There's enough potential here that I'm looking forward to playing Reload as soon as it releases (even though I'm betting Atlus will force me to buy the game a second time for the eventual expansion they release).

A bit less enthusiastic about this DLC after finally completing it. Not really any interesting new character developments in the story, and the combat feels a lot less frantic once you fully upgrade your TMP and Stingray. Sometimes grapple melees just don't work, which feels like shit. In the end, it felt like I was just headshotting with the Stingray and not really doing much else, which really is the most boring outcome of the RE4 combat system.

It's a game about thinking about what could've been, so naturally the ass inside me is going to take this review to reflect a bit on "what could've been" for this game, but I want to supplement that aggressive opener with the fact that the only reason I'm gonna bother being critical is because this is a pretty great game that you should absolutely check out if you like it when visual novels do cool things with the format.

Beacon Pines plays like a choose-your-own-adventure book, except it's mostly pretty linear. What this means is it successfully engages the reader in learning about the world in specific ways, then returns the viewer to points where some delicious dramatic irony can play out as the characters are put in different situations where them not knowing what some characters are hiding is part of the fun. The game does something pretty miraculous in somehow pulling this off without ever going through any scenes of groan-worthy "re-explaining" and maintains that tension largely until its final hour, something I struggle to name a single AAA game in recent memory bothering to put effort into despite constantly advertising themselves as "choices matter" with "immersive worlds". This is just a really cool way to tell a story and fill in background details while still having a central plot that moves along on its own. It's a game that ties this choice of presentation with themes of growing up, thinking about the conversations that could've been, things that could've played out differently if you just had a bit more knowledge of what was going on. If you couldn't tell, the art is also quite pretty, but the real showstopper has to be the soundtrack which I stopped to gawk at a few times.

However, as with a lot of indie games, I just can't help but wish there was more. I wish it went deeper into the body horror (a phrase I notice I've been saying more and more these days when evaluating media but I digress); I wish the game didn't tease so many text options then rarely ever give opportunities where they felt like you were really choosing something significant; I wish they had the courage to not resolve so many plot points in the epilogue; I wish they did more with the juxtaposition between storytelling and reality. It feels like a game I wanted to love, because at the pique of my interest it really excited me, but it ends things fizzling out on a bittersweet note right when things look like they might get more complicated. It accepts the unfortunate cliche of beating the villain by finding out what his plan was and having the story just end there.

I've been thinking a lot about "unfair deaths" in video games lately, especially video games that send you far back if you fail. This problem has popped up for me while playing Persona 3 Portable and Separate Ways Remake on their hard difficulties, where an encounter designed with RNG as a major component could absolutely screw you over and make you lose up to half an hour of progress if things are not designed to have guaranteed results. While this kind of design feels ridiculous, I think playing through Termina right before both of those games has made me question the value of bullshit like that in games. Roguelikes like Spelunky have systems where, if you get unlucky, enemy mechanics can become so overwhelming that there's nothing you can do to avoid taking lethal damage. However, it's arguable that such unfairness leads to incredible game situations, where you mitigate as many dangers as possible and somehow scrape your way out of a situation you know feels like it could've easily turned unfair if your luck just wasn't good enough.

Fear & Hunger is a series that was probably introduced to a lot of people with this design philosophy in mind. In Termina, there are plenty of consequences for not avoiding an encounter you can't win, for saving at the wrong time, for missing a hit, for saying the wrong thing, for trapping yourself in a corner etc., but the game also offers plenty of consistent freebies if you follow the wikis or explore around enough. I'm curious if this will be a game I come back to more, especially if content expansions start coming out. It would be cool for more character moments to really flesh out their missions. I played a lot of this game on the ADarkRaccoon Easy Mode mod, and it feels like the real challenge of the game isn't from individual encounters (unlike the aforementioned P3P and RE4 remake where I had to reload some saves several times) but from one wrong move sending you back for hours. So when I do come back to this, I want to try doing everything without sleeping and see if that finally gets me the experience I was hoping for from this. Or maybe I just need to dive into the Masochism mode where I seem to have no hope of killing anything at the start.

Slowly making my way through this - some ways into Chapter 3 right now - but just wanted to reflect a bit early because a lot's been on my mind playing this. It's fun. I'm playing for the first time on hardcore as I did with my first run of the base campaign, and it's tough in ways that feel both stupidly unfair at times yet riveting. Since finishing the remake I was surprised to find a lot of my peers on here were conflicted about the combat, and on further reflection (now that I have a reason to come back to the game) I can absolutely see why. Sometimes you're backed into a corner and there's just jackshit you can to do avoid taking a hit because stunning someone in the head with a pistol is random, which is poor design.

Sometimes in this DLC there are sections where it's better to just run past people because there's just no way you can take on the enemies, and while I will say it makes for some pretty neat horror to be scared of getting absolutely demolished by a random civilian getting the perfect angled stab into you while you're trying to maneuver past, it does certainly feel unfair when you die as a result of something so unpredictable. So, as a game that people hope to replay over and over, especially when compared to the original's fantastically predictable mechanics that allow you more control over getting better at the game, I can see why people felt like leaving so much up to RNG is just annoying. You see it constantly with the speedrunners when they lose hours of progress due to bullshit. I'm playing another game right now, Persona 3 Portable, on the hard difficulty and it's got a similar problem. Sometimes things are just brutally unfair because the enemy patterns become unnavigable and there's jackshit you can do about it. But I'd be lying if I said the release of tension when I finally figured out a cobbled-together strategy to get past something ridiculous wasn't enthralling. So, I guess maybe that's what a lot of these devs want - even if it results in reloading saves unhappily constantly - and while I don't know if I like the way this is designed overall, when I beat back two chainsaw sisters using nothing but my rifle with all my knives with fully upgraded durability breaking on my first try, knowing how unfair things could get if I failed the good run that had been given to me, it felt like exactly the kind of memorable situation I wanted more out of from the base campaign.

Maybe the DLC will drop the ball in the last two thirds, maybe the new story changes will suck, so I'm definitely writing another review of this when I'm done, but as stupid as some of the fights are, my first 2 and half hours with it have been great and I think this is one time I agree with the big industry review sites that this might be GOTY. Maybe the DLC is so good because it avoids trying to recreate things from the original and the devs have to design encounters with the new combat system more in mind.

This review came out really harsh. My only hope is my own ramblings are more insightful or entertaining than the hot garbage they charged $25 for.

This expansion is honestly so devoid of any meaning that it's made me doubt if Wreden had anything thought-provoking to say ever, or if it was purely my projection that made The Beginner's Guide seem thematically powerful as a kid. It's been months since I played this, but while recently compiling a list of games I've played these past few years I was just overwhelmed by how unfathomably terrible a product this game is the more I thought about it. Genuinely one of the biggest wastes of money you could possibly get, in an industry I didn't think could get any worse with microtransaction hell. Let me try to walk you through just how shallow nearly every new addition to this game is, so that hopefully you can understand just how my jaw is agape thinking about how this unfinished mess was a streamer delight for weeks. Bennett Foddy - whose Getting Over It I still think is the most misunderstood game of the century - foreshadowed the age of "found object" games and now you get shit like this and Only Up! getting millions of views without an ounce of shame.

The skip button section has nothing to say. The narrator adds a skip button in a confined room because some critics were requesting it. Skipping dialogue here doesn't actually affect anything in the game; it's entirely scripted for a five minute section where you are actually FORCED to "skip" to even progress. If you try sitting and listening through his monologue before "skipping", not only are the sections poorly looped where lines cut into one another, he has absolutely nothing to say. Not even some mundane story to tell, the entire monologue is exclusively nonsense. If this is meant to be a comment on artists failing to take criticism and going insane, it's hard to give a shit when there's no original vision that's being altered to include the skip button. So what is the joke here? That the game's writing took a fucking nosedive and removed any specificity whatsoever? In fact, that's a running theme here. This entire expansion just vaguely gestures at "bad game practices" that I can't think of a single other game doing, essentially making this a game that's purposefully bad as "satire" for nothing in particular but itself.

The consequences for skipping dialogue don't make sense either. Time in the game world progresses when you skip, which is supposed to convey what? That players are messing with the logic of the world by doing things on their own terms? Sure, this is probably frustrating as an author, and I don't really respect people who - for example - fast forward through movies. But, at the end of the day, what is the point of making fun of players who skip dialogue? If skipping dialogue doesn't change the fundamental meaning of the scenes, as is the case here, why is a fuss being made about doing so? Skipping dialogue in video games typically happens when someone is replaying and/or trying to go through it faster to reach the more difficult content, yet something this fundamental to the thing he is making fun of is never once brought up.

This is because the entire skip button section isn't actually about the concept of skipping in video games at all, but about some stupid fucking reviews people left on Steam intentionally targeted at the narrator for being annoying. It's the equivalent of a fucking Reddit post making fun of someone's dumb comment about a product, except the guy has a meltdown about it and somehow the meltdown itself isn't even funny. You can't just go "UNFUNNY!???" towards a shitty comment and automatically be considered funny, you have to put effort into writing jokes with some kind of layers supporting them - which I thought Wreden was fully capable of but maybe I was just fucking hallucinating last decade because that could not have been the same person that wrote this shit. The base game arguably had some of this with its premise of the narrator and the player being in an endless battle, with neither coming out that much better. Yet this expansion is no longer interested in that tension between audience and authorial media analysis, if the games were ever interested or just blowing smoke up our asses the entire time. We basically just have a bunch of sections where the narrator decides to make fun of a random fucking player request for an entire level. Here's two more examples:

What about collectibles? What game out there adds collectibles to the base game after a decade and charges you full price for the expansion? Name one game that fits this criteria that the game is supposedly making fun of, because I'd be fucking fuming at that game, but the only game I can think of that pulls such a gross stunt is this one. The closest thing I can think of is when AAA games have prepurchase rewards that include more collectibles, which is still questionable but a very different situation from buying the whole game all over again. We also have varying levels of remasters, with the most egregious probably being The Last of Us which does a graphical overhaul no one asked for and pretty much nothing else. There's also shit like Nintendo Switch ports that charge full price for ports; I guess that could be what's happening here? So, is the game trying to criticize itself for needing to "expand itself" to justify being ported to newer systems, because that would be an actually interesting thing to talk about for indie games especially with how awful game preservation is. If this was indeed an intended theme of the game, it's barely touched on because the game wants to treat these half-hearted "expansions" as funny in and of themselves.

I've heard Todd Howard once promised to try making voice actors say the player's name a thing, but has anyone seriously been asking for this enough to make a joke about it? The narrator is taking a shot at self-righteous players who think they're very important by imagining a feature no one asked for. What about all the shit recently with right wing mods removing gender and race options in RPGs, an actual fucking real-life situation you can satirize instead of this lazy nonsense? Is this a joke about Todd Howard and people like him trying to implement a difficult feature that barely does anything but jerk the player off? What's the joke? How can you make fun of writers who cater to audiences when they have nothing to say when that's exactly what's happening here?

Every single issue Ultra Deluxe brings up feels like it focuses on the least interesting party. It focuses on the lazy criticisms from shallow audiences instead of how they affect how the author creates. It focuses on the bad products that result from shitty industry standards rather than how those standards affect artistic creativity. It's like it's asking the audience to give up hope for creativity under these circumstances, even though they've lasted long before this game's release, by intentionally making itself the most noncommittal, boring game you've ever seen. This game is so depressing that I honestly hope Wreden and co. get into a better mindset because this fucking shit is embarrassing for a writer who felt like such an icon in the indie game scene for a little while. Infinite hole scene innocent though.

I hate to feel like a contrarian, but after almost 195 hours of this, I fail to understand why this is being praised as leaps and bounds above Bethesda products in terms of narrative. The vast majority of amusement from this game is the exact same kind of thing I get from Bethesda games, which is in experimenting with how small character changes affect how different scenes play out and the explore-fight-loot loop. The Dark Urge had some fun surprises in Act 1, for example, with random acts of violence that tease that shit's about to get serious if you play this character compared to the rest. With such a tease, I was determined to push the thematic tensions this game introduces as far as they would go to get the most out of things, making decisions on a whim based on how curious I was to see their outcomes. I played on Tactician difficulty too, expecting a greater difficulty forcing me to make harsher decisions. This is the game that, after all, people are recommending as the antithesis to Starfield.

Except, just like Bethesda games, BG3 struggles about as much to make these role-playing decisions mean much in terms of thematic impact or gameplay scope. The Dark Urge's story is my main example here also, because of just how disappointed I started getting with how his narrative twists barely affect anything revolving around your party composition despite several actions he takes or took prior to the events of the game being obvious huge red flags. BG3's mainly concerned with telling the stories of cultists escaping abuse and what kinds of people they choose to become afterwards. However, despite having the majority of its main cast dealing with varying situations like this, it's a bit astounding to me that we're rarely shown why their histories complicate their decisions more. It's more like their cults are established and then there's a pivotal scene where they realize they want to be more autonomous, and then what they do with that autonomy is frustratingly trivial: designed to just get you to check out their native boss fight(s) in Act 3.

The most memorable scene for me in the game is when Lae'zel enters the zaith'isk and you're just witnessing this empirical soldier you've been traveling with obsessed with cleansing herself of rot, even though almost everyone there understands it's a euphemism and that machine will kill her. Scenes like that, where the consequences the game wants you to think about feel like they mean something - potentially losing the most powerful party member in the game to some force outside of your control - feel so scarce, while the gameplay of fights feel entirely disconnected from any of these themes whatsoever. Your companions fight each other a few times in Act 1, and then the tensions that feel like they shouldn't be resolved so quickly just dissipate. I felt like maybe I could get to understand these characters early on in the game, with another memorable scene being when Lae'zel threatens to murder-suicide you all because she was just that paranoid over losing control and losing the favor of her god. But this desperation reaches its apex at the scene in the zaith'isk, and then seems to lose any urgency overnight.

BG3 essentially tries to add some complications to the hero narrative by allowing you and your companions to abuse power just as much as your predecessors did, but there's barely any meat behind your or their decisions. This is especially obvious when you recruit Minthara, who requires that you mass murder two entire groups of innocents. The game's options for you to explain yourself as to why you did these atrocious things are shockingly scant, and the most that happens is one companion tells you to fuck off and the other just straight up disappears for the rest of the game. The "companion disapproves" message started to feel completely superficial after this. During the celebration after the massacres, talking with your companions on their feelings about this major event reveals very little about their motivations. Shadowheart hints at having more complicated feelings, but they don't amount to much; as far as I can tell, it doesn't affect her going forward. Astarion wants to feel more powerful, but there's never anything that even remotely challenges his position on any-means-necessary.

The gods and masters of Baldur's Gate 3 are also just fickle without having the thematic focus to make standing up against them feel like standing up against any particular concept. Fighting them felt like I was doing so only because 1) I want power and 2) my companions have unfinished business with them. In essence, this feels like I was just doing fights because they were there and I sorta cared about my companions even though I was never really sure who they were beyond their trauma.

The gameplay in Tactician is barely any different from the normal difficulty. The only thing I really noticed was that some enemies in late Act 1/early Act 2 disarm your team a lot more. Really devastating if that happens, except half your team probably does not care about being disarmed. You also get so much food throughout the game that you should never be anywhere remotely close to running out of long rests, so you can't really call the main gameplay challenge resource management either. I know it's a meme if you're like me and save up every single scroll in the game for some big fight in the end, but I think that that also says something about how the game is not challenging you to think outside of the box at all. But beyond that, the scrolls offer you basically what some people in your party should probably already have anyways by mid-game, so they're just redundant. The most fun I got from the fights was pushing enemies around like some schoolyard bully. Big damage numbers are always nice too. I got some nostalgia from XCOM 2 similarities. These were unfortunately not interesting enough as main mechanics to sustain such a long campaign for me.

There's just so little conflict despite so much potential for politically and morally complex storytelling here. I can't possibly take this narrative as a serious work when it kept feeling like background dressing for the tried-and-true explore-fight-loot Bethesda formula everyone is supposedly just as eager to have more depth out of as I am. Yet, the fact that this is being championed as the new standard is just indecipherable to me. Meet the new gods, exact same shit as the old gods. That's the real theme of this game.

Over the thousands of hours I've spent playing team shooters, Team Fortress 2 has remained so appealing to me because of its clear focus. By not taking its roster anywhere near as seriously as your Overwatches, your Rainbow Six Sieges, etc., players are allowed to fulfill their role-playing fantasies in a kind of self-parody and the result is (mostly) a community that finds a balance between competitiveness and fun goofing off. TF2 Classic is arguably better than the base game at the moment because it removes a lot of the weapon clutter, forcing each class to play their class better rather than relying on swapping in and out cheesy gimmicks.

Some of the new additions are excellent. The jump pad is the real star of the show, but plenty others feel like they're keeping in mind the role of the class and adding something that's a reasonable extension of that.

I don't like the state of melee weapons in the game, and I think how awkward medieval modes feel demonstrate what I mean. I think every class should be able to get crits if some of them are - and I don't mean random crits which still feel iffy even if they're only for melee now. Maybe they could make it so Medic can manually charge up Shock Therapy, but doing so means he's not healing.

Hopefully they'll find a way to add more good weapons and balancing in future updates, but things have been refreshingly good. My biggest hope is they add back pl_swiftwater and group dancing. Sniper is still a frustrating class. Someone on YouTube suggested making it so that the longer he charges his rifle the more visible a faint laser sight should be. That might encourage Snipers to get better at quickscoping rather than holding sightlines to get kills, while still keeping the oppressiveness of the class just without literally sending people to spawn so often.

I didn't expect this, but I can't stop thinking about this game. Went back to finally do an Undertale Genocide Run to see if I was just completely wrong being so lukewarm on that game, but there's so many ways Deltarune takes the good ideas Fox had for that game and expands on them to really reveal their potential. First, the silent protagonist finally gets a personality through cutscenes, through the music, through how the other characters feel about them. The new Tension Points and party system for ACTing make fights/encounters feel like there's so much more depth to replay. I really appreciate games released in chunks when they take advantage of the time spent between update waits, and so far it feels like Deltarune might be doing that.

The narrative here is structured similarly to OMORI, but I think it succeeds more than that game did in "fantasy" environments actually providing some kind of insight into the characters being controlled, where that game was largely only about fantasy as avoidance. So, yeah I'm super on board and I hope this manages to become Fox's masterpiece. Even if it doesn't turn out so good, this is probably the most I've gotten out of free game.

"NOW'S YOUR CHANCE TO BE A BIG SHOT"
Still too early in the story to tell if the meta stuff is gonna work on me this time, but I'm glad to finally be invested in something from Fox.

The puzzles are pretty simple, but they mostly just provide an excuse to go around the map and learn bits and pieces of the tragedies taking place. I got to a secret, non-canonical ending instead of figuring out what I'm actually supposed to do, and I think I'm satisfied with leaving it at that since the backtracking was getting a little stale by then. Can't say anything really stuck with me as definitively great, but there's enough charm here in the storytelling that I don't regret checking it out.

Hoping Capcom doesn't abandon the very cool melee combat expansions hidden in here. Resident Evil as a series never found a way to make multiplayer anywhere near as memorable as it seemed like it could've been. Maybe they'll try again in the near future. I feel like they'd need to have more focus in the gameplay than just letting two people run around and occasionally turn cranks though. Even if they can't make it "Resident Evil" why not go the other way and embrace the silly, innovative arcade action fully?

The series is known for pathing and inventory and time management, especially rewarding replays, but none of that is present here. There's not even any puzzles in the chapters I've played so far with a friend. I wish they leaned harder into the arcade style if they were gonna swerve that hard away from imo the series' core gameplay themes. Resident Evil 4 Remake's very fun combat hopefully won't be the last we see these ideas implemented. Hell, this is one instance I'd be okay with seeing a series being milked for remakes if they decide to remake each campaign separately somehow. I think there's still so much potential left for the series tbh. Don't think I've ever been so excited about a video game franchise, but I guess I like these games.

Doom (2016) is my preference in the series. The original Dooms felt like I was making much more deliberate decisions rather than reacting to things (although speedrunning would probably be a different story). Doom II is a trolly game, where it's easy to miss level exits and ambushes happen constantly. Can't say either of the originals are personal favorites, but they were decent enough to spend a couple dozen hours on.

At its best, it's a game about meticulously planning routes past dangers. Not having an autosave does suck while learning the map, but like the best Resident Evils it's made to be speedran by amateurs on replays. The rigidness of the gameplay design is nowhere near as bad as people say it is. In fact, I'd welcome a few revivals of the genre. RE2 Remake has some of the inventory management, but it really can't compare with the king of survival horror. And learning to navigate the cameras ends up feeling so rewarding. Also, the game looks so pretty. What a classic. Can't wait to sink another 20 hours into it.

This decade so far has seen a surge in Asian American indie films, yet none of them come close to the specificity of this. What a relief to finally have some real fucking stories to tell instead of the vague, pretty junk about not fitting in constantly blowing up on Letterboxd.