Perfect example of a game I'm just not gonna finish here in 2021. Spent an hour and change getting four missions deep into this and just didn't have it in me to go five or ten more, even on easy mode, so I watched a three-hour Let's Play instead and called it a day. There's a lot to love about this, even if the execution feels a bit rough twenty unfair years later. It's not terrible but the fixed camera and a couple platforming segments make this almost unplayable by modern standards. Still gotta respect the overall vibes of what's so clearly a hack-and-slash Resident Evil inspired by Vincent Valentine, and I appreciate what this was, but I mostly think what it was a precursor to much better partial copycats.

Very tempting to call this "the prettiest SNES game you never got to play on SNES" or something similar but, get real, nothing on the SNES ran this crisp and smooth. Still, what a beautiful and beautifully retro-vibed game this was, often challenging, rarely frustrating, and impeccably designed throughout. The split personality subtext and mountain-as-depression metaphor could have been more subtle, but who cares? With a game this charming and snazzy, a properly told story is just icing on the cake.

Haven't played a new release sports game in fifteen years or so, and when this longtime Sony exclusive was made available on Xbox, on Game Pass, on day one, I knew I'd take the plunge. The gameplay is more or less what it's always been, and the things I loved and hated came down to the menus and game modes. Huge fan of the idea of a "diamond dynasty" in which you essentially build up a fantasy team of the best possible players from years past and present. Give this old-ass millennial Frank Thomas, Alfonso Soriano, and Pedro Martinez any day. The flagship "Road to the Show" feature felt like a total slog though, just tons of time spent simulating games and churning through mundane menu text. Huge bummer that you can only have three pitches with a create-a-pitcher, and if they've fixed that via patch by now, who cares? Too little, too late. Another huge issue: the servers constantly crashing. A minor annoyance when you want to start playing a game, but an enormous pain in the ass when you've just spent an hour on a crucial win of some sort and the network shits its pants and bails, erasing your hard-earned W. Need to tear myself away from this one because the dopamine hits associated with unlocking so many players and perks and cards are enough to addict a man, but the time spent here ultimately just isn't worth it with so many other games on the table.

Here's a long overdue update to one of the strangest and most memorable oddities of the N64 era. It's a rail shooter through and through with the crucial subtle tweak where instead of bullets you're shooting digital photos. I don't think this set-up works for any other franchise than Pokémon, and yet it works wonders with Pokémon. This is probably four or five times as big and long and full as the old game, but that also means it began to wear out its welcome just a little, little bit by the end of it all. Would love to revisit this over the years and keep fleshing out the Photodex, but we all know how rare a revisit is in this day and age. Hey, even if I never touch this again, I enjoyed this all the same.

Really enjoyed this in a way I've never loved a roguelike before. The art, the characters, the setting, and the variety of gameplay styles and strategies kept this from growing old and stale as I kept on failing and starting over again and again and again. My big regret here is not enabling God mode sooner, an adaptive difficulty setting that increases your defensive stats by 2% each time you fail. Why did I stubbornly waste 50 escape attempts before turning this feature on? You can always turn it off later if you want the additional challenge! I could easily see myself returning to this well again and again, if only there were so many more hours in the day. Alas...

Four years later and I've taken the dive. Tried this out for an hour or two a few years back and it left me as cold as a Zelda game could. This frustrated and half-apologetic Albert Burneko review sums up how I felt exactly (https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/god-help-me-i-dont-like-the-new-legend-of-zelda-game-1793718635). I'll co-sign on everything he said without repeating much of it, but I'll add that it was neither the limited inventory nor the extremely breakable weapons that sapped my spirits as much as it was the combination of the two. At any rate, that was four years ago and just earlier tonight I dealt the final blow to Calamity Ganon somewhere around the 60-hour mark after logging some heavy hours on this game in the past month or two. I already break it down in memory into three distinct 20-hour sections, each with a different vibe and experience. First came the flustered and overwhelmed and underjoyed component that I've previously described and linked to above. Everything kills you, you can barely climb halfway up a tree, the entire map is black and empty - honestly it just kind of sucks! And then bit by bit you fill out the map and increase your heart count and stamina bar and fill in some map locations, and kind of suddenly you're in the middle chunk of the game, much more confident and capable and empowered to explore. You fill out the map, you're tracking eight side quests at once, you've got multiple story threads unfolding in parallel while you bang out shrine after shrine. And then there's the final third of the game, when the shrines have started drying up and every hour you spend tramping around the vast-but-shrinking Hyrule is yielding diminishing returns on both your power-ups and your enjoyment, so, sure, let's just wrap the whole thing up in short order now. There's a fourth section of the game, an overtime third of the game if you will (that I will not be playing) which would give you a chance to clean up loose ends and track down every shrine in the game. I got to 85 and opted to skip at least half a dozen more that I knew would take fifteen minutes apiece to unlock and finish. Look, at the end of the day I liked this. I almost liked it an awful lot, and it got better and more enjoyable as I went along, and even by fifteen or twenty hours in it was very easy to forget all the headaches and heartbreaks associated with the game early on. But I mean, consider what that means. It means that for fifteen or twenty hours this game is exhausting and tedious and frustrating, and that just kind of sucks. The shrines themselves, and the hunts to find them in some cases, were a true delight and easily the game's highlight. And I thought the divine beasts were fun too - mega shrines, kind of - even if I'd prefered full blown temples. I appreciated more of this game than I disliked, really! But I would much rather play a Twilight Princess or a Wind Waker, let alone an Ocarina of Time, than this big and empty open-world adventure marathon any day. Credit to Nintendo for trying something new here when they could have gone fully derivative. But fuck all that climb-preventing rain, that was dumb as hell!

The story, concept, and execution are almost perfect but there's something about the whole thing that left me just slightly cold. Feels like it's caught halfway between a much longer and much bigger open world space sandbox and a much shorter and smaller and more fully polished space puzzle game - simultaneously overpadded and underbaked. How can this be? Probably just me, not them, and so on. Plus the soundtrack's a delight. I think I recognize everything about this that everyone else loves so much. I just wish it hit those same pleasure centers in my own tired, aging brain.

Still unsure whether or not "walking sim" is a pejorative but this is as good an example of that genre as any, along with Firewatch. Plenty to like here. Each member of the Finch family has their story play out with its own specific flair and flourish - minigames from different genres, specific artsyles, and so on - but the whole thing ends very abruptly and left me wanting more. That's not the worst thing a game can do, and I'll happily move on from this and hope it made enough of an impact to register in my memory a year or five from now.

I've got whiplash! Hard to imagine a bigger swing within the Annapurna Interactive Ultimate PS4 Collection than the one between Kentucky Route Zero and Sayonara Wild Hearts. This is an absolute zipper of an auto-runner and rhythm game, all speed and flash and gorgeous synth pop and neon motorcycle rides. It takes less than an hour to beat but shines and dazzles for each and every second. The developers called it an interactive music video, and that's perfectly apt. May genuinely be the shortest video game I've ever played but it rips like a damn Carly Rae Jepsen album so who am I to complain?

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.

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.