I'll be vague but blunt. If you've played either of Sam Barlow's previous two games you know exactly what you're in for here - spend a few hours collecting a bunch of disjoint video clips so as to figure out "what happened." As in the previous two games, you can get as much or as little out of the characters and the clips as you want; you're entirely responsible for your own inertia and your own trajectory through the experience. There is one twist - one - which you will inevitably encounter after anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours of gameplay. It's an absolute mindfuck and it recontextualizes everything about the story you've been putting together, sending you straight back to every clip you've already seen and changing the scope and vibe of the game from that point forward. I had the... misfortune, maybe?... of discovering this twist fairly early on. It sent chills straight down my spine, but finding it so quickly may have made my gameplay experience shorter and shallower. But that's the way Sam Barlow's games work. (I found the climactic clip of Telling Lies like ten minutes in and then spent five hours filling in a story I just couldn't stay interested in.) Ultimately, I love the unconventional gameplay and - again, staying vague - this is easily Barlow's most artistic game so far. I'm sure I'll be reading discussions and theories and breakdowns for years to come. Play it alone in the dark late at night by yourself and make up your own mind.

Was a big fan of the first Life Is Strange and then never touched another game in the series for years. This one had its moments, but there was an awful lot of empty space and time in between them. Still a heartfelt story about a young woman helping people and wrestling with the choices she makes, set largely to folksy and twee ear pleasers and taking place in a carefully-rendered and fully realized environment - but the whole thing felt flatter and emptier than the original did five years back or whenever. Maybe the well ran dry. Maybe I'm just too old now and have too little time for hours-long LARP excursions.

Holy smokes, my first logging in ten months or so? Fellas the gaming game is rapidly passing me by. But not this game, a delightful and barely challenging game for babies in which I collected every wonder seed over the course of, I dunno, three weeks, concentrated into four or five nights of actual playtime? Look, I loved this. Loved the idea of each level going batshit sideways in its own hyperspecific way, loved the quality of life improvements over previous games in the series. Probably my favorite 2D Super Mario game since the SNES days? Low bar, but consider it high praise all the same. A better game might have thrown more difficult endgame content at me... says the guy who's logged two games total in 2023? Get the fuck outta here, self. Go beat Tears of the Kingdom already!

Had never played a Souls-like before this and depending on how you define the genre maybe I still haven't. Either way, this was enjoyable. A little too much emphasis on class variety, if you ask me. I maxed out most job trees at Level 30 without grinding, and very rarely did I need to switch up jobs to handle bosses. The story's predictably a messy disaster but it all mostly still works as either a prequel to or alternate version of the original Final Fantasy game. Ultimately this feels like a fairly minor and largely forgotten title - did it really only come out two years ago? Feels like five to ten! - but I really did enjoy it for the most part once I understood how to play it.

Short and beautiful puzzle game that played a lot like Braid. Most of what you do here is advance and rewind time as two characters traverse a predetermined path, solving increasingly difficult but never super-complicated puzzles that have to do with light orbs, switches, and orders of operation. Really dug the soundtrack and art direction here - these levels really feel like little dreamscapes and the story, though incredibly simple and predictable, tugs at the heart surprisingly well when all is said and done. Little puzzle game like this won't be for everyone, but I enjoyed my time with it just as much as I enjoyed how brief that time was.

Gorgeous game, impeccable detail. Would love to see more dumb war games do campaigns like this one - simple little vignettes that highlight forgotten or underexplored chapters from overstuffed wars, providing the barest skeleton of a historical lesson. That said, where's the Eastern Front? This game's got a level in which you take control of literal Nazis, killing at least two hundred American troops pushing forth over the Rhine into Germany. Give me Leningrad, give me Stalingrad, give me a glimpse of the side of the war where 15 million soldiers died instead of a fourth chapter from the Western Front where I play as the goddamn Nazis! Sheesh.

Played the first two Theatrhythm games ten years ago and they were little more than niche obscurities, little rhythm games on the 3DS for Final Fantasy diehards meant to scratch nostalgic itches. Chippy little MIDI battle songs, sweeping and bombastic orchestral stuff - it all falls into the same "hey, I 'memba that song!" basket, and that's really the extent of what those games felt like. Imagine my surprise then when I dug into this third title and found a full-fledged JRPG system in its own right, serving as a framing device of sorts around 400-something songs from the franchise. I dumped so many more hours into this thing than I ever imagined I would, not content just to "beat the game" but trying to complete every series and song and quest, collect every character, and boost each of them up to Level 99. Cooler heads are prevailing in 2024 and I'm recognizing that I'm just still so, so far away from achieving... any of that. I've got a PS5 now, I can't dump another thirty hours into this thing. Let's retroactively call it a 2023 finish - I'm overqualified, I beat this back in March and only sat waiting on "endgame" content for so long because I wanted to wait for Chrono Trigger DLC - and increase last year's logging output by 50% in the process. It'll be a better 2024 folks, I promise. Did I mention I got a PS5?

Easily the best "new console hardware demonstration" title since Wii U's Nintendo Land. Just an incredible display of what the DualSense controller is capable of, namely: precise gyroscopic awareness, highly resolved vibrations, incredible adaptive haptic technology in the triggers. Combine that gameplay with a quick and easy "story" about collecting old PlayStation controllers and memory cards and baby you've got yourself a very pleasant three-hour experience. Real shame how nobody is designing games around these console-specific features, though. Appreciate the future-proofing foresight, but it must be a total buzzkill for the designers and engineers who make these incredible components only to see them go to waste.

Time to call it. Got a genuine kick out of Biohazard after decades of mostly avoiding the Resident Evil series and hit the ground running here. Same first-person engine, same mechanics - there was nothing not to like! And yet, after only a few enjoyable hours and without making it through the Lady Dimitrescu section, I lost all will to press forward, to finish the fight. Weeks turned into months, months turned into a year, and I've only started and abandoned half a dozen more games since this one. I'm a mess! So yeah, time to acknowledge a failed effort and return this disc to my disappointed but patient friend. For me, Ethan's journey ends in perpetually being stalked by the tall vampire lady. Maybe he's happy. A veritable sea full of horny Deviant Art suggests that he should be!

Deeply silly but genuinely joyful puzzler-slash-playground from the creator of Katamari Damacy. It's tough to describe this one accurately while successfully selling it, but if the thought of a game with dancing anthropomorphic apples and pencils, a smooth and happy jazzy soundtrack, and boatloads of child laughter doesn't appeal to you, go right ahead and skip this. My complaints here are all related to the controls and the framerate - it just felt clumsy and clunky, especially late in the game. Otherwise completely delightful!

The "abandoned" status this site allows you to use is so freeing. Ten years ago, on Backloggery, a game like this would forever be marked as "unbeaten" in my backlog, and my young dumb ass would have poured fifteen hours into whatever campaign mode exists just to get it out of there in honest fashion. But here on Backloggd in 2021? Ain't nobody got time for that! I love it. The game itself was a semi-broken experience. Anecdote: immediately, somehow, I unmapped the "cancel" button and then whaever I went to use a cannon or a harpoon I was stuck forever. Took five minutes of searching online to figure out what the hell was going on. The concept is pretty cool! Yeah, you're a pirate. Go sail your boat. Go find some treasure. Get rip-roaring drunk, back at the bar. Deck yourself out in elaborate coats and hats like a fancy lad. But doing all of that for a few hours with my friends on a Friday night was plenty for me; any time we tried to advance the story we'd sink the boat or sell our hard-earned jewels to the wrong guy or whatever. This was dumb and this was fun, and there's simply no way we're going to all sit back down - together or solo - to play this for another 15 hours. So thank you, Game Pass! We were curious, we streamed, we shrugged and said "eh, no thanks!" And we're moving on with our lives and with our backlogs.

Enjoyed Her Story plenty when I played it on Steam a few years back. Enjoyed this spiritual sequel a little less, and it's easily the weakest game in the Annapurna collection so far. That's a bummer, because the scope and idea here are fairly ambitious! Like in Her Story, gameplay consists of entering search queries into a database and watching video clips that contain certain words or phrases. So in one sense you're just watching little fragments of a six-hour movie out of order. The problem is twofold. One, most of the clips are just one side of a two-way Skype or Facetime conversation, which means every time you find a five-minute clip, about two and a half minutes of it are silent reaction shots. I'd have appreciated the option to merge the two sides of any given conversation together upon finding a pair! Alas. And two, the entire point of the game is just to unravel what exactly is going on and how the various characters interact. Once you get the gist of the story, the entire rest of the game is just fleshing out details and filling in gaps, many of which aren't particularly compelling. It's cool that games like this exist and they make for interesting experiences, but the well already feels somewhat dry for this particular Sam Barlow game type.