Halo: Reach (2010) by Bungie

(Note: I played the remastered version of Halo: Reach released in 2019)

343 has done a lot of work with the textures, and it shows—the environments have been spruced up a bit, but the character models especially have been retooled to near-modern standards. While it runs exceptionally on my system on paper—I'm managing 200+ fps nearly constantly (depending on how much Michael Bay is going on on my screen)—there is a persistent stutter which makes things look rather jagged. Normally this would be excusable, but it's rather bothersome in a shooter. Some of the settings are welcome in a remaster such as this; the field of view slider is particularly nice. It shows the team remastering this were listening to the demands of their potential PC customers. I'm sure adding that took some extra work on the part of the devs, and it's much appreciated. TotalBiscuit would have been so happy to see it.

Additionally, mouse and keyboard controls are fantastic. I'm somebody who played all of the original Halo: Reach when it released in 2010 and it plays exactly as I remember it—which is odd because I played it with a controller back then, and I'm playing with a mouse and keyboard now. That goes to show the hard work the development team has put into making mouse and keyboard controls feel so good they come naturally in a game that was never originally meant to have them. There is mouth smoothing and acceleration available, but thankfully they are set to 'off' by default. Another little thing I appreciated as a PC gamer.

In addition to the odd framerate stutter, another complaint regarding the port would be that the sound is relatively poor. Guns are far too quiet and their sound design lacks pop, which makes them feel like little more than plastic toys, and there is no dynamic range here whatsoever which hampers the realistic feel of gunfire and explosions most shooters feature these days. Additionally, the mix in general sounds a bit muddy to my ear—the bass of the music often blares too loudly and drowns out the dialogue that is occurring. It shows how far shooters have come, as I recall Halo: Reach being completely competent in the sound department back in 2010. Sadly, it shows Reach's age, whereas the updated textures make you feel like you're playing a modern game.

As far as stability is concerned, the port has been wonderful. I haven't experienced a single bug thus far.

Maybe you're new to Halo? Perhaps you're a younger gamer, or you've been a old-school PC gamer who never picked up Halo: Combat Evolved or Halo 2 back when they released on PC in the early 2000s. If that's the case, the Halo series represents a sprawling, thrilling adventure that's ambitious and action-packed, and it's a completely competent shooter even in the modern day. My opinion is that you owe it to yourself to check it out, and if you like Halo: Reach, then you'll probably dig the rest of the series, too.

Time to manage expectations, though. Don't expect a fully modern shooter with Halo: Reach! Even with the fresh coat of paint, Halo still feels like Halo—and this is not necessarily a good thing to some people as it's a very particular taste.

Movement and jumping has always felt a bit floaty in Halo games. The campaign difficulty might be a bit higher than folks might be used to, and stronger enemies such as the elites can feel a bit bullet spongey. It will take some time to get used to not being able to aim down iron sights for every weapon, and for sprint to not be readily available.

If you're looking for a great campaign, you will find it here. Halo: Reach features a poignant, phenomenally written and designed campaign with absolutely perfect pacing. It will leave you reeling from its emotional impact despite its minimalist storytelling. One of the highlights of Reach's campaign is that you're finally not the only Spartan around. As Noble Six, you have five other team members around you at all times. Certain members accompany you on certain missions, and sometimes the whole team gets together. It's tough to avoid growing attached to your squadmates as you play through the campaign. Whereas in other games they might remain faceless, helmeted supersoldiers, in Reach they are given a coloring of humanity and they feel like real people as a result. Carter is a stoic leader, always attempting to put his feelings to the side, which makes it all the more noticeable when they bleed through. Kat is a grouchy, technical genius—her disability does little to hamper her. Jun's quiet competence suits him as the sniper of the group. Jorge is gregarious and seems consciously at odds with his nature as a killing machine, and perhaps the most dangerous of the bunch. Emile is a clear A-type personality, and his actions later in the story are perhaps the most memorable bit of Halo: Reach. And Catherine Halsey, the intelligence spook, is perhaps the best of the bunch—her cold calculus renders her little more than a psychopath, but we see the humanity poke through a bit here and there. I particularly loved her scenes with Jorge. Throw these characters into a catastrophic, desperate battle to defend their homeland in a losing war, and you have the makings of a gripping, shattering story of sacrifice and perseverance. This is the best campaign of the series in my opinion, and one of the best single player shooter campaigns ever crafted.

To top it off, all of this game has a soundtrack of nearly unheard of quality despite the lower than usual mix from the muddy sound of the port. The Halo series has great music in general, but Reach's score in particular is so poignant and moody and it suits the campaign narrative perfectly. You'll be humming some of these songs in the shower after a night of playing. Others will bring a tear to your eye for years to come, whenever you hear them.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) by Respawn Entertainment

Fallen Order looks gorgeous and its respect for the Star Wars license is apparent. It does a fairly good job at taking inspiration from recent, popular game series such as Dark Souls, Uncharted, and the Tomb Raider revivals. If you like those games, or you're hardcore Star Wars fan, go ahead and pick this up—You'll probably quite like it! For me, however, it didn't do enough to elevate itself above its genre or its license, and although I love Star Wars and was eager to jump into the world, that love failed to carry me to enjoying this title. I frequently found myself struggling to have fun with it for a number of reasons.

Although Fallen Order looks great graphically and runs fairly well in general, I experienced regular, annoying framerate hitches—most often during transitions into different areas. Normally this is a minor annoyance, but there are several instances in which this hitching and other frame drops occur when you're attempting to platform, or even in the middle of sub-boss fights. It's extremely frustrating to miss the timing for a jump or a parry because the game is dumping frames from 70+ down to 20ish. One instance was the ice slides on Zeffo, at which framerate takes a dump at certain points when you're attempting not to slide off the edge, or make the jump from one slide to another, or when wallrunning and attempting to jump to a hanging vine from which to swing. The framerate hitching here is severe enough to hamper your timing and cause you to miss a jump, which is very frustrating. There's another instance during one sub-boss on Kashyyyk, which I had to battle while experiencing awful framerate drops seemingly every time I entered the room, which led me to such frustration during attempted dodges and parries that I quit playing the game completely for a few days... And scared the crap out of my dog with a loud string of vitriolic curses damning the game's existence.

I generally find Respawn's level design to be incredible; it was the main attraction for me in Titanfall 2. Although the design is nicely cyclical in Fallen Order and cleverly uses shortcuts a la Dark Souls, the actual layout of each individual area within the levels themselves seem far more gamey and much less ambitious than the lived-in, unique, inspired spaces found in Titanfall 2. Fallen Order is made up of mostly small corridors and a sometimes rectangular, box-like rooms for larger encounters. A lot of the stuff in this game looks beautiful graphically on Unreal Engine 4, but I did not enjoy roaming through these environments because despite this graphical beauty, they all ended up seeming very dry content-wise. I appreciate the attempt to liven up the atmosphere by scattering bits of lore and storytelling items throughout the level, but this was done in such an inorganic way that they seemed contrived and out-of-place and made everything feel gamey more than they made the environment seem lived-in and realistic.

Another issue I had with the game is its reliance on backtracking. If you have liked Metroidvania style backtracking, then you'll probably enjoy this about Fallen Order as well. I personally dislike using unlocked abilities to backtrack through levels, as this loop serves more to frustrate me with repetitive environments and engagements rather than impart a sense of a growing power level. I don't want to grind through 90% of an area I've already cleared to unlock something, get to 10% of a new corridor, and get a box that has a different lightsaber knob. To me, that is boring and unfulfilling. For you, maybe it will be different—perhaps you'll enjoy the added challenge. I can't say.

Fallen Order relies on combat as its main challenge, and while it is decent, I couldn't help feeling like swinging the lightsaber felt too light and airy, in addition to having a very small range. It also constantly clips through the environment as you move through the game, and it seems to do no actual physical damage to humans (by this I mean the dismemberment you would expect from a lightsaber, such as with combat finishers in Witcher 3) but still somehow kills them, which feels fake—like your lightsaber is make-believe—and gives a distinct, immersion-breaking feeling of weakness. Some of the most satisfying combat in video games, such as in Dark Souls, features weapons that all seem to have a realistic weight to them, and act physically like a real weapon would. The lightsaber in Fallen Order feels like a make-believe object—a toy, or a stick—and imparts no sense of power or danger that it should. Swinging the zweihander in Dark Souls, or parrying in Sekiro, for example, are some of the most satisfying weapon interactions of any game I have ever played. I wanted the lightsaber in Fallen Order to feel somewhere near this good, too, but it's just lacking. The animations are enjoyable enough, but the weightlessness and the lack of any effect on the environment are unsatisfying enough to noticeably damage the experience. The force powers, however, were excellent—I wished I could use them earlier in the game, and more frequently once I had unlocked them.

I bought the game because I wanted a good Star Wars story, and perhaps most damning was that I had little to no emotional investment in the game past the first level. Past this introduction—which I found gorgeous, polished, compelling, and inspired—I felt like I was simply shuttled from video game level to video game level and with the plot driven forward only by a MacGuffin I didn't care about. Additionally, the loot and collectible items scattered through the environments did little to help motivate me, either, as they're pretty uninteresting: you will sometimes spend 10 minutes solving a puzzle, only for it to unlock a minor difference on the rubber grip on your lightsaber hilt that you'll never even notice outside the work bench interface. I've done an entire platforming challenge on Kashyyyk only for Cal to scan a Force Echo and say "this place was sacred to them". Due to this I felt no drive to explore side paths and find additional loot because their contents were almost always underwhelming, nor was I urged to do so by additional plot or character development.

Since neither the story nor the collectibles motivated me, the vast majority of the game felt like grinding forward through samey corridors, similar encounters with similar enemies, and ultimately to unfulfilling tedium. There were a few boss fights I legitimately enjoyed (Second Sister ended up being my favorite character), but the plot left me unsatisfied. It features some very contrived turns that made little sense. Haxion Brood base felt completely out of left field, for example. The constantly forces you into making contrived mistakes even when you know they're coming, robbing you of any agency to affect the story. It often turns you towards going back to worlds to which you have already been and grinding through areas you have already cleared, since there is no fast travel system. The game tries its best to utilize shortcuts to funnel you through quickly, but there's only so much the level designers can do here. If these were interesting, inspired areas that provided a genuine, lived-in feel of immersion, then not having a fast travel system would be no issue. But they're not; they're boring corridors with little to catch your interest, creating a feeling of tedium when you're forced to go through them repeatedly.

If you like action games, Soulsbourne games, or Star Wars, then Fallen Order might be right up your alley. You may even love it, as many people seem to. But if you're looking for narrative punch or realistic, inspired world and satisfying lightsaber combat, you will likely want to look elsewhere, as it's very light on that—at least so far. For me, though, it's been a disappointment.

⭐⭐

Disco Elysium (2019) by ZA/UM

Disco Elysium is a very well-written game. If you like reading, classic cRPGs, or point-and-click adventure games, chances are you're going to love this game. But if you're a fan of the RPG-lite games that have released in recent decades such as the Mass Effect trilogy or even JRPGs, this actually might be a little too slow and too RPG for you. I don't mean to look down anyone who likes those things—hell, I am someone who likes those things! I personally never got much into cRPGs or point-and-click adventure games, but I did love JRPGs growing up in the '90s, and the Mass Effect trilogy are my favorite games of all-time. Disco Elysium took a lengthy adjustment period for me before I began to love it as a result of these tastes—but I do love it.

The most striking difference between this and most RPGs on the market today is that there's no combat engine in this game. You walk around, talk to people, and examine stuff, and that's basically it. Every conflict in the game is governed by skill checks. So you're not running around gunning people down or even stealthing your way through levels. However, I enjoyed this about the game—It allows it to effectively build tension in this manner and makes it so that, when something violent does happen, it affects us more closely to how actual violence does in the real world. It's more shocking.

Most of the game lulls you into a sense of the mundane—A vast majority of what is happening is centered on relatively low-key conversations with NPCs, in addition to the protagonist's own inner dialogue between different aspects of his personality. This probably sounds pretty boring—and it might be to some folks. It certainly could have made the game incredibly dry, but for me, though, it was absolutely riveting. I suspect this has partly to do with my own interests (I'm a lover of classic literature, which is often permeated by these sorts of lengthy derailments into philosophy), but it's also rendered a strength of the game simply by the astounding quality of the writing. None of these inner dialogues that occur inside your player character's head seem like padding. They're all entertaining on some level—either because of the substance of the conversation, or due to the absurd, bleak humor of the game.

This game is hilarious. I haven't laughed this much at a game in my entire life. Even the way simple things are handled—such as choosing to have your character say 'Hello?' into an echoing chimney, only to have him lose his cool unexpectedly and unleash an echoing monstrosity of a scream that reverberates throughout the entire building. Or choosing to tell the hotel manager that you're not paying for the room by slyly slipping away from the desk, only to have your player character sprint away, trip, and fall into a lady in a wheelchair because you don't have a very high dexterity skill—leading you to become a clumsy oaf.

And that's the beauty of this RPG: It allows you to fail—frequently, and often in humorous ways—that allow you to continue the game with only minor penalties. It constantly surprises you in ways such as this whenever you fail a skill check, and it does so in a way that feels deserved. It leaves you thinking, "Why did I attempt to be sly here? I have only 2 points in my Motorics skills. Of course I was going to screw that up". Successes often result in you feeling like Sherlock Holmes, or a sly con man, or just a bad-ass. Failures will make you look silly, sure, but they also lead to unbelievably hilarious moments. And once you get a hang for how the skill systems work, you can reasonably predict not only what sort of outcomes will be had by succeeding or failing a check, but also when you should try for a risky roll, and when you shouldn't, because the stakes are too high and screwing up in a situation will result in some serious misery for everyone involved.

The more I played, the more I was entertained not by the central mystery of the game, but by my player character's inner dialogue. I should probably make clear how this actually works: When your skills get high enough—things such as your physical prowess, your logic, your empathy, or your ability to 'feel' the city around you, etc—these skills vocalize themselves to you (the human playing the game) in order to help you make decisions in-game. For example, you might be interviewing a witness, and your ability to Empathize with them will chime in in unspoken text to tell you; "Hey bud, this guy is lying", and it will also narrate why your player character knows this—the person's eyelid might flutter, or they may pronounce a word in an odd way. Or, your gut instinct (the skill called 'Inland Empire') will call your attention to the way a door feels—it's "too blue", or something—prompting you to inspect it.

This is an astoundingly accurate depiction of how our subconscious mind works. We're constantly making these calculations that, had they occurred in our active thoughts, would take multiple sentences to vocalize. But in our subconscious they're quickly calculated and filed away in the background without you ever noticing.

For example—Have you ever felt when driving that you can tell somebody ahead on your right is about to switch lanes, even before their signal is on, or before they've indicated in any way that they're going to do so?

Why?

"Well... Because they're just moving their car in a way like they want to change lanes? I don't know, it just felt like they were about to switch lanes."

And then, guess what? You're right. They switch lanes.

Disco Elysium is a game full of stuff like this, and the writers are skillful enough to depict it in a way that feels real. To borrow a horribly overused phrase in video game reviews—It makes you feel like a detective. But not just a detective—It makes you feel however you choose to play your character: An alcoholic drug addict craving a fix. A pretentious, artsy-fartsy tool. A meathead weightlifter. A super-cool disco-obsessed fop. Whoever you decide you are, the game is consistently narrating your character's inner thoughts that way, and this all feeds back to you to create an incredibly engulfing experience in which you're attempting to roleplay as somebody and the game is rewarding you for doing so by adapting to your inputs and feeding you lengthy, beautiful narration depicting who you are choosing to be. It bleeds through everything in the game from how you look, to what you're doing, to how you apply your strengths to a challenge, and how you fail challenges that are outside your realm of expertise. And it does this in a superb, artful, hilarious way. All of this creates an attachment to your player character that I've never felt before, in any other game—roleplaying or otherwise.

The game is definitely not without its faults, though. The voice acting is particularly awful in some areas, with the actors delivering monotone, unconvincing lines into microphones without pop filters. I found myself picturing some characters' voices wholly different to how the actors portrayed them, and this made for a jarring experience whenever their lines were voiced. I would prefer to play the game with the voice lines completely turned off, and just allow their voices to play in my own head. It's also very, very wordy, so if you hate reading, you'll probably hate it. Be aware.

You owe it to yourself to give this game a shot if you like RPGs. If you have loved wordy cRPGs in the past, you'll probably love this game. If you have liked RPGs, give yourself a cushion of time to get adjusted to what Disco Elysium does differently. You may be rewarded with a unique experience that's not quite like any other—like I have.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Fallout 4 (2015) by Bethesda Game Studios

These kinds of bugs...

I picked this up again to kill some time while waiting for Obsidian's upcoming The Outer Worlds, but set it back down and uninstalled it once again after only a couple of hours.

Unfortunately Fallout 4 falls far from the quality of its predecessors. It features some notable graphical improvements and a voiced protagonist, but provides an extremely buggy experience (see, uh... all images in this post), with a clearly aged and no longer acceptable engine. The shooting feels too loose, movement feels too imprecise, and there are notable frame drops indoors which I could find no way to alleviate.

...are unfortunately ubiquitous...

In addition to this, the factions are much less interesting than those found in New Vegas, and the writing overall is weaker. The main plot is contrived and tries too hard to be clever and twisty. The dialogue is poor and unbelievable, and the player's ability to maintain agency through dialogue is severely damaged by a lack of meaningful roleplaying. The quest design is also very straightforward; solvable in only one way (which usually involves shooting), and almost never presenting the player with any significant moral problems that are anything more than window-dressing. Nearly every side quest or main quest I picked up was instantly forgettable, and most of my enjoyment from this game came from wandering the world, looting areas for new gear and materials with which to mod my current gear, leveling up, and enjoying Inon Zur's wonderful soundtrack. I had to go out of my way to actually enjoy the game, as it kept pushing me towards it's bad quests and, what is perhaps most game-breaking for me personally: The game constantly pushing you towards the monotonous, inane, and janky settlement management. Surely there are some people that enjoy this kind of thing, but when I play a Fallout game I want to explore, roleplay, level up, and gather loot to become more powerful in order to affect the world more strongly. I don't want to be called on to help idiots defend their settlements regularly, I don't want to build walls and houses. I want to be free to explore at my whim without having these silly obligations nagging at me and breaking my flow within the game's core loop of exploring, looting, and leveling up. It seems Bethesda learned nothing from all of the complaints about Grand Theft Auto IV's constant demands from friends to go bowling.

...in Bethesda's latest broken mess of a video game.

This is an experience that puts all of the emphasis on looking pretty and listing its features in a neat sheet of bullet points that probably looked great in a boardroom, and none of it on the core experience Bethesda has provided which players had come to love in games such as Skyrim and Fallout 3. It has no narrative punch and it lacks whimsical, gritty heart that Fallout 3 successfully emulated and Fallouts 1, 2, and New Vegas exhibit so well. Fallout 4 wastes a potentially intriguing premise and setting on skin-deep bells and whistles that offer no real payoff or enjoyment, and it gives the player no strong themes to dig into and think about. If you want to kill some time and have a high degree of patience for bugs and poor optimization, then you may want to take a shot on Fallout 4. But if you're looking for a good roleplaying experience with a compelling open world, you should play New Vegas instead.

⭐

Fallout: New Vegas (2010) by Obsidian Entertainment

New Vegas is such a genuine, realistic, deep world that it becomes so hard to tear yourself away from it.

"What!? Dude, there are giant scorpions and ghouls who have adapted to radiation and live for hundreds of year! There are freaking aliens! What the hell are you talking about!?"

I know, I know. That sounds like a ridiculous thing to say—that a game with such a far-fetched premise could feel like it deserves to be taken so seriously. But this is a world that is based mostly in logic, despite it's more campy weirdness. Let me explain that.

Each character, settlement, and area are based logically. In Fallout 3, people have built a bunch of walls around an unexploded nuclear weapon—it's called Megaton, and it's the first settlement you see after leaving Vault 101. Have you ever asked WHY the hell they did that? It makes no sense. It's literally a bomb! The water around it is irradiated. If this were real life, why the hell would anybody build a town there? There's no logical reason for them to do so—Bethesda simply did it because it was a neat idea and it makes for a nifty looking town. Even the town's name doesn't make any sense. Why would you be proud enough of settling around this bomb to call your town 'Megaton' after these bombs have destroyed your entire world? The logic behind the settlement completely falls apart if you think about it for more than 2 minutes.

Fallout: New Vegas's comic relief often hits the mark.

Usually, you're so into the game that you don't consider things like this, but they can begin to weight on your subconscious and your ability to suspend disbelief. You stop caring so much about the setting. You begin to have a bit less fun. You care about the story and characters less and start treating it more like a game. You begin to feel less of an emotional connection to the game. Eventually, you set it down for good, no longer interested. This was my experience with Fallout 3.

In New Vegas, however, each settlement and character is grounded with very realistic motivations. Novac is a settlement based in an old motel, which people began to settle organically because it's down the road from Repconn Headquarters—an old robotics manufacturer that, although equipped with dangerous security systems, features tons of old technology to salvage and trade. The name of the town itself is short for 'No Vacancy'—taken from the half-broken sign out from in front of the derelict motel in which these people have settled. Every bit of this place has a reason for existing, and the fact that it does makes it feel like a REAL place to you. You take it seriously, its inhabitants feel more like real humans. You start to forget that you're playing a game and you become more immersed.

New Vegas's well-rounded cast keeps things interesting

The entire game features this kind of lovingly crafted fiction. The characters are no different. They have real, poignant histories. They are funny, and irritating. Reliable and flawed. The factions are equally legitimate—I particularly loved how the NCR had their bases situated in realistically-feeling locations along the river. The quests and side quests are so deep they give you a myriad of ways to deal with problems, and they're universally well-balanced and solvable by all roles. Stealthy? Sneak through, quietly killing your foes on your way to your objective. Not combat-oriented? You can hack computers, lockpick doors, or smooth-talk your way without fighting. Or, if you're a madman, go in swinging a giant hammer, or blowing everyone away with a giant minigun. Be good or evil, or something in between. Chaotic good? Go for it. Lawful evil? Equally viable. The game will mold itself to you, and its storytelling does not suffer, no matter what role you choose for your character. No matter what story you think up, the game will go along with you. It is fantastic at that.

This is one of the most brilliantly crafted and written experiences in the history of gaming. It's buggy as hell, so you'll want a fan-made patch full of bug-fixes. And its graphics have aged very poorly. The character are pretty poorly animated and the textures are muddy, so you may want graphical mods, too. But aside from that? If you like RPGs, this is absolutely not to be missed. Buy the Ultimate edition at full price without a second thought.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Dark Souls (2011) by FromSoftware

Though I always had interest, I always avoided Dark Souls on PC because Prepare To Die Edition had a poor reputation for stability and graphics options. Dsfix was a thing but I figured it would eventually be patched or remastered and decided to wait instead of deal with the hassle. I didn't really care enough to read any further.

I finally bought Remastered recently, and despite its reputation the game is really not all that difficult compared to what I expected. I think players are just used to the forgiveness and handholding that modern games provide and this game has none of that. It's designed like older games, where you are expected to have a modicum of intelligence and figure things out for yourself, sometimes via trial and error, and sometimes remaining stuck for a significant portion of time, which forces you to try new things or explore different avenues of advancement. The difficulty thing seems to just be a lazy meme, or perhaps a marketing tool adopted by publishers. Saying Dark Souls is difficult is very shallow. There's more to it than that.

Dark Souls does a lot of big things really well. Like many great games, its level design is phenomenal; gorgeous, inventive, and logically sound. Its combat balancing is excellent and insures a satisfying experience in which everything moves with a weight, creating a satisfying impact whenever physics collide, weapons scrape against shields, or characters fall to the ground. The art, inspired by grimdark manga series such as Berserk, is fantastic and the graphics look great in the remaster.

But what's most impressive to me are that there are so many small design choices that are very minor in the grand scheme of things, but really brilliant from a philosophical game design perspective, and executed upon perfectly by the team at FromSoftware.

For example, the way communication via messages and bloodstains mirrors pre-internet gaming, when you were reliant on the advice and experience of the other kids on the block to get through games. Or how the game ties dying into its fiction, and punishes the player with reasonable loss to remove the constant reincarnation superpower that so many other action games feature: "Oh, you died? Just reload the last save, as many times as you want, with losing nothing but a minute here and there. No big deal." Dark Souls solves this problem of balancing failure with a reasonable loss of progress and currency, without being overly harsh like the retro games it calls back to and doing something like sending the player back to the beginning of a stage, or the game, and frustratingly costing hours of progress. Dark Souls strikes a perfect balance: Dying without reaching your bloodstain costs just enough to add tension and make you struggle to avoid dying, but not so much that dying becomes an experience frustrating enough to put the game down for good. This balance must have been monumentally hard to manage, but the game absolutely nails it and leaves you in a flow state while playing of gathering souls, levelling up, getting to a point where you're comfortable with trial-and-error, dying, and then finally making it to the next bonfire and feeling triumphant before beginning the process again. Its core gameplay loop is absolutely wonderful, whether you're analyzing the game from a design standpoint like I am, or whether you're just a casual player looking for a fun time.

Another small aspect done extraordinarily well is how death involving the loss of certain resources pushes the player to use them, rather than hoarding them all game long without ever touching them like players do in RPGs. I always finish every Fallout game with a practically infinite amount of stimpaks, for example. In Mass Effect 2 on Insanity, I'd be banging my head against the wall and dying repeatedly but still refusing to spend any medigel in case I needed it for some impassable moment in the future. In Dark Souls, if you didn't lose humanity when dying, I'd have tons of it saved and probably would never use it. This also trickles down to regularly using consumables such as bombs or arrows in a desperate, last ditch effort to make it back to your last death spot.

Everything is very tight in this manner, all these systems tie into one another, and the execution and balancing of the planning room philosophies is perfect. The little things like this add up to create the feel that so many people half-jokingly claimed has ruined lesser games for them. I played the latest Assassin's Creed game before this, and while the scale of that game is mindblowing and it's gorgeous, so much of it just felt bland and repetitive in comparison to Dark Souls, a game that came out 7 years and a generation earlier. I'd prefer a smaller, tighter experience like Dark Souls any day of the week.

At the risk of donning my beret and sounding too pretentious, Dark Souls at its best strikes me as an allegory for life in general. Continuing to push onward, failing repeatedly, relying on the help of others who have come before, and eventually succeeding in one monumental push only to begin the struggle anew at the next bonfire. Dark Souls is proof video games are art, but in order to realize this, you need to be intimately familiar with video games. So unfortunately the Roger Eberts of the world will continue, in their ignorance, to disregard it.

I won't call it a perfect game, though, because it's not. There are several instances where the game takes its trial-and-error a little bit too far by kicking the player in the groin for no real reason. These "gotcha" moments occur when the game kills the player out of nowhere, and provides no hint beforehand that something like this is about to occur; a prime example being the infamous bridge moment early in the game. Trial-and-error is fine in most cases, since it puts the onus on the player to experiment and learn, but in these cases the learning is so one-dimensional that these deaths seem more like unwarranted punishment rather than opportunities to learn. They take the fun out of the trial-and-error present throughout the game and render it more frustrating than enjoyable.

That said, I'm still very impressed with Dark Souls. I'm pretty old among the modern day "gamer" demographic, but I've loved games for a long time (nearing 40 years now) and try often to think about them critically when I'm playing them and I believe Dark Souls is one of the most well-designed games I've ever played. You can tell the people who made it have thought long and hard about the medium and regardless of potential profit or popularity set out to design a game that improves upon the general faults so many games exhibit today. It lives up to its reputation, in my opinion, and it's a game that everyone who enjoys video games should give a shot, regardless of their personal tastes.

Dark Souls is an all-time great game. It's a genre defining experience and a medium-pushing landmark. You should give it a try, even if you hate dark fantasy, RPGs, or difficult games. Put in 8 hours, press forward, and if you don't like it after that, then maybe it's not for you. But you owe it to yourself and to this game to give it a shot anyway. If it doesn't look like something you'd be interested in, wait for a deep sale and pick it up then.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐