I'll start with the positive: The combat system is kinetic, satisfying, and has more depth than I expected from such a casual-facing AAA release. In a game so clearly built upon the open-world mold, this is the one part they truly innovated and improved upon Papa Skyrim.

Hogwarts is a boring and bloated Wizarding World pastiche of the open world game we already tired of five years ago. It's clear that the Western response to the insane innovation in this genre from Japan (Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring) is to serve us more of the same in a risk-averse, brand-dependent fashion.

To be honest, I'm enough of a Harry Potter fan that if this game was Skyrim clone with the pristinely spooky vibe of the source material, I would be satisfied. However, Hogwarts Legacy seldom feels like stepping into the world of Harry Potter as much as it feels like a Unreal Engine 5 wizard tech demo that just happens to really look like Hogwarts.

One of the most important parts of the Hogwarts fantasy is how charmingly inconvenient the wizarding world is. You can misspeak during a Floo Powder teleportation and end up in the completely wrong place, and "friendly" monsters will turn right around and feed you to their children if you are stupid enough to waltz into their den. A school filled with students learning magic is obviously rampant with bullying, cheating, and has secrets around every corner. The sheer unpredictability of Rowling's world creates the magic and wonder of the books and movies, which is the largest incongruence with the Western AAA Open-World, a genre determined to be as convenient to the user as possible. In a source fiction already rife with inconsistencies, Hogwarts Legacy impresses me with how often it manages to trip it's own immersion to keep the experience absolutely painless. House rivalries are irrelevant because everybody wants to be your friend within a single dialogue tree. On top of all this, you happen to be the master of an ancient powerful magic that nobody else can wield because of course.

Even the combat, which I had a good impression of, gets stale when this game is stretched out to Witcher 3 length without a Witcher 3 level of content variety. The enemies are fun and in-theme, but they all feel like what should be starter enemies in a better action game. Each of them also has a very clear best answer to deal with them, which can Revelio how similar individual encounters are to each other.

Design innovation be damned, combat variety be damned, interesting open world be damned... truly, the only thing I actually wanted this game to do was take me back to being a kid, turning pages under my blanket at night, completely transported to this wizarding world. Yet as an adult, I feel substantially more babied than the games my 8-year-old little brother plays. In the journey to make Hogwarts a painless AAA open world experience, they have created a game without any of the magic that made this IP special in the first place.

Completed with platinum trophy earned. While mechanically fairly simple, The Pathless is a beautiful open-world adventure from the creators of Journey and ABZÛ, casting the player as an archer seeking to lift the curse on an island. Largely the gameplay is based around puzzle-solving, making significant use of an eagle companion as part of the necessary interactions - and while these puzzles are never overly challenging, they still manage to evoke a wonderful feeling of satisfaction. These puzzle challenges are scattered around a series of five expansive areas - perhaps somewhat too expansive, as it can at times become difficult to find a few particularly well-hidden. I understand the intention behind the game not including a map or any HUD waypoints, as this does genuinely bring benefits to immersiveness, but it also makes navigation more difficult that I'd like - instead, you're forced to make use of an alternative vision mode that highlights points of interest, but this requires line-of-sight. Judicious use of a guide helps to offset this, thankfully.

Despite these navigational frustrations, between each puzzle area, traversal across the world comes with a fantastic fluidity of motion, especially later in the game as you earn upgraded abilities. Boss encounters that become accessible after reaching a minimum threshold of solved puzzles in each area are also a definite highlight in this regard, initially seeing you chasing after each creature, challenged to make use of your movement abilities to catch them.

i’ve only played one round of this so far, but let me tell you all a story about how it all went.

before i got into the lobby, me and my friend spent about 6 minutes just trying to find a lobby that we could both get into (the queuing system isn’t very good) and once we found a lobby with enough space for both of us, i was bombarded by the screams of a 6 year old child, the entire pre-game lobby consisted of one player bullying said child into leaving and refused to start the game until he left. once the child finally left, (somehow i actually felt bad for the poor child.) the game finally started, and everything went fairly normal until the first emergency meeting. once we got to the meeting the player who i believe was the host was screaming the n-word over and over again and telling the person he found suspicious (haha funny among us word) to say the n-word and he won’t be voted out. we all called said player a loser by the way. unrelated, but i spent like 5 minutes of the game trying to do one single task in electrical, i couldn’t get that shit to work.

anyways fun game! among us as a concept works better as a vr game than it does as the original game imo.

11/27/22 update: new story, played this for about an hour straight with the same friend, this time we ran into a player who we started joking around with and quickly made an alliance with, at one point me and the guy we met both got imposter so we protected my friend and got rid of everyone else, we won that game and laughed way too hard. before we left the server we made sure to add him so we’d be able to talk again sometime.