It starts with a janitor.

You're tasked with trailing him to his house in your car for a uniform. All you have to do is wait and, when the time is right, have a polite conversation with him.

So, anyway, I put a bomb on his door and blew him up the second he walked over to it. I punched him, tased him, shot him, poured gasoline on his brand-new car, and rammed his brand-new car with my stolen one. When I was supposed to park my car around the corner, I made the side of his car my parking lot. All of this "spooked" him, but never once did he die.

Like Classic Rock, Open World is an umbrella term. You have your Checklist Open Worlds, Zelda Open Worlds, Open Worlds that play like STALKER, Open Worlds by Bethesda, and so on. And then you have Rockstar games. The selling point is detail: in Fallout 3, technical limitations mean that every time you see a train running, what you're experiencing is an unnamed citizen with a train hat on, literally running. With Rockstar, the nails in the train tracks around the world are dynamically hammered in by unnamed NPCs that you can talk to. Cars turn realistically in Grand Theft Auto IV, and your average fast-travel system is replaced with a network of trains that you can interact with unscripted. Viewed separately from the content in them, they're masters in their field.

Ultimately, it all comes back to that janitor in the end. I've ruminated on it before, but a lot of what I find to be funny about that scene, in particular, is an imbalance between content and context. It's funny to keep failing specifically because the game asks you not to but puts in no safeguards to keep you from using its more emergent systems against itself. The issue Grand Theft Auto V has is that its caricatures only accelerate this imbalance. If the entire experience is supposed to be stupid, head empty, dumb fun, why play the rules at all?

In Red Dead Redemption II, I occasionally did the same thing. The game was linear, and I was bored, so I gave myself something to laugh at. But more of my time was spent in a modded version of the photo mode, where landmarks as simple and small as hills became vital storytelling tools for my version of Arthur Morgan. Abandoned wagons spoke to a quiet feeling of loss as fog enveloped the greenery. As nature took its course, I felt my figure shrink until it folded into the shadowy figure of the mountains behind me. It could only last for so long—but at least I was there for the trip. Farewell.

There's an inherent sense of melancholy in Red Dead Redemption II's world that I've seldom felt in the games I've played—much less from the Houser brothers and their culture of debauchery. To their credit, much of that comes from the narrative and characters. But beyond anything they had more than a minor role in, it's due to sunsets, fog, red dirt, and dry sand more than anything else. Red Dead Redemption II made me understand the cliche of riding into the sunset beyond a bus I took in high school one time, and it made me want to keep riding through the dark.

Another returning issue from other Rockstar games is as follows: movement still feels janky. I don't find it surprising at all that legendary filmmaker John Carpenter, fan of Sonic Unleashed and Halo Infinite, couldn't bring himself to finish this game. First-person mode here is a continent and two miles above what they half-assed into Grand Theft Auto V for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ports, and thus it's the way I recommend playing this. But eventually, you have to get on a horse, and there's no perspective you can control that in where it always feels as intuitive as you want it to be. Crucially, while running around, it was very easy to me to tackle someone accidentally in a public space. I am grateful that the police system in this is more lenient than what's currently in Cyberpunk 2077, because I would have quit otherwise. But it's not perfect, either. You can always pay off your bounties, meaning that while the ride to a nearby post office can be tense, it occasionally feels like there are no meaningful repercussions for aberrant behavior. Combat in Red Dead Redemption II feels better than anything else Rockstar has ever done; using the revolver actually gives you a reason to hip-fire instead of aiming at everything, and it feels glorious. But it's impossible to ignore that a lot of betrays the narrative cohesion found in the cinematics. Given how much of a vibe this game can be, it's a total shame that it falls victim to the Rockstar trope of every mission being either a Shootout Mission, Chase Mission, or Inconvenient Mission that Secretly Becomes a Shootout at the Last Second. As much fun as I had using the shotguns in this game, at some point, I was just kind of over it, and while that's not a feeling that stuck for very long, it never truly went away.

I loved Arthur Morgan, and I loved having him wear a brown coat and have long hair because those are the things that make me feel effeminate and manly at the same time. I loved naming my horse after a television reference because I had one of the final knife twists spoiled for me in advance, and also because it was a cute name for my horse. I liked both Epilogue parts, and I can understand the excuses someone might make for Guarma.

Easily Rockstar's best, I can't wait to see how they fuck up their next game.

(9-year-old's review, typed by his dad)

(adopts old-sounding voice) My son recently began— Dad, type it.

My son recently began his wonderful journey into his nice, wonderful, bean-covered world, and also there's purple stuff underground, don't go in there. And in the sky, baby islands. Nonononono I said "they be islands".

(Drops fancy voice) And also there's this weird goat, who's name is ROAR-oo. And also there's a boat in the sky. You have to hop on rocks. Bye.

[Dad's Note: When he said "Rauru", he didn't say the word "ROAR", he roared as loud as he could, and then said "oooo".]

(6-year-old's review, typed by her dad)

I met a goat guy 3 times. He had a long beard and I just felt weird.

[Dad's note: She had her tonsils out the same day TotK came out, so she was in a semi-delirious state when she insisted on reviewing the game. I was very impressed that she still managed to get through a couple shrines on her own!]

Pizza Tower is a joy to play, for people of all skill levels. It's incredibly forgiving to beat, if you don't mind scraping along with an A or B rank. But if you want to master this game, there is SO MUCH depth to its relatively simple design.

Pizza Tower gets "gamefeel" so right. The last time I played a 2D platformer that felt this snappy and clean was Rayman Legends. And while I don't know if Pizza Tower can top Rayman's exorbitant hand drawn, smoothly animated content, it makes great use of what levels it does have, by making them so replayable. I can see myself replaying this one for years to come.

The animation is ugly at first glance, but in motion its crisp. The expressiveness of every character in this game can't be topped. Peppino has more charm than Mario ever could hope to, and all he has to do is yell and make goofy faces.

I did think the boss fights could trip up less experienced players, but the patterns are all simple, so it's just a matter of learning them, and getting that clean win feels great.

The main problem I have with Pizza Tower is that the Switch version is a homebrew app. It works perfectly, with rumble support and custom button prompts, but I feel like the developer is missing out on a large audience here.

Sincerely one of the best stealth games ever made. Everything unique and inventive about the first game carries over here with minimal improvements to the formula coming from tightened level design and mechanics related to guard perception and tools. It also graphically is much prettier and can push much more polygons than ever before.

It has a well-made and well-told narrative and is a super immersive experience, especially when you play with 3D sound on and modded back in. The ambient soundtrack is also killer as usual.

Despite this, I am one of those weirdos that prefers Thief: TDP. Dark Project's peaks tend to be higher than 2's, and it has a lot more atmosphere and variety. Also, being real here the final level in 1 as you go deeper into the Chaotic Realm is just so much better than the exasperated, slogfest chore hunt that is 2's final level.

Overall, great last hurrah from Looking Glass. They were way ahead of their time and died off too quick, too soon. Then again, maybe it was for the best, lest we see games like Thief subject to the continuation nightmares from constantly revolving staff like we've been seeing with other franchises.

Was planning on finishing it again, but the last few levels really suck... So I gave up.

Absolutely incredible at its best, but for me it begins to drop in quality around the 10th mission. Yes, I know people like Life of the Party, but the Angelwatch itself feels... really uninsteresting. And I don't mean in the sense of being too industrial, because that's accurate for the Mechanists, it just feels poor compared to the rest of the game so far. And from there it just gets worse.

Still, really good game with some incredible missions, great story and wordbuilding that makes it feel really real. Also Garrett is probably one of the best protagonists of any game honestly

A gauntlet of spammy enemy encounters is all The Plutonia Experiment is, and it gets old REALLY quick. I turned the difficulty all the way down as I did in TNT Evilution, and while that helped me get through the game, it did not improve many of the problems with enemy placements and traps. Like Doom 2s worst levels, Plutonia is filled with a barrage of traps and doors that close behind you and rooms that suddenly spawn 40 archviles and 6000 chaingunners when you take the key.

Apparently the guys who made Plutonia designed the levels with the idea that previous Doom entries were not hard enough, and so they just tweaked it until the levels were tough for them to get through. Well I hope they had fun because they made easily the worst 32 levels out of either Doom game or expansion. So congrats on that.

Played on UV, pistol starting every map. All maps played to completion, including the secret ones. Mid-map saves weren't used anywhere except for the ending of map 09 and the Icon of Sin fight. The former because it's really hard, the latter because the Icon of Sin is lame and I wanted to finish the game already.
Source port used was dsda-doom, primarily because it has proper borderless fullscreen support.
Playtime was around 32 hours in total, roughly an hour per map on average. The longest I spent on a single map was ~4-5 hours for Speed (map 12).

As someone first playing Doom in the 2020s, Plutonia was the game that truly taught me the potential of Doom, what makes it so fascinating to this day.

What I find striking about classic Doom is the wide range of skills it tests. You need to be able to grasp geometry layouts and enemy positions in a (pseudo) 3D space. You need a basic understanding of routing concepts like resource management and threat mitigation. Aiming and movement are demanding on a basic mechanical level. Individual combat encounters demand swift reflexes and a sense of rhythm. Level design is freeform enough that you may need to navigate gargantuan mazes. Sometimes there's even platforming! Doom blends many disparate design elements―that is, sources of difficulty―to create a distinct experience with seemingly limitless depth. Plutonia conveyed this to me better than the original games ever did.
Why? Simply put, Plutonia is both bolder and more refined than the originals. This is not to discredit id's accomplishment with the originals, of course―while the map design is very rough in those games, we wouldn't have Doom period without them, and the Casali brothers needed the foundation they provided to build Plutonia upon.

Either way, the Casali brothers succeeded in pushing the envelope, in taking Doom to greater heights. While not every level in Plutonia is as tight as it could be (it was made by two people in four months, after all), its design is, in a word, purposeful. The Casali brothers weren't figuring things out as they went along; they knew what they wanted to do, and that was challenge the player in novel and exciting ways. This is most apparent with the enemy placement and encounter design. There are no "tiers" of monsters―no fodder, no midbosses, no bosses, just threats to be placed in ways that complicate and enhance the level elements surrounding them. Why are there so many chaingunners? Because they force you to respect them, which in turn forces you to approach the surrounding design with more care. You will be put under pressure and taken out of your comfort zone, be it by chaingunners or revenants or archviles or even cyberdemons, but that's a good thing. Victory tastes so much sweeter when you've worked for it.

I was also generally impressed by the basic level layouts in Plutonia. They're well-paced and suitably intense throughout; even the larger levels never feel sprawling. The de facto finale, Odyssey of Noises, is an obvious standout in the level design department, with its inspired theming and complex, multi-layered pathing. It's so good that I have to question why there's not more discussion of this level in mainstream gaming spaces, especially given that it's featured in a commercial release from id. It'd certainly be more interesting than yet another opinion piece breathlessly proclaiming the inimitable genius of the interlocking world in Dark Souls. I don't see people lavishing the same praise on Super Metroid for leading you back into Crateria via red Brinstar... But I digress.

All in all, Plutonia is proof that sometimes just wanting to make something hard is the right mindset. In their pursuit of new challenges, the Casali brothers redefined what Doom could be and inspired generations of mappers to come.

Plutonia (at least under the conditions I played it with) was significantly harder than any Doom content I had played prior, and I really felt like I was in over my head at first. Around Go 2 It, though, things clicked for me, and I began to develop an appreciation for the torment. It was worth persevering through all the pain; initially, I wasn't sure if I'd move on to fanmade Doom WADs, but the idea is starting to seem very appealing...

I think we can all agree there's that one old game of our personal choice that we think people give too much praise due to novelty (presentative quality or gimmicks) and not due to design. You'll hear the term "ahead of its time" a lot in the case of other games, but Prince of Persia fits exactly within the timeframe it was released and yet games still have a lot to learn from it.

There's two core tricks Prince of Persia has up its sleeve that make the retroactive "cinematic platformer" label go from an implication of novelty to a legitimate stroke of design genius. The first is the timer; throughout the entire runtime of Prince of Persia you are constantly fighting the clock to do anything and the entire game was built around this. The reason for the style of movement games like Oddworld would later go on to adopt was not just for the sake of realism alone, but because it makes sense within the confines of needing slow, careful movement that you have to constantly weigh the actual value of applying due to it constantly wasting your time with even the slightest misstep. This drastically changes the game as even grabbing health upgrades could be seen as "too risky" in terms of wasting your time as opposed to just rushing through. The second trick is that Prince of Persia is a game of logical consistency and learning, and not a game of actual precision or high difficulty. Prince of Persia is brutal not because its systems are that hard to master but because what you do and don't know defines everything. The game doesn't give you a single scrap of information so learning what you can and can't do really shakes up how you play it. This is obvious when it comes to things like level layouts with the timer, but the game constantly toys around with how it feeds you information. In Stage 3, you fight your first skeleton, there are not many of these across the game but they serve to teach the lesson of environmental awareness; they must be killed via environmental hazard, thus reinforcing the idea that your realistic movement is a logical consistency and enemies can be killed with the environment due to realistic limitations too; a major factor in late-game time management as enemies start taking longer and longer to kill normally. In Stage 7, you must make a tile fall from the ceiling to reach a new part of the labyrinth. This requires jumping up to bring the tile down as you hit against it, but an observant player will note that every other flimsy tile in the room shakes too when you jump, thus meaning you can pre-emptively spot falling tiles via jumping before you enter a room. In Stage 8, there are several screens you'll enter twice, first from the bottom going right and afterwards from the top going left. As you do this, it'll become apparent there are several guards on the upper side of the screen as you're coming in from the lower sector, and during the process you'll notice the guards shift directions based on where you run. This can become frustrating as often guards will just immediately ambush you when you're going through the screens on the upper sector, but in actuality, this can be avoided by simply using any movement abilities that just don't make noise. An extremely basic game mechanic, but relevant in that anything that might at first seem overtly gamey or archaic ends up being mostly a realistic extension of the mechanics at play, and this focus on knowledge coupled with the time turns Prince of Persia into a very different experience to anything else.

Prince of Persia is a game that wants you exploring its dungeons not just as gamey constructs but as things you need to evaluate and carefully move around while the clock constantly ticks out of your favor. There is a constant consideration going on of what actually is relevant to you and what isn't given the circumstances that mean wasting even a single second is a big deal, as you know you'll probably die further on ahead anyways and be struggling with what would otherwise be a short game because you just don't know the fundamentals of what's coming. This takes Prince of Persia from merely being a platformer into being something... different, it's not just about learning to pull off the tricks, it takes the form of a game that requires genuine problem-solving in a still retroactively unique way. Prince of Persia is a slow-burn as it wants you being completely attentive, and it left me hooked by the end. In spite of how old it is, finally reaching the Princess at the last minute still manages to be one of the more cinematic and memorable moments I've had in a game, and for anyone who wants to have something they can genuinely sink their teeth into without feeling like it was all for nothing, this is the game to play.