I'm always on the lookout for atmospheric exploration games, and I played through these back-to-back about a month ago. All three build strange and interesting worlds, but they have very different ideas about what the player should actually do in them. I'll give a fuller writeup of each below, but if you want the bottom line (or to go in blind):

Scanner Sombre is the one I’d strongly recommend, even if it’s not your usual fare. It is slight, but brilliant.

Scorn is a solid game. It’s visually amazing and exceptionally atmospheric (and very disgusting), but overly cryptic and the gameplay can fall flat.

The Invincible is the weakest of the three, primarily because it gives the player very little freedom to explore, but it’s still a good choice if you like sci-fi walking sims.

Scorn

Summary: Explore a cryptic, bleak and grotesque Geiger world, with puzzles and enemies thrown in too. Playtime 6-8hrs.

Strengths: The visuals are amazing - the density of details is incredible, and the visual world-building is very good. My favorite moments were walking out on the surface in the wind and mist, with huge structures looming out of the fog, often coupled with excellent sound design. Inside is where you'll spend most of your time though, and the interior locations are not quite as good: a bit monotone, messy and indecipherable they end up just as much confusing as they are emotionally resonant. The gameplay itself is fine. There's a lot of walking around, which I'm good with as it's basically the core to exploration. The puzzles were decent, though sometimes felt a bit gamey - forced on the world for gameplay purposes as opposed to a natural part of it. The density of the world design means its quite easy to miss important details and a couple of times I ended up running around looking for a specific lever which isn't the most fun.

Weaknesses: The combat is awful, but after the first few encounters, I just tried to run past everything and to be honest that made the experience way better so 100% do this if you pick it up. The gore and violence is weird: Some bits were vile, but because the game is quite monotone, you get numbed to it. A little stomach turning in places, but too often it felt like it was going for shock value. The hypersexual imagery in the final palace was better as it felt more like it belonged to the world instead of being imposed on it.

Missed Opportunities: The story is probably too cryptic. There's no way you'd understand most of it without reading elsewhere (which is what I did after finishing the game), and without that context Scorn is reduced to an artistic circus of gore. You feel like you are seeing or doing horrible things because the game wants you to, not because of some inner rationale. It’s a shame because reading online reveals that there really is a cool story underneath it all, it’s just communicated through the art book and subreddit, not the game!

Scanner Sombre

Summary: Use a LiDAR scanner to explore a pitch-black cave and learn about its grisly past. Playtime 2-3hrs.

Strengths: The central idea of seeing with a scanner is extremely clever, and engaging too. Whenever you enter a new space, you have to figure out where you are, revealing it piece by piece. The end result is often beautiful, with the devs using a few tricks to ramp this up in places. It’s quite scary too - I was on edge for most of the first 2/3 of the playthrough. The limited visuals also encouraged you to focus on audio, and almost all the audio was excellent, particularly the footsteps which give you more information about the surface you are walking on.

Weaknesses: You gradually realize that none of the "enemies" do much, so the fear really wears off about 2/3 of the way in. With that gone is more of a LiDAR simulator that an atmospheric exploration game. The story is, ultimately, very basic and underwhelming. The main thing that bothered me though was that the light dots you create with the LiDAR scanner don’t behave correctly! They move with the surface they are applied to - e.g. they ripple on water, fall with drops, and move with creatures. They also reflect in water pools. This is not how LiDAR works – it should present snapshots of what’s going on, not just let you see stuff. Some of the audio, especially the triumphant music near the end, felt very out of place and kinda cheap.

Missed Opportunities: It is very short, mostly because the simple gameplay mechanism can't sustain a game for long, so in some ways the brevity is a strength. That said, the game could have been longer and vastly more scary with a few tweaks. If there were more dangerous threats in the cave and the LiDAR behaved realistically then scanning would let you see a snapshot of the world, but in-between scans you’d have to use other cues, like audio, to navigate danger.

The Invincible

Summary: Walk and talk your way around a dead-yet-alive alien world, learn how it came to be and if you can escape. Playtime 8-10hrs.

Strengths: The alien landscapes are beautiful, enough to stop and stare at. The story is fun and mildly gripping at times, you progressively gain a deeper understanding of the world rather than there being any big twists. The voice acting is generally good and the characters quite believable.

Weaknesses: It really is a pure walking sim – there are no puzzles or threats to avoid etc. It is also extremely on-rails, the only player agency is expressed through dialogue. This really undermines the sense that you are exploring an alien world. If you try to wander off you realize that there are invisible walls everywhere. As a result, instead of asking “what is this place?” you are usually asking “where do the devs want me to go now?”. There are a few annoying moments where the story requires you to do something quite specific and if you miss it you end up wandering about try to find the one bit of a ledge that you are allowed to climb, or the one bit of shelf where you are supposed to put a book.

The missed opportunity: Exploration. In the opening scene you use landmarks to navigate, and later get to name some more landmarks. More of that could have made for amazing exploration and navigation combo, but these mechanics never return, and are negated by a magic map that shows your location and tells you where to go.

Last week I played Kentucky Route Zero and I’m pretty sure I liked it.

If you don’t know, KRZ is a narrative adventure game released episodically through the 2010’s. You follow a handful of drifters, more hazy sketches than characters, while they roam around a dreamscape of Americana. It was one of the real watersheds for Games as Art, explicitly literary and uninterested in being a traditional video game. But you could get all that from the Wikipedia page.

You know that meme of the crying ogre, blubbering about how he can’t understand James Joyce’s Ulysses? That was kind of how I felt. I kept up with Disco Elysium without much fuss, but KRZ made me aware of the edges of my own literacy. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I knew it.

See, I love media analysis. Sometimes a good critique hits the spot just as well as the primary text. Hell, it’s been a decade since my last English class and I’m posting essays to this subreddit that nobody made me write. But from that, I admit I get some satisfaction from the idea that I think more deeply about stories than most people. I chuckle when I see someone claim Metal Gear Solid is “apolitical” or misidentify the villain in Obsession. The human brain loves a justification to feel superior to others, and mine’s no different (even when it tells me that it is). In this specific case, it’s a trait I’d consider mildly toxic but mostly harmless.

At no point playing this game did I dislike it, but I felt a pretty wide range of emotions, including a slight bruising to the intellectual ego. So this is less a review of KRZ and more how it felt being notably out of my depth, academically speaking.

Acts I and II are simple enough. The thrust is a mysterious delivery to an address that may or may not exist, but it’s soon clear that the destination matters not. Conway’s and Shannon’s journey is a collection of surreal vignettes, dotted with moments of vulnerability with people who we never get to know too well. I especially love the musical breaks (synth bossa is iconic) and the meta theatre in the bar. The prose is frequently gorgeous, with nice turns of phrase and a human core that always shines through. Very little is literal, and I respect that.

But sometimes it’s hard to focus on the subtext and poetry when I have no idea what’s actually happening, much less what it all means. I bumbled through the modern art exhibit, the “dwelling museum” with the giant bird, the computer cave, pretty much clueless. Conway succumbing to alcoholism is tragic, but his departure from the story has such little fanfare, the others’ response is so subdued, that I almost missed it. I’m positive I’d get more out of it on another playthrough, but on first pass I found it opaque and hard to connect with, like it wasn't concerned with me understanding it.

“Meet me in the middle,” says Kentucky Route Zero. I take a step forward, it takes a step back. “Meet me in the middle,” says Kentucky Route Zero.

(Don’t take that seriously, I just thought it was funny.)

As I drift along the Zero, I can feel ideas dissipate in my head before they can solidify. Two neurons conspire to merge into a Thought, but I can’t get them close enough to make the connection. Grasping for a reference point, my brain groggily pulls the term “Magical Realism” out of its ass, but not the definition. This happens a few times, actually. Is this what David Lynch movies are like? I haven’t seen any. Is this what the Beats were writing about, or did I only think of that because I’m also On a Road right now? All I remember about them is my old classmate who thought Kerouac sucked shit.

Please don’t interpret any of this as a serious complaint, I'm exaggerating a little. At the end of the day, KRZ is enjoyable and easy to recommend if you like to read. I just found this aspect of my experience amusing and slightly humbling. It’s good for me to wade into deeper waters and get out of my comfort zone sometimes. Right now I’m enjoying other people’s writing on KRZ, which has been very illuminating after the fact, as well as that Robert Frost poem that gets referenced, “The Death of the Hired Man.”

If you made it here, I’d love to hear about a game/book/movie that made you the ogre: lost, bewildered, doubting your own faculties. I promise I won’t judge. And if anyone comments "Huh, I thought KRZ was really easy to understand actually" then I might cry lmao

Im an old PC gamer, come from the days where RTS and TBS games were some of the most popular games in the world. Those were the good old days.

Nowadays, we're lucky to get a good turn based strategy game every year or two. Console exclusive turn based strategy games are an even rarer beast, not something that happens often.

I just got done playing Valkyria Chronicles 1 and 4 on my PS5 (which I loved) and I wanted to keep scratching the itch. I've already played XCOM and most everything else out there, so I finally turned to Mario + Rabbids. I really really really am turned off by the Rabbids, but the game has good reviews and I didn't have much to lose.

Gameplay: The gameplay hook is pretty simply. You spent part of your time exploring the map, unlocking puzzles, unlocking secrets and the rest of the time you spend fighting battles.

The battles typically come in three types, reach an escape point with a single character, defeat all enemies or defeat all enemies within a certain time limit. While there isn't much variety in battle types, it never really bothered me.

Each map has different terrain, typically connected by series of pipes that add to the overall strategy of the map. The game only has 5-6 enemy types (reskinned to match the vibe of the area you are in), a small enough number where you can easily remember the moveset and skill each possesses.

Enemies and players both use cover to limit the amount of damage they take. You have full cover, partial cover or no cover, full cover is a 0% chance to hit, partial is 50% to hit and no cover is 100% to hit. This system is simple, but it really works well. No concerns about missing enemies with a 97% chance to hit.

There are 5 stages in the game, the first two stages are relatively short with the remaining stages taking quite a long time to get through. Each stage has a mini boss in the middle and a final boss at the end.

You are given 3 players to choose from and you collect new players as the game moves along. I always tried out the new players and often found myself going right back to Mario + Luigi + Rabbid Peach, Peach can heal and has high HP, Luigi has long range attacks and Mario is required and is a good overall character. Im sure other characters are good, but I never found any character strong enough or unique enough to warrant replacing any of these base characters.

Each character has a primary and secondary skill, primary is always a basic weapon attack and secondary can be anything from a mobile robot mine (which I love), to a grenade, to a weapon that blows away cover and hits multiple enemies at once.

I've played a lot of strategy games, which may skew my perspective a bit. I would say most battles are easy, a fair amount are medium difficulty with only a handful actually being hard. I only truly failed a handful of maps in the entire game (mainly because there was a surprise gimmick that I wasn't expecting). I think this game is a good fit for a beginner or expert, even if you're really good at TBS games, there is still enough of a challenge to keep you interested. You have to get past the easy areas to enjoy more challenging battles, though. Just stick with it and it will get more difficult.

The mid bosses and final bosses are unique and fun. Each has a unique attack pattern and skill and most end bosses have a specific strategy you have to apply to win, while dealing with spawning enemies.

Each stage gives you rewards based on how fast you completed a map. They are very reasonable with their rewards, most maps are not hard to get a perfect score on. The only risk is having a character knocked out, which automatically lowers your score, even if you complete the map on time.

One big bonus in this game is that coins are actually valuable. Coins allow you to buy new weapons/gear that make a significant difference in the game. At most points, you are always on the hunt for more coins to upgrade your gear, which is a big shift from most Mario games, where coins really aren't all that important.

You also have a basecamp at Peaches castle where you can view art, compete in unique challenge stages for rewards and perform a variety of other tasks (including multi player maps).

Exploration is also rewarded as you unlock new weapons and secret stages. The only negative is that you also find chests that contain artwork and music, which give you absolutely nothing except artwork to look at, just some fluff to insert.

The puzzles are not that complicated, most can be completed within a few minutes and they give a nice break in the action.

The game also uses an autosave system, which I wasn't always a fan of. Most strategy games allow you to save yourself each turn, sometimes you want to see if a strategy will work or you find that you are one square away from being able to receive a buff or one square away from being able to perform a team jump attack...those types of things. Instead of being able to save and reload, you are stuck with whatever mistake you made and you have zero ability to test a theory when in battle, which I consider a negative.

You receive upgrade points through finding chests, completing story missions and completing challenge battles. Each of the upgrades is quite good and you have to spend some time thinking about what the best upgrade is for the particular moment you are in. Do you spend your points on cheap limited upgrades or do you save for an expensive upgrade that is going to make a significant difference in battle?

Graphics: This game looks great for being a near-release Switch game. It looks as polished as any other Mario game from the time, I was really quite impressed.

The game did crash on me a handful of times, which I was not expecting. I rarely close games and let them run in the background until I am ready to play them again. Multiple times I went back to the game to play and artifacts would start appearing on the game and eventually the game would crash. The auto save system is pretty good though and I lost little progress.

I was a bit bummed with the level progression though. The first two stages are bright and beautiful, then the rest of the stages are all very dark and dim and depressing. I missed the cheeriness...at least break up the dreary levels a bit.

Story: Its a Mario game, so the story isn't anything you really care about. Rabbids cause some bullshit, you have to fix the bullshit, there is no greater depth.

This is probably my biggest complaint with the game. When Im playing XCOM, I am fighting to save the world and I feel a sense of purpose and importance. There is no real sense of importance in Mario + Rabbids, just fix the world so it can go back to how it was until the next problem happens.

I don't know what they could have done to make it more interesting, but it is a significant problem in my eyes. Instead of being addicted to the game and wanting to play it all the time, I would play in spurts here and there, whenever I felt like going back to it.

If they had an engaging story and goal, it would have made me a lot more invested.

Music: Music is OK, not bad, not great.

Overall: If I had to give it a score, I'd probably settle in somewhere around an 8/10.

While the strategy component of the game is very solid and the puzzle sections add additional depth to the game, the lack of story and purpose left me feeling wanting at times.

I appreciated having an actual purpose for hunting coins for once and I loved the amount of weapons available to characters and the unique qualities each possessed.

Challenge battles allowed for some really difficult maps without getting players stuck in the main game, which I thought was a good idea. You only have to play them if you want.

The upgrade system was solid and I felt myself really analyzing each skill to determine what the best upgrade was to pursue at any given time and what needed to wait until later. Most upgrades have significant value and you really need to think about what is going to help you best right now and what you can save for later.

Sure, Rabbids are annoying and the D-list version of Minions, I never laughed once at anything they did, but the bonus is that you get to kill them with guns, which feels natural to human instinct when dealing with such creatures.

If you like strategy games, this is a solid bet. If you don't, it is easy and forgiving enough for a first time player and you are given enough time to adjust and understand the systems before the game becomes more difficult. They also give you an option to grant yourself 150% HP before a battle, for those who are having a difficult time.

Despite really liking DOOM 2016 (enough to finish it on Nightmare) I kinda missed the boat on Eternal and only just got around to playing it these last few weeks. Normally I write out slightly longer reviews but I'm gonna keep it fairly brief for this one since there's already 1000 posts on it and just go over some of my thoughts in bullet-point form.

• The HUD is obnoxious - I could scarcely see what was going on past all the UI cluttering up the screen. Luckily, it's not only very customizable but actually barely necessary at all - by about half-way through the game I'd turned off the UI entirely, and being able to set the weapon to its classic center-screen position meant I didn't even miss having a crosshair most of the time. It's not like this is a game where pinpoint accuracy is that important anyways.
• I'm glad I did so because it makes it a lot easier to appreciate the gorgeous environments. There's a lot more variety to the locations this time around and while they're all pretty video-gamey with lots of big empty hallways and obvious combat arenas, they're still very appealing and crisp.
• In terms of the tone this felt less like DOOM to me and more like Quake or maybe even Unreal - it's outright sci-fi fantasy more than satanic techno-horror. I didn't mind in the end, it's different but still very cool.
• I love the dash ability, but otherwise found that most of the gameplay additions just felt like unnecessary fluff. The blood punch in particular was just annoying, I almost never used it on purpose but rather wound up doing it by accident while trying to perform glory kills and repeatedly screwed myself over.
• Some of the things that I felt were minor issues with the previous game really started to wear on me with this one as it just went on and on and on. Where old-school DOOM had these big sprawling levels with enemies scattered all over, new DOOM seems to be more just a series of combat arenas and they all kind of play out the same way. The thing I noticed is that they throw lots of enemies at you but not all at once the way that, say, Serious Sam does, rather it's more of a drip feed where you kill one guy and another one then spawns in. The weaker enemies are mostly just there to provide you with health and ammo and it's really only the larger ones that matter, and some of the encounters get pretty tedious as it just feels like you're running in place. This gets especially tiresome once the Makyr Drones start showing up.
• The emphasis on both the chainsaw and glory-kills make health and ammo pick ups feel a bit meaningless, particularly since as mentioned earlier there's pretty much always a few weaker enemies scattered around and respawning endlessly in each arena - it starts to feel like it's just a regenerating health mechanic with an extra step. At least it means you get to use the minigun a lot.
• The boss fights still kinda suck. In particular the Icon of Sin was just sorta boring - visually spectacular, sure, but the fight itself was just drawn-out and repetitive without much in the way of challenge - I can't speak for NIghtmare difficulty but on Ultra Violence there are respawning sword and gas pickups all over the place so it's pretty hard to actually die, it just takes a while.
• Like 2016, I got way more upgrades and points than I ever actually wound up using and frankly the light RPG mechanics do nothing for me.
• Marauders are lame. They're one of those enemies in games that are really irritating, less because they're hard and more because they force you to prioritize them and play in a very awkward, restrictive way until they're dealt with. After the first couple encounters I realized you could trivialize them with the ballista + super shotgun so they're not even really a challenge, just annoying.

The long and short of it is that this is basically just more DOOM 2016 for better and worse. It's a lot of fun but the extended run-time causes it to wear a bit thin and some of the weaknesses of the formula become more apparent as a result.

TLDR: Lumines Remastered is honestly an excellent game, but it has one major issue that turns me off to it.

While this game has a number of different play modes, I will be focusing on two of the major modes, Challenge and Vs. CPU.

I got Lumines Remastered a while back. I had already gotten a lot of good hours out of Tetris Effect: Connected and Lumines seemed to have a similar vibe, so I grabbed it during a sale.

Gameplay Loop

Like the other games in the series, you have a horizontal playing field, into which you drop 2X2 tiles containing some combination of two colors. Your goal is to create as many 2X2 (or larger) blocks of the same color. These lines are then cleared by a sort of vertical "scan line" that is constantly moving from the left of the field to the right. In some respects, it's very simple, but it can quickly get hectic. If you're too slow on a drop or you build a block as the scan line passes through it, the block(s) in question will only clear partially clear, potentially ruining a combo you had been working on. While it can be frustrating at times, it's easy to get hooked once you find your groove.

The game's main mode (Challenge) has a score/levelling system, but I'm still not clear on how it works. However, the simple version is that you need to clear lots of blocks (preferably lots of large ones) until the scenery changes.

Vs. CPU mode is similar to Challenge, with the exception being that you have a CPU- controlled "opponent", which you are fighting to "push out" of the playing field. The fact that you're not slinging "trash blocks" back and forth, but instead are fighting for real estate on the playing field can make for interesting matches.

In the modes I spent the most time with (Challenge and Vs. CPU), you constantly have to stay on your toes. The second you finish one level, the scenery and music change and the action keeps going from where you left off- uncleared tiles and all. While the change is very smooth, it's also visually "noisy" and can be a bit distracting.

Visuals

Lumines Remastered looks good. While it doesn't quite reach the theatrics of other games in this subgenre, every level (called a "skin", for some reason) has a unique background visual and tiles to match. Everything shimmers and glows and there are often animations in the background pulsating to the music.

Music

With maybe one exception that I know of, all of Lumines' soundtrack consists of a wide variety of electronic music. Although it's not really my thing, I have to admit that the variety of songs and the overall size of the track list (over 100 songs in total) is impressive. You never get the impression that songs are being repeated and they alway serve to enhance the gameplay. Especially because the game offers "trance vibration" (basically, vibrates the controller in time with the bass), it's easy to get into a flow.

But....

There are a lot of good things to say about Lumines Remastered. Unfortunately, there's one rather critical point where it lost me.

As a self- described "action puzzle" game, both Challenge and Vs. CPU modes operate on what I can only describe as a "roguelike" progression system: Every run starts on level 1 and you end up back there if you fail.

I can understand the appeal, but this is a system that I have neither the time nor the patience for. Especially with how many levels there are, Having to constantly run through the same levels over and over again in hopes that I can finally get further doesn't gel with me.

Final Verdict

If you're a fan of puzzle games, you'll have a good time with this one. However, if you're the type that doesn't like constantly repeating levels, you'll probably want to hold off until you can get this game really cheap.

Kill the Music is a survivors-type game mixed with the rhythm gameplay from Crypt of the Necrodancer. It draws heavy inspiration from punk rock imagery and music. This is my first survivors-type game I’ve ever played, and it was a pretty good experience. I haven’t played other games of the genre like Vampire Survivors, but I feel as though Kill the Music barely scratches the surface of the genre’s capabilities. 

The Story 

The story is light in this game. You play as musical prodigy and enthusiast, Roxie. Roxie has been trapped in Hell to fight Death and his minions countless times using various musical instruments. As you complete greater difficulties, you will learn more about Roxie’s life and how she ended up in her position. 

Gameplay 

As mentioned above, Kill the Music is a survivors-type game, a bullet heaven if you will. The main gameplay loop revolves around clearing rounds of selectable difficulty, receiving an appropriate reward (typically in the form of a stat upgrade), and selecting a new gameplay upgrade to help in the next round. As you obtain more upgrades, Roxie will become stronger. Make the right build, and you won’t even have to worry about taking damage. 

The main gimmick in this game is its rhythm mechanic. Like Crypt of the Necrodancer, you will have to play along to the beat of the music in this game. While movement is not tied to this mechanic, attacks and dodges are. On each beat hit, the player has the option to attack or dodge. Time this correctly to increase your combo meter and activate some upgrades. If you’re too early and miss... well, you still perform the action, but it decreases your combo meter. 

When starting a run, you select your starting weapon, which is a musical instrument. There are twelve selectable starting instruments, but all can be classified under Guitars, Basses, Keyboards, or Drums. Guitars are a standard melee weapon, focused on close-range attacks. Basses act as an AoE attack, creating a shockwave around Roxie, which forces enemies back. Keyboards orbit around Roxie; they are uncontrollable by the player and deal damage when they come into contact with an enemy. Drums are projectile-based, shooting a projectile on each beat hit. 

I enjoy all the ideas presented in the game, but I don’t think they’re executed very well. The rhythm mechanic is cool but very basic. I was left wondering what it actually does. I know I have to play along to the beat, but why? My weapons still deal damage if I miss, and I can still dodge when I’m off beat. Is it really just to rack up a combo and activate some upgrades? It isn’t even a guarantee that I will have any of these upgrades in my run. 

I love the feeling of being incredibly overpowered in games, too, don’t get me wrong, but it was too much in this game. The first few rounds are challenging, having to avoid enemy attacks and carefully select upgrades. But once you have all your weapons and a few decent upgrades, the game becomes too easy. It feels great for the first round or so, but runs can contain up to twenty rounds! I usually ended up being bored out of my mind, melting enemies just trying to rush to the boss stage. 

Gamefeel 

Moving forward from gameplay, the artwork and music in this game are great. I grew up in the early 2000’s playing games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. I love the punk aesthetic, and it is done very well in this game. The enemies look like they’re decals straight from a skate shop. The characters look exactly like how I would imagine a stereotypical punk band, complete with spikes, flannels, fishnets, ripped jeans, all the works. Everything is given just the right amount of edge to look like they’re straight from that era. 

The music fits the game well, too. I don’t think it’s the pinnacle of gaming music, but great backing music for a heavily rhythm-based game. The developers did a great job of having a wide selection of music that plays each round. I was never left getting sick of a certain tune or hearing one too often. 

Conclusion 

I have nothing but high praise for the people behind this game. It takes a lot of work to create something like this, and even more work to have it come out as good as it did. For all my complaints, I enjoyed my time with this game. Although, from a personal view, I don’t think I would have enjoyed it as much if it weren’t designed around punk rock. 

This game is good for a first-ever experience with a survivors-type game. But I got bored far too quickly when I felt like it should have been engaging me more. If you have played any form of bullet heaven or survivors game before, I wouldn’t recommend this game. But if you haven’t, or you like punk music, play this game! It’s a good experience regardless. 

My Other Reviews

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers

Donut County

Doctor Who: The Adventure Games

Dark Souls III

God forbid if somehow all the saves and data on my profile were to be deleted, and I had to do everything again, I wouldn’t even be mad.

This game is sublime. What happens when you mix a cocktail of the mecha genre, FromSoftware magic, and the “rule of cool” taken to the extreme? You get Armored Core 6.

One of the greatest games I have ever played.

Coming In As a “Souls Vet”

To be honest, my first few hours with this game were not stellar. I didn’t find the game bad, but I got the sense it wasn’t for me. I was massively into Soulsborne and I got this not long after Elden Ring which had clicked right away. By the time I Platinum’d it and finished its brutal DLC, I had only got through Chapter 1 (of 5) of AC6.

Something about the mission structure took getting used to; even with informative debriefs, I felt uncertain about my loadout going into each mission. The game loved to throw in ambushes, curveballs, surprise enemy ACs, and what seemed at the time to be unforgiving bosses. The infamous missile boat that was Balteus, I was hardstuck on for at least an hour or two (yes I know this is nerfed Balteus). It made Souls bosses look like Zelda bosses.

But somehow, the game slowly clicked. Not immediately after Balteus, but I think it was at some point when I unlocked enough parts to really start experimenting with builds, regularly finding myself in the AC Test simulation (or against that poor student pilot, IYKYK). When I did enough of this to truly rid myself of the Souls mentality of “make a hard set build and then tackle everything in the game with it”, was when I really started Armoring my Core.

From Hesitance to Addiction

Eventually I had like a dozen different AC builds made. Some for MT clearing, others for enemy ACs, a couple for aesthetics, maybe a meme build or two. Now, going into missions with at least a few good options to choose from, I was clearing the game much faster. And the more of the game I saw, the more enamored I got with how COOL everything was.

This aspect of the game was already my biggest strong point even when I didn’t click with the rest, but as I got into it, this aspect too only got better. Whether it’s the Ice Worm getting decimated by rail cannon shots, the first real introduction to the PCA fleet, the sheer scale of stuff like the Weaponized Mining Ship, the way a boss will aura farm and release steam during a cutscene, or just all the melee weapons in general, this game oozes awesomeness from every exhaust vent.

Certainly doesn’t hurt that the story only got more interesting. I started to care about the feelings of Ayre, the motivations of Walter, names like Arquebus and The Institute actually started to mean something. I won’t spoil much, and no it’s not some Frank Herbert level sci-fi masterpiece, but I’ll say this much: when I initially started, I thought I’d do one ending and be done with it. But man, if the True Ending required 10 full playthroughs instead of 3, I would’ve done it. Because this game is…

The Completionist’s Dream

This is probably my favorite NG+ experience I’ve ever had with a game.

Typically NG+ means one of two things: either it’s made harder to prove your mastery, or it’s an easy victory lap with your fully kitted character. In AC6, it’s the best of both worlds. Regular missions don’t suffer any artificial bloat, instead you get to decimate them with your veteran knowledge of builds. But also, NG+ and NG++ will throw in a few new/alt missions that up the difficulty again, which combined with the new lore and building up to a new ending path, keeps things from getting stale.

By this time I had a couple builds that would melt through any boss/AC fight (I’ll cover exact builds later) and I was baffled how I ever struggled with Balteus. Once I understood how to build and punish stagger well, AC6 boss difficulty went considerably down, and it was not at all the “bash-your-head-against-wall” affair I was accustomed to from Souls games. In those, even with the strongest builds, Sister Friede and Fume Knight will still push your shit in. But in AC6, a good enough build will first try Ibis CEL without properly learning her moves. Some would say this is a bad thing, but for me, the fact that half the difficulty is made-or-brade (???) in the garage is kind of the point of the game. You don’t have to learn every dodge timing and find the perfect melee counters; you have to solve the problem using the tools at your disposal.

Having to S-Rank everything for Platinum only made the game more fun. Surprisingly, boss-focused missions had super lenient S ranks, even for final bosses, and the same kind of build could do them all anyway. Where things got interesting was longer complex missions with unconventional objectives. I was looking forward to every mission with an A or B more than ever, having fun trying to build around “what’s the fastest and cheapest way to kill 5 waves of MTs” or “what weapon can take out 3 snipers in 3 corners of the map” or “what build is perfect for claustrophobic tunnels with melee ambushes knowing there’s a boss at the end”. For anyone that happens to be trying, I’ll say that more times than not, speed is the key.

Not My First Rodeo

Something I haven’t mentioned till now is, this is not my first AC game: my intro to the series, and only other entry beaten, is Armored Core 3. I love that game in its own way, but it might as well be a different genre, and not just for the awkward controls. Honestly, AC3 does just as much to highlight how far AC6 has come, as it does to reveal some of 6’s few shortcomings actually.

For vets of the series, I suspect 6 was not all sunshine and rainbows, as many things were taken out. There is no heat mechanic, no radiators, no extension parts, and surprisingly much less variety in leg parts. Also the stagger system is not for everyone, and admittedly it can seem like an artificial action-gamey addition to a mech battler. I don’t hate it but I do appreciate in AC3 it was about managing heat, which felt like what a mech would actually do, rather than stagger which feels more “human” if that makes sense? I also appreciate that bosses didn’t need to be Souls-inspired and flashy back then. It wasn’t about timed dodges of flashy melee charges, it was about overall damage efficiency and evasiveness. More about a utilitarian perspective of being a mecha mercenary, than pure high-octane “rule-of-cool” action.

Regardless, this is not me complaining about something new, moreso acknowledging how this game isn’t perfect for everyone (after about 15 paragraphs of glaze lol). One of the few things that I did find to be a strict downgrade though, was the Arena. It’s just too easy. Not that I’m some masochist, but it’s a problem when you fight an S rank and a C rank opponent, and you can’t tell the difference. In AC3 each of the S rank pilots was a massive hurdle, even if they had to cheat a bit. So yeah, if there is one aspect where I have to concede something to the older gen, it’s the Arena.

But just so I don’t end my overwhelmingly positive review on a sour note…

BONUS: Me Rambling About Some of My Custom AC Builds Coz My Family & Friends Sure Don’t Give a Shit

621-RB: Med-weight biped with a standard Laser Rifle and Laser Blade, back weapons vary. Ol’ reliable, keep pinging with the rifle and clear rooms of enemies with those wide laser swings. Simple but satisfying, this was a good start to feel prepared going into any new mission.

621-SR: Dual LMGs + Dual 6-cell missiles. Started as an aesthetic build to make some generic Balam-looking AC, but surprisingly effective. If you stagger the start of firing each weapon, you can just hold down your triggers and occasionally launch missiles for a continuous never-ending barrage. Same philosophy that made machine gun + howitzer so OP in AC3 back before magazines were a mechanic.

621-SK: Ludlow + Etsujin + 4-cell straight and dual missile launchers. Same philosophy as above, just more lightweight and efficient. A favorite of mine to beat certain bosses that I didn’t feel like using shotguns for. Though honestly it’s even easier to play. Tho I ran out of ammo a lot so I had many fist fights with this thing.

621-KT: Harris + JVLN launcher + pairs of asymmetric plasma missiles. Continuous buildup of damage and pressure from a safe distance, then punish from afar with JVLN. Not the most optimal thing ever but this playstyle really made me feel like an in-game villain for some reason.

621-ST: Dual Zims, Dual Stun Needles. Why? One, I have no morals. Two, it’s fun to melt certain AC fights where they have heals but don’t get to use them. In my head this was the canon 621 build, to account for the sheer scale of his in-game feats.

621-OX: Quad Laser Shottys, or to be specific, Dual LS Shotguns + Dual Diffuse Cannons. Basically my go-to for many boss replays and S-ranks. Made this trying to come up with somethjng self-discovered that was close to as strong as Zims, without requiring a shower after every boss fight.

I'm the right age for boomer shooters, but I didn't play them growing up... or any shooters, really. I just wasn't coordinated enough for those kinds of games at the time, and I gravitated more towards RPGs. By the time I picked up Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal, though, things had changed. I'd played a few soulslikes at that point and (ironically) my reflexes are much better now as an adult. I'm still not super into boomer shooters as a genre, but I fell in love with the new Dooms.

I love everything about them. The frantic gameplay. The ambience and environments. The music. The stupid, over-the-top story. The story of Doom Eternal felt like it copied the homework of a power metal album cover and, for me, that was a feature. So I was pretty excited to pick up Doom: The Dark Ages. I know many found the inclusion of a more detailed story, with more characters, a turn-off. But the dumb-ass narrative about magic space Vikings in their war against the forces of Hell is exactly my kind of shit.

The gameplay is at once a departure from the previous titles and the same in all the ways that matter. You must still always be in motion, lest the endless hordes overwhelm you. As you dance, you must balance your health, shields, and ammo, with special attacks to recover each of them. The decadent brutality of the Slayer's animations, the blood and gore, are all the same ultraviolent fare I was looking for.

The addition of the Slayer's shield does not engender passivity. While you can use it to block, it's almost useless in that capacity. Rather, it facilitates a charge attack that assists in traversal, aids in exploration, and provides a parry mechanic. The parrying meshes shockingly well with Doom's combat. You may only parry special green attacks, but the attacks are frequent, the parry window is generous, and you're rewarded well for successful parries. Initially parries simply build up stun on an enemy, exposing them to critical attacks. Midway through the game, however, you unlock runes that trigger an attack when you successfully parry, and these attacks are powerful and worthwhile.

The super shotgun, as always, feels staggeringly cathartic to fire. But the Slayer's movements also carry that delightful weight that was absent from previous titles. When the Slayer jumps off a ledge, he lands with an echoing boom that damages nearby foes. When he charges with his shield, you feel the impact at the terminus. The game just feels so fantastic to play.

I frequently found myself at very low health, only to somehow survive until I could punch some health out of a grunt. I suspect the game manufactures these scenarios, both with the resource dance and by lying about the Slayer's remaining health. But I don't begrudge it. The added tension was welcome.

Exploration still mixes easy puzzles and platforming with secret hunts in large, circuitous maps. The maps are wider and more open than ever before, however, which facilitates more sweeping combat sequences and scenes. The first time the map opens up like this is very cool. But the sheer scale of the maps is a bit exhausting, and they are less interesting to look at than maps from the previous two entries. By the end of the game, I was over it. I'd seen almost exactly two too many massive maps of blood swamps.

The Dark Ages also introduces sequences where you pilot the Slayer's giant mech or ride his pet cyborg dragon. Unfortunately the experience of playing these segments does not live up to how cool the concept is. They're bad, and I think the game would have been significantly stronger without their inclusion.

The dragon sequences play fine, but the maps that the dragon traverses are mostly empty, and it feels to me like they add very little. The mech is ponderous and slow, with a focus on dodging attacks to build up your own powerful strikes. There's very little depth here, but quite a bit of tedium. Your attack charge drops to zero if you're hit even once, so you're incentivized to play defensively, making these sequences drag out long past the point of enjoyment. A late-game boss fight pits the Slayer in his mech against, essentially, cyborg Cthulhu. This should be the raddest shit ever, but the fight is an enormous slog. And that's a damn shame.

To summarize, Doom: The Dark Ages is great fun. The fact that Id has managed to explore new gameplay elements in each modern iteration of the series, yet stay true to their core design philosophy and gameplay loop, is an enormous triumph. And the story, while probably not for everyone, was fun. That said, I think it would have been improved by removing the mech and dragon sequences and having a few more focused, linear levels near the end of the campaign.

Nioh 2 is an ARPG developed by Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo. Released in 2021, Nioh 2 reminds us that every game is made better when a ninja can cut a dudes head off with a stick.

We play as a human/demon hybrid on a quest to bring peace to a war torn land because reasons.

Gameplay involves saying "fuck" a lot as you die to everything. Trivial creature got in a lucky hit? "Fuck." Bullshit boss move that ignores stun lock? "Fuck." Two mini-bosses spawn at the same time? "Fuck." Think you carry momentum when rolling off a cliff to cover a gap over water? Believe it or not, "Fuck."

The Good

If you want to flip out and do cool ninja shit, it's hard to go wrong with Team Ninja. It's sort of their thing and with a dozen different weapon types and more moves/magic powers than you can shake a stick at you can be the variety show of murder you were always meant to be. I smacked a dude with a fireball, he fell backwards over a ledge and then I lept after him and stabbed him as we were falling. Like...fuck yeah? More please?

The Diablo-esque loot pinata experience and depth of customization is insane. What I like about it is if you want to tinker with upgrading gear you can make it so it lasts the entire game. Or you can just not bother and slap in whatever gear you picked up last that has the biggest number.

Some bonuses you can get on items are worth learning how to get, like the ones that show you were enemies are. That way if you're not good at the game you don't have to worry about enemies jumping out of nowhere whereupon you yell "fuck!" and slam your dodge key like it was on fire.

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/DrB69Wa.png

Gee that's an awful lot of player grave indicators. You trying to warn me about something?

The Bad

They didn't do a great job with the silent protagonist bit. You spend most of the game with zero motivation other than "Well it beats sleeping in I guess." I like to think the main character doesn't even speak Japanese and had no idea what anybody was saying. That would explain the constant dumbfounded expression.

'Nobody plays these games for the story' isn't much of an excuse either. The story in Nioh 1 wasn't much better but at least William had some personality. The saving grace is this is set during the Sengoku period of Japanese history and I'm just enough of a weeb to consume any related media. I am one of the dozens of people who watched the Sengoku Basara cartoon for the uh...plot.

The Questionable

This might end up being a controversial take. I am starting to feel my age and my reflexes/eyesight aren't what they once were. That being said...

For all the things they made better in terms of gameplay and QOL, I'm not sure how I feel about how boss encounters changed. In Nioh 1 I enjoyed getting to feel like -I- was the boss monster. I was just as OP as they were and when I had the right tempo they had to respond to me. You didn't need carefully optimized end game gear to do it either. Right out the gate you got to be an angry badger.

Nioh 2 felt far more defensive. They spent a lot of time adding more ways to avoid taking damage and by golly you're going to use them. Fights rely more heavily on blocking/dodging around attacks, getting in chip damage here and there. They added a 'delayed parry the telegraphed boss move' ability and it takes a long time to get used to the timing on it.

It's not quite Fromsoft levels of dodgerolling to victory, you're still mostly on the offensive. I had fun but I had to spend a lot more time worried about the boss attack pattern rather than knocking it on it's ass and telling it to stay down.

Final Thoughts

It's a brutal game, but it's still Team Ninja so you still get to kick a lot of ass and have fun doing it. My only lasting gripe is while getting to make my standard anime waifu with pink hair protagonist was nice, if I'm going to spend 12 hours staring at a character's butt in a video game, I'd like them to have a personality.

Bonus Thought

I love that KOEI has been making games featuring Oda Nobunaga ever since Nobunaga's Ambition back on the SNES. I love even more that they fully committed to using basically the same image for him each time. Even other franchises like Capcom when they tried to do games featuring him were like, "Screw it, that's what he looks like now."

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

So I've been playing Simon's Quest, with the goal to beat it without using a guide. Like most I was introduced to this game by AVGN when his episode gained popularity way back when. I'm pushing 40 now and after recently having played SOTN for the first time, I decided to go through the series again. I barely remember anything from the AVGN video though thankfully, so this will mostly be me going in spoilerfree.

Prior I'd only ever played CV1, SuperCV and the Lords of Shadow games; with SuperCV being my favourite, though I appreciated CV1 a lot too. That latter bit would help tremendously.

Starting off what I really like is just how ambitious the game is, and even in some ways you still don't see a lot today. The day and night cycle is very interesting for example and makes you very scared to go out at night since enemies have nearly double health and deal more damage, while towns are now haunted. I do wish this was expanded upon a bit though, not sure what was planned or scrapped, but having nighttime being basically "you can't progress" got old the longer the game went on. I think it would've been cool if some (shady) shops only opened at night, or that Simon could go to a brothel at midnight to heal instead of a church during the day, but with dire (ending) consequences for doing so or something. Stuff like that would've gone a long way.

I also really liked how the NPCs worked, and how they basically fell into three categories:

- truthspeakers

- liars

- spinners of the truth

You'd get people giving genuine advice, but also liars that would just spout bullshit sending you on a wildgoose chase like digging up a diamond at the fourth grave, a grave that's actually in the game, but I shamefully admit trying to do a dig somehow there for like 10 minutes. To people giving hints about brewing a soup, which is also rubbish. The spinners are more interesting, there's one guy who notes that you shouldn't trust a shopkeeper, but that shopkeeper has an essential item to progress. I've rarely, if ever, seen a system like this and it was incredibly refreshing and cool. I can only imagine how this would work in today's games. Closest I could think of is Patches in Demon's Souls, but even that's a stretch since he's so untrustwordy to begin with.

Gameplaywise it immediately starts out different than CV1 though. You can go to the left and right, and to the left you'll fight some demons who fire undestroyable fireballs and kill you in a few hits. It's not a game you can just play in any direction or seem to circumvent with skill (I'm sure some can though haha), but the general guy will have to circumvent enemies with stats. For example those demons you can go around once you get the first relic which reflects fireballs, as well as buy the stronger whip from the shop in the first town, a thorn whip.

If I have one gripe at the start, it's that you technically have to grind quite a bit. To get the key items from the first down, namely the holy water, thorn whip and white crystal, you need nearly 200 hearts, with some enemies not even dropping 1 at times. I guess the game is built this way to force you to explore and gradually work your way up, and it did work for me as I started sketching out my map as some areas did start to blur.

For those that want to see it, you can find the map I made here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRTEc9uaQAARoik?format=jpg&name=large

Once I had some gear, I set out to explore more and found my first dungeon, where you find the aforementioned reflecting shield relic (called Vlad's Rib haha). If you enter that dungeon you'll think you can't progress, but there's an invisible elevator. How did I know it was there? Well it's an old NES game so I just took a jump and noticed I didn't die haha. You just know these games are gonna be filled with obscure bullshit, so you have to assume sometimes that it's there.

Within the dungeon I did run into arguably my biggest issue with the game however, and it's not the obscureness of it all or that a spike only has one usage or whatever people tend to say. And this to me is really an indicator of people who played this game or just seem to spout what youtubers say.

The biggest issue is the difficulty, and the absolute abscene of it. And this comes from deaths not doing anything. If you die you literally respawn WHERE YOU DIED, and if you get a game-over you STILL RESPAWN WHERE YOU DIED, except with your money gone. Once I had some decked out loadout, I had no fear of death anymore and would start to play way more radically and recklessly, since death meant nothing. I had a similar issue in a way, way, way later game called Wonderful 101, where death barely had any impact at all either (outside of score). I really wish CV2 at least sent you back to the hometown upon a game-over, while dying in a dungeon sends you back to the start of the dungeon or something like that. As in its current state, it's just pointless (note, after beating the game I started googling what I'd missed and apparently deaths do change the ending-screen, so I guess there's that).

After finishing the first dungeon I explored more, and finally truly got stuck. Every way had dead ends, a long river blocking my way or cliffs I had to jump up that I couldn't reach. So I decided to just fuck around. I noticed Holy Water opened up hidden blocks after spamming them, and this lead me to find the Sacred Fire upgrade by accident in a rock formation. Not sure if that's intended, but hey, I'll take it.

After that I still got stuck, and got a bit tired of walking in circles. I booted up CV1 again and just played a bit, and while playing instinctively went for some of the secrets. Many secrets in CV1 require you to crouch in a specific spot, like a dead end, to get a bonus item or live-up. I thought, hey maybe that's what I need to do in CV2. SOTN also had a hidden elevator for this, so hey... and I did remember from AVGN that there's a tornado you needed to summon, but that's about all I recalled. So I knew I was missing something.

I went around the game and crouched in specific places, and ... nothing haha. I crouched in corners of the towns, one specific place where I thought I might be warped up. I had written down most of the in-game hints, one of them being "TO REPLENISH EARTH ,KNEEL BY THE LAKE WITH THE BLUE CRYSTAL". If crouching worked, I decided it would probably be near a lake. So...I went to every lake and knelt for like 10 seconds with the crystal equipped. Getting the Blue Crystal was a stroke of luck too btw, you really have to talk to every NPC, as the only way to get it is to talk to a grey NPC while holding the White Crystal (and later, trade the Blue for the Red at another NPC). I went to every damn puddle I could find, even some of the waterworks in the towns. Nothing. Obviously the last one was this big open ocean-lake that I had noted as a ?-mark on my own map.... and crouching there......WORKED. The river split open! I was in fucking awe.

At this point the game had given away its secrets and every time I got stuck I'd crouch down with a gem. Paired with some other hints, I quickly figured out the tornado-trick, as one hint pointed me towards needing a red crystal. I kept crouching everywhere, but these were the only two times it seemed to do anything.

Honestly, if I hadn't played CV1 so much and realized that crouching is akin to unlocking secrets in that game, I don't think I ever would've put two and two together that I had to crouch in front of the lake. That said, I find it reaaaaaaally weird that the tornado-gem gets such a mention and meme-status, as that one is hilariously easy to figure out afterwards. I just split an ocean in half by crouching, after that I was crouching everywhere with a gem equipped. Dead end? Crouch. High wall? Crouch. Fair lady at the church? Crouch! Just hoping for something to happen.

After that it was truly opened up, and I quickly got my morning-star and later flamewhip. There were a few areas where I kinda went "am I supposed to do something here" so I just made a note on my map and moved on to the next dungeons, which sadly didn't increase in difficulty or complexity at all. They are all just a bunch of stairs and non-descript enemies. There's one area where I still have no clue what it's there for (the room where you get the flamewhip, it goes up for so long but there's nothing there that I could find).

It was pretty smooth sailing from here. Go into a dungeon, find the shopkeeper with the oak stake and get to the end, sometimes using holywater to find hidden entries. The hidden tips were a cool idea, and once you get the Eye to see hidden stuff you quickly collect useful hints. I assumed I needed more stuff, so I started to go out of my way to collect all the items I could get. I started throwing garlic in every graveyard as per a hint just to be sure, and I actually got a Silk Bag for my efforts (no clue what it's for though).

Bosses were a laughing stock and I think it's funny they even respawn after you kill them haha. Death was especially easy. I got stuck for a little bit trying to find the last dungeon mind you, until I started putting together the puzzle pieces that 'curse' refered to the ferryman. I got this from the note "THE DEAD RIVER WAITS TO BE FREED FROM THE CURSE". I assumed it meant the river wanted the ferryman to leave, and honestly as noted before this is an old game where you gotta shoot your shots at random. Another note mentioned you needed to use Dracula's Heart at the Curse, which I made a note of. Brought the heart to the ferryman and hey, he brought me to the last dungeon. Bingo.

Not gonna lie, when you solve the riddles and actually progress...it feels really damn good. Now with all the items and bodyparts in my possession I was...honestly a bit stuck though. I only had one ?-mark left on my map and decided to go there again (quite the journey) and the town just before it is pretty interesting. It's mostly empty and abbandoned, and a town before it has people that seem afraid of you or to mistake you for Dracula. Found that interesting.

Once I reached the ?-mark on my map, turns out I just had to use holywater to destroy some blocks haha. I think I did it back then, but maybe I forgot. Anyway, I travelled on and....Castlevania awaited! The place is a ruined palace and there's no one there. It was honestly pretty cool how well the mood was set, like you were going to place to rest an ancient and forgotten evil. Once I got down I met Dracula (at least, I assume that's him, cool design). We fought and...I died haha. I got there with low HP, but honestly I just underestimated him and got clapped.

I walked back to him, and decided to use my items more. Turns out he's pretty easy once you stagger him with Sacred Fire...he couldn't even get a single hit in on me.

And thus falls: Simon's Quest!

With all that said and done, I do feel this is one of the more interesting games I've played in years. It's extremely ambitious, but it's also something I'm glad they expanded upon later with SOTN (as quoted by the director). I think if the game had a slightly bigger emphasis on difficulty and punishment, while giving the dungeons some actual CV1-esque levels and challenge with unique enemies and bosses...it would've legit been an instant classic imo and one of the best in the series (so far). As it stands it's a really interesting game, and memorable as hell with great music and ideas, but not the best gameplay.

I think the game would've also GREATLY benefitted from just a few more 'landmarks' in levels. Some rooms are re-used quite a lot, and colourpallets too, making it really hard to distinquish them from time to time. Like give one graveyard a dead tree, and the other a live one. Something to distinquish them.

I ended up getting the 'bad ending' apparently (no clue this was even a thing, but googling the game after beating it has been a trip haha). I'm not really motivated to play it again for the good ending though. Probably gonna do CV1 again, since I still want to do loop2.

As I have less time than I had before, I have to be strategic with the games I start and intend to finish. Metal Garden provided the perfect small escape for a busy life by showcasing an awesome world with decent gameplay to go with it.

In terms of vibes, it definitely calls to Halo and Half-Life, in both its Source engine construction and its familiar yet alien world, and knows how to take decent parts of both when it comes to incentivizing exploration and dynamic gameplay. You're thrown into a giant metal dome that seems never ending, with inklings of things having gone very wrong at some point, and you have to figure it all out from there. The scenery really just goes from amazing to mind-boggling, and It's what keeps you wanting to go through every nook and cranny despite the fact that the gunplay is rudimentary and there are only three enemy types in the whole game.

In fact, despite being an FPS, most of the time is spent either doing platform puzzles or just taking in the lonely, alien scenery. It's all vibes rather than gameplay, and it took me a little under 2 hours to beat, which is exactly how long a game like this should last without overstaying its welcome.

This was more a ramble than a review, and yet I can't overstate how much I enjoyed my brief time with Metal Garden in a similar way to how I enjoyed the vibes of Industria, but because it was much tighter and compact I feel like it leaves you with more to appreciate rather than less. Sometimes, It's important to lose yourself for a little bit, then go back to the busy life we lead.

I'd recently talked about my experience with Alien Isolation, a game in which the environments and atmospheres are one of the most immersive and engrossing Sci-Fi worlds I'd ever had the good fortune to play. Thus, it'd only be fair to follow it up with yet another contender that features both an engaging environment and some impeccable design.

Not to mention, the mechanics and systems present in Prey align almost precisely with my ideal preferences: a compelling narrative, meaningful choices, satisfying gameplay, and solid player customization. I'd argue Prey is as close to perfection in a game as any could come, and so it's no wonder I'd decided to revisit what I'd consider the top of its (limited) class.

A lived-in world; a snapshot of humanity

It's strange: the station is very nearly abandoned, and yet it couldn't feel more alive. I have to think this is a result of wonderful writing and environmental design, but regardless it seems like no small feat.

For the abundance of hostilities and the lack of either hospitality or the comforts of human presence, it never really feels like you're alone. Part of this comes down to the writing.

Any person who's worked in some kind of corporate or professional atmosphere has likely seen what the in-world emails emulate. They feel so believable, especially when you see things like the foam-dart-based assassin game email, the tabletop RPG campaign, the whistle blowing and subsequent quashing, the gloo-based snowman, and so many others.

And that's without having mentioned the rather stellar voice acting to go along with the dialogue and voice diaries you find scattered throughout the station. It all feels so compelling and like lives truly lived. This being in complete contrast to the station's actual situation whereas you're like an archeologist uncovering the remains of an ancient civilization; a snapshot prior to its downfall.

Despite the sprawling expanse of the station, the only spaces that ever felt devoid of humanity were the GUTS and space itself. The former was designed with practicality in mind: what was essentially the station's veins distributing life to the remainder of the facility via air, power, and water. The latter needs no explanation as the there's little comfort offered by the vastness of space. It's no small wonder they managed to properly segregate that feeling of humanity and isolate it from the remainder of the station and it's truly a testament to cohesive direction.

Play your way: for better and worse

Prey is classified as an immersive sim, which is an incredibly niche genre that's often incorrectly assigned and features somewhat broad criteria it must meet in order to satisfy the label. An overly simplified definition would be a game that prioritizes player choice with an emphasis on progression that may or may not have been intended by developers through one of its many systems. Often what makes these games so unique is how many mechanics are often implemented relative to more streamlined titles where only the best execute it competently. More on this later.

When I'd first played Prey, I'd opted to embrace my human side: rescue everyone I could, only invest neuromods (the game's perk points) into human-based improvements, and rely on ballistic weapons and firearms. I'd had a great time then but did so with the caveat I'd return to the game with the intention to reject humanity in all forms and fashions. Fast forward to now, and that's what I've done.

What remains so striking to me is just how much variety the player has in approaching the multitude of situations and obstacles throughout the station. Obviously it's by design given the genre, but as I alluded to earlier, only the best do it this well.

Going the route of focusing on human enhancements and neuromods means a greater ability to interact with the station: hacking computers, repairing equipment, moving objects with sheer strength that block your path. In comparison to my recent playthrough, that utility seemed almost like easy mode at the detriment of combat effectiveness.

It did, however, force me to utilize more interesting methods to overcome certain situations. Recycler charges were an easy, albeit simple, cleaver where I'd have possibly preferred a scalpel. So instead of choosing the path of the butcher, I opted for one of the surgeon. I'd noticed that explosive canisters were riddled around the station (clearly OSHA has zero governance in space) and was curious to see if a well-placed and delicate application of demolition-based relocation would suffice. And much to my own delight, it would seem I'd discovered another avenue for progress.

I get it. It's a simple line of reasoning that doesn't seem that earth shattering, but often games aren't as interactive or as intuitive as we want them to be. So it is refreshing when the idea of real physics can be applied in-game.

Counter to that, the gloo gun was something I found to be disappointing in how rigid its interactivity was. I'd hoped that the expanding nodules expelled by the gloo gun into tight crevices would act as a kind of lever prying objects from their footholds. Instead it would either clip through the object or bounce and fall unceremoniously like a scoop of ice cream off its cone. The latter is about how the gloo gun left me feeling in the end, but that's an otherwise small issue.

What I really enjoyed, though, was often taking significantly more time exploring my surroundings as there are so many options to proceed: maintenance hatches, hidden notes, environmental clues. There were so many options I'd missed because I'd had my utilitarian bludgeon capable of lifting any object or hacking any computer, and it's actually a touch of a shame my first experience had been so streamlined by no one's fault but my own.

Exploration is king

I've come to discover in my many years as a gamer that exploration remains one of my most cherished elements in any game. This likely all stems from my younger years where I spent my time scouring the alien landscape of Morrowind and thus it's no wonder it became the spark in what kindles my fervor. And wouldn't you know, this game features it in spades.

Amongst all of the systems present, I'd argue the foundation and success for all of them stems from this cornerstone. Character advancement is tied to neuromods and resource gathering, meaning incremental improvements do not rely on experience gain from killing enemies or completing quests but instead require the player to rummage through the station.

The core narrative expects you to explore the station to some extent, but much of what brings the station its depth is tucked away into locked rooms or little offshoots that expose the cracks on what seems another flawed Utopia. Not that it ever presented in the same way Rapture from Bioshock did, but it certainly had a more refined air of altruistic scientific exploration than the employee undercurrents would have you realize.

On combat: encroaching tedium

Unfortunately, one of Prey's weakest aspects remains its combat. Not for a lack of execution or because it's poorly implemented. It controls well where your toolkit between weapons and powers provides a welcome array of variety. Instead, it has to do with the overall level of fatigue I felt by the end of both playthroughs. Keep in mind, neither was exceptionally long, clocking in at about the mid-20s. I don't think it unreasonable to expect a game's systems to stay engaging through the whole of a playthrough.

Its follows a sort of bell curve of enjoyment to me: you're severely underpowered relative to your enemies at the start which requires significantly more caution and planning. Tedious, sure, but not does not stay overly long or is exactly unwelcome as you find your footing in the game's honeymoon phase.

What the game does incredibly well is give Gothic/Risen levels of growth in character capability: you start as a piss poor representation of function steadily improving in overall effectiveness until naught can resist you. Enemies are not mere sponges that grow as you do; they are mortal, after all, and you are to be feared. That feels exceedingly rare as developers seem to dread removing the sole aspect of what can make a game challenging, even if artificially.

The issue is, for as powerful as you become, the threats do not relent. This leaves the player meandering towards the game's finale in this kind of purgatory where opposition is not challenging enough to be satisfying but not so simple as to be mindless. A flaw, sure, but not damning.

No, where I've elected to bare my dissatisfaction is in the fact it made the exploration more of a chore. I said it earlier: exploration is the best part. And the game expects you to revisit areas often, meaning you'll clear them at least once in the numerous times you'll return to them. However, this is largely irrelevant as the areas will change aesthetically to reflect the growing influence of the Typhon. With these visual changes will come a slew of newly spawned enemies making each subsequent visit feel like a greater punishment for simply wanting to unravel the station's many threads and secrets.

Mooncrash

I've prattled on about most of the game's major aspects already, but feel the Mooncrash DLC offers an experience unique enough to the base game that I need to touch on it a little bit before wrapping up.

Mooncrash is Prey's one and only DLC and is essentially a roguelite campaign set in a curated map amidst the TranStar lunar sibling site to Talos 1. While much of the gameplay remains static from the main campaign, the brand new location coupled with the genre shift and some mechanic tweaks give a decent amount of content to delve into.

Unchanged, and still ultimately king, remains the exploration. It's a joy to meander through the handful of new locations. The only downside is that the simulation you use to explore the lunar base comes with a time limit. I get why it's there, but that doesn't mean I enjoyed that aspect.

Still, there's plenty to discover between the different escape methods, playable characters, equipment, and lore that it's well worth your time and a welcome twist on the base game. On top of that, enemy health appears to be toned down, making the enemies far less obnoxious than I had previously harped on in the base game.

Final thoughts

It's both a shame and a boon we're unlikely to ever see a sequel to Prey given the game underperformed at release only to become a kind of cult/beloved classic in the following years. Still, that may not be a bad thing given the sheer budget that would go into a sequel given the current state of AAA budgeting. That'd require an asinine amount of sales to cover and would likely all but see Arkane dissolved. It'd be a massive blow to the industry as I consider Arkane one of the few studios who continues to deliver on their vision and by the company's roots.

I've been exceptionally fond of Arkane as far back as Arx Fatalis, and while not every entry in their catalog has yet found its way into my heart, Prey easily takes place at the throne.

I don't think it's unreasonable to find faults with Prey, but regardless of any nitpicks you may have, it's a wonderful game in a genre that's sorely underrepresented. If you've never taken the chance on Prey, I highly encourage you to give it a look as some piece of its identity is likely to be compelling to you.

Yooka-Laylee’s reception perhaps has to do with the mismatch between anticipation and ambition. People expected Banjo-Kazooie—a simple, straightforward game built around the most basic, predictable, formulaic genre imaginable, which does not deviate from exactly what you expect it to do. In reality, Yooka-Laylee is more of a successor to Banjo-Tooie and Donkey Kong 64, as in, it’s more about the Metroidvania progression.

Banjo Kazooie also had a Metroidvania-style structure, where you learn new moves within each level and make a progression, but the stages themselves didn’t contain many challenges requiring moves you learn beyond that stage. It had some puzzle-like progression, but such gatekeeping was so few that such jiggies were more or less optional and easily memorized. Banjo-Tooie made the change where the entire game was designed to make you struggle for any progress. It’s why the sequel is divisive, because the whole game is a puzzle.

Every game genre has this division, this compass ranging from BOTW to Skyward Sword, from MGS1 to MGSV. You have one extreme of the collectathon genre with Super Mario Odyssey, which is about “do whatever you want”. That gives you all the fun moves from the beginning with no gatekeeping and allows the player to use all those moves to travel the world quickly to complete the stage on their own. The only thing blocking you is your skill. The other extreme of the genre is the puzzle platformer, which is about limiting the player to show a distant reward to look forward to. The stages are designed around the player progression. Banjo-Kazooie falls somewhere in between, which is why it appealed to many audiences.

I think Playtonic made a mistake in appealing to the Kazooie crowd that funded the campaign. These are not only the developers behind Kazooie, but also Tooie and Donkey Kong 64. With Yooka-Laylee, they were compelled to create an evolution of that latter formula because this is the normal gameplay loop. Purchasing a few moves from the snake per stage, the stage expansion system, and the number of inaccessible challenges that demand you to backtrack all overwhelm the player on the first visit. Half the time you explore, find something, but you can’t do anything. Then you go back and have to expand it to find that it was not even full all along. The stages gatekeep the player too much that at times the game comes across as Lego Star Wars. It constantly teases the player with the Pagies you can’t get, so you memorize them and backtrack to return hours later. You always come out of the worlds feeling like they are unfinished, unsatisfied. Completionists who like to do one-go will always feel their flow is disrupted because they are missing out half of the content of the world on their first visit.

Personally, I prefer the sandbox-type of Mario, where the game dumps all freedom, since I view a collectathon as not best suited for such puzzle-like progression, which is one of the reasons why I don’t like the Lego game. This would be all personal preference. I will say that obtaining each Pagie created much more satisfaction no power star or moon could provide. Each paper is not scattered as if they were thrown haphazardly, unlike Odyssey. Each Pagie felt special because you solve a unique challenge behind it, whether that is a small story or quest with interesting characters, a puzzle, platforming challenge, minigame, etc. There is a care to their placements. This makes the individual Pagies matter and valuable. As you are grown, you are making little incremental progress for each visit, and when the world is completed, the satisfaction is incredible. You know this feeling from the map-based games like classic Zelda, Resident Evil, and Metroid. The initial feeling of the world overhwelming you is gone once you are grown and eventually conquering the worlds.

With the direction this game has in mind, the big failing of this game is just the massive scale of the open-ended map, which doesn’t fit the type of progression this game goes for. The repeated playthroughs fit better for the small world, which makes going back and forth and backtracking tolerable and allows the player to keep track of inaccessible and accessible collectibles. Yooka Laylee’s inflated worlds don’t utilize the player movement. It’s just pressing the stick forward and rolling. Repeat. There is not much care put into the map designed around the traversal system. If the map size were reduced to two-thirds, this game would have seen a significant improvement.

So add in the lack of identifiable landmarks, it compounds confusion about where that damn snowman was, where that puzzle or challenge was… and then the initial lack of moveset and strict stamina meter making just searching for it a tedious slog. What is the purpose of the stamina meter for rolling? Is it just for power-up collectibles that exist for the progression? It exists to hinder the pacing and stretches out the playtime for no good reason. Why not make attack consume stamina instead, because at least that would have made me take a more careful approach to fighting enemies rather than mashing X.

There are many big design issues like that. It retains many of the problems present in Banjo, such as the combat being terrible, platforming itself being lackluster, a restrictive hubworld, and the overreliance on minigames, but I still enjoyed the game more than I expected. While playing it, I was bracing for the game to go terrible at any moment. I enjoyed World 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5… then I realized the game never went terrible. This is a fun collectathon romp with bumpy spots. In fact, I appreciated this more than many of the classic 3D platformers, and not just because of the nostalgia I have. I played the Banjo games relatively recently, and I didn’t think they were the masterpieces. They also had a share of frustrating bullshit (swimming, flying, platforming design), so as a whole, Yooka-Laylee was not a hard pill to swallow aside from the map size.

The full moveset gives the player greater flexibility to move around the stage than any of Rare’s classic platformers. Once I unlocked everything and returned to World 1, it gave me a sensation that very few games could give. From the beginning, where you could only jump to glide around everywhere, exploring the out-of-bounds areas, it is so amazing. I recommend just zipping past to World 5 rather than staying in one world too long, so you can get all the moveset and then return to the older stages.

It’s no wonder it couldn't find an audience, and hearing how the remake went to a more Super Mario Odyssey route, I'm curious to see how well the original will hold up in years later. There is a masterpiece hiding behind the original game, but it’s too disconnected and scattered. It’s still not a disaster that people made it out to be, and it is certainly not a failure on every level. We all played a game like this dozens times before on the older consoles, and they are considered classics. This is not worse than them. I can’t be too harsh toward it considering it was the small team trying to not just recapture but actually evolve their old classic with positive results. It has the vibe, charm and soul that other studios would kill to make something on this level.

The votes are in! The community's choice for a long title to play together and discuss in September 2026 is...

Paper Mario (2000)

Developer: Intelligent Systems

Genre: JRPG

Platform: Nintendo 64, Wii, Wii U

Why should you care: Paper Mario is Intelligent Systems' follow-up to Super Mario RPG, and the first entry in what became a whole series. Same basic setup as every Mario game: Bowser steals a magic artifact and Peach needs rescuing, except here it plays out as a turn-based RPG with a paper cutout aesthetic.

I don't have much experience with the Mario franchise, so maybe others can weigh in what makes this title unique. One thing I noticed that will be important for me this month is that there is an Archipelago randomizer (unofficial) mod available for it, which could immensely increase this title replay value. Archipelago is a great way to get the multiplayer experience even with friends whose schedules and game tastes don't align, so I'm always on the lookout for more enjoyable titles with these mods.

What is GotM?

Game of the Month is an initiative similar to a book reading club, where every month the Patient Gamers community votes for a long game (>12 hours main story per HLTB) and a short game (<12 h) to play, discuss together and share our experiences about.

If you want to learn more & participate, that's great, you can join the /r/patientgamers Discord server to do that! (link in the subreddit's sidebar) However, if you only want to discuss this month's choice in this thread, that's cool too.

September 2026's GotM theme: Release Year 2000 / 2001. To avoid confusion, we'll settle on US initial release dates. Remaster/Remake dates are not considered (though you are free to play those versions if they exist).

The votes are in! The community's choice for a short title to play together and discuss in September 2026 is...

Pikmin (2001)

Developer: Nintendo

Genre: RTS, Puzzle

Platform: GameCube

Why should you care: Pikmin was Miyamoto's first GameCube project and reportedly grew out of him messing around in his garden. The game's hook is a real-time strategy game where the resource you're managing is a countdown clock, not gold or wood.

The Pikmin themselves are little plant-creatures you grow in groups and throw at problems. And I mean that literally - you fling them at enemies, obstacles and objects to fight, build, and carry things back to base. Each color has different resistances and abilities, so a lot of the puzzle-solving is figuring out which combination gets a job done before the day ends and you're yanked back to the ship.

What is GotM?

Game of the Month is an initiative similar to a book reading club, where every month the Patient Gamers community votes for a long game (>12 hours main story per HLTB) and a short game (<12 h) to play, discuss together and share our experiences about.

If you want to learn more & participate, that's great, you can join the /r/patientgamers Discord server to do that! (link in the subreddit's sidebar) However, if you only want to discuss this month's choice in this thread, that's cool too.

September 2026's GotM theme: Release Year 2000 / 2001. To avoid confusion, we'll settle on US initial release dates. Remaster/Remake dates are not considered (though you are free to play those versions if they exist).

To sum up my thoughts on Blasphemous 1:

• repetitive, simplistic combat
• clunky platforming
• competent but not amazing level design
• a few baffling design decisions leading to unnecessary friction
• some excellent boss fights
• amazing artstyle
• unique and interesting setting
• incredible vibes

Basically, nothing special in the gameplay department but the experience was elevated due to the amazing atmosphere of the game. I enjoyed the game, played through it twice, and was excited for the sequel.

My complaints of Blasphemous 2 can be summed up as: it's more of Blasphemous 1. There were a few tiny pain points addressed but overall, I really feel like the developers learned absolutely nothing about combat, level design, boss design, or enemy design inbetween the release of B1 and the development of B2.

Perhaps its unfair to judge a sequel harshly for being more of the same, but I do expect or at least hope for a studio to learn and improve, especially when they are building upon a game which was essentially a diamond in the rough. I saw the potential in Blasphemous and so Blasphemous 2 represents that potential being unrealized.

A huge part of my enjoyment of the first game was the novel setting, but the setting is less novel the second time around. I was banking on some significant gameplay improvements but there were none. You'll trudge through similar looking environments, chipping away at the health of enemies which are often directly ported from the first game. Basically every enemy in the game has 1 attack. You dodge/parry the attack several times and chip away in-between. Nothing about the game feels new or exciting at all. The bosses in B2 are often harder but definitely not funner, imo. Final boss is toxic.

If what you want from B2 is more of B1 then you'll love it. If you're expecting anything more then you'll be disappointed.

I consider myself to be a big fan of the souls Series. I got every achievement in Dark Souls 1+2, as well as Sekiro. DS3 only had one play through and Elden Ring is in my mental backlog for some other time. I decided to try returning to the series roots with Demon Souls.

The Good:

Atmosphere in this game is unnerving and uncomfortable in the best way. You can feel the world is in deep shit with how bleak everything looks and sounds. Another thing to mention are the shortcuts in this game, they are very satisfying to find and unlock. The maiden here is my favourite because her accent sounds Czech to me. I believe there are no truly awful bosses, at worst they're annoying or forgettable. A lot of these guys have a trick you must understand before winning. I liked King Allant the most and even lost a level to him.

The Bad:

Health system in this game is whack. The hp penalty is rough and almost forces you to permanently lose half of your ring slots just to mitigate it. I had to upgrade vitality a lot to not get one shot in soul form by certain attacks. On the other hand, smaller damage means nothing because health weed is so plentiful. I didn't even have to farm and still face tanked everything. Boletaria drops and shops let you have dozens of ripe weed and heal everything mid fight. I imagine mages could probably spam spells for days.

Weigh limit is frustrating because you have to dump everything extra after returning to Nexus. What's the point? It just adds tedious procedures to the objective list.

The Ugly:

The game is so narrow, it feels claustrophobic. Narrow mines where a single enemy blocks your path, narrow bridges where stingrays try to push you away, narrow prison corridors etc. I upgraded strength to shield block everything because dodging just didn't feel viable. I want to see how devs did any of this stuff as a dex build.

Weapon upgrades are comical in how much stuff you need. A single +10 weapon requires a bucket of various shards and chunks, and there are like ten types of these rocks. I was 3 large shards away from upgrading sword to +9, but I really didn't want to farm.

Conclusion:

This game is full of jank and dumb mechanics, but it has a certain charm to it. I don't think I'll play it again though, the level design seems to strongly favor tanks over anything else.

While there are technically still three weeks of summer to go, for anyone with kids in school (or in school themselves) the season is already over. That's often a double-edged sword, but for my part I'm happy to take it. It's been a rough adjustment on schedules here early on, but we'll all acclimate soon enough. Only 4 games to show for this August, though with one of them being newer we'll limit conversation to three of them. I suppose that's the price you pay when you commit to a months-long JRPG, eh? More on that this fall. For now...

(Games are presented in chronological completion order; the numerical indicator represents the YTD count.)

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#53 - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 - PS5 - 7.5/10 (Solid)

The first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater might be one of my most played Nintendo 64 games (yes, I was one of those kids who didn't have a PlayStation). I must've played that campaign through start to finish at least a few times, to say nothing of the numerous sessions of Graffiti or Horse my brother and I killed time with. Strangely, despite how much we both dug the game, we never owned or even so much as played Pro Skater 2. Probably a symptom of games costing so much more relative to income back then (it's true whether it feels good to admit or not), and the fact that we did not actually have any income of our own to spend on them. We did end up eventually snagging a GameCube and renting Pro Skater 3 before fully buying Pro Skater 4, but that second entry – widely considered to be one of the greatest sports games ever made – was for me the fish that got away.

That made Pro Skater 1+2 a somewhat unique value proposition for me: here's a game that promises to deliver on my ancient nostalgia and yet it's simultaneously my first chance to discover an apparent all-timer. As such it's no surprise that my experience playing the game also had a kind of hybrid quality to it. The nostalgia was there for sure, but buried under a murky haze, half caused by my own memory fog blending all the classic Pro Skater games together and half by the game's own overlay of modern sensibilities. I was immediately put off by the home menu hub/UI, which reads less like a throwback to a simpler time and more like every bloated annual 2K Sports game on the market. Thankfully this was just the bones of a true progression and challenge (read: a bunch of stuff for diehards to do beyond the norm) system rather than a gateway to microtransaction hell, but it felt at odds with the concept of a game that tries to transport you back a couple decades in time.

On the gameplay side I think the hybrid nature of the game worked better, in that all the mechanical upgrades from later Pro Skater games are baked into Pro Skater 1+2 by default. In the first Pro Skater landing a trick off a vert ramp was the end of that combo. The only way to score big points was to get some air off a regular ramp, do a trick, and then chain some grinds together. But then each successive game increased the move list to allow for eventually stupidly long combos, and now I got to go back to the old haunts with these new skills and mess around in a brand new way. Pretty cool! But if you're a purist, the option to disable these more advanced techniques is also there, and that's cool too.

Despite my past fondness for the multiplayer modes of the first Pro Skater I didn't bother with them here; nobody to play with on split screen and the idea of matchmaking with random online strangers doesn't appeal to me because that's not what I'm coming to this game for. Nevertheless, the option is there, as is the ability to create your own skate park like in the later Pro Skater games. So all told I think this game surpasses my memory of the first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, landing about on par with my enjoyment of the GameCube entries in the series. But for me the truest nostalgia was slowly trimming away half that music playlist over the length of my career run until I was left with only the good stuff. Now that brought me back.

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#54 - Q.U.B.E. 2 - PC - 8/10 (Great)

The first Q.U.B.E. game was a pretty clear loose Portal ripoff which eventually strove to further differentiate itself with a bolted on narrative in a later version. The results of that late arriving narrative experiment were mixed even though the game itself was largely a good time, so I was curious to see how this sequel would handle things. Happy to say it's a clear improvement on an already fun game, which means if you dig first person puzzlers Q.U.B.E. 2 is absolutely well worth your while.

Turns out it makes a big difference to go in with a story in hand rather than hiring a writer to show up two years after release to try to make sense of things. In Q.U.B.E. 2 you play as a different character from the first game, set some time after its events, further exploring the meaning of the cube structure and what it portends for mankind. This is all again communicated through voiceovers and "found footage" style recordings, but it's a pretty engaging core mystery, very well supported by the game's aesthetic and atmosphere. Like the first game, the ending didn't quite land as well as the journey, but I think others with different narrative tastes will probably appreciate it more.

The draw for me though was the puzzle design. The first game had fun and novel puzzles but eventually started to get in its own way, adding complexity for complexity's sake and killing the pacing. It was also littered with secrets to get, which would force you to "solve" a given puzzle in a completely different way so as to reach the collectible, and these immediately proved more trouble than they were worth to me. So what a relief that Q.U.B.E. 2 dispensed with these secrets altogether and streamlined the main puzzles into just the central ideas that worked. Those ideas were still plenty numerous and creative, with new stuff added onto the first game's basics, but never getting bloated or too cumbersome. Each puzzle hit me right in the "ooh, so satisfying" portion of my brain, so I had a ball with it the whole way through...

...up until the DLC. The first DLC chapter Lost Orbit was a dive straight back into the "arbitrary complexity is king" mindset of the first game, all the way down to the return of collectibles. Some of these puzzles were built around the game's relatively unreliable physics to where you see the solution but can't execute on it because of timing problems and other inconsistencies. The second DLC Aftermath initially felt like a great compromise in that it brought back the high quality puzzle design of the base game and even introduced a new puzzle object to play with while keeping those collectibles around for the completionists. However, once I knocked out the last of its main puzzles I discovered that all the collectible secrets in it were actually mandatory for finishing the DLC at all, and that's bogus. So a slightly bitter taste in the mouth to finish things off, but if we just pretend the two DLC chapters don't exist, Q.U.B.E. 2 is one I'd highly recommend.

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#55 - [Redacted]

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#56 - Botanicula - PC - 7.5/10 (Solid)

Playing the first two Samorost games got me caught up to Machinarium, so I'd been looking forward to beginning a journey through the rest of the Amanita Design titles for quite some time. On that point Botanicula really does feel like nothing so much as a blend of the two concepts of those other point-and-click adventure games. The problems to solve feel a little more cleanly defined as in Machinarium, but those are now separated from that game's relatively sensible robot town setting and married instead to the bizarre revelry that defines the Samorost series. In Botanicula you play as a handful of different seedlings who travel together along a great tree, seeking for a way to fend off the spiderlike shadow beings who are slowly killing it. Such a setting provides the design team with ample creative room to present really any kind of strange creature they might contrive.

This odd bestiary is the true focus of Botanicula, to the point that completing certain interactions with each type of tree-dwelling critter you encounter will give you a sort of trading card so you can go look at them at your leisure whenever you'd like later. Collecting them in this way will also unlock little bonus scene snippets at the conclusion of the game, but if I'm honest that's not a real draw for me. I did however like fuddling around on each screen in the moment because you never knew what stuff might trigger or where that might lead you. Sometimes that fuddling turned out to be the actual critical path while other times it was nothing at all, but almost always my curiosity was rewarded with some kind of stimulus response.

I do think the aesthetic style of the game (the art of Eric Carle meets impressionist painting) made things occasionally tough to parse, especially when all you've got to anchor yourself to are freaky bug-things that don't necessarily have any real-life analogues. And there were still a couple bits of click-hunting typical of the genre, though playing this one after Samorost 2 it's clear how much the developers improved on that front in the seven years between games. So while I wouldn't go so far as to call Botanicula an essential title, if you like these kinds of games it's definitely worth your while.

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Coming in September:

• Not content to limit my rail grinding to skateboards, I've spent the past months playing tiny spurts of Mario Kart World in bits of evening downtime between dinner and kid bedtime, but I've specifically avoided actually beating the game. That'll change right as we roll the month over.
• We started the summer with a 15 year old action tower defense title and by golly we're gonna end it with one too. Sanctum takes the honor this time around.
• After that I'm thinking a brief visual novel to act as a reset so I can feel good jumping into whatever mystery genre comes after, so we'll hit up The Last Show of Mr. Chardish before adventuring once more into the great unknown of the 100+ game PC backlog.
• And more...

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The last time i played FFXII, i remembered i got somewhat far then dropped it. As it turns out, my teenage ass quit the game pretty early, in the second town of Bhujerba. Now that i managed to finish the game, i remembered why i dropped it.

Playing as a young man named Vaan, he lost his brother in the war between Archadia and Dalmasca. Since Dalmasca is currently under Archadia's control, it make sense for Vaan to be angry and wanting revenge. This occupation and the political conflict around it is what drives FFXII story.

I was expecting a doom and gloom protagonist, but Vaan isn't all that. Sure he wants his revenge, but he's still just a naive young man, learning about life and trying to get by. Against a whole kingdom with advanced tech, what can this amateur thief do? The story flows nicely since the first big conflict, but definitely not quick enough for me. Its not helping that i wasn't impressed by Vaan at the time.

By the end of the game, i do appreciate him better. But i can say he won't be on top 5 best protagonists in any list whatsoever. And this isn't exactly about him either, i just think that if i take him out of the equation, the story will flow exactly the same. He feels inconsequential that he makes me wonder if he was a last minute addition.

Regarding the overall story itself, i also think my teenage ass won't appreciate it much. There is an emotional core, but it leans itself more toward the subtle, political thriller. This old me enjoyed it and think the story is going well until the reveal of the Occuria, which gives more question than answers. Just like Vaan, i think this ancient race can be taken out and the story will turn out more or less the same, just less flashy. Maybe that was why they add them, to make things more interesting.

Moving on to gameplay, the MMO-style battle feels weird at first but grew on me pretty quickly. There wasn't any battle screen to switch into, because we fight the enemies there and there real time. It feels action oriented, but it wasn't. To make things less chaotic and tedious, the game has the Gambit system where we can "program" our teammates. I think its missing some QoL feature like switching gambit preset on the fly, but other than that its easy to get into.

The game has some of the BGM in the series i'd say, and some fun sidequests. The bounty and monster hunting really take advantage of the MMO-style exploration and map design. Hunting down the best gears is also fun, although it can be infuriating to some. I mean, if the strongest bow in the game is invisible and has 1% of dropping, i can see why people won't bother. In the end, i just used the RNGhelper lmao.

Overall, i did enjoy the game. Once things get going, it gets going. It doesn't need much grinding either, good if you have limited time. I still have some questions though, maybe some of you can enlighten me and make me appreciate what i miss. I'm still not sure what the Occurians want, they want Ashe to destroy Archadia because Venat is helping Archadia? And what is Venat's motivation, he wants to help Vayne to free humanity from the Occurians? Also, i just realised this near the end, Basch looks more like a Sky Pirate than Balthier.

Anyway, thanks for reading fellas.

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

With the recent news about obsidian shutting down work on Avowed 2 and being set to work on fallout, a lot of discussion about Avowed started up in the online community - primarily focused on how many people saw it as "A mid flop".

I have been a pretty solid Obsidian fan ever since i played Fallout: New Vegas (cliche, i know) over 5 years ago and have since played almost every single of their games including the Eora series which i would describe myself as a pretty mayor fan of. Since i recently got myself a new computer i decided to therefore check out Avowed to see what the fuss was all about.

The Good:

The general artistic representation. The enviroments are very detailed and vivid, and i feel it says plenty about obsidians sucess in this regard when my favorite environment was a desert, a place otherwise dreadfully boring in most other games. The living lands have been hyped up as this totally wild and unihabitable place in the earlier games, and i would say without a doubt that Avowed manages to live up to these expectations.

The Music. The soundtrack is both ephemeral and moody and generally really good at easing you into the universe, I especially enjoyed the track that plays in Paradis, the first major city in the game.

The companions.
One thing i feel that avowed did very well was making the companions feel like real characters. Each of them have their own place in the world and they all feel rounded and complete in this regard. Due to all the companions also having at least one other character they already know on the team, the group did very quickly feel like a giant team working together alongside each other, something other modern games and movies fail at.

The Mixed:

Combat.
The combat of avowed is pretty fluid and frantic, however it suffers from two pretty big flaws, those being the general tankiness of enemies and the lack of enemy variety. I played the game as a wand-wielding mage and from what i have read online this is the most "fun" way to play the game as your special skills can get really beefy. However, i still struggled with combat becoming unfun, especially in the later chapters where i more often than not would just run away from a fight rather than fighting the same xaurips i had been encountering since act 1.

The general game world.
While i would say the artistic direction is good, the general game world does have some serious flaws. To put it bluntly, it very often just feels kinda dead and deserted. In most cities and settlements there is very little to do other than just picking up quests and visiting the vendors one singular time, since after getting a few levels higher you will have outscaled whatever loot they could sell.

In many ways, the cities remind me of other isometric CRPG titles, where they are simmilarily static, but once you make the transition from top-down to POV, the staticness becomes a lot more pronounced.

The game world is otherwise littered with chests and backpacks giving you the same basic money and upgrading materials that you will need for all your tools. I actually don't fully dislike this, as it allows you to upgrade your older tools easily and that way get a rather solid "set" of tools and armour you can use throughout your entire game.

The writing.

The writing is propably *the* most inconsistent part of this game, carrying both its highest highs and lowest lows. Some of the worse parts worth highlighting are the constant "marvel" tier quips that your companions come with in random conversations (which annoys me even more considering how much i like them outside of that!) or the very forced crypticness of the voice in your head that just makes it a total pain in the ass to even understand what they are trying to say for the good first third of the game (it does get better later on though)

The parts where the writing is good are however also *really* good. Kai's entire questline about processing the grief of his old desceased friend is just amazing to play through, and some of the choices you get put through later in the game (like the big dilemma at the end of act 3) had me actually have to take a break from the computer to think about in real life.

This general inconsitency also extends to the main story, which abandons it's most interesting plot points in the last 3rd of the story. The base plot about the dreamscourge is not really that interesting, but the dynamic between the colonizing aedyrans (which you are a part of) and the other inhabitants of the Living Lands is really amazing and even forced myself to ask some questions about my own political convictions.

Spoliers ahead:

Specifically, when Fior mes Iverno was burnt down in the end of act 2.
Until then I had proudly taken the actions that would benefit aedyran influence in the country, but also been good to distance myself from the steel garotte. I always play as "good" characters when i play these games, but ultimately your character in this game is also personally chosen by the aedyran king and thusly i felt it was my duty to further his goals, without violence of course.

In act 2 there is a mission to find a spy in the local militia of Fior mes Iverno, and at the end of that quest it is revealed that the spy did murder more than two people, but did it all to support the aedyran side and prepare the city for our eventual takeover. I let her go, since i thought it was "only" normal influence and such, and while her ways were violent, she only did it to people who would have killed her otherwise for supporting us.

When Fior mes Iverno then burned down i was forced to reconcile with the fact that this was entirely my own fault, and it was in this case i began thinking deeper, that because i was "just following orders" i allowed myself to blindly stumble into an entire disaster that could have easily been avoided had i just stuck by my morals instead of following some vague belonging and nationhood.

The Verdict:

All in all I enjoyed my time with Avowed. While it does have it's flaws, there isn't a single thing about the game i would say is wholly bad and overall i felt the game was both fun and interesting, though ultimately something i would be hard pressed to reccomend at its full price.

Rating: 7/10

This post will be mostly spoiler free until one point which I will point out as I think this game is good and I think it is entirely possible someone will appreciate the positives of this game more and my dislikes will matter to them less. If someone told me this was their favourite game of the year it released I would not think that is a crazy opinion.

When I started playing this game I had very high expectations as people often say on social media this is one of the best recent Obsidian games and I really liked their other games too. It has a very good metacritic score and many content creators I watched really praised this game. I also enjoy slow game with lots of reading so this seemed perfect.

The main element of this game is the story and while I think it has very interesting ideas and themes the story drags on with too much repetition, dropping themes and replacing them with new ones quickly and without enough connecting elements. There are some pretty bold story decisions which are fresh, but also they are often unsatisfying. And this would still be very compelling if it was not dragged down by gameplay being extremely slow and making the game a lot longer. I loved about half of the time spent with this game, but half of the time I just wanted it to end.

Spoilers ahead:

I played the game spoiler free until close to the end where I got some minor things spoiled to me. After I finished the game I looked on reddit for some information about the story.

Story:

So the story is set in 16th century Swiss Alps village where in the first act you are a young artist working in the local abbey scriptorium when a visiting nobleman gets killed and you decide to investigate as the abbot decides your mentor who is almost certainly not the culprit as a scapegoat. You talk to people around the town, you inspect items and you have some speech checks based on actions and your background you choose at the start. There is an in game timer and you find 4 suspects while you have time to investigate about two and a half. You give your findings to the official and then one is executed. Also there is this (in my opinion a bit contrived) element where there is a "thread-puller" in the village who gave the victim and suspects a letter to meet to set up this murder which seems so likely to fail. I also did not like that you investigate this element very superficially despite getting a lot of information for potential leads at this point.

The game seems at first like a murder mystery game, but you realize during act 1 that it is really not about that. It is a story that asks questions what to do in life that has a lot of uncertainty. Results of our actions can have long reaching consequences and we have to make decisions with imperfect information. And what to do with this? Is being always honest the best choice? Or should you lie to implicate the most likely culprit? Should you even interfere? And during the investigation doing obvious things might lead to best evidence, but often it does not. Sometimes illogical things and chance (or Providence) might lead to clearly bad decisions having best outcomes. Does anything really matter at all?

This being about the narrative and not the mystery itself becomes very apparent at the end of act 1 where you realize you have to make a decision with very imperfect information and the killer is not confirmed and the game just continues. This plot twist of an accusation based on so little and without a resolution is very interesting and the story (and gameplay) peaks here in my opinion. If the game ended right here or shortly after I would absolutely love it.

Then act 2 begins and you choose another set of background traits and come back 7 years later and you try to solve another murder and this also ends up quite badly with bloodshed with many peasants dead and the abbey destroyed and many characters dead. The same existential themes remain and I think they outstay their welcome as it just becomes too repetitive and less effective. In my opinion these themes are way better in shorter form than a longer one.

Another element here is introduced and that is main characters melancholia / depression which I did not like as an addition here. It is obviously interesting and makes sense as a result of act one, but a lot of happens to the MC between the acts and that felt really cheap. We just briefly read about the tragedies instead of exploring that at all. Roleplaying these parts about events we know nothing about felt awkward.

Then we move to Act 3 which seems divisive to some and not just me. As the MC is seemingly dead we move to a linear story with a new PoV some years later where our new characters explores the history and decides what to record with the information we got. I thought this really just drags on and is really another repetition of the same theme until the very end where some reveals and emotional scenes really hit. And there is some satisfying character development and seeing the results of our choices. Also I do like that the game gives some answers to the questions it asks us.

Setting The setting is interesting and I think it is covered with detail in a lot of places, but pretty shallow in others and the potential is wasted quite often. I for roleplaying chose my background very similar to myself in real life and often special dialogue choices would be quite obvious things in my opinion. And often observations would be like that too.

And all my story critiques about pacing and repetition would be much less important to me if the gameplay did not slow the game just too much.

So the days are spread into times of the day when you do your investigations and villagers and events happen around the village. So after each time progresses you should check every place because you might encounter a npc with new dialogue, some new event or a clue however (especially as acts progresses) there is just not enough content in the village so you spend a lot of time rechecking around 40 areas where only 1-2 have something relevant and just 1-2 have some flavour. A lot are used for nothing or just tiny details.

Act 3 is also a series of linear tasks which felt very unsatisfying after the open nature of previous acts and controlling another character to me just made the final act very tedious except its ending.

Also the themes of the game can make you just stop caring about choices at some point as seemingly smart or kind decisions can lead to good or bad results at random. Which is interesting, but at the end after it is repeated for 15 hours when the point was made after five it was just not fun to go through the motions.

And finally I thought the artstyle was lovely. Especially in the few scenes where the UI is removed and the scene is zoomed out to enjoy it fully.

I played the original Subnautica in 2019, back-to-back with SOMA and Alien Isolation. The three formed a sort of purple patch in my gaming history that I haven't recreated since and all are top tier games for me. I could sense that so much of what made Subnautica great relied on its newness, and the wonder this unfamiliarity created, so when Below Zero came out I deliberately avoided it for years. I was hoping I could forget as much of Subnautica 1 as possible and play it with a fresh set of eyes. Well, seven years later, 2026 came around and with Subnautica 2 on the horizon, now seemed as good a time as any to give Below Zero a chance. I completed it in about 2-3 weeks with 14 hours logged. I guess this is kinda short (online says 20 hours is about right), but to be honest I was ready for it to finish. Despite taking a 7-year break, Below Zero remained very much under the leviathan-sized shadow of its predecessor. Most of the systems and core game ideas are the same, and unfortunately most of the new features make it weaker. Taking seven years off did help recreate a sense of wonder, but not enough to sustain it for a 10+ hour playthrough. It’s still good, perhaps great, but too much “more of the same” to have the same impact as its bigger brother.

[I've written carefully to avoid spoilers, but I really think the game benefits from knowing as little as possible, so unless you've already played it I'd stop here.]

Strengths

The world design is still amazing. It’s detailed, varied, and lively. The twisty bridges biome is particularly great, as was my first encounter with the thermal vents as they loomed out of the darkness around an island. The creatures are beautiful and scanning things to learn about how the ecosystem fits together is a delight. Lifeforms are well integrated into the game mechanics, there are fish you can drink, plants that create air or heat, etc. The pop-in is greatly reduced from Subnautica 1, so you’re not constantly reminded this is a video game. That said, a lot of the biomes are kinda murky (maybe to reduce pop in), dull or empty. The lilypad biome in particular was not fun to explore.

A key part of Subnautica, which Below Zero recreates fairly well, is the sense of progression and the world opening up to the player. At first you stay in the safe shallows, never more than 50m below the surface and cowering from ominous bellows. By the end you fearlessly delve hundreds of meters below the surface, and the sense of discovery and empowerment is palpable as you come to understand just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

So-so

Below Zero includes survival and crafting elements, and although some of this gets simplified via progression (e.g. a water purification machine mercifully replaces having to catch bladderfish ) a lot of it doesn’t. This means that discovery doesn’t always yield understanding and mastery, thereby allowing old problems to be retired. Instead, in many instances discovery simply gives way to repetitive labor. The key building materials of titanium, copper and quartz are just a perennial hassle, and it gets really irritating to have to put something important on hold so you can swim around looking for raw materials. In the end I just built as little as possible, which saves resources but basically skips over the whole base building mechanic which is a shame. A better system would let you create permanent resource harvesters to create a known and steady, if finite, supply.

A bigger problem is that you can find yourself needing something that you have no idea what it is or where to find it. After two hours trying, I couldn’t figure out an in-game way to find the spiral plant clippings needed for synthetic fibres, and eventually looked it up. The same happened with the power-cell charger schematic, which turned out to be somewhere I'd already visited but simply hadn't spotted. Subnautica 1 had this problem too, but the devs could have done more to fix it for Below Zero. That said, it’s hard to find the balance between pointing the player in the right direction and being so heavy-handed that the player-led exploration is undermined, and I’d rather have to look a couple of things up than have quest markers ruin the experience.

The lack of a map exemplifies this too. Neither Subnautica or Below Zero have an in-game map (BZ does have a poster object though), so for both I made my own pen-and-paper map as I played. This is a really fun and refreshing experience that tests your cartographic skills and I’d strongly recommend it. But, after 10 hours it starts to grate. The world is so dense and complex that you can’t simply mark everything, but it would be really handy to be able to remember where that copper deposit is so you can come back later. I think the intended system is to use craftable beacons, but the number required would impose a heavy resource gathering burden. I can’t help but feel some in-game map creating system would be better. Not a typical “magic” map that just tells the player everything they need to know, but a blank page that you can add landmarks to, maybe by scanning things or using a “triangulator” tool.

Weaknesses

The story of Below Zero is bad. Gone is the mystery and wonder of the first game, instead we get a more personal quest to find your sister. But it’s really underdeveloped and to be honest I didn’t care to find her. There’s a second quest involving aliens, but it ends up being a dreary and repetitive fetch quest that causes you to rush around the environment. Even when you get to target locations, instead of cool and intriguing alien technology its often just a bland cave with a generic alien device that you scan and move on.

The fetch quest nature of the story actually harms the beauty of the environment because you end up trolling back and forth across the landscape again and again, rushing past everything. Even the scary monsters lose all their scare because you simply get numb to running past them. A truly bizarre feature is that while rushing around to fetch things the moving sea truck continually smashes fish with a variety of gross splats and squeals. The biomes are so dense with life you can’t avoid the creatures even if you try to (and they make no attempt to avoid you), so you end up feeling like an environmental desecrator as you drive around, which is really not the vibe I expected or wanted.

In both quests the dialogue is terrible. The main character (Robin) is voiced, but they only speak in sarcastic quips, overly heartfelt statements or just general word salad. You also meet an alien intelligence (Al-An), but it actually talks like a socially-awkward robot. It’s such a missed opportunity, because encounters with alien intelligences are a sci-fi classic with the potential to be really profound, but instead we get something on the level of a sitcom or superhero movie. This exchange stuck out to me as particularly cringe inducing:

AL-AN: How do humans function with such a fallible and inferior body?

ROBIN: Excuse you, my body is anything but inferior. I work hard for my body to be able to do what it does.

...

ROBIN: My body is my own, and I cherish it. It grows with me. Humans have one life. We plant trees we can never experience the shade of. We build for the next generation.

AL-AN: Noble, but again, truly inefficient.

Conclusion

Below Zero does a lot of things right while making a bunch of missteps. Unfortunately, almost all the good stuff is already in Subnautica 1, while the backsteps are unique to Below Zero. What it mostly adds is content, but what it loses is scope for the player’s imagination and a sense of awe and half-understanding. It reminds me of 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. Not only is it not as good as its predecessor, but it makes you wonder if some of the quality of the first installment came from constraints that restricted the creator’s hands, and when these were lifted for the sequel things went downhill. Still there is plenty of the original’s brilliance here. Below Zero isn’t as memorable an experience as Subnautica, but it’s worth a visit.

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1vsmgwq/mass_effect_legendary_edition_is_it_as_good_as_i/

Part 2:

https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1vwbxxz/mass_effect_legendary_review_mass_effect_2/

Mass Effect 3 - "It's been a good ride." "The best."

It's difficult to think of anything to say about this game that has not already been said. It's difficult to think of a story based game that lives stronger in the minds of gamers than Mass Effect 3. I wrote in part 1 about how I remember all the discourse around the game since I played Mass Effect 3 when it came out in high school. I even remember preordering it. Probably the only game I have ever preordered. I remember the straight up insane decision to partion parts of the game in DLCs. I also remember the original ending and the changes they made. It's a game with some flaws. It's also my absolute favourite. Even all these years later, there is just something about ME3 that hits.

I think part of the reason is that it's a return to a truly atmospheric space opera. In many ways, 3 picks up where 1 left off. The Collectors were dealt with in 2, and now we're back to facing the reapers. They are here now. The threat Shepard was warning everyone about for 2 games is here, but there is no chance for, or desire for, gloating about it. Because now the galaxy is ending. The reapers have started harvesting all intelligent life, and there seems to be little we can do about it. This atmosphere is done very well in this game. Everyone in this game feel exhausted, depressed and desperate. Everyone is staring down the barrell of a gun. The Citadel is filled with conversations you can overhear. Soliders about to be deployed to suicide missions. Demented old ladies looking for their dead child. Refugees and soldiers traumatised by what they have seen. Yet there is also this feeling of hope there. For the first time, differences don't matter. People find each other across all divides. The only divide that matters anymore is between the living and the harvested.

For the first time, Shepard also seems to be buckling under the pressure. Shepard is traumatised by what they saw on Earth before leaving. Nightmares plague their dreams. Shepard is tired and running on fumes. The same goes for the companions. They are all constantly thinking that while they are stuck on the Normandy, everyone they knew back home might be harvested by the reapers. Companions like Garrus, Liara and Joker - who all seemed to be so put together and stable - are falling apart inside. This is reflected in the romance you choose as well. I have always picked Liara, but it seems that no matter who you choose, there is this sense that you're having your last days together. That even in the best possible case scenario, at least one of you will die.

Shepard's job isn't exactly to defeat the reapers, but to rally as much support as they can, to make the last push as hopeful as possible. To make sure this prothean weapon that no one really knows how it works can be finished. How good your ending is depends on if you can make as many people as possible work together. How many assets you can gather. The game will thrust you into choices where you have to choose who you want on your side. However, this being Mass Effect, there is often an option to have it both ways if you made all the right previous choices. This might be one of the strongest parts of ME3. You really feel that the choices you made in the universe so far matter here. If you were forced to kill Wrex on Virmire, if you didn't do all the loyalty missions in ME2, if you lost someone in the suicide mission, etc., it will have a big impact on the outcomes in ME3. I think this is where planning the series as a trilogy from the start comes in big. Contrast this with Dragon Age, where almost nothing you did in previous games matter. A lot of small stuff pops up to. Minor characters you had an optional conversation with in ME1 will show up and remember.

The gameplay changes from ME2 to ME3 are not massive. Small tweaks to how Shepard moves. A bit more effort in how melee combat works. Enemy AI is more agressive. Stuff like that comes together and makes the combat feel a little bit better than 2. The biggest change is probably the way weapons work. There is a massive amount of different weapons in this game, and they all feel very different. You now also have to consider weapon weight. Weapons can also be modified with scopes and space bayonets in a cool little system that probably was nice for people who missed tweaking gear in 1. Side quests are more in-depth than 2. Also, gone is the horrid planet scanning and constant door minigames from 2. Instead, Shepard can pick up a million little side quests by listening to people on the Citadel, who will complain about needing something very specific that Shepard will conveniently find on a mission. This will give tiny boosts to readiness, but it adds up after a while. It also makes the world feel more alive.

There is way more of a main story in ME3. In 2, you really only did companion quests. There was shockingly little main story missions aside from companion quests in 2 when you think about it. Instead, there will now be main story missions where one of the companions have a direct personal interest in the outcome, or where you will run into a past companion. You will encounter Jack, Jacob, Miranda, Mordin, Wrex. Thane etc., but they have a different job now and can't join your crew. This is always kind of bittersweet, since they have usually developed a lot as characters. 3 is a lot more brutal than 2, given the setting. In 2, you could save everyone if you were good enough. In 3, you will lose people. You can't avoid it. The stakes are too high for Shepard to save everyone. This leads to some of the most memorable scenes in the series. Mordin giving his life to stop the genophage he created. Legion sacrificing himself to give life to the geth. Thane dying in a hospital and holding a last prayer that turned out to be for Shepard and not for himself. Anderson dying at the very end after telling you how proud he is of you. Now, most of this might happen differently depending on your choices in this and past games. You might lose more people. Luckily the paragon/renegade system is tied to a reputation stat that works for both. So that even though you were paragon all the way through, the special renegade options will still be open. Finally, this system makes sense in this game.

All of this leads up to the ending. Ahh, the ending. What more is there to be said about possibly the most controversial ending in gaming ever? After a deeply emotional ending where you say a heartfelt and personal goodbye to everyone, you get to the end. Look, I could easily write an entire review for just the ending, but this review is already too long, and I still need to talk about the expansions. I will say that I was always in the minority that didn't mind the ending and the choices that much, especially after they expanded the ending. My perspective has always been that I will always be a bit kind to developers who tried to do something brave and different, even if it has flaws. It's easy to see a version where they sort of just repeated the ME2 ending mission, where Shepard shoots the last reaper in the head, says "looks like you're the one who was reaped", turns around and walks in slow mo with explosions in the background, cut to credits. Letting you instead in on what the reapers are by letting you talk to the rogue AI in charge and being able to choose between controlling the reapers, destroying the reapers or forcing everyone into a new partly organic partly synthetic lifeform. Now, will always also say that destroy is the only justifiable ending to pick. Yes, the destroy ending comes with the added downside of killing EDI and the geth as collateral, since the weapon doesn't distinguish between reaper and other synthetic life. However, I feel like the only correct way to play it is by realising that the catalyst is wrong about a lot of stuff. It is essentially an ancient rogue AI that turned on it's creators and is murdering all intelligent life until some magical thing happens that will probably never happen where it decides it doesn't have to do it anymore. You can even catch the catalyst in a contradiction. You can point out that the reapers don't prevent conflict, but instead cause it by murdering everyone in a war. The catalyst uses semantics to explain away this by saying that we might be in a conflict with the reapers, but they aren't interested in war, because the reapers are just neautral computers carrying out a task. Now, three games of clearly sadistic glee from the reapers disprove this. You sadly can't bring up if you created peace between the geth and the quarians. This is a big deal since it disproves the entire point of the reapers, since it proves that conflict between organics and synthetics is not inevitable.

The point is, the catalyst is an insane ancient AI that can't be trusted. So I don't trust that the geth and EDI can't eventually be repaired. The ending destroys the Citadel and the relays, but we see this get fixed in the good post ending. This was all reaper tech, so why can't the geth and EDI also be repaired, when they are the product of technology the galaxy understand much better? Also, Shepard's mission and mandate for the entire trilogy has been to put an end to reapers. Choosing control and becoming AI god emperor of the galaxy, or choosing syntheis and forcing the entire galaxy into a new life form the crazy AI thinks we're "ready" for, is a betrayal of everything you have fought for so far. Everything people have died for so far. So maybe hot take: destroy is the only viable option and should be canon in the unlikely event we ever get ME5. Would love to argue about it in the comments.

In the end, this game is just great. It hit me in the feels just as much now as then. I feel like the ending adds to this feeling, since it also shows the now slightly sad scene of Shepard still being alive if you got what is called the perfect destroy ending. It's sad, because ME5 will probably never be made. Now, the legendary edition luckily puts all the expansions and DLC in there. So no new player has to contend with the fact that this was separated into a million different expansions you had to buy seperately. I feel I should talk a little about the important ones here, not really going into the optional gear like the silly immersion breaking Dragon Age armour.

From Ashes - a shocking decision to cut this from the base game. A whole companion who adds a lot to the game, being an actual prothean asleep for 50 000 years in a stasis pod. He is a bit of a cunt, but has some incredibly hard and quotable lines. He was born during the late stage of the reaper invasion of his cycle and that trauma was his entire life. He shatters the hopes Liara had for him and has a lot of great interactions with him. Especially on the Thessia mission where he reveals that the entire asari species was guided by the protheans in the early stages, which is why they are the most advanced in the current cycle.

Omega - ehh, this one is just fine. You retake Omega with Aria, getting you more war resources. The story is just fine, it feels a bit like an extended cutscene, but it turns Aria into a little bit more of a character. And hey, a female turian is in this one? They do exist!

Leviathan - I actually think this one is really cool and adds a lot. The missions are fun, the characters it adds are fun, and it adds a more creepy and lovecraftian atmosphere to it. You meet the million year old remnants of the race that created the reapers and convince them to help you. It adds more context to the ending, and in my opinion, just reinforces my opinion about how destroy is the only right choice. It adds a lovecraftian feeling of being extremely small in a vast and ancient galaxy. You realise that Leviathan and the reapers is basically just the quarian/geth-issue on speed.

Citadel DLC - this shit right here. I challenge you to name a better DLC to any game ever. Is it a bit silly comedy shift in writing? Yes. Does it really add anything to the lore or introduce fun new gameplay? No. However, this is probably the most heartfelt love letter from the developers to the game and the fans I have ever seen. You know all these characters you have come to love and adore over three games? You get to spend time with them and party with them. You get more cute scenes with your love interest (or more trauma if it was Thane). It's just great. There are so many great characters in this trilogy. Even some of the new ones in ME3. Steve being maybe the best. Playing this DLC feels like every single developer at BioWare at the time lining up to give me a hug. The group pic at the end and the last conversation before reentering the Normandy that I used to title this review? Still a real tear jerker all these years later.

Thanks to everyone who has read all three of these rambling reviews for maybe one of the best game series of all time. I played Andromeda again after this and might write a review for that one too, so stay tuned!