My first instinct was to regard this as a “flawed, but promising” take on the game-night horror boom - but as the experience sat with me, Ive started to realize: I dont think this game has a soul. I dont believe that the game itself' believes in its concept. Much like its subject matter, this feels like a stunt. A toothy-grinning facade hoping to capture nothing but attention, like a decoy predator. A skinwalker, a doppelganger. A veneer. It almost tricked me, almost got in.

Which isnt to say the game is nefarious. What Im saying is, I dont think its… well-meant. Theres an obscured hollowness to it. A fakeness. Plastic, dressed to look warm but when you touch it all you feel is cold - and there is a low-level deceptiveness to that. Your nerves sense it, they fill you with distrust. I withhold my trust from it.

This games existence is very strange to me, indeed. I'm unashamedly a fan of the first game, to the extend I'd call it an underrated classic. A game which, even at the time of release, I was the only person I knew in my entire friend group of games who even played it. Now, more than a decade later, the sequel appears. Years of development hell and to be honest, this game is lucky to even see the light of day, let alone be as... um, decent (?) as it is. Dead Island 2 has one and only one thing genuinely impressive about it, and that is its buckets and buckets of viscera and gore. You can go absolutely primal on mother fuckers, pick them apart with weapons that generate realistic looking flesh rending and mutilating depending on what weapon is used and where you strike them. The amount of hours that must have been put into making this work are absolutely commendable. Everything surrounding that, however, is just dull and uninteresting. Not even in a bad way, by all means, but everything seems so formulaic it borders on being white noise to accompany the sick and violent ways you'll pull apart the human (zombie) body over and over and over again. The game absolutely plays like a game that went from studio to studio, as the story and several of the gameplay elements seem very disjointed from one another, to the extent where the 'rage mode' available at the beginning of Dead Island 1 and Riptide is now pulled out and reintroduced about 50 percent of the way through the game for no reason other than to introduce a rather uninteresting and fairly lame story development. The existence of such a wide cast of characters does seem to encourage multiple playthroughs, but as there don't really exist any meaningful role playing opportunities, I don't really find myself drawn to doing another playthrough any time soon. Maybe in a few years I'll find myself nostalgic for it in the same way I feel for it's predecessor, but I will admit I highly doubt it. A very commendable effort by it's development team and well worth a playthrough if you're a sick bastard that likes me and enjoy blood and gore a little too much.

Maquette struggles in places to work as a game and doesn't always mesh well in its story-driven content either. Although I enjoyed some of the recursive puzzles a lot, there were plenty that were so obtuse and out there that they made me feel dumb when I worked out the solution. I don't think that's a marker of good ludic design if the way to play the game alters this much.

Sure, it's a beautiful looking game (although on PS4 suffers from significant frame-rate issues and stuttering) and the love story between the two feels like a modern, realistic attempt at navigating relationships.

That said, why is it told through a maquette world? What is the maquette of the gameplay and title really for? I get that there were some metaphoric connections between symbolism in the maquette and the real world, but it felt very tacked on. I learnt after finishing the game that this whole story WAS tacked on. Originally, the story revolved around a more fantastical setting involving a wizard trapping someone in the maquette. Makes more sense than what we got.

The game left me feeling frustrated, miserable and honestly quite bored.

This game would be a 10/10 if my biased opinion mattered.

I fucking love Mario Sunshine, call it nostalgia I do not care I love this game to death! But since I'm supposed to be professional and have respectful opinions and take, I will acknowledge that this game is unfinished, rough, and unpolished all around, even if it breaks my heart in half.

Super Mario Sunshine is the shortest game in the franchise with only... 7 worlds, wow I swear this game feels like it has a lot more but excluding Corona Mountain and Delphino Island this game only has 7 worlds with 8 main starts each unlike 64's 6 main starts excluding the 100 coin bonus star.
Though more does not mean better at times since you'll notice a reoccurring pattern in how Sunshine does its missions, each world has an 8 red coin, a secret platforming stage, a shadow Mario stage, and one last bullshit gimmicky stage for its 8th mission if its not just a collect all 8 red coins.
This repetition does not help the linear structure that this game forces on the player, you need to finish stage 7 on each world to access the final stage compared to 64 where the stars matter compared to the stage themselves beaten, and this formula works so much better though I'm probably the billionth person you've heard that from.

But thinking about it, if only the 7th and 8th shines tend to be copy-pasted wouldn't that make the 6th first stages really fun? You're damn right they are! I think Mario Sunshine has some of the most varied missions per stage in any Mario game, with 64 mostly focusing on "Climb this again" or "Do this again, but with another step" Sunshine fully embraces the idea of making different missions, different ways to play the stage, I think Rico Harbor might be one of the greatest stages in any 3D platformer, it starts as a small explorable city where the game lets you fuck around a bit till you make your way to the boss, then it makes you play with bloopers which is nothing as we've seen before, then the game says "fuck it" and drop you in this jungle-gym of scaffolding and its just so much fun, I love doing tight jumps on small platforms, I love using FLUDD to its fullest, I fucking love playing Mario Sunshine and I think Mario Sunshine is like some big playground that just lets me fuck around for time immemorial.

But yes, it has the pachinko stage, yes it has the lilypad stage, yes it has the rocket balloon stage, yes it has the blue coins, yes the shines doesn't matter, yes this game has many flaws but I think that if a game with flaws is more fun than a flawless game, wouldn't that make it the better game since it keeps being fun even if while you are being backstabbed by the game countless of times? These are some foods for thought, I think Mario Sunshine will forever stay as the black sheep of the 3D franchise since people know that 3D world is good now and nobody knows that 3D land exists, so wear this with pride Sunshine, you may not have the premium feel that another game like Odyssey or 3D World has but no one else is like Mario Sunshine, nothing else will be like Mario Sunshine, it's a product of its time through and through and I love it for it.

Super Mario Bros Wonder is an interesting case. After four New Super Mario Bros games and them not being super innovative compared to each other, 2D Mario had become stale. Were they bad games? No, they just didn't do anything special in the slightest. Now after 10+ years since the last NSMB game, we have the next big 2D Mario game, Mario Wonder. Does it do enough different from the NSMB series? Hell yeah it does! Am I totally in love with it and consider it peak 2D Mario like a lot of people have been feeling? Sadly no, it has several issues that really hold it back in my eyes. But it does do a lot right.

The biggest change from NSMB and one of the best aspects of this game is the changed art style. Gone is the very samey art style that was used in all the NSMB games. Now Mario and the gang are expressive as ever and really feel more like their more classic games. There's so many different animations for various moves and interactions with things, it's great. They even brought back Mario's hat moving up and down when he jumps from Mario World. There was clearly a lot of love put into the overall style of the game, definitely a much-needed change, I think.

Another really nice change is just the amount of new stuff they crammed into this game. This game is absolutely filled to the brim with brand new enemies and level gimmicks. There were some returning enemies ofc but like 80% of the enemies in this game were all brand new, and that's just awesome imo. And as for the level gimmicks, they tie into the new wonder flower which basically just throws all kinds of ideas at you. One level you may see singing piranha plants, another one you might see Mario turn into a spiked ball. There's even one where you ride this super cool dragon, man that was cool. The abundance of different ideas, even if they do get reused sometimes, is just very immense.

I also enjoyed the secrets this game had. It's definitely not as expansive as Mario World in that regard but finding the game's secrets were pretty fun. Especially since it unlocked the special world that you can access early on like Mario World, man that was cool. I'd say I enjoyed most of the worlds in this game actually besides World 3 (idk it was just lame) but besides that every world was pretty solid. My favorite world though had to been 4 just because I remember being really impressed with some of the levels there.

Badges were whatever. I didn't really use them most of the time because I felt they made the game easier depending on the badge. The badge levels tho were pretty cool even if a little short.

Alright time for the negatives, why I don't love this game as much as everyone else. One of the biggest issues I had was the difficulty curve. I honestly did not think this game had a good climb in difficulty. I found every world pretty easy for the most part up until the bowser levels, which amped it up a little bit. And then the final badge stage was actually decently tough. I found past games, even the NSMB games to have a much better difficulty curve. Speaking of that final badge stage, while I found that somewhat difficult (even if it did have 3 checkpoints in it, that and the final regular stage in the special world were nowhere near as hard as some of the final stages in some of the more recent Mario games. Found that somewhat disappointing along with the easier difficulty as a whole.

Another thing I didn't like were the lackluster bosses. Reusing Bowser Jr 4 times was just really lame imo. They got so creative with the levels and they end up doing that for the bosses? Man, that's just so much missed potential I think. Speaking of the final Bowser fight, it was alright? It was again easy but also felt uninspired. Like the first thing I thought of when I saw it was the final boss to DKCR. Idk, they could've done much better with it along with the bosses as a whole.

Something else that kinda irked me, while I do like how experimental a lot of the levels can be, a chunk of them just felt like filler. You have your regular levels, your little badge levels which is fine but then you have these break levels that sometimes take literally 5 seconds to beat. I'd much rather play actual full-length levels instead and a lot of the time I just said out loud "what was the point of that". Idk, I never hated any of them, again they just felt more like filler.

I guess one more little thing that annoyed me, and it ties into the easiness of the game, is the fact that when you collect those purple coins worth 10 and then die, you keep it even after dying. Star coins never worked like that in the NSMB games and it makes certain levels that would otherwise be pretty tough to 100%, super easy.

The talking flowers I'm neutral on. They can be kinda funny but they never made me hate them nor like them too much. They're just kind of there and don't disrupt the gameplay really.

Before ending the review tho, I will say after beating the final final badge level, that final badge you get is very awesome. I just love how weird the developers got with this game, that badge reminded me of that one song in We Love Katamari lol. Also the end credits to the game were really cool too.

In the end I did really enjoy this game and it's definitely a step-up from the NSMB games overall. However, it has enough issues imo that hold it back from being really great. I know that's a hot take, I'm not expecting a ton of people to agree with me but I'd take Mario World any day over this game personally. I'd put this game around on par with Mario 3 and 3D World methinks. Also speaking of Mario World, playing this made me wanna replay that so that's what I'm gonna do. Look out for that review next!

7.5/10

Check out this review in podcast form on VOID ARCADE
Ah... Death Stranding. I just finished the last of the achievements... Here on Steam. This is technically my second playthrough. I preordered, and played for 40 hours on a borrowed PS4, and now I'm here. Lend me an ear, and I'll explain the appeal of this game. Right out the gate here: To the probably 95% of you reading this, you will probably not enjoy it. But to the small 5%... You've found an absolute masterpiece of a game that's worthy of your mind, and your time.

I say that 95% of people won't like the game because a majority of people, I imagine, will not look at this game beyond the core game play. They won't like the combat. They won't like the movement system. Many people will just say Death Stranding is a "point A to point B simulator" and get very frustrated with its mechanics, and I don't blame them for it. A lot of people want something different out of games when they sit down and play them. It's not everybody's version of "fun", and it's definitely not fast paced by any means. But it's slow burn I found it immensely satisfying, and I thought that all the games systems worked together in perfect harmony to create one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time.

Many say "Death Stranding is a walking simulator". And, while that's a perfectly adequate description, I don't think it goes deep enough. To me, Death Stranding, is a JOURNEY simulator. And a near perfect one at that.

I've always reveled in the journey of my characters in open world games... Bethesda is fairly good at it, and with Skyrim especially, I vividly and fondly remember a vast majority of my time exploring the countryside and impossibly scaling mountains. I never fast traveled... Never even used a horse... It was soothing and cathartic for me to take in the scenery, occasionally find some baddies to fight or loot to grab, and just enjoy my time, seamlessly wandering and living in the world. If you've done anything similar, then don't even bother reading the rest of this and hit buy. You'll fall in love.

Death Stranding hits that particular dopamine generator like a ton of bricks. The sheer realism of nature, the rocks and the grass, and the few bits of fauna is astounding. The sound design, especially with the music that kicks in at pinnacle moments makes me go absolutely agog. All of the fine details they put in this game, to make you feel like you're Sam, taking this epic journey across the country, sincerely blows my mind. All combined, this is a gaming experience I will never forget. I'll always be a Porter, and carry the memories and feelings I've had here until I die. For months, I've felt emotionally attached to Death Stranding's "vibes"... I feel like it's the perfect representation of my feelings of great loneliness (the kind I feel no one can understand). The soundtrack to the game goes on repeat for weeks at a time. It's all remarkably validating.

And that's not to mention how important I think this game is as an allegory to today, done in true Kojima fashion. Death Stranding has powerful messages about coming together, about the depression and loneliness of being "stranded" or alone, and other really important topics that go beyond this being just a game but a commentary on the world at large, which just continues to drive it home (to me) that it's one of the most important games of the generation. It's not new to do this in games... but these messages really hit home.

The world building is also immaculate. It's so unique, and so fresh. I can't help but remember when trailers of the game just kept releasing and making the plot more and more elusive. It's incredible. For the most part, the writing and dialogue helps with this as well, but at times I found it lacking, and occasionally very cringe (Fragile's "catchphrase" and that Mario liner from Amelie near the end of the game make me welcome an early death). Maybe that's from the wacky Japanese to English translation gang but either way... those hurt in my ears haha.

All in all, if you've made it this far and are still considering giving Death Stranding a shot... I really recommend you go for it. Play it with the mindset that it's more a cathartic experience, rather than a "hyper-fueled fast paced" game experience, and you'll do just fine. I absolutely envy you new players. My first time playing blew my mind open at every turn. I can't wait until I un-vault this in 5-10 years and come back home to the UCA... it will be... remarkable.

At this point, I feel like I’ve been playing Journey for half of my life. I’ve played through underwater Journey, forest Journey, air Journey, space Journey, cat Journey, and even boring Journey. Yet upon my yearly ascent in the original Journey on New Year’s Day, I find myself just as floored as when I first picked it up years ago, in spite of clone after clone exhausting my goodwill. What exactly then, is present in the original’s realized game design philosophy that every other spiritual successor has found themselves bereft of?

To answer this question, I want you to imagine a world where Journey doesn’t exist. A world where the formula to indie developers meant something more than just mindlessly tilting up on the left joystick to walk towards the next checkpoint while some narrator waxed poetic in the background. Before Journey, before Flower even, the closest ancestor we had was Ico. Fumito Ueda described his game as an execution of “boy meets girl,” and what it boiled down to was a minimalist adventure game with some puzzles cleverly disguised as platforming and timing segments. Occasionally, you also whack a few shadows while protecting and pulling your female companion Yorda through vast and still castle ruins. It wasn’t a perfect game by any means; the combat was frankly tedious, Yorda lacked much of an identity outside of pointing at objects of interest/opening doors/getting kidnapped, and at the end of the day, there really wasn’t much in the way of a balanced and developed relationship when the player was calling all the shots, but it was still the start of something beautiful. It wasn’t mechanically complex or esoteric in any fashion, but it was different. It was different, and it felt dangerous.

This write-up is not intended to be a critique of Ico, nor is it meant to imply that games proceeding Team Ico's philosophy of “design by subtraction” have since been inferior. Rather, I bring up Ico in particular, because there seems to be this general perception that minimalism results in a crippling lack of mechanical depth. That is, many seem to believe that discarding and minimizing a game’s various elements results in a dearth of tangible mechanics or imagery to cling onto, and thus appears to result in an empty and vacuous experience with little to justify further replays or deeper dives. To me though, this line of thought fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of addition by subtraction. It was never about creating mechanically deep systems with limitless possibilities like an immersive sim or a sandbox. Rather, the philosophy aimed to remove excess layers that distracted from the game’s “more realistic feeling of presence”, such as removing optional bosses and landmarks in Shadow of the Colossus or reducing enemy types in Ico to just a single design. In fairness, the goal wasn't just to remove extraneous elements that made something feel overly “gamey,” but also to marry mechanics in a way where the invisible layer of intended design never made itself too apparent (i.e. hiding the user interface in Shadow of the Colossus outside of fights). It was not just addition by subtraction; it was also addition through illusion.

To that end, I firmly believe that Journey is the best Team Ico game that Fumito Ueda never directed. Journey’s design philosophy was not necessarily revolutionary for its time, considering its predecessors in the forms of Flower and Ico, nor was its ultimate goal of reaching a final destination via walking/jumping/flying mechanics particularly exemplary. What was exemplary was its level of care and precision in how it implemented said minimalist design philosophy. Every time I play through Journey, I pick up more subtle details through its fusion of audio-visual presentation and gameplay that seemed so clear and intuitive that I had taken their presence for granted. There are the obvious strengths, like how Journey wordlessly conveys your path forward by keeping the shining peak of the mountain visible at all times while outside, or how it uses consistent visual language through cloth creatures and strips to demarcate safe zones where the player can recharge their scarf. But there’s more beneath the surface; what about the game's sneaky introduction to the sand-sliding mechanic from the introductory dune so it’s no longer unfamiliar during the exhilarating and committal descent, or how there’s a section of the underground that’s filled with these scarf jellyfish tinted in blue allowing you to remain in flight that evokes the feeling of being underwater, foreshadowing the next section as a tower ascension where the player must continually breach the surface to “swim” and escape? Sure, everyone knows about how the bitter cold disempowers the player by slowing their movement and lowering the scarf’s energy gauge, but I usually don’t hear about how strong winds can chip away at the scarf’s capacity itself or how it reduces the volume and area of effect of your shouts, making it far more difficult to restore your energy gauge from the growing frostbite.

There’s also the overlooked audio aspect of Journey. Granted, everyone loves to discuss the soundtrack’s thematics, like how the final chord of Journey’s motif never resolves a single time in any track until the end of Apotheosis or for that matter, how all the instruments are never fully present until that final ascent, when the entire orchestra finally comes together as one only to slowly fall away as the player and the world fade away. Yet, the sound design regarding Journey’s implementation of said soundtrack often goes underappreciated. Again, there are plenty of clear strengths that have been widely discussed, such as the punctuated stillness of the desert dunes providing room for the piddle paddle of the player’s footsteps amongst the vast desert winds and eventually swelling into triumphant bursts of adventure. But again, there are little subtleties that speak to the soundtrack’s interactivity, like how the backing drum during the aforementioned underwater section gives the track the impression of being muted and seamlessly drops this filter once the player breaches the surface, or how the player’s shouts are always in the key of the backing track’s scale, meaning that the introduced notes remain within the game’s tonality. It’s these little things that further round out Journey’s experience; the music is so seamlessly woven in that it takes a discerning ear to pick out every specific detail, in such a way where it feels like the soundtrack is organically supplementing every memorable moment of the game.

Of course, it’s not enough to just handle the basics well, even if there’s a master’s touch present to carefully disguise these additions so silently. As I mentioned before, popular works need compelling hooks to draw in an audience, but they also need an element of danger to keep that audience engaged. In the case of Journey, Thatgamecompany tackles this through their stealth multiplayer. This is where Journey easily outclasses its successors and may in fact, even have one-upped Ico. If Ico’s main limitation was a lack of autonomy for any non-player characters, then Journey circumvents this problem entirely by replacing the AI with real players instead. The loose implementation adds a catch: nothing in the game aside from the final completion screen listing your companion(s)’ name(s) ever hints on this, and not once is the player given instructions or suggestions on how to interact with said players. The only obvious mechanical incentive from cooperating with other players is the ability to recharge one another’s scarves via proximity/shouts, and there’s no consequence to merely abandoning random players or quitting in the middle of a session. It’s what makes this multiplayer so compelling; many times you’ll find other players just wandering about by themselves, despawning, or quickly rushing ahead without care towards your presence. There’s no guarantee that they’ll cooperate… which makes that one instance where they do that much more memorable. In this sense, I think Jenova Chen and his team solved two problems at once: the aforementioned challenge of granting outside elements a degree of realism, and his own personal challenge of creating a minimalist environment where players had no incentives to act in bad faith despite never having any major incentives to cooperate either, resulting in seemingly organic interactions.

Perhaps it is cheating to state that this spontaneous element is what gives Journey a step-up over its peers, but I also can’t deny that this same feature is exactly what lends the game its identity. It’s hard to provide drastically different experiences for focused single player games after all; no matter how much Fumito Ueda may have insisted that he was inspired by emergent gameplay mechanics and player autonomy to allow for more diverse experiences, there remains an upper limit upon how far those experiences can unravel. However, Thatgamecompany’s take upon the “single-player odyssey” alongside the game’s cyclical nature and short runtime means that Journey is a far more replayable experience while remaining every bit as compelling as its competition. Even after multiple trips up the summit, I continue to be amazed by the thoughtfulness shown to me by other players. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen down the temple from being blown away by the wind, only for my companion to jump down with me, or how many trips through the blizzard were spent slowly trudging together mashing my shout, just like strangers on a cold winter’s night huddling together for warmth while shouting cries of encouragement to take one more step forward. In essence, Journey didn't need an intricate or elaborate story told with fanciful cutscenes and voice-acting; it simply needed to provide a backbone with no other contradicting elements, allowing players to form their own stories by experiencing the game on their own terms.

Journey isn’t mechanically rich or wildly innovative in terms of its scope, but it doesn’t have to be. Rather, it’s a deceptively simple yet meticulous and thoughtfully different approach upon a respected design philosophy, which aimed to further refine said formula by whittling down any elements that detracted from the game’s constructed sense of reality. Similarly, it doesn't feel the need to present a grandiose narrative, instead stripping away any specific contextual layers as to allow players to create memorable experiences with no conflicting moments in-between. I should be sick of this formula after tackling so many misguided copycats, and I can't deny that I was afraid to label yet another old favorite as propped up by nostalgia. Thankfully, my fears have been assuaged. I keep waiting for the day where I’ll finally be content putting this down forever… but that day has yet to come. I was not the first adventurer to embark upon this pilgrimage, nor will I be the last. Maybe I just need to get over my cynicism and accept that there was never anything to be cynical of to begin with. I’m sure more developers will continue to lazily carbon copy one of my favorites until the end of time, but that doesn’t mean the good times have to end.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Happy new year, and here’s to another journey around the sun.

For being a game quite literally titled I Am Dead, it is a pleasant surprise how it spends its entire runtime celebrating life. You, as a newly departed spirit, visit various locations around a compact little island close to the mystical land of New Zealand, and dive into the memories of those who remain to learn more about their connections to those who have left marks upon them and have moved on. These various slices of life told with the anecdotal vignettes and the descriptive and colorful scenery really sell the tranquil and meditative atmosphere that life goes on through the memories of what's around us. As for the gameplay itself, it's a fantastic take on the classic hidden object game, scouring around the island for mementos; there's also a perspective shifting puzzle (that's fairly generous fortunately) for more collectibles, and hidden riddles (that really could do without the 30 second timer) for even trickier collectibles. Perhaps the biggest complaint to this all then, is the somewhat vague and unsatisfying ending; I won't spoil it because I still love the general vibe and message conveyed, but is quite an abrupt disappointment when considering how much detail was put into its excellent presentation and snug worldbuilding. Regardless, if you're looking for a more positive yet cathartic take on life after death alongside vibrant visuals in a captivating and magical little island, give this a shot.

On a scale of 1 - 10, it's an 11, and I'd give it a 12.

Jokes aside, let it be known that I generally do not like video games that are difficult for the sake of being difficult and most boss rush games (as an example, I stopped playing Cuphead around the 3rd boss because I really was not having fun). I decided to go play Furi because all my friends had given it a lot of hubbub and the soundtrack is filled with bangers.

For all the attention that this game gets for being difficult and uncompromising though, more attention should be given to just how well designed the overall experience is. The tutorial is literally a boss and gets you right into the actual meat of the game, which is a bold design choice yet also makes complete sense; it quickly adapts you to what you have to face for the rest of the game. Every boss has a distinctly different design with their own characteristics and forces you to adapt to a slightly different strategy every time, keeping you on your toes. But this isn't an issue at all, because the game is more than happy to let you adapt. You can regain your health via successful parrying and shooting green bullets (think of it as risk leading to reward), and getting knocked down only results in the boss resetting its phase. Since you still have 3 overall tries and you get another try every new phase, there is more than enough time to adapt. The fighting itself is a good mix between bullet hell, close quarters combat, and dodge and punish; all of these aspects are touched on with no excess. And in the case you suck at one of these aspects or parrying, there's a practice mode where you can hone up your skills to your own delight. Worthwhile, because boy does it feel good to get a successful parry on attacks.

Now granted, I took care in making sure I only fought one boss a day (with the exception being the last day, because I don't count the Beat as a boss and I just wanted to finish the game by the time I got to the Star), both to make sure I was doing other things with my day, and so I definitely wouldn't get burnt out from getting too angry, as was often the case with these very intense and difficult games. But not once did I get angry, which shocked me. It was just a thrill getting down to the action and having a fight of a lifetime 9 times in a row. Final shoutouts go to the Edge, which is one of the best designed bosses I've ever seen in a video game; you either get your ass handed to you in a minute, or you know what you're doing and you blaze by him in 4 minutes. One of the toughest bosses in the game, yet it doesn't waste your time as an HP sponge like many other tough bosses of video games.

Needless to say, this was a pleasant surprise, but a more than welcome one. Furi is worth playing even if you don't usually like difficult video games, and that's the highest compliment I can give it.

This game is beautiful visually, musically and thematically from beginning to end. The opening and ending cinematic are extremely powerful and you will feel them at a core level. There's no dialogue or text through the entirety of the game, it's story and meanings are all conveyed abstractly primarily through color and the state of decay of the world around you. The games audio profile consists of the pitter patter of lightly played piano in quiet moments to orchestral swells when the playable character is in the grips of strong emotional transitions. Everything just works really well to pull similar emotions out from within you.

I won't say much about it, but the story is about young woman and her journey through the five stages of grief as outlined by the Kubler-Ross model.

The gameplay works but is the weakest element of the game. You navigate the world primarily linearly, though there are some points where you have a branching path to individual collectibles you need to progress. Most of your interaction will be light platforming with some minor navigation based power-up puzzles. I don't see anyone having too much trouble getting through this game no matter their skill level.

I started this game one evening and really wished I could have completed it in one sitting. I feel it's emotional journey would have been more impactful from start to end without a break. It's definitely doable seeing the game is about 4 hours long, I just couldn't get it done. I ended up finishing the game on a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee. The kids woke up just as I was completing the last few segments. I then was bombarded with kid questions about what was happening on screen as I was going through all the accompanying emotions with welled up eyes. I then had to attempt to distill the meaning of grief and it's five stages in a kid friendly way as my 3 and 5 year old jumped up and down all over the couch.

I highly recommend this game to just about anyone who is looking to go on an abstract artsy emotional journey.