Just the epitome of a good idea that feels too stupid and ambitious for it to work and yet it ended up even better than it sounds.

I have some personal issues with some of the mechanics feeling like the game betrays itself, and with how intrusive dialogues get when retrying battles and how that turns what would otherwise be a fun challenge into a big time waste, but these are negligible.

The delightful novel of everything being synched with the beat, the vibrant and cohesive yet varied art style full of personality and the self-aware humor that permeates the whole game from the dialogues to the readable files, and how well the combat works in spite of how inherently delimitating the rhythm-based mechanics are make this one of the most intriguing games of these past few years and one big example of why actual creativity and innovation shouldn’t be limited to the indie landscape.

It’s a game about music, shitty puns and the power of friendship. Of course I’d love it.

Tackling on mental health issues is a move most videogames aren’t touching with a ten foot pole. Unless you have first-hand experience dealing with this stuff (Games like Hellblade do it well because psychologists and neuroscientists were involved, for example), it’s easy to mess up and unintentionally stereotype and disrespect those that have to live with it. That’s why it’s so common to make the subtext do the heavy lifting when these themes come to light. It’s a move some might find cowardly, but it’s comprehensible.

Now The Cat Lady isn’t the least bit afraid to wear its themes of depression and suicide. Right off the bat it starts with its protagonist, Susan Ashworth, reading her own suicide letter before overdosing in sleeping pills, surrounded by the stray cats that keep her company.

It might feel heavy-handed at first, but it treats it how it should: without euphemisms, cutting out the bullshit; this woman is fed up with the world and is trying to kill herself to stop the pain she has been drowning in for so long. This is empathetic; it shows how she is feeling without beating around the bush.

Empathy IS what makes this game so good. This is an adventure game that’s bloody and gritty, there’s instances of fetishist serial killers, cannibalism, healthcare violence, dead babies; hardcore edgy death metal shit, but it doesn’t feel unwarranted. It channels the darkness of Susan’s past and present, mirroring how she feels on the inside.

That aspect is very interesting, because the line between what’s fact and what’s fiction here is very blurred. There are both supernatural elements and navigable dreams, and it often jumps between them and the actual world, making you question whether or not what’s happening is true, false, or something in between.

This surrealism works quite well here, for the abstract allows for abstractions; raw emotions flow out of the characters and are made form. This also is an interesting way of subverting expectations; the jumps between “this is just a dream” to “OH SHIT THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING” make this an engaging and thrilling psychological horror experience.

This is all communicated through a Lucasarts-like aventure game, that works like a point-and-click but it actually presented like a 2D side-scroller. This is because it’s important to show the protagonist and her interactions, since it’s such a character-driven game. The camera is also used against the player, as it allows for the game to hide things that are in her field of vision, which works as a tool for creating suspense and horror.

The puzzles are standard Lucasarts and King’s Quest stuff, requiring lateral thinking in a mixture of common sense and thinking outside of the box to be solved. Unlike these games, however, they involve stuff like giving drugs to a heroin addict and killing a kidnapper with poison gas. Fun stuff.

Visually, it’s very singular. It mashes these semi-realistic pre-rendered backgrounds with black and white hand-drawn characters that look weird but still very much human; and they do come to life through the excellent voice acting (that does suffer from poor audio quality… it’s a budget game). As a vehicle for showing what it needs to show, it’s perfect. I actually finished the game in love with its style.


The soundtrack is amazing. The horrifying footstep sounds and music brings the scary moments to a whole new level, whilst most of the game is this alternative rock album that helps paint the picture and intensify the feelings it’s trying to convey so well. There’s sad, hopeful, and even badass moments that are dictated by how good the accompanying score is.

Susan is like that. She’s sad and lonely and charming and badass. A tough old lady. Through the trials she overcomes and the bond she creates with this lovely young woman that was also dealt a bad hand in life (but nonetheless teaches her so much) makes her grow a lot, and is a big symbol of hope for me.

Through this deep dive into her past, present and future (all at the same time) I was able to learn about myself and about people, and is something I can’t recommend enough for those struggling with themselves. It’s heavy, but beautiful. Isn’t that how life is?

This is one odd game. So odd that it's hard to talk about it critically. It's junk food. Is it arrogant to critique junk food? Do you treat McDonalds like you'd treat a restaurant, fine dining or not? Of course it's not the same thing, this used to be an AAA priced game on launch that got price-dropped afterwards, but it still isn't set out to wow you with its amazing story and visuals or whatever do AAA games promise nowadays, and that is fine.

That being said, it succeeds. It's a fun game with deep systems and engaging combat that makes you feel powerful, segmented by competent dungeon-crawling segments, each loosely based on a different numbered game in the series (which is unfortunately too subtle to be impactful). This is all accompanied by a story that is fun to experience and doesn't take itself seriously, but at the same time is a bit hard to follow and is not as meme-y or as satirical as it might seem for those who watched clips of it online. These funny moments are actually part of main character Jack's oddly compelling character development, something that is one of the game's biggest charms and gives the journey more meaning. Other than that, there's the in-depth job system that allows for a lot of customization and the amazing and surprisingly free co-op, which is by itself the ultimate way of experiencing this gem.

Overall, it's a relatively short soulslike experience that can be straight-forwardly played with friends, and that is something that I'm partial to. It being a Final Fantasy game with a Final Fantasy story is just icing on the cake.

A solid DLC featuring the game’s strengths and weaknesses. It definitively does a good job of explaining Leviathan’s absence from the main game whilst approaching it in an interesting and different way from the other Eikons. The main area is stunning and the new characters are compelling and Clive’s as amazing as his companions are useless, standard FF16 stuff we love. And they added in a rogue-like mode, cause that’s what the kids are into these days.

As a side note, I love how every side quest adds lore tidbits, it’s a strength of the game and I love how they kept that. I do wish they weren’t as shoehorned into the UI and had more meat in them, but as a lore nerd I’m satisfied.

I’d just be sad this is it for this cast. They are so great and full of untapped potential it’d be a waste to just move on.

A critique of The Stanley Parable itself would be too ironic for me. An irony that I’m not keen on taking part of, much less if it means creating the opportunity to be made fun of by the devs when The Stanley Parable: Ultra Mega Deluxe Director’s Cut or something comes out.

Instead, I wanted to express how surreal it was to begin the game at 12:00 AM not knowing that the game asks what the time is first thing when booted up, as the default time IS 12:00 AM.

And I realized that only when booting up the game for the second time; it asked the time again, and I adjusted it accordingly. The game mentioned how it was pissed off at how I didn’t adjust the time the first time I booted it up but calmed down after I actually adjusted it the second time around, jokingly saying that it must had actually been 12:00 AM then. But it was.

The coincidence itself is cool and all but it actually mentioning that afterwards was just an awesome meta moment that made the whole game worth it.

This game stunlocked me for over 100 hours and I’m still waiting for me to recover so I can properly talk about it.

It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but it is one of these games that is so good you can’t help but wonder when will the compromises show themselves; but unlike its predecessor, they never do.

It’s dense and full of glee, in a way that it made me like things I usually despise in games, to a point where I was doing every single activity it threw at me.

How can a studio deliver a game like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth in less than 4 years after its predecessor through a worldwide pandemic and have it be everything it promised and much much more?

It might just go down as one of the best sequels of all time. Final Fantasy LIVES.

A real jolly good time, feels very much like a late 90s/early 2000s platformer made in 2024; unfortunately, I’m not sure how much of this is paying homage, and how much is just due to it being rough around the edges.

It’s a very standard 3D platformer with satisfying movement options. If you’re looking to scratch that Super Mario Odyssey itch, this might just be the game you’ve been longing for.

It’s very much themed around yo-yo tricks. Not necessarily ones that performers do in real life; it’s more far-fetched. Like riding the yo-yo like a little hoverboard kind of far-fetched. The best comparison I can make is that it’s similar to how Yoku’s Island Express uses pinball. It’s more enamored to the concept than it is to how it’s realistically utilized, which works in its favor.

There’s a fun little story being told, and the dialogue both in and out of cutscenes is hilarious and light in tone. However, there are weird gaps between cutscenes and gameplay sequences. For exemple, there’s an instance of a sailor that had its ship damaged talking normally to the protagonist before realizing who they were talking to; they start to get angry and then the game suddenly cuts to a gameplay sequence where you have to fix their ship while avoiding their attacks. It’s sudden, and while you can piece things together, it’s still an odd jump. Such moments are frequent and can make a very simple story seem messier than it is. Luckily it is, while good fun, not what we’re here for.

Each world is memorable and unique, thanks to a strong art direction that isn’t afraid to get trippy, and levels that follow the themes faithfully. That does work against it, though, as most worlds just present themselves through the first level and the rest of them don’t really build upon the concept; they’re just more of the same. The levels themselves are fine, they’re all over the place with multiple paths while being very intuitive in terms of progression.

While the movement itself is very fun, the game does suffer from depth problems. I’m not sure if it’s the pre-programed camera angles or if its the saturated art style, but there were a lot of times where I was way farther than I previously thought, or the opposite. The camera is specially weird, they settled for this angle that can only be micro adjusted using the d-pad (as the right stick is used for yo-yo tricks) and it works most of the time, but backtracking becomes nigh impossible, making going back for collectibles a risky choice at best.

The collectibles spread throughout, composing of three special coins and three little side quests (or as the game likes to call them, dilemmas) per level. The coins are pretty standard collectathon stuff, but the little quests are quite fun; they all follow the level’s path (so no backtracking) and are quite varied, between collecting a certain number of objects within a time limit to reaching a certain score in the yo-yo tricks point system. And yes, there is a scoring system similar to what you’d find in a hack and slash, but it involves doing the maximum amount of tricks without standing still on the ground. It’s pretty basic dopamine-farming stuff, and it sometimes can feel a little inconsistent, but it is quite rewarding to reach a high score while speeding through a level.

The difficulty balancing is fine. It’s not hard nor easy, it feels just right. Definitively on the jollier side, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

As stated before, the art direction is intriguing, but visually the game isn’t the most appealing. It is cute and bright, but the saturation makes colors clash in weird ways and the models aren’t the best looking. There’s a blur on faraway objects and sceneries that makes them look like watercolor painting, and it just looks weird on an HD screen.
This being a shadow drop, it makes me wonder if it should had spent a little more time in the oven. It’s not a buggy mess, but there were a bunch of moments when weird collisions, physics, or just plain bugs got in the way of the gameplay. There’s a little button-prompt minigame at the end of each level that isn’t the most polished, and it’s as precise as it looks. And it looks weird. Not as weird as the in-engine cinematics, though. Specially in boss fights; some of the animations look like those 2000s adult swim low-budget animations, like Xavier Renegade Angel.

Alright, that was a bit too harsh. But I do wish it looked a little more pleasant. It just made them feel anticlimactic, which is the opposite of what a boss fight should be. I’d be happier if it just settled for not doing it at all, instead of them looking and feeling like that.

Also, the menus look nice, but there’s some odd choices here and there. You can press the left and right bumpers to access the in-game shop and some challenge levels (that are short, fun and use the coin collectibles to unlock) respectively, but pressing the return button takes you back to the start screen instead of the level selection. I believe it’s meant to cycle between the three options, but it is an annoying and easy mistake to make. Or maybe I’m just stupid. Either way, I hope they patch that shit.

One thing I want to praise are the 2D art sequences they have going on. It looks beautiful and it fits with the regular 3D art-style nicely.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with this one, but I wish it had a little more going for it. It’s an easy recommendation for fans of the genre, but I’m not sure if there’s enough bang for the buck. Might be worth it after a few price drops, or if you just want to support the Sonic Mania dev team.

Disclaimer: I wanted to talk about a lot of things but for the sake of omitting spoilers I settled for a certain vagueness. Sorry not sorry. Also, I would easily give it 5 stars but I can’t in good conscience do that to a game that wants me to pay extra to access NG+. To whoever called this shot, a sincere go fuck yourself.


Fiction can impact people in many ways. By allowing them to empathize with others through characterizations that express humanity’s own flaws and hardships, or by presenting them with a story that can keep them on the edge of their seat, or simply by allowing them to experience something that can stimulate their senses in cool ways. For better or for worse, the eighth installment in SEGA’s ever-growing… i-don’t-even-know-how-to-describe-it crime drama franchise aims to check all of those boxes, much like its predecessors, and while they do achieve this with varying degrees of success in what is their most packed adventure yet (even surpassing their bloatum opus Yakuza 5), Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s greatest achievement is, much to my surprise, in how it is able to deliver its underlying message in an elegant yet emotionally impactful way.

Plot aside, there’s an insane amount of content here and that makes it one hell of a journey (I reached credits with 96 hours of game time), but the depth of the story’s own themes give that journey meaning.

With the days of the Yakuza reaching an end, both in game, out of game, and in real life, what better way to move forward the series that has for so long dealt with criminals, their struggles and how they affect innocent people than with atonement. The ending of Kiryu’s saga had him realize that conciliating his past as a criminal and his dream life as a father for a whole orphanage is nigh impossible, and thus leading him to be declared dead to everyone he knows. Infinite Wealth seeks not to revert that, but to make this sad conclusion into something positive, much more fitting for a series that has dealt at length with finding beauty in criminals.

It’s an interesting fact that this is an Ichiban game. He’s the one that leads 10 out of the 14 chapters in this story, he’s the one that protagonizes all of the game’s 52 substories (that are all hilarious and worth doing, save for the final six; they have him being sexually assaulted by different women and it’s played off as a joke), he’s the one that trains the game’s own fully playable Pokémon parody minigame story, and he’s the one that leads the game’s own fully playable Animal Crossing parody minigame story. Yes, these are both pretty in-depth things in this game and I can’t believe I am serious about this. And they can last some 30 hours combined. And they rock. Anyway, it’s interesting that it’s an Ichiban game, because for him, it’s another chapter in his story. A (very bloody) vacation, if you will. But for Kiryu, this is very much a grand finale. And a very grand one indeed, but I’ll leave it at that.

But what really had me thinking is that even though this is a true passing-of-the-torch moment, Kiryu’s influence doesn’t really change Ichiban all that much. The burden on his shoulders got heavier, sure, but he’s still the same ol Kasuga that we love. Kiryu, on the other hand, has a compelling arc very much impacted by his goofy friend. Even though he already has over 10 games to his name. I don’t know how they keep doing that.

It’s hard to delve deeper into how that is without spoiling the experience, but there are a lot of newfound circumstances behind all this that make it a very fresh take on a character that already had his whole damn life played out through these games.

The fact that they can make this whole-ass game set on a completely new location and then double down on what made the previous game special and triple down on what made that game’s predecessors special and tie it all with a bow into an almost cohesive story is very much something to be celebrated. With how large the scale of this title is, it’s impressive how they manage to make it make sense and tie loose ends; even if certain characters deserved more development and screen time, everything here is enough to deliver a powerful message about living and atoning for your past sins, about this Infinite Wealth that is life itself.

Just raw arcade beat em’ up combat with punches and kicks, in a way that a PS5 controller can just barely do justice to. Cool ideas and passion can go a long way, even if devoid of depth. A game can be fun enough that it compensates its shallowness, and that is why even though I just stumbled upon this while running an errand in Infinite Wealth I couldn’t stop until I rolled credits.

And yeah, I beat this through a Yakuza game. Through another game. As Kiryu. Videogames sure have come a long way, huh

For such a short game, it does have a powerful message and compelling characters. Even if the dialogue is a bit too cheesy, it definitively treats them with empathy, while not beating around the bush.

It does deal with some heavy themes, but I did not see them approached with the right nuance. It’s like they researched them enough to get a grasp but not enough to use them in a way that feels fully realized.

It is still one emotionally impactful, scary and hypnotizing experience. It being free gets big points and it is a step in the right direction. Don’t skip this.

Whilst it isn’t a very well defined concept and a subject of much deliberation, art has a paramount importance not only in helping us pass through times, difficult or not, but also in stimulating our senses, allowing us to feel alive, to learn, to make our brains do the chemical reactions that feel good. It allows us to relate, to feel not alone. It’s something made by humans for humans; it’s precise enough for it to make its own statement, but at the same time it has an imprecision that allows us to interact and paint it with our own knowledge, to fill the blanks and interact with it making our own experiences unique. It’s an intense way of communication, it’s our gift.

Art, fiction, there are many names with many definitions that in fact all amount to the same thing, maybe with differences in the specifics and context, but it all fills that one purpose. It helps us, but more than anything, it changes us. Like life experiences do.

Oh, the irony of Alan Wake 2 portraying a world where fiction has the power to change reality around it, when the game itself is a piece of fiction that changes reality around it. Not necessarily in the same, literal manner, but it’s a work that changed MY perception of games.

It’s a labor of love, a passion project. You can tell by how much it loves its predecessors. The connections to Control (and obviously, Alan Wake, its DLCs and the standalone Alan Wake’s American Nightmare) are abundant and important to the overall plot, and there are even callbacks to Max Payne: namely James McCaffrey giving his voice to Sam Lake’s portrayal of Alex Casey; protagonist of Alan Wake’s main work as a writer and himself a reference to Payne.

There’s just this meta aspect that permeates this entire project from beginning to end. Sam Lake is Alex Casey, Alex Casey is created by Alan Wake, Alan Wake is created by Sam Lake and Sam Lake is Alex Casey. This metalinguistic ouroboros is one of many examples of how self-aware the game itself is. It’s a work of fiction about works of fiction, and it knows this fact, REMEDY knows this fact.

There’s even a certain goofyness to it that’s almost too on the nose. It takes the concepts like “The Dark Place”, “The Dark Presence”, or the villain being an evil doppelgänger of the titular protagonist named “Mr. Scratch” very seriously, but at the same time, it pokes fun at it. It’s just amusing to see the skeptic and serious Alan Wake losing his sanity lost in this hopeless but nonetheless bizarre situation.

It helps that the game sets the tone very early, making you prepared (but still surprised) for what’s to come. The very first segment sees the player taking control of a random, bloated, naked and dirty man with his balls out and his ass cheeks clapping; later on it’s explained who this man is, but for a first scene it’s quite shocking and impactful. It introduces the game’s format alongside its darker theme, inherent weirdness and very abundant jump scares. When making an immersive game like this it’s important to set the tone so players don’t get thrown off by the weirdness in the thick of it. It’s like if you’re reading this seemingly serious review about a game you like but suddenly they drop a “balls out and ass cheeks clapping” in the middle of it; it can feel jarring.

In that same vein, nothing’s out of context. It is, of course, a very bizarre piece of fiction, but even Alan Wake II’s most outlandish moments still have meaning and fit its plot, even if not in the clearest of ways. It isn’t set to answer every mystery, of course, it is a weird fiction game. It answers questions but leaves even more. It’s ambiguous. It wants to sparkle thoughts and more thoughts.

At the same time, it does feature a detective story, with mysteries sown explicitly and implicitly. It does solve the whodunnits and whydunnits and howdunnits but there’s more to it than meets the eye.

The mystery-hungry Saga Anderson is a wonderful addition and an amazing parallel to Mr. Wake. Not only does she fit perfectly into this world, the fact she’s completely oblivious to the situation at first makes her a good parallel to new players, and the way that the two different stories play out allows for the un-contextualized to keep up with the plot, since you can play each to its completion whenever. The way they come together is also masterful.

Saga’s Mind Place and Wake’s Writer’s Room make good use of the current gen hardware, allowing the game to mesh narrative with gameplay in many different ways, and their differences make each character feel wholly unique.

This connection is also exemplified in how game’s areas are wonderfully signalized. Not only do the maps offer precise information, they are beautifully designed to resemble what real life maps look like; each area with its own design. There are signs and directions that mesh with the background while still being perfectly readable and intuitive, AND making sense within the world.

Budget clearly was an issue, though. Not that it was low, it is an AAA title after all, but there’s enough evidence to infer that they were using every penny and dime they could. The lack of a physical release, for one, indicates that they’d rather used the money somewhere else. The game’s locations are very detailed and beautiful, but collision is weird. Characters often get stuck between small objects on the floor, or don’t properly fall from surface to surface. Subtitles (and sometimes even the voices) get out of sync in a few scenes. What is funny in all of this is that the game’s setting can sometimes mask the bugs, in a way that can even enhance the experience. Objects floating can be caused by bugs, but maybe it’s the Dark Place’s influence. Who knows?

It just shows that this IS a labor or love. They pulled out all of the stops to make Alan Wake II come true, and their vision came to life in the most marvelous of ways.

I just didn’t expect to fall in love with the game this much. It’s a wonderful thing, made by some of the most ingenious developers in the industry. My brain got fucked in real time, by the story, by the setting, by what I was witnessing, by the fact that the game’s so beautiful that sometimes I can tell the actual gameplay from the FMV sequences… it changed me. I don’t think Sam Lake or the team at Remedy made this game thinking of it as a work of art, but that’s what it is. It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean. Of semen. My semen.

Drakengard is what a never-ending post-nut clarity would feel like. It’s quite (not) literally a brain rot. Not in the usual “hyperfixation” sense, it’s more of a “going down into a hole of insanity and despair” kind of thing.

To be honest, these devs got lucky. Some of the decisions made here make them seem inexperienced at best, even for 2003 standards. But for some reason the writers decided it was a good time to unleash their accumulated anger and frustrations all at once into a project and ended up with a story as bizarre and deranged as it is dark and despairing; a subversion of every videogame trope poured into a long road of loss and defeat.

The result is a game that intentionally and unintentionally excels in making you feel like shit. In an unprecedented move for its medium, it paints the idea of not being either fun or a gratifying experience as its main goal.

It’s hell, but it’s refreshing.

The cast is pretty much the antithesis of the usual playable crew. The protagonist is a bloodlust-filled maniac driven solely by revenge and an incestuous lust for his own sister, and is accompanied by: a human-loathing, hypocritical dragon; a bossy, self-centered and racist priest; a blind, self-loathing pedophile that for some reason is probably the most empathizing of the bunch; and a cannibalistic elven woman driven to madness by the loss of her own children, with a sweet tooth for little kids.

Ballsy and edgy, and not in the greatest of ways, but it just fits this pit of madness; you get so numb to it that it doesn’t even feel like it’s trying too hard.

Now when it comes to the combat, they didn’t really try that hard; in fact, I don’t think they even tried. I mean, they probably wanted it to be good, but it landed right on the other side of the spectrum. And for some reason that works better here.

There’s both hack-and-slashy grounded combat segments inspired by Dynasty Warriors AND flying segments reminiscent of Panzer Dragoon and Ace Combat. Neither are very good; the former lacks impact, precision and for some reason both the player character’s actions and the camera move in respect to a close-but-otherwise-arbitrarily-chosen enemy, while the latter is as imprecise as its counterpart while having just an odd difficulty balance, and controls that in and of themselves are a challenge. It just makes the whole experience loathsome, which wasn’t the point. Wasn’t.

The soundtrack is just very… insane. I’ve seen people describe it as schizo music, and while I won’t comment on the ableism ingrained in that sentence, the sentiment behind it is quite… accurate. It’s the musical equivalent of putting your brain in a blender. Which is quite ironic given how it samples classical pieces and puts THEM in a musical blender.

It’s all just very odd, that given the story direction the game’s shortcomings work in its favor. This is the kind of game that is unique from its conception to its legacy, there’s nothing really like it, in a way that is even hard to explain.

It makes me question what makes a good game or a bad game, or even if there are games that fall out of that spectrum and belong somewhere different entirely. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but was it a bad one?

I mean, it was worth it, and it made me feel things no other game did, no other ANYTHING did. It was not fun, it was not entertaining; it was miserable. But it was worth it.

And THAT is the game’s statement. Games don’t need to be fun, or beautiful, or entertaining, or just centered around giving the player a gratifying experience. They CAN, sure, but not as a rule. They can be more than that. Art is more than that.


[Edit: I’ve come to realize that while it’s implied, I’m not sure if the romantic love between Caim and Furiae goes both ways. {SPOILERS} Furiae definitively kills herself because of her not wanting her feelings exposed by Manah, but all that really entails is that he doesn’t (or she thinks he doesn’t) know about it, not really that it isn’t reciprocal. I’ve come to expect this kind of vagueness from Taro’s work, but I’ll still keep it written that he lusts for her because shock value; yes, I’m just like that.]