Apropos of nothing, here's a caveat: I have never played Bloodborne. I am a PC gamer, and I have not ever owned a PS4, nor will I. This frustrates me, as someone who enjoys From Software's catalog quite a bit.

I enjoyed Nightmare Kart! I think it translated the Souls-like formula to a kart racer incredibly well. Using souls for speed, stamina for drifting, pickups as consumables-- it all works far better than it should. The art style is gorgeous, I love how emotive everything is-- the game is just absolutely lovely.

That said, the AI is a bit janky at times and I didn't really see any difficulty, outside of the final race when one racer got really far out ahead and I'm still not sure how.

It's free, it's fun, the boss fights (particularly the one with Nicholas) are unique highlights that are unlike anything seen in kart racers before it.

This game is fine. It's fun. It's good. It's not the most in-depth thing ever, but for a community in-joke turned to an April Fool's joke turned to a fully functional game, it's worth a playthrough.

For better and worse, this game is exhausting. The narrative forces you to meet it on its terms, and refuses to ever try and explain anything. You have to interpret and understand everything yourself. There is a lot of meaning and it's obvious that a lot of focus is put on making things feel visceral.

Unfortunately, that exhausting also extends to the gameplay. The combat is... unfortunate. The boss fights range from okay to a lot of fun (a certain late-game boss is very fun and doesn't wear out its welcome all that much), but the regular enemy fights are just exhausting. There's no difficulty to the combat, everything is very straight forward, they just decided that the best way to up the difficulty is by throwing more enemies into the fight.

Early game? Yeah, one or two. Mid game? A basic enemy and an interesting enemy. By the end? Enjoy a cluster of time-wasting combat where making mistakes means spending a lot of extra time re-doing the fights.

I wish I had more to say about the story, though. It's meaningful, and obviously has a lot of heart-wrenching moments as you explore Senua's... everything. She might be the most tormented-feeling character in all of gaming. But the gameplay is at its most interesting with puzzles that feel like they'd be at home in an escape room, and combat that just... shouldn't really be there.

Maybe the developers wanted the players to feel that same level of exhaustion and frustration as Senua, but for me it's just... not fun. This is one game that I feel would 100% work better as a movie.