Kingdoms of Amalur is a Western open world RPG, often thought of as a 3rd person Skyrim. It has most of the features you would expect from this type of game. An open world map. A huge number of side quests. Character creation, skills and leveling. Alchemy, blacksmithing and opening locks.You pick between 3 character types, the classic Fighter/Mage/Thief typesets, each one having different special abilities and able to use different equipment. You can also do a combination of the 3 if you want. The combat is quite fun, you combine your attacks with your special abilities and can parry and dodge too. It's nothing special and gets fairly repetitive after a while, but you have the option to change classes at any point in the game by use of a fateweaver and this helps keep it fresh. On the face of it, KOA seems like a fairly standard RPG for this gen, but there are two things I think it does really well. Firstly, the dialogue in the game is really nice. All quest givers have something interesting to say to you and a lot of the time they will even accompany you or provide some form of voiced twist, even in the smallest of side-quests. They also separate the most menial of fetch quests into a separate group called tasks. Secondly, the map is excellent. For a start, it's bright and beautiful with a great variety of environments and enemies. The connections between each area really flows well too, which gives you a nice feeling of continuity and makes it quite fun to explore. It's a pretty solid RPG which I think probably holds up to the reputative it received at release as a decent but not special game. It's cheap too so pick it up.

TST is like a time capsule of horror games, I mean... beyond things like walkmans and stuff, the rumors are like very basic and focused on confronting a ghost and giving a quick tragic story, then moving on to something else when nowadays horror games usually have you explore X place and tell you the history of that place, the ghosts and inhabitants.

At first I didn't like how open it is and how outdated it feels in conveying horror, but then looking online, I saw that it was based on rumors of ghosts IRL in Japan, which made it more interesting on an educational level.

The game uses scaled down photos + pixel art, but the ghosts are less pixelated photos of real people, but not sharp enough to realize it's a photo and I love it! it gives it an uncanny look that I adore but sadly failed to enjoy beyond that.
The stories are very simple and quick, and most of them could be summed up to 3 minutes instead of 2 hours and I still have 2 twilight syndromes to play, so I hope they're better qwq

My biggest problem with TST is that it's very simplistic! it drags its story a lot to barely tell anything, but from the cliffhanger of the ending, the next game is going to be much better and less simple since it's not going to be more mysteries in the school..? I hope?? idk
I spoiled myself to see what's up with the twilight syndrome and silver case relationship and yeah, I saw that it gets better in the future, but that's about it. TST really feels like a biiiiiiiig buildup that while I didn't enjoy as much as I wanted to, I hope it was worth it.

For the most part, I did enjoy this point-and-click adventure horror. It was released in 1998 so the language isn't the best. One particular ableist slur and demeaning toward mental patients. The main character, Max, refers to patients as "crazies" when they appear to be suffering.

Overlooking that, I did enjoy the overall story (in the real world). There are some surreal moments that make you question "wtf is going on" but in a good way during those chapters. The puzzles are mostly fun up to the last chapter, then it's just trial and error pattern puzzles. Awful design.

There are 9 chapters and 3 of them are "nightmares" where you don't play directly as Max. Those three were easily the weakest points in the game. They had very little purpose.

One chapter was so over the top "horror" that it became laughable. Imagine a horrible thing in a room. Then you move to the next room, where there is something more horrible. You move forward to the third room and GASP it's even more horrid! The game kept trying to one-up itself on horrible and evil things. Plus you knew it wasn't real so why bother to care? I was desensitized and only wanted to move on. Those chapters didn't need to exist. They only dragged out the game.

If the game could completely cut out, or least heavily condense those chapters, it would have been a tighter, more fun experience. I didn't need to see weird things happening in the nightmare world because weird stuff was happening in the real world that was more impactful.