Kind Words (2019) by Popcannibal

We're all in need of encouragement from time-to-time, even if such encouragement is often brief or shallow.

This is a game in which you write letters to other players (real people) while listening to music. That's all! Kind Words isn't subtle about what it wishes to accomplish, but it's so forthcoming in its earnestness that it's hard not to be charmed by it. I could see loading up this game becoming a sort of morning routine for me, as I drink my coffee before heading off to work for the day. The background, soundtrack, and act of writing letters all contribute to a vastly cathartic feeling that's puzzlingly simple but somehow so satisfying in which to engage. I spent my first moments of the game simply writing out 14-line letters to some of the more thought-provoking prompts I came across before ever requesting any letters for myself.

Somehow the developers moderate strictly enough to ensure that I haven't seen any internet trolling slip through the cracks. Such a thing is no small feat—as we all know by now, with anonymity comes callous cruelty in the form of words. I can only imagine the putrid garbage the devs must sort through on a daily basis to accomplish this, but from what little I've experienced thus far, it works beautifully and ensures that only positive requests and messages are sent out.

While the game appears wholesome and altruistic—and surely does feature those virtues—in the end, it's about you. It's about empathizing with the faceless human being on the other side of the screen and prompting yourself to treat them as you would like to be treated. I can talk all day about the attractive simplicity of the game, its charming art style, or its wonderful soundtrack. But what makes this game so worthwhile is how it spreads kindness and how it teaches people empathy; a valuable ability that we seem to be losing at an alarming rate.

Perhaps most astonishing was that after spending a mere hour playing Kind Words, I found the positivity urged by the game spilling out into other avenues of my life. Suddenly, all of my comments on social media were of an encouraging nature. I was stopping to appreciate my dog on my way to the kitchen. I admired the way the sun shone in through the blinds. The kind of positive thinking prompted by the game is contagious; it weaves its way into your mood and your actions and propagates itself outward. Quite a surprising experience!

This is a wonderful little game, highly recommended at full price. If you like writing (which I do, as you can tell) then you'll love it. And even if you don't, this game will likely have a positive effect on your life—even if only for an hour, or a day. Give it a chance!

⭐⭐⭐

Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) by Bungie

A great remaster that still manages to show its age

Argh, so this is another difficult one for me to recommend against because although I loved it so much back when it released, it is undoubtedly showing its age. Like many old games, it's aged rather poorly and I'm afraid most modern shooter fans coming to it now will not see what made it so great in the first place.

If you—like me—played this back in 2001, and you're considering purchasing it again for nostalgic purposes, then I would probably recommend it. The remaster work done here is pretty solid. The new textures look like the original game does in my idealized memory, which has without a doubt been colored strongly with nostalgia. I'm in awe when flipping back to the original textures, which look pretty terrible by comparison. It also runs extremely well on my machine; I'm pretty much locked at 144 frames per second, no matter how many enemies or explosions are on-screen.

Halo: Combat Evolved featured several groundbreaking new ideas that made it far-and-away the best console-based shooter when it released. It features an epic science fiction story with quality voice acting and a superb soundtrack (see below video)—I'm talking all-time great caliber video game original soundtrack, to the level of something akin to a John Williams film score. It's so good it's half the reason I still play this game. This was also one of the first console shooters to feature wide-open spaces and vehicles, like something you'd find in a PC-style multiplayer shooter such as Unreal Tournament. And the AI in this game was the best console players had ever seen. Watching enemies clash with other enemy factions and with your allies was so entertaining back in the day, and this game helped to inspire other which also include dynamic AI such as this.

That said, some of these levels are bad. Like, really bad. They often feel like poor multiplayer designs, shoehorned into a single-player game. Your trek to the control room and through the library are so poorly laid out that the devs had to put giant arrows on the ground to help you find your way. They don't feel organic and they're not at all fun to traverse. Some of them are reused ad nauseam and make up entire stages of the game, such as the infamous library, which is literally just the same room repeated nearly a dozen times, which you traverse repeatedly while being swarmed by the same 3-4 enemy types. The entire game is thus permeated with a feeling of tedium and pacing issues. While the shooting feels good and the assault rifle and shotgun have an excellent impact to them, there are only so many times you can satisfyingly shotgun an enemy in the face, or time your melee perfectly so that an enemy elite's shields break when your assault rifle magazine runs empty and you execute him with a rifle butt to the face. The rest of the gameplay has to rely on its level traversal, or its story which—although inspired—is extremely bare-bones, and the game often falls flat due to that. In the later stages the game throws a seemingly endless horde of enemies at you, which becomes extremely repetitive, tedious, and frustrating. You end up trying to navigate these labyrinthine levels in which each turn looks the same as another while battling a seemingly inexhaustible stream of the exact same enemies. Additionally, vehicles all have some overly floaty physics and clipping issues which make them a chore to use in any kind of environment other than an extremely wide open one.

Despite loving the game back in 2001, replaying it today has left me with a strong opinion that an awful lot of Halo: Combat Evolved is a tedious slog that's severely lacking in fun. Playing this immediately after Reach has been eye-opening. But if you can properly look at Halo: Combat Evolved with 2001-era eyes, you might see a lot of what made it so special back then. It's got a lot of heart. It's got one of the best plot twists in video game history. And every time you're moving from cover-to-cover, shotgunning flood in the face, with that epic soundtrack pumping, perhaps you'll touch a bit of what made this game so special to us old farts, and perhaps you can enjoy it like we did back on the original Xbox in 2001.

But if you're looking for a solid shooting experience, this entry of the Master Chief Collection is completely skippable. Try Halo: Reach instead, which features a far better campaign in my opinion.

⭐⭐