This game was just a pure joy to play. I don't know how a series as old as Mario keeps finding fresh ways to surprise and delight you but Nintendo keep pulling it off. It had been quite a while since a new 2D Mario game (and even the last 3D game is over half a decade old at this point) and the New series wasn't particularly inventive but they came out swinging with Wonder.

The game is constantly throwing new ideas at you in every level. They'll introduce a mechanic or enemy at the start of a level that will will provide the platforming challenge and explore it well in a short amount of time. Then you're onto the next level which serves you up something new. This is eccentuated by the Wonder Effects. You trigger these by finding the Wonder Flower in a level and it changes the level in a weird and often surprising way. There's plenty of unique ideas with the effects and pretty much every level has one. I'm not going to say every level and wonder effect is completely different from every other one in the game but they really do keep you guessing each level and it never feels repetitive. There are also badges that you can unlock that will give you different movement options such as a spin jump or a glide. It's probably the one portion of the game that feels a bit underbaked because it's easy to just stick with the one option the entire game. There are a few levels that require certain badges which are pretty fun.

The game is a bit too easy. The lack of challenge didn't hinder my enjoyment as I could easily flow from level to level having a great time but a bit more resistance could have made some levels more memorable. There is a hard level right at the end but it isn't as good as the final levels in 3D World or Galaxy 2. The game is great to look at with lots of nice details especially with some of Mario's animations. The music is nice too although perhaps not as catchy as some of ther series' greats. The game does feel a bit short with me getting 100% in less than 20 hours. If the old adage keep them wanting more is to be followed, I certainly did want more because I enjoyed almost every single level. I don't feel like the game was lacking in value with the quality of everything being so high. This is a must play for anyone who likes 2D platformers.

The Dark Pictures Anthology hasn't been stellar with its release up to this point. Not that it's terrible. Man of Medan and Little Hope were a fine way to kill a few hours. House of Ashes is definitely better than the previous two. There are still some of the weaknesses of the series. It still doesn't feel particularly interactive since sometimes you switch to a character to watch a cutscene with one QTE or dialogue choice in it. Ashes is a bit more action focused so you do feel a bit more active with a lot more of those segments where you have to aim at a target. The characters are still pretty underdeveloped but Ashes has the advantage of having one really likeable character in Salim. Seeing him forced to partner with these jingoisitic American soldiers to survive the horrifying depths they've fallen into is interesting. It's fun to see the distrust between them fall away as the game goes on. Of course, some of that was me directing the story that way. It has a solid setup with the Iraq War setting and the Akkadian history backdrop. The story takes some turns I really didn't see coming that were pretty cool. Perhaps they wouldn't be so surprising if you've seen some of the nonsense programming on the History Channel these days. Overall, I had a good time with this. I should probably stop wishing for these games to be more interactive at this point. They're a known quantity and Supermassive Games have been very successful with them.

There's been a lot of these survival horror games where a monster stalks you with little ability to fight back, especially since Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The original Alien film feels pretty formative for this type of video game so using the Alien license feels like a match made in heaven. As far as these types of games go, this is a pretty good one. The Xenomorph is terrifying and have a randomness to their route so you're are always on your toes even after dying and reloading. The sound design is really strong with the symphony of the alien crawling around in the vents and the beeping of your radar leaving you a nervous wreck. Sometimes you don't know whether to move or stay still when you know the alien is nearby. Outside of the alien, there's also human and android enemies which are less interesting to deal with. It's a serviceable stealth game when those segments come up. You do get a bit more means to fight back later on in the game with more aliens which feels like it was trying to reference the film sequel, Aliens. It takes place on a space station that you backtrack through and get upgrades to access new areas. Unfortunately, everything looked the exact same that I rarely knew when I was revisiting an area. The level design seemed decent but it was just very boring to traverse. I was also pretty uninterested in the story and characters. Nothing there held my attention. Alien: Isolation is a game that does one thing, i.e the stalking alien, really well while everything else is mediocre.

Luigi's Mansion 3 has all of the Nintendo charm you've come to love despite Next Level Gmaes not becoming a Nintendo developer till after its release. On a technical level, they pulled off a lot with the weak Switch. The animations are quite stunning with lots of nice little details. The series has never been mechanically dense, Luigi has a few different moves to keep it interesting. The new Gooigi feature adds a bit to the puzzle solving. That said, often when I'm faced with a problem in the game, I just cycle through the toolset till one of them works. I still do find it fun though at least with the puzzles and exploration. Combat is a bit boring with flashing and slamming them with the vacuum cleaner; at least for the normal enemies. The game does show a lot of creativity with the different floors of the hotel feeling different from one another. It probably doesn't make sense that a hotel has an Ancient Egypt floor but who cares? The variety is also seen with the bosses which pretty much every floor has and it rarely feels like ideas are being repeated. The normal combat may be dull but they really did a good job with the boss fights. The flow of new ideas for each floor and boss rivals the inventiveness of the mainline Mario games. Although I don't think Luigi's Mansion 3 has as high a quality of some of the Nintendo greats, it still was a joy to play through.

I like schlocky horror movies and Supermassive Games are very good at capturing that invideo game form. I appreciate that The Quarry is full length game since we've been mostly getting shorter experiences since Until Dawn. This gives us a lot more characters to bounce around to with eight of them being playable who can all live or die by the end. Despite being annoying teenagers, the cast are all pretty likeable. The performances are all great especially from the adult characters who feature such horror icons like Ted Raimi, Grace Zabriskie and Lance Henriksen. I do often wish these games were more interactive. The gameplay is mostly just walking a short distance before the next dialogue choice (which is usually just two options) or quick time event. What it lacks in interactivity, it makes up for in consequence. You can get some pretty different routes based upon decisions you make. Some characters can die surprisingly early too. Very early decisions can come back to haunt you. I've always enjoyed breaking apart these games and seeing all the changes that can be made. I just wish Supermassive would add a dialogue skip or something to speed up cutscenes as you will have to replay a lot of the same stuff too. It's a good game and the developers have certainly carved a niche out for themselves.

There are things to praise in The Medium. The art is good and the developers are skilled at creating a creepy atmosphere. The puzzles, while not anything amazing, are decent and serve their purpose in making your interaction with the world satisfying which can be a problem in narrative focused games with little to no combat. The split between two worlds with you controlling the two forms of the main character simultaneously is cool and works really well. They have enough technical expertise to make that work without performance issues. The load times after dying are surprisingly long on the PS5's SSD. The main department where this game falters is the writing which is a pretty big problem for such a story heavy game. There is a certain element that has some pretty awful implications. I would like to think that there was no maliciousness on the part of the writers and they just didn't think it through properly. Either way, they were not equipped to deal with a story with sensitive subject matter. It's worrying that Bloober are working on the Silent Hill 2 remake which deals with a lot of sensitive issues. If they focus on the strengths, i.e their art, and leave the story the way it is, it should be ok but we'll see.

I've wanted these Yakuza Samurai games to get a western release since I've learned of their existence. Playing Ishin, I certainly enjoyed it but I think it's on the lower end of the series. I was surprised that I didn't like the combat as much because I do think style switching in great. I just don't like the focus on weapons. I like hand-to-hand fighting in Yakuza so the swords and guns interest me less. There is a brawler fighting style but it is incredibly useless in this game. I didn't hate the combat. I certainly had plenty of fun setting up heat moves but it's far from the heights of the combat seen in 0, 5 and Lost Judgment.

I love going through the completion list in these games and it is a bit of a drag. This is mainly because of the crafting. There's a lot of stuff to craft and it costs a lot of money so you need to grind out chicken race betting. The seals, which are buffs you can add to equipment, can be very annoying to acquire. There's also a lot of materials that you need to grind out the same battle dungeon for ages. I know I don't have to be a completionist but I really do enjoy playing these games this way. The rest of the content is still pretty good. A lot of the familiar minigames show up such as gambling games, singing, dancing which are still fun. They have a farming and cooking minigame with its own story involving Haruka which is great. There's a lot of friends to interact with and plenty of fun substories to find.

The story takes a while to get interesting. I wasn't that motivated to see it through in the early parts of the game but it starts to come together in the latter have. I did enjoy the who's who of Yakuza characters throughout. It was fun seeing what roles the familiar characters would play. It was nice that they added characters from 0, 6 and 7 into this remaster which wouldn't have existed when the original release came out even if it meant some other character had to be replaced. Looking at the list of replaced characters, it mostly seems like an upgrade but I haven't played the original release to be sure.

Despite sounding mostly negative, I do still think this is a pretty good game and I'm glad we finally got it. I'm still eager to play Kenzan so I hope it gets a western release at some point.

Far Cry, along with the rest of Ubisoft's franchises, is a pretty known quantity at this point. Far Cry 5 didn't do anything to change that notion so if you're into the series, you'll probably like this one. It has an interesting premise with the Montana setting which could have been used to make sort of statement on modern America but expecting anything like that out off Ubisoft was probably always a losing battle. Maybe you're someone who wants politics kept out of video games but they shouldn't have set the game up like that if they weren't willing to say anything about it. The story is dragged along by some fantastic performances by the villains but the dialogue is filled with a lot of cult cliches. You're not going to miss the villains because each of the three region leaders kidnap you a few times. It get very repetitive especially since two of the three involve mind control. They did something kind of clever with one of those but the regularity of it all gets annoying. The silent protagonist is a really weird choice here. There's some value in putting the player into a blank slate character in this setting to question our own susceptibility to cult thinking but it just comes off incredibly awkward and sometimes downright comical. I kept expecting some twist with the playable character with why everyone was obsessed with them but they're a nothing character. There is a twist ending however which I actually quite enjoyed. It's perhaps a bit silly but at least it's memorable.

The gameplay is what you expect out of the series although a bit more open ended in when you can tackle story missions. There's enemy camps to clear out, stuff to destroy and animals to hunt (although they got rid of the crafting incentive to hunting). Plenty of traversal options in terms of vehicles and you ahve a wingsuit which is a bit less useful in a flatter location. You get interrupted a lot on the road by cultists. This does keep you engaged and added difficulty with helicopters and planes being sent after you once you've caused enough destruction in a given region. It does lead to some interesting moments but I could have used a bit more downtime between missions. Their rendition of Montana is gorgeous and sometimes I just wanted to drive through it instead of being shot at every five seconds. The gunplay is solid and the stealth is fine. I think this series is mostly OK and Far Cry 5 fits into that. I probably will keep playing the series as they appear on subscription services I have because they are an alright time.

Moving Out 2 is a decently fun time. It would probably be more fun with other people but I played it all solo which there are some accessibility options to help with. The physics of dragging things around the house and breaking everything is pretty funny. It doesn't change up enough to keep it interesting the whole way through. They do provide visual variety with the the universe hopping but you'll mostly be doing the same thing in every level. It's not completely rote as there are a few wrinkles in certain levels such as one-way doors or having to throw stuff onto a moving train. I was still pretty tired of the loop quite a bit before the end of the reasonably short game. The last level was actually pretty unique where you have to drag one item through a whole level which I enjoyed. It's a bit of fun but it won't stick with me.

Tchia wears its influence on its sleeve but unfortunately, it does not do anything interesting with it. The main mechanic of possessing animals or objects seems cool at first but there isn't much to it. Throwing possessed objects is pretty fun for a time. It builds its world to be explored based upon your curiosity of what you can see. Not marking your location on the map was an attempt to encourage this exploration which I appreciate but it didn't work well. I mostly just marked everything on the map and then just follow the compass. The activities you find aren't particularly fun and of all the games to have enemy camps to clear out, this shouldn't have been one. I don't want to to be too hard on the game since it was clearly made with passion and features a setting we rarely if ever see in video games. It just didn't work for me.

A mark of success for games like this that are calling back to an older era of games are when they can take a person who has no nostalgia for that time and makes them a fan. The person in question being me. My first console was a PS1 and I have not subsequently played any of those SNES RPGs. Now I feel like I've been missing out because I really enjoyed this game. Without even having the necessary points of reference, I can tell how much of a love letter to Sea of Stars is to the SNES classics and can feel the developer passion in every pixel.

I think the combat is great. It's not overly complex since every character only has a handful of abilites to choose from but there are a number of mechanics that keep you engaged. There's this lock system where an enemy will prepare an attack and the game will give you a set of damage types you need to hit the enemy with in a number of turns to prevent the attack. It makes you very aware of the different attack types that each of the party members have and you have to figure if you can make it in the number of turns the game gives you. Each pair of party members have unique combos so it's a good way to get a bunch of damge types in one turn. You recharge your mana for magic attacks by using melee attacks. Melee attacks also release orbs that allow you to apply magic damage to your weapon damage so you can perform magic attacks without costing mana. Although it is turn based, there are active button presses while the characters perform moves. Pressing the action button at the right time can make your attacks stronger. This also works for defending against enemy attacks. It's very satisfying to perform although I wish there was some sort of training mode to test out the timing as some abilities didn't have obvious indicators. There's a number of systems that individually are not that complex but added together makes for a very fun experience.

I really love how the levels are designed. The traversal and puzzle solving, although not challenging, provide enough substance that makes working through dungeons satisfying with lots of secrets of the hidden path. Although the stats part of the game isn't that deep, it's always nice to find a better weapon or new combos. It's certainly not a Metroidvania but you do get new items and abilites that allow you to access new areas as well as a late game ability that changes how you move around the game world. There's quite a lot of dungeons in the game and they all have a decent visual variety. The game looks fantastic and before this, I had never been the biggest fan of pixel art. I should probably rethink that position. The game also sounds great with plenty of themes worming their way into my brain.

The main weak link is probably the writing. It's not awful but it's a little uninteresting. The two main characters are pretty dull whose personalities may as well be the exact same. Garl is great though. Don't say anything bad about Garl. I found most of the other characters pretty forgettable. The story does go a few places I wasn't expecting so it's not like I was completely bored with it the whole way though. The ending isn't particularly satisfying whether it's the normal or true ending. The appeal of Garl does go a long way though.

This game was a really nice surprise for me. I wasn't anticipating it at all and only played it because it was on PS+ Extra. I really have to go back and play its inspirations like Chrono Trigger or Super Mario RPG (which is getting a remake soon) or some of the older Final Fantasy games. It really opened my eyes to a type of game I had been ignoring up to this point.

Ghost of Tsushima can feel a bit generic if you'vve played an open world game in the past ten years or so but it's pretty good. I'll admit I didn't like it as much replaying it recently than I did when I played it a few years ago. Sucker Punch are very technically proficient that makes it worth playing through.

Set in 1274 during the Mongol Invasions of Japan; I'll always appreciate a historical settings in video games. You'll find yourself fighting a lot of Mongols throughout the game so it's a good thing the combat is so good. Just swinging the sword feels great and using the ghost weapons like kukuri or sticky bombs during combat works well. The bow also feels great to use. On the other hand, the stealth is not very good and I would much rather play it as a stealth game. There's a few stealth options but the level design is not there to support it. Most of the areas just give you some wires to walk along or tall grass to hide in. The interiors to infiltrate are even worse as there is only a handful of different building designs. The island of Tsushima itself is beautiful and they do a decent job of giving some environmental variety throughout. That said, I just didn't enjoy exploring it that much. It's a very checklist game and I do enjoy games like that but it did make me ignore the world around me and just run from icon to icon. I appreciate the attempt to not use a minimap with GPS markers allowing you to follow wind or animals but I mostly just kept spamming wind until I knew what direction to go.

This is not to say that you're not rewarded well for following the various icons. The progression system in the game is fantastic. PLaying on the highest difficulty, I valued every single upgrade I could get. There are a lot of cosmetics to unlock but everything else gave you more health, more resolves, more technique points, more reputation, new abilities, new charms, new armour and a host of resources to upgrade gear and weapons. It's a very satisfying loop. Even after having a set of armour and charms I was sticking with, I still wanted any other upgrade I could get. The activities to get these upgrades are fairly standard for the genre. There's camps to clear, climbing challenges and just following icons. I did quite enjoy the bamboo slicing which is a button memorisation minigame. You'll probably get sick of most of them after a while but they're mostly fine. There's a series of side quests that are written to be interesting but they all follow a pretty rigid structure.

The story is decent although you'll never want to hear the word "Mongols" ever again. The writing is perhaps overly dreary. It's not like I expect an upbeat tale of people suffering an invasion but it really got overbearing at times when we have a tale dealing with Alzheimer's. Jin falling away from his noble Samurai code and embracing his Ghost persona didn't entirely work for me which makes up the thrust of his character arc. The Iki Island DLC included in this Director's Cut does offer a bit more insight to Jin's relationship with his parents and has to reckon with his father's past deeds. I probably enjoyed the writing more there. The DLC also continues the best part of the game, i.e. the progression with new armours and techniques to unlock. You even get a charm that extends your chain attack with a kurai throw which I loved. Everything carries back into the main game which is always my favourite type of DLC.

It's a good game if lacking in a number of areas. It doesn't do anything particularly interesting in the well worn open world mold. A fun progression system and great combat does go a long way though. As much as I said I didn't enjoy it as much on my replay, I am still interested in a sequel. Hopefully Sucker Punch will improve the stealth which could really elevate it to greatness in my eyes.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a cute Metroidvania with nice music. It doesn't do anything noteworthy for the genre but being able to paint anywhere on the screen is pretty novel. I can see some people liking the artstyle but I found the white and extreme colours a bit hard on the eyes. The abilities you unlock throughout the game are not the most exciting but I did enjoy swimming in the paint. The puzzles are fairly simple but still satisfying. The story is a fairly standard "rid of the world of corruption" plot but I did like the charming characters. It's a decent game.

After playing Breath of the Wild, I thought that a sequel could be the greatest game ever made. I didn't love BOTW as much as the rest of the world but it had elements that could be greatly improved upon in a sequel. Unfortunately, I don't think Tears of the Kingdom is the amazing sequel I wanted. It certainly improves upon the previous games in certain ways but I probably enjoyed it less than BOTW.

The game is still great though. There is an amazing display of creativity that very few developers are capable of. The four new abilities that you get access to early in the game are fantastic and feel they make BOTW's abilities a bit boring in comparison. There's Ultrahand which allows you to manipulate and attach objects. This is the main one people are talking about. It certainly is imaginative and it can be very entertaining to create some horrible monstrosity that still manages to perform the task you wanted it to. It can be tedious to use and I did often just find myself making the same few things which is probably more my fault than anything. Fuse is another imaginative ability that allows you to combine almost any object in the game to your sword, shield or arrows. There's a lot to explore with Fuse although similarly to Ultrahand, I mostly made the same combinations. Recall allows you to rewind the motion of an object. It has an infinite range as long as something is visible on screen. It was one I often forgot to use but it certainly is a lot of fun and made for some decent puzzles. Lastly, there's Ascend which allows you to jump upwards and move through ceilings. In concept, this is probably the least interesting but it's the one I probably liked the most. It's the ability I wish I had when I was playing other games. Despite there being a height limit for how high Link will jump, there is no limit for the actual ascension through objects. You will literally never stop till you reach a surface. This is something that I feel would make a game crumble at the seams. It's incredibly impressive how few bugs this game has (I honestly can't remember experiencing any) and Ascend feels like the true test of that to me.

Exploration was the heart and soul of Breath of the Wild. Tear of the Kingdom uses the same map which takes a lot of the intrigue out of the world. There are two major things added to the map however. There are the sky islands which I found pretty disappointing. The first one which is the tutorial area is fantastic but the rest are pretty small and similar to eachother. You see everything they have to offer pretty quickly. The other major addition to the map are the Depths which I just find boring. It's a massive area but there's not much there and I don't enjoy navigating it. There is a host of new shrines to discover but the shrines are probably my main problem with the new Zelda games. All the exploration feels tuned towards them and they're the main source of puzzles. I really don't like that shrines are these seperate areas from the rest of the game. It takes you out of the world and it would be much better if the puzzles were integrated into the map better. I do prefer the aesthetic of the Zonai shrines over the Shiekah's at least. The caves are also a new addition which I did enjoy until it's either really small or there's just another shrine in there. Sometimes you wander into a cave and there's a genuinely new puzzle in there and those moments are magical. Those moments are few and far between though.

The dungeons are quite an improvement over BOTW. The Divine Beasts were pretty lame with the exception of the elephant one and the bosses were all the same. TOTK's dungeons are still far from the quality of some the best from the series but they're not bad. They do share the same formula of activating five triggers to reveal the boss but they're visually distinct and the bosses are unique. The boss fights are actually pretty great. The build up to the dungeons are pretty good too. They involve some navigation and puzzles that are not tied to shrines. These made me appreciate Skyward Sword more since that entire game is build ups to dungeons and then the dungeons themselves which were amazing in that game. The story is fairly good punctuated with decent setpieces although I was bothered by a lot of characters forgetting Link between games which is more a problem for the side quests.

I do not begrudge Nintendo shaking up the series' formula with Breath of the Wild even if I strongly prefer the older games. It clearly was the right choice considering how many people absolutely adore the new games. While Tears of the Kingdom improves on the previous game in significant ways, the reuse of the map diminishes its main strength, i.e. the exploration. It is not one of the greatest games ever made as I was hoping an improvement of Breath of the Wild could have been but a lot of people seem to think it is. It's clearly an amazing achievement regardless of how I feel about it.

It was hard to not be a little excited for this game after watching the gameplay demo at Ubisoft's conference in 2012. It really looked like something special but we all should have seen through the deception. The way NPCs reacted in that demo was never going to work outside of this incredibly scripted scenario. Still, playing this game many years later, I think it's not bad. It even shines in some cases. It is very much a Ubisoft open world game which were already fairly routine back in 2014. I do enjoy these types of games although with regards to Ubisoft's franchises specifically, I favour Assassin's Creed because I enjoy the settings more than what Watch Dogs or Far Cry have to offer.

Hacking is Watch Dogs main theme and it's heavily simplified. Sometimes it only comes down to pressing the hack button when you're prompted to. I do understand the compulsion to make this easy because you'd never use the hacking in more frantic situations like shootouts and car chases if it was difficult to access. It does end up just being uninteresting when the most complex thing you do are some easy Pipe Mania puzzles. Combining the hacking with stealth can be very fun though. Completing an objective without being seen by using distractions or creating routes using the hacking can be very gratifying. Sometimes you don't even have to enter an area to get the job done by bouncing between cameras to find a hacking point. Surveying guards using the cameras is also more interesting to me here than using a drone (or eagle) that sees everything from an aerial view.

The game is filled with activities that are fairly typical of the genre. Although you're not actually climbing towers to unlock the map, there are two layers of "towers" that you need to do get icons to appear on the map. The first one, which allows you full hacking access to an area, where you have to reach a hacking point surrounded by guards was actually pretty enjoyable because I liked the stealth. The second layer which puts the icons on the map were navigation puzzles which ranged from decent to tedious. There's gang areas where you have to take out the leader, convoy targets, perspective puzzles and a host of collectibles. There's some story attached to the collectibles but they all lead to uninteresting endings. There's nothing amazing in there but there's some fun to be had unless you are completely bored by the same old open world activities. There's also these privacy invasions which I thought were weird. You hack in and watch some random person's private life. They were probably going for some fun or interesting vignettes but it just made Aiden come off like an absolute creeper. Speaking of Aiden, he is as dull as dishwater in what is already a fairly boring story. If it wasn't for his iconic hat, I don't think I could describe a single feature about his character model. I did have a good time with this game but it's certainly not going to sell anyone who is sick of Ubisoft's formula.