elude me... until I played hitman world of assassination. While I would describe this game as sandboxy, it sufficiently provides you with a plethora of objectives to aim for, which means I'm not limited by my lack of inventiveness. These goals serve as the perfect guide for you to organically play with the game's mechanics in endlessly novel ways. There's seemingly a bottomless bucket of characters, disguises, interactions and tools to discover at every corner of every map. On top of this, it's absolutely hilarious in both gameplay and dialogue. I'm over 100 hours in without any sign of getting bored, and if I had to pick a single game to play for the rest of my life it would easily be this masterpiece.

Assassin's creed has always felt like a jack of all trades for me. It tries to do a lot of things but it's just okay at all of them, and this entry is no exception. Everything from the stealth, combat, exploration, story, rpg elements, etc. are good enough for what they are, but have been done better by another game. The quests are all very similar to each other, and the gameplay lacks the depth necessary to make these encounters feel fresh for very long. It doesn't do anything particularly wrong, but nothing about it really stands out.

The McDonald's happy meal version of botw. I used to think that the amount of open useless space in botw was a negative, making exploration more of a chore, but Immortals made me appreciate emptiness more. There's so much stuff packed into every corner of this game that it ends up losing its sense of adventure rather quickly. There aren't any secrets to uncover if the game constantly throws everything it has at you. Beyond that, the game loop got very repetitive very quickly. The combat is always the same button mashing, the "shrines" are always boring "push an object onto a button" and are way longer than they have any right to be, and those two things are pretty much all you do in this game. The narrators are also super annoying and need to learn to shut up. Visuals are nice though and the game managed to entertain me for a couple hours.

Pros:
- Beautiful graphics
- Interesting character drama narrative
- Very relaxing to play
- Great soundtrack

Cons:
- Janky controls
- The story kind of just ends without properly wrapping up loose threads
- Grandma was a bit of a mary sue
- Average voice acting
- After finishing, you have to restart the game if you want to go for any missing collectibles.

I admire what this did for the open world genre, but it's clearly an unfinished and flawed game. The criticisms I have are basically the same as the common ones, so I won't regurgitate it here. The only thing I'll really add is that the Devs themselves clearly knew the game was unfinished, as they added tons more content in ToTK. This is probably the first Zelda game that's been made almost entirely obsolete by its followup. This was the first Zelda entry for a lot of people, and I suspect that's the only reason why its average rating is the highest in the series.

I played this game a couple years after it came out but I completely forgot about its existence. I came across it again the other day and decided to give it another go. I do really love the premise of a pure platformer metroidvania, as I usually find combat the worst part of most action-adventure games. It also helps that the game keeps cycle based platforming (the worst kind) to a minimum, only sparsely including it in a handful of rooms. There are a few gripes I have with this game that keeps it from being a standout for me however. The biggest one is that it's too short - it can easily be beaten in less than 2 hours. Likewise it's a bit too easy, I felt like there wasn't enough in the way of precision platforming, or creative mechanics to make it more engaging. The game could've also really used a map even though it's short, a metroidvania without a map is kind of a nightmare. Lastly, at times the game goes for that annoying "I wanna be the guy" fangame trolls that were popular at the time but haven't aged very well.

Platformers are by far my favourite genre, so I was incredibly excited to give this game a go. It's hyped up as one of those indie masterpieces, on par with the likes of hollow knight and stardew valley. Unfortunately, it was off the mark for me in quite a few ways. Although the developers clearly did a great job with the player mechanics, their level design is in equal parts abysmal, absolutely putrid.

At its best, Celeste provides some exhilarating platforming that will make you feel like a gaming god, but at its worst, it'll make you wonder why you even bother playing video games. There truly are several decisions made by the developers that are just straight up game design terrorism. Here's a non-exhaustive list of them:

- A stamina mechanic that never needed to exist
- You don't know how much stamina you have left until you're already running out
- Frustrating cycles on moving obstacles that feel super inconsistent
- Momentum based jumps contradict basic intuition from real life physics
- Joystick controls are completely unusable due to forcing analog directions
- Difficulty is often increased by a negativist approach, through limiting the power of the player, rather than adding new mechanics that are harder to master
- Insufferable enemies that add unpredictability where it only serves to frustrate
- Hardest parts of a screen are often at the very end, so you have to repeat a large chunk of gameplay ad nauseum just to learn that part

The story is also incredibly mid, and the fact that people praise it blows my mind. It's one of the most on the nose takes I've ever seen on mental illness and the characters are all super one note. The fact that the dialogue is so mediocre only adds salt to the wound. The music can get really repetitive and annoying while you're grinding through the tougher levels, and they could've used a much more minimal soundscape.

With that said, the highs for this game are very high. When the stars align and the mechanics are all working together in harmony the game is truly a joy to play. Unfortunately the lows are much more frequent.

I was kinda disappointed by this when I first started it. I haven't played the first, so I wasn't totally sure what I was getting myself into. I was expecting a mario-style platformer with worlds inspired by different mental conditions. What I got was much more combat heavy, story focused, and with significantly easier and less inventive platforming. Once I accepted the game for what it was however it became a much more enjoyable experience. The story is really gripping, and explores lots of great themes, and the worlds were all unique in their design (although not really in their gameplay). Overall a good play but definitely overhyped.