The indie scene is so strong for video games right now. For every complaint one might hear about predatory practices in AAA gaming, failed promises, broken launches, abuse of fear-of-missing-out mechanics, there's a small indie game which comes along that completely blows one's mind in its compelling simplicity. Vampire Survivors—which is basically Castlevania meets Cookie Clicker with some bullet hell aesthetics thrown in the mix—is a prime example of the golden age of indie games we're currently finding ourselves in.
Vampire Survivors was probably never meant to be anything profound. Although surely the developer has labored a great deal over the balance, it's a relatively simple game. It appears to be a bullet hell, but in reality, there's very little twitch input required from the player. Your player character fires off their attacks automatically so you're tasked mostly with choosing which upgrades and build paths to pursue, while occasionally moving the player character around the map in order to avoid enemies. Enemies have no projectile attacks of their own; they're relegated to contact damage only, which is a great choice that ends up facilitating this more passive style of playing. So describing this as a bullet hell game, while it might appears accurate from the game's aesthetics, is not really all that accurate. This is a more passive, casual experience in which you are mostly tasked with planning rather than taxing your mechanical skill as a player.
Personally, I love that. I'm not a huge fan of bullet hell, and roguelikes are often unappealing to me because I dislike their randomness and the lack of any permanent, long-term upgrades most roguelikes eschew in favor of appealing to the crowd which prefers RNG and chance coming together to facilitate a successful run. Vampire Survivors does have a built-in permanent progression system of unlocking stages, player characters, weapons, and permanent passive upgrades. This all serves to dampen what I dislike about roguelikes, and drew me in to Vampire Survivors even further.
In the beginning you'll find yourself mostly bewildered as you experiment with new weapons and tactics, but as you grow more familiar with the game you'll begin to gravitate toward specific playstyles, and putting together the pieces and acquiring evolutions becomes intensely addictive and rewarding.
If any of this sounds the least bit compelling to you, then take a shot on Vampire Survivors. Although it's in Early Access, I believe the game currently offers more than enough to warrant the $3 USD price tag, and I'm shocked the developer has kept the game at such a low price. It's an absolute steal with at least twice as much value as the current price tag, so there's really nothing to suggest against purchasing this. I'd go even further and urge anyone considering this game to jump on it now before the developer comes to their senses and raises the price.
It's very difficult for me to speak in a reasonable manner about the Mass Effect trilogy because of my undying love for it.
Replaying Mass Effect is like visiting old friends from your college years. You haven't seen them in years, you've probably been lax at keeping in touch via social media. You've grown as a person—perhaps drastically. Maybe your life situation has changed as well; you're working a lot, you've gotten married, you've had kids. Yet the moment you enter the same room as your old friends, you fall immediately into common ground. You're laughing at the same old things, sharing inside jokes once again. It may have been years (nearly 15, in Mass Effect's case) since you first met each other, but the moment you spoke once more, it's like you've never left. Garrus makes a calibration joke and you laugh the same way you always have. Wrex smashes something and you chuckle. Mordin sings. Jacob says something boring. In these moments you forget that these are video game characters and that you've already seen these scenes—perhaps dozens of times before. They are real people to us, and they are capable of affecting our lives the way real people do, despite them being aliens in a schlocky space opera.
This is the impact that Mass Effect's characters have on players. There are thousands of stories out there from people who were ill, or considered themselves depressed, or perhaps were even near suicide—all of whom exhibit undying love for this series because these games gave them succor they desperately needed at hard times in their lives. Such is the power of well-written fiction, and Mass Effect succeeds in spades in that regard. Its worldbuilding and character writing are second to none in the medium of gaming. It confronts us with people who feel real and allows us to take agency on their behalf, to try and make their lives a little better. It shows us a world not unlike our own, with its prejudices and its flaws, and gives us the power that we lack in real life to affect change regarding these issues in the fiction. It allows us to become better people in real life by examining serious issues such as bigotry, state corruption, greed, cruelty, and the cost of due process. We see these issues through the eyes of another and decide what our player character might do to right such wrongs. As always, fiction is the great lie through which we tell the truth, and if Mass Effect doesn't cultivate a little empathy in your blackened, shriveled gamer-soul, then nothing will.
But, enough waxing poetic. I know you're all, "Shut up, Jon, you bag of hot wind! Everyone already knows how great the Mass Effect trilogy is. How does it run!?"
The answer to this, so far, is mixed, but I definitely believe this is a far superior version to the original PC port. On my setup I'm holding 100+ fps at full 4k with relative ease. This is a big deal, as the original games were limited to 62 fps thanks to the way they used physics, so the unlocked framerate is a massive plus here. The higher resolution textures look fantastic, and the new lighting and screen space reflections are really something. I expect we'll see some great photos being shared via the game's new Photo Mode relatively soon. The only drawback to the visual improvements that I've noticed so far is the characters seem to get a bit bug-eyed at times. I think this was due to the original game having much harsher, darker shadows, and perhaps covering up some character model issues specifically with the eyes. The animation has also aged notably, especially with the advent of performance capture technology in modern games, so expect some wooden facial animations and unnatural lip syncing, despite the effort made to remaster these games. All three games lack a field of view slider, which is a big negative for me. It's desperately needed since the camera is quite claustrophobic when your gun is drawn. In addition to this, I experience regular, debilitating framerate stuttering when traversing planets in the Mako in Mass Effect. I'm not sure what's causing this, but my framerate (which is typically locked at 100+) varies wildly from 55 to 75 fps in these instances. Fiddling with graphical settings has not alleviated the issue. I assume it's a texture streaming issue, due to the new high-res textures added to the game. Additionally, I have seen some people complaining about mouse acceleration, but the mouse action feels fine to me. Your mileage may vary.
Ultimately, this is very far from what I'd call a great PC port. However, the original PC ports of these games were absolutely awful, and Legendary Edition is clearly superior to those, even with its lack of graphics options and tendency to stutter. It looks fantastic when compared to the originals. If you played the original game or have a high tolerance for older games, you'll love Legendary Edition's changes. The best remasters make old games look like they do in your rose-tinted memory, and Legendary Edition accomplishes that in spades.
The gameplay changes are rather minor in the latter two games, but even in the first Mass Effect—the game which received the most attention—they are not groundbreaking. I noticed that Insanity feels markedly easier, so I think there's been some balancing done to level out some of the absurd difficulty spikes in the original game. One change I don't care for is that sniper rifles are now easily usable by all classes. I think this is a bit unbalanced and removes a lot of the value of the Infiltrator class, specifically, but I understand why they did it: It doesn't really make sense to pull out a rifle and suddenly begin aiming like a drunk person with Parkinson's. The Mako is still rather wonky, but the added stickiness does make it feel better. There are also some noteworthy changes to boss fights, but I won't spoil those. Suffice it to say they're all excellent, and bring some much-needed freshness to the significant encounters of the game. Ultimately the changes are quite minor; enough to feel like a marked improvement over the original game, but not so much that they alter the core experience of the games. BioWare did a phenomenal job toeing this line. It couldn't have been easy to do, but they nailed it.
The Mass Effect trilogy is an incredible experience, and this is by far the best way to play it, even when considering the great texture mods available for the original games. If you love the original trilogy and are considering Legendary Edition, I'd recommend you purchase it. If you're a first-time player and a lover of well-written space opera, interesting characters, and RPGs, there's never been a better time to dive into Mass Effect.
Present-day internet discourse certainly leaves a lot to be desired.
It seems like with every major game release a cabal of confirmation bias-seeking nincompoops skitter out of the woodwork with the specific goal of weaponizing any piece of data they can find which confirms that New Game™ is either the best thing since sliced bread, or an unholy amalgam of everything that's wrong with the medium, the industry, and human civilization as a whole.
The amount of ridiculous, false criticism I've heard regarding Cyberpunk 2077 so far is astonishing and depressing.
"It's not an RPG!" It most definitely is. There's ample roleplaying to be had here, and not limited to just whether you want to play stealthily or in open-combat.
"Your choices don't matter!" They most definitely do. I've replayed several story missions and been surprised by how much they change in general, but also by how the game recognizes small things such as reading a single e-mail which grants you a dialogue option with a character who's hiding something later, or asking a minor question which ends up raising suspicion of a snuff film compound you are later tasked with infiltrating, causing them to add more guards patrolling the perimeter (you learn this via a specific email you can find on a computer in the compound, which is not there if you never ask the question earlier). Perhaps most notably, a key choice you make in one of the first story missions has a massive impact on a very important side quest in Act 3. There are dozens more examples I could list.
"The worst open world." NPC AI complaints aside, this is the best open world I've ever seen. Specifically from an art direction and level design standpoint, this world succeeds in spades. It looks gorgeous, feels real, and features an endless number of carefully crafted nooks for the player to explore. It's mind-blowing.
"Stealth sucks! Shooting sucks! Driving sucks!" Stealth is good. Shooting is better. Driving is adequate. All three aspects of this game are much better than I had expected from a developer who had never made a game featuring any of them before.
"It's got no heart!" Cyberpunk 2077 features some of the most human, charismatic, and carefully crafted characters I've ever come across in a game. Cyberpunk chooses a dark satirical angle with exploring its world, but the game's true heart—where it opens itself up, makes itself vulnerable, and, as a result, becomes most earnest—is in its character writing and its characters' story arcs. The experience of this game relies on how you choose to affect the lives of Night City's denizens, and the emotional payoff from following these arcs through to their conclusions is where the game lives or dies.
More than ever, people interested in video games need to take early post-release hot takes with a grain of salt. Cyberpunk 2077 is a hugely flawed game, but every CD Projekt Red game has been hugely flawed due to the ambition the developer pours into the games they produce. Witcher 2's branching storylines feature two wildly different stories, which require the player to play the game twice to fully experience everything it has to offer. On the downside, this makes a single playthrough feel a bit abrupt and incomplete, requiring the player to bludgeon through content they've already seen in order to gain a grasp of the full story. Witcher 3's narrative and world have so much effort packed into them that the actual combat sometimes fails to bear the brunt of it all and becomes dry and repetitive for some players. CDPR shoots for impossible goals and inevitably fails to accomplish everything they set out to, but still makes pretty damn great games because they end up succeeding here and there, and when your goals are so lofty succeeding only sometimes is usually enough to float the experience even when so much of it is flawed and outright broken.
Where CDPR doesn't deserve slack, though, is in the way they've treated console players. I'm a PC-only player, so I played Cyberpunk 2077 on PC. But what CD Projekt Red did in purposely obfuscating how poorly this game runs on last gen consoles is extremely sketchy at best, and outright malicious and deliberately misleading at worst. This company fucked their console consumers. I refuse to believe they weren't able to provide review copies because they were "working until the last minute"; that's silly. They deliberately prevented the truth about how poorly the console versions ran from seeing the light of day in order to cash in on hype and holiday dollars, and that sucks.
CD Projekt Red is a developer of extraordinarily ambitious narrative- and character-driven RPGs, and I love that. They are also a developer who has taken advantage of their reputation as consumer darling who cares about their customers, when that is plainly not true. They are just another AAA developer, and they deserve to be treated as one from this point onwards.
The hype for this game clearly ran out of control, and many people already recognize that the largest problem with Cyberpunk 2077 is not actually anything in the game, but the warped and unrealistic expectations players had when they ran it for the first time.
The lead-in
I'm not sparing myself from said hype. I honestly can't recall the last time I was as excited for a video game as with Cyberpunk 2077. Covid-19 has kept me indoors and not working for a while, now, with books and video games as my chief time-sinks.
I adore Witcher 3. It might be my favorite game of all-time. I've poured nearly 600 hours into the game over the past 5 years, over 3 separate playthroughs. So knowing that the same developer—the same team, even—was working on a new game really lit my fire. I must have watched the 2018 gameplay reveal a half-dozen times. I watched all the Night City Wire preview episodes. I gobbled up preview interviews with developers like I was starved. On December 10, 2020—the game's release date—I counted down the hours, chatted online to friends and others on various Discord servers and subreddits and shared in the collective excitement. In the last hour, I watched the minutes tick by as I took in the release party stream on Twitter. When I finally finished up downloading the day one patch and first launched the game, the experience of starting up the game was something like this:
And then I jumped into the game. So, how was it? Did it live up to the hype? Yes and no—like any CDPR game. But, for me, mostly yes (I know, I know; shocked gamer noises).
The heart and hard work required to craft a city from the ground up
I grew up just outside of New York City, and I've spent a lot of time there throughout my life. Cyberpunk's Night City is the first video game city that truly feels like a real city does. The most minute of back alleys feels like a real, lived-in place. Different cultures melt together, creating numerous examples of differing architecture, shops, NPC chatter, and loudspeaker announcements in different languages. There's detritus scattered about, clutter on fire escapes, empty bottles on back-alley porches. The way the nooks and crannies of this city fold inwards onto each other, overlapping and intersecting, is incredibly life-like and bleeds realism, but at the same time, doesn't; the first time you see glowing, neon advertisements which stretch upwards into the sky, or see airborne vehicles zipping through the air, you'll know you're in a science fiction setting. It's just the right balance of realism and fiction; enough to feel familiar, but at other times, utterly foreign. It's a joy to exist in such a surreal, satirical, curious place. And as far as gameplay, although Night City appears labyrinthine and layered, built up and up on itself over the decades, but its levels never manage to feel overwhelming or too difficult to navigate. It's a truly masterful job done by the people who have designed this world.
There is an endless amount of love put into each and every area I came across in this city. The environmental artists and level designers have created extraordinary spaces which satisfy both your brain and your heart; they appear to be real, logically, while also satisfying your heart's desire for an aesthetically pleasing place. I can't say enough about it. Walking through the city and taking in these spaces and grasping the stories these level designers are telling you just with a few pieces of clutter never gets old, and it subconsciously heightens every other experience I've had with the game. I may be deep into a story mission, focused on what's happening with the characters and how to stealthily clear this next room, but I'm also subconsciously noting what this person's living space is telling me about them—what kind of food they eat, the clutter indicating that they might be depressed, old framed army photos of them and their friends long passed. The amount of sheer effort, sheer manpower involved in designing a single arcade, or a single liquor store on a single block in this game filled with dozens—or hundreds—of these things, is almost unfathomable. Someone asked me recently if it was readily apparent where they had spent the past 8 years developing this game (or 4 years in full-scale, active development). I answer instantly; in designing the bones and the flesh of this city. It jumps out of its pixels and slaps you in the face. You feel as if you exist in this world as just another function. You never feel as if your player character is the focus, you always feel as if you are witnessing one of the thousands of machinations that go on in this world each day. The way soda pop cans are placed on a shelf, doubtlessly the hard work of a cornerstone wage slave. The trash bags piled up against a fence in the badlands; a year's worth of a hard life's waste. The way a food stall's vendor looks at you as you walk past and the way you can read their experiences just from the way their area is organized.
If you enjoy games for these sorts of carefully crafted spaces—the Bioshocks, and the Dishonoreds, for example—then you're going to adore it in Cyberpunk.
The worldbuilding greatly supports this effort. The corporations, the brands of different drinks and porno ads and cars. All of this stuff is so strongly crafted from an artistic perspective that it's difficult, sometimes, to believe it's all not real. The history of this world is alive and mutating as the game goes on, living within its characters and imparted to the player with a level of skill only truly great writers can manage. Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith has a fantastic creation that feels real and lifelike in the worst ways; our deepest fears come alive. In this way Cyberpunk feels more like a post-apocalyptic setting than a cyberpunk one. But I suppose that's perhaps what the subgenre is; post-apocalypse without the big bang. Just a slow slide into ennui, depravity, poverty.
Cyberpunk 2077 is what The Outer Worlds tried so hard to be: A biting satirical look at consumer culture, a rabid display of the dark savagery of humanity, a dark story that's peppered with the naïve good intentions of some of its characters and its black humor. Cyberpunk strikes the balance far more deftly than Outer Worlds ever did.
The game looks flat-out jaw-dropping. I'm running it on my system without real-time ray tracing enabled and it still looks marvelous. Roads throw a damp slickness and reflect the omni-present glow of the city at night, the neon of buildings reflecting off them with precise screen-space reflections even with ray tracing turned off. Textures are high resolution. Cars gleam chrome and red and have so much effort put into them that it's insane to think about the man hours it probably took on behalf of the developer. Each car you own has a fully fleshed out interior, which you can inspect at any time in first-person. Every car has an opening hood and trunk. And all of these designs are fictional, yet look superbly realistic, gorgeous, and appropriate. The off-road cars or heavily modified ones have spare wires and screens strewn about. The luxurious supercars feature leather which looks so real you can almost feel it against your skin.
The sound design matches how ambitious the visuals are. This is perhaps the best sounding game I've ever played. Guns sound universally appropriate; all have fantastic impact. My favorite weapon, a sniper rifle called Overwatch that I got from a character-driven side quest, is my favorite sounding gun I've ever used in any video game, ever. It's that good. The thump it plugs into your ears is matched only by chonky bolt-action effect, and the reload clack is so sexy it'll leave your ears begging for the next time you empty the magazine. Revolvers, silenced pistols both sound great. Submachine guns titter away like late autumn insects.
The amount of music, too, is astonishingly vast and universally excellent. CD Projekt Red has brought on several well-known artists create original music for the game's radio stations and it's all superb. Refused, Run The Jewels, and Nina Kraviz all make appearances. Refused's effort as Johnny Silverhand's band Samurai is particularly good, and I find myself looking for extra driving destinations whenever one of their tunes comes on the radio. In addition to this, some of the ambient and combat tracks are so good I've already found myself listening to them outside of playing the game, when reading or driving in real life. The ambient stuff in Cyberpunk 2077 is so atmospheric and feels appropriately sinister, hinting at what horrifying atrocity is always around the next corner.
I can't speak enough about how unbelievably great this game sounds. Music, cars, guns. It's a cacophony of beautiful noise that all crafts the experience at least as strongly as the visuals do. Bravo to the sound team at CD Projekt Red. They're the finest designers working in sound at any video game developer, in my mind.
In general, the sheer amount of work and heart put into various artistically-driven aspects of this game is nearly unbelievable and readily apparent.
Ambition
The fact that this game does not succeed universally in everything it does is dwarfed by the fact that it tries to do so much.
Quests are constantly interlocked with one another. In the beginning I believed gigs were just uninteresting, one-off, side activities. But as I progressed through them I found this wasn't true. Several of the characters introduced in gigs re-appear later, either by mention from other characters, or in e-mails or shards. For example, one early gig I did—convincing an under-cover cop to drop her case when the gang was onto her—showed up 40 hours later, when I did a separate gig and found out she had been speaking with a crooked cop who refused to help her with the case. There are numerous examples of this throughout the game, but they're relatively subtle and depend on the player paying close attention to be noticed. The way side jobs are given to you, too, feels organic. You aren't simply dumped with quest line, one after the other, but rather the game gives you space of several days before having an NPC contact you with the next 'episode' (so to speak) of the quest.
Nearly all of the Main Jobs, Side Jobs, and a significant portion of the Gigs are high-effort, compellingly written stories, including some of the best characters written into a video game in years. Their production values are extraordinary; the standards in acting and animation in this game are higher than any video game has ever accomplished before. They bring these characters to life, and although the city and the narrative is at times horrendously dark, these characters regularly bring light and joy to it. The missions themselves constantly put the player in interesting circumstances and always ask questions of them: How do you judge a person's crimes, and is it your right to decide death is their proper punishment for what they've done? Is it better to live free, independent, destitute, and in poor health, or shackled and dominated, but in the lap of luxury and with every technological advancement in the palm of your hand? What does identity mean, and where's the line for when you stop being you? It gives you the means to affect not the world, but the characters you spend time with. You cannot save this world—it's already doomed. But you can save some of the people in it, and perhaps even yourself... If you're lucky.
I completed all of the side content Cyberpunk 2077 had to offer
Aside from these high-effort, well-written, well-designed quests, though, there are the NCPD Scanner Hustles. These appear as blue icons on your map, and there are a lot of them—150+ scattered throughout the game world. This is, unfortunately, where the effort begins to lack a bit. These small ambient events usually task you with cleaning out the enemies of an area and securing "evidence", which is almost always a container with a few pieces of loot, and a data shard giving you some background on why the incident was taking place. Typically it's something like a drug deal gone wrong, or a corporate stooge stealing from their employer and getting caught. They add some nice flavor to the world, but begin to become very dry and grindy after hitting only one or two of them. I think it was a mistake to include these on the mini-map and expect the player to clear them. Leaving them off the mini-map and letting the player stumble onto them organically as they played would have worked far better at making Night City feel a living open world. As they are, they feel too much like busywork and open world fodder, and thus come off as far too gamey. The icons appearing on your map and associating with an achievement push the player too strongly towards completing them, when they should have been left more ambiguous and had a more optional nature to them.
When the Scanner Hustles stumble into mundanity, though, you always have the interweaving, dopamine drip-feeding systems of Attributes, Perks, and Cyberware to drive you forward. I cleared every single Scanner Hustle in the game despite their relatively uninteresting nature simply because I was so hooked on the game's character specialization system and I enjoyed both the stealth and combat so much.
The carrots
Attributes, Skills, and Perks. Guns, Gear, Cyberware. Cyberdecks, Daemons, Quickhacks. The amount of systems in place, and the layers involved in each system allow for absurd amounts of depth and customization in the way you play the game. They're all interweaved.
Guns, too, feel incredible. I fully expected CD Projekt Red's first go at first-person shooting to be a sub par affair, but this turns out not to be the case. Shooting as a whole feels good, although the unique reload animations randomly pepper into the game as your skill with a weapon type increases always does a lot to heighten the experience. Once you begin finding iconic weapons, or receiving them as rewards for quests, everything hits an entirely new level.
The player's style of roleplaying is regularly referenced by NPCs
The game is constantly recognizing and calling out the way you spec you roleplay. On missions in which I went berserk and murdered every bad guy in sight, my allies and questgivers would make note of that; calling me a bad-ass, or being surprised I took out every guy. When I was stealthy, they'd notice that, too; calling me quiet as a mouse, calling me a ghost, or commenting on how quick and clean my job was. There are also specific characters you will vibe more closely with, via special dialogue options, if you spec a certain way. Nix, the netrunner at the Afterlife, will be much more chummy with you if you have high Int and netrunning capabilities. Likewise with Panam, a repairing and scavenging nomad, who will respect a more technically-talented player characters. The way the game specifically makes it a point you recognize your roleplaying and call it out to you was a constant joy for me, as it's something RPGs often fail to do. It puts you more strongly into the role you are crafting for yourself.
Your roleplaying is regularly given opportunity to show itself. The game gives you two characters to play: V, the street mercenary doing odd, often violent jobs for cash, and Johnny, whose consciousness has been imprisoned on a biological computer chip. V is the more open-ended of the two, as Johnny (played by Keanu Reeves) is an established anti-hero who's already famous in Cyberpunk lore. In the beginning, I played V as I wanted to roleplay him: cool, professional, competent, but prone to extreme violence at times. I played Johnny as he was written: drunk, arrogant, angsty, and sometimes cruel. I typically chose stealth and hacking with V and open combat and aggressive dialogue options for Johnny, no matter the situation.
As the story continued I found myself bridging the gap between the two; my Johnny softened, and my V became more brash and aggressive. Johnny's responses become softer, V's more aggressive. It's hard to expound on why this is so noteworthy without getting into more spoiler territory than what I've already dipped a toe into, but realizing that my manner of roleplaying the two characters had been slowly creeping towards the middle of the two was an experience I'll never forget, and something that could only be managed in the medium of video games. It was a rare case of the writing of the game matching my own personal experience. In most games, the way I feel and the way the game expects me to feel at any given moment are usually separate enough that it causes a jarring incongruence in the way I experience the game's narrative. Cyberpunk instead took advantage of its designers' ability to know exactly what my experience would entail, and to heighten that experience with their writing.
And yet despite all of this, there are strong criticisms on the internet suggesting that Cyberpunk 2077 fails as an RPG.
"It's not an RPG!"
One of the main criticisms of this game is surrounding its supposed lack of player agency over the narrative, or via dialogue options in general.
I've replayed several story quest chains and dialogue options impact their arcs—sometimes even just minor ones. There are the obvious choices in which you choose a particular faction to side with, which heavily impacts the quest chain, but those are pretty obvious. Examples being Maelstrom versus Militech early in the game, or Voodoo Boys versus Netwatch in the mid-game. But there are more subtle ones, too. For example, at one point I asked a seemingly innocent, information-gathering, optional blue question in dialogue to a BD dealer, which tipped off the snuff film compound you are tasked with infiltrating afterwards. The dealer lets them know that you were asking suspicious questions about them, and the compound added more guards. You can find an email on one of the computers which specifically mentions that someone was asking questions. I'm sure there are more instances such as this that I'm not aware of, but that will be more clear when I replay the game.
Is Cyberpunk 2077 a wide-open cRPG? No, of course not. V is a set character with voice acting, so that was never in the cards. But it's definitely comparable to Witcher 3, and, in my opinion, a more open RPG than that game was. It's not Fallout 4, though, which seems to be what most people are hinting at with this sort of criticism directed at Cyberpunk's supposedly limited dialogue options.
Your questions in dialogue can drastically affect quests, but these effects are usually subtle enough that the player won't realize their impact unless they play a given quest twice
The conversation for how much an RPG should facilitate allowing the player to affect the actual narrative is a good one. Witcher 2 versus Witcher 3 is a pretty solid comparison, just choosing from CDPR's own oeuvre. Personally, I greatly prefer Witcher 3 because, although the player doesn't have nearly as much power to impact the grand narrative (the player's agency to change how things go is typically limited to individual quest chains, like it is in Cyberpunk), I felt it allowed the writers to tell a tighter, more affecting story, and I personally value storytelling over having a major impact on the narrative via dialogue choices. Cyberpunk's method of restricting this agency in order to tell a more cohesive story is what I prefer, because I always found Witcher 2's narrative to be too fragmented. Yes, you can greatly change where the story goes via your decisions (the entire middle portion of the game is completely different based on your choice in Act 1), but this is not always for the best, in my opinion. In Witcher 2, characters become stretched too thin, the plot spreads a bit too unwieldy, and you end up having to play the game twice to fully grasp what is happening. I think CDPR learned from this (I believe the same person who directed Witcher 2 directed Cyberpunk, so there is shared DNA there). But, there's an argument there, for sure. I know some people prefer that kind of agency over the plot. That being said, as far as Cyberpunk offering only (or even "mostly") false narrative choices, and dialogue choices which do not affect anything (or even "very little") in the game, that I definitely disagree with and there are examples pretty readily available throughout the game which contradict that criticism.
Drawbacks
Gushing aside, there are several things Cyberpunk 2077 does very poorly which deserve to be called out.
Firstly, crafting is nearly completely broken economically. It's far too expensive to upgrade the gear you currently have. I got to a point where, in order to upgrade my favorite pair of ~75 Armor shoes, I needed hundreds of rare upgrade components, when dismantling rare loot (which doesn't drop often, as the name suggests) only yields in the single digits. This quickly made my favorite pair of boots obsolete, so I was forced by necessity to chuck them for a clownish pair of neon green plastic snow-boot looking monstrosities. The player ends up endlessly swapping out their old gear for new gear in this fashion because of how broken the crafting economy is. It also has the ill effect of making their character appear to be a complete clown with ridiculous, mismatched clothes when they might rather appear to be street-savvy, or a professional operator. The opportunity for roleplaying with clothing is thus completely lost with the failure of this system.
The UI is also a completely broken mess. The way shards are sorted is particularly awful. I've currently got nearly 100 in two separate categories both titled 'Other'. It's impossible to locate shards by name because they aren't sortable, nor do they default to sorting alphabetically. If a shard pops up on screen, you'd better press 'Z' immediately, because once you have to search for it by navigating the menus it's pretty much gone for good. Even more severe is the fact that the quest log features utterly unhelpful blurbs. I had a quest I set down for a few hours when I felt like roaming, then, upon going back to the blurb to refresh my memory of what's going on, I saw only this summary:
How is this helpful at all? I have no idea whatsoever of where I left off, what was happening in this quest, how it started, etc. How the hell am I supposed to grasp the dozens of quests I've picked up when returning to them later? You'll often pick up quests just while driving somewhere in the middle of another quest, so it's impossible to do them all as you get them, and this sort Quest log fails abysmally at keeping the player's head in the game.
I feel like I must comment on bugs, since that's the big news these days. The only bugs I encountered through my playthrough were either minor graphical glitches—a character's cigarette getting stuck in the air, or my player character occasionally T-posing out of the car when I drive fast—or broken NPC triggers, which were always relieved on a reload.
For comparison's sake, I recently played Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and that game was far buggier than Cyberpunk 2077. I haven't experienced a single crash or soft lock with Cyberpunk 2077, yet I experienced numerous such issues with Valhalla—one of which caused me to lose hours of gameplay. I put about 40 hours more into Cyberpunk 2077 than Assassin's Creed Valhalla and I experienced markedly more bugs in the latter, overall.
Conclusion
At one point in my playthrough I had been forced into seeking out help from a certain gang in one of the more disreputable areas of Night City. My point of contact with said gang had already double-crossed me once before, trying to kill me due to a specific choice I had made. Yet, due to the situation, I felt it wisest to continue working with them. A few steps later in the quest line, and I found out that they actually could not help me at all, and were just using me the entire time—even after having tried to kill me once before, they screwed me again.
I was fully in my character's head at this point. Beyond frustration, my pride as a top-class merc in the city was insulted—they're really gonna try and screw me, again!? I had previously made the choice to side with them because it seemed the better option of the two, but now I realized I had made a mistake. This frustration bled into my roleplaying. The game was going to allow to me to leave the gang's building scot free, since I had sided with them despite being screwed over. But, via dialogue options, I was given the choice to antagonize my point of contact. I took this option (because fuck them, you know?), and progressed it into a decision, hidden in dialogue, to tell them all to get lost, and that I was going to kill them. I gleefully took it, unsheathed my Mantis Blades, and went ham on the lot. Limbs and blood strewn everywhere, I finally felt payback had been due. But it wasn't done yet. Shortly afterwards, a few more gang members came in to see what was taking so long, chattering to themselves. I quickly hid on a scaffolding as they came into the room strewn with gore. They commented, fearfully, that I had killed everyone, and they wondered at why and how I'd done this. I took them out stealthily, continued to the exit, also killing the person who had attempted to kill me beforehand.
This sort of agency is why I play RPGs. A major choice I had made in a quest prior led me to this path, and I reacted as my player character had. Being in your player character's head is something that no other medium offers aside from video and board games, and at this, Cyberpunk 2077 succeeds wholeheartedly. The quality of its world, its characters, and its gameplay only help facilitate this even more by often granting you in-world commentary based on your choices, and NPC reactions to said choices, even when it's a choice most players will not choose to make.
My strongest big-picture criticism is that the main story felt too short. Its quality was so high throughout that I was almost ravenously hungry for more, even after 150+ hours of gameplay. When I hit the point of no return, I was still wrapping up some side quests and map markers (I ended up clearing every single side job, gig, and NCPD Scanner Hustle in the game), and seeing the warning message that there was no more content to experience created a sharp pang of remorse within me. The end of Cyberpunk 2077 left an ache similar to the feeling of mourning a great novel when you're finished, and that's something that only the best, most affecting video games can manage.
I ended up completing every single quest and open world marker. I bought every single car. I completed every single cyberpsycho boss non-lethally. And yet, at the end, after nearly 200 hours of gameplay, I still wanted more. I didn't just like this game—I loved it. I'm still hopelessly infatuated with it. It's one of my very favorites of the past decade, and I would not be surprised to see all of the most fervent criticizers of this game change their tune, years from now, to argue that they really loved it along.
Perhaps in the years to come, Cyberpunk 2077 will eventually get the credit it deserves for being one of the greatest RPGs ever made—as games with rough launches such as Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines and Fallout New Vegashave before it. For me, it's already firmly ensconced in that pantheon, and things will only get better from here as the game receives further patching and post-release support.
Ezio returns for another traipse around Renaissance Italy
Coming directly from Assassin's Creed II into Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is like taking a massive breath of fresh air.
Brotherhood is a direct sequel to II. So much so, in fact, that Brotherhood picks up literally the moment at which II ends. Beyond its story, though, it makes a number of drastic improvements on its predecessor. Most notably is that it runs a bit better. Assassin's Creed II has an unfortunate, persistent stutter, in addition to effects pop-in that really draws back from the experience. Brotherhood still features these issues, but they are much fewer and further between, suggesting a bit of massaging of Ubi's Anvil engine between games. This is in addition to having higher resolution textures and better lighting effects in general. It doesn't feature the abundantly thick atmosphere and filters of AC2, but I chalk that up to taste, anyway.
In addition to the graphical and stability improvements, free running animations are much more expedient, and free running in general is much more polished. I notice myself being frustrated with free running gaffes such as making the jump in a wrong direction, or getting stuck on geometry, far less frequently than I ever did with AC2, which could have me singing curses at it when a free running oddity would ruin an assassination approach. Brotherhood seems to have fixed the majority of that wonkiness.
Combat is also revamped in a huge way here. AC2's combat felt clunky, slow, too sticky, and plagued by a poor camera. Everything is streamlined here to great effect. Proper counters, a bevy of tools at Ezio's disposal, and unbelievably slick animation work leads to the new chain-killing feature being extremely satisfying to execute and really making you feel how much of a master combatant Ezio has come since his youth, running across Florence's rooftops to try and get it in with some rich noble dude's wife.
The focus on just a single city is a huge boon for this series, too. There were far too many viewpoints to hit in AC2, and they dragged the pacing out and felt like busywork. The half-dozen areas in AC2 only added to this—most people fondly remember Florence and Venice, but Romagna and San Gimignano are both forgettable at best and only serve to take the spotlight from the better areas. Brotherhood doesn't suffer from this: Rome is front-and-center, sprawling, and it feels far more realized than either Florence or Venice did in AC2, and lacks none of their incredible atmosphere. I also loved this aspect of Unity and Syndicate, and I do hope Ubisoft considers doing a single-city game again in the future. I really feel it lets them stretch their legs and add an appropriate amount of depth that a major European city like Rome, Paris, or London deserves. I don't think it's a coincidence that these three settings are my favorites in the series! But, I digress. Back to Brotherhood...
While I've never considered the stories to be the main draw in any of the AC games, Brotherhood's is easily the peak of the series. The effortless banter, great dialogue, and some of the voice performances (Nolan North as Desmond and Kristen Bell as Lucy are spectacular whenever they're quipping back-and-forth) really carry a lot of the experience here. It also starts with a bang (literally). Each time I replay this game (on console in the past) I always find it hard to put it down until I get through the beginning, because it's such a satisfying roller coaster ride and an apt love letter to Assassin's Creed II, before it moves on to become its own thing.
Leading your own squad of assassins is easily the most addictive and compelling part of Brotherhood
I'd also be remiss not to mention my favorite feature in this game—indeed, probably my favorite feature in any Assassin's Creed game! The Assassin bureau management system and all the perks that come with it are insanely addictive (I once played this game for 19 hours straight back in 2010. Don't judge me. I pay my taxes, alright?). It's so freaking cool to put it to use, too. Recruiting assassin apprentices, sending them out on missions and leveling them up, and then seeing them in action in-game when you call them in to take out a few guards or help you out in a fight is just so damned cool. You are basically summoning an Ezio from the first game to swoop in and stealthily dispatch an enemy. It's always so slick and it never gets old. You instantly feel like chief of the bad-asses each time you do it, and it makes you want to continue going back to the bureaus to level them up some more. Having a full set of master assassins on hand in the late-game to help you out at any time by silently dispatching enemies in front of you as you make your way towards your target is just the coolest thing I've ever done in an Assassin's Creed game. And engaging in an all-out street war with you, your assassins, and a dozen guards is just always so cool. Gunshots ringing, clashing steel. Man, it really never does get old. This game's almost 10 years old and it's still so much fun!
If there is something bad to say about Brotherhood, it's probably that the stupid flying machine level, which is truly awful and frustrating garbage—easily the low point of Brotherhood. The thing controls so terribly, it's just unreal that it even made it into the game. Or, a more general flaw, that this game is just too damn easy. With Ezio's new arsenal, his spectacular countering and chain-killing abilities, it's never been easier to simply carve your way through a dozen enemies with ease. Factor in being able to summon your own assassins to pick off enemies, and much of the game becomes trivial to conquer. But that's how I like my open world games, if I'm being honest; beautifully realized, fun to look at and explore, and just a pleasure to exist in. I don't really pick up open world titles for a challenge, I pick them up to veg out, hit map markers, and discover cool stuff. And in that, Brotherhood succeeds in spades.
Reuniting with old friends
I love this game, man! Assassin's Creed Brotherhood kicks ass. It's the best the Assassin's Creed series has ever been. But you've definitely got to play Assassin's Creed II, first, to fully appreciate what Brotherhood does so well. Start there so you can feel the full impact of how excellent Brotherhood was when it first dropped back in 2010.
Like my review for Mass Effect 2, it's difficult for me to speak in a balanced manner about BioWare's Mass Effect 3 because it's one of my favorite games of all-time.
This game exhibits all the strengths in atmosphere that the prior games do. Its worldbuilding is second-to-none in gaming; this feels like a real galaxy, with real politics, and real culture and history, and it's a pleasure to exist in. The soundtrack—although done by Clint Mansell this time around instead of the typical Jack Wall effort—is phenomenal and does a lot to help shape the atmosphere. And Mass Effect 3's characters—carried over from the prior two games (if they survived)—are some of the most genuine-feeling characters in the medium.
That brings me to my first caveat: Don't play Mass Effect 3 if you haven't played the first two games. You're going to be dropped into a strange situation for which you have zero context. You're not going to know any of the characters or the world, and all of the moments which are meant to be emotionally resonant will fall flat for you because you lack important context provided by the prior two games. With this series perhaps more than any other, it's paramount that you start from the first game and play your way through completely. Doing otherwise will rob you of all the great emotional moments and reveals of the later games in the trilogy because you haven't been properly set up for them, and even if you go back and play the earlier games afterwards, you will still be robbed of the genuine reaction you would have had had you played the games in order.
Lots of praise is given to the writing of the Mass Effect series, and a lot of it is deserved. However, with Mass Effect 3, I noticed the writing dip into the unevenness for the first time.
Plenty of fuss has been made about the ending not being satisfying, and I mostly agree with that. But I tend to find the "Mass Effect 3 has great writing and a terrible ending" statement to be untrue. There are some really, really great and satisfying arcs in this game, which I can't really mention by name without spoiling the experience for players. But for each one of those, there's an equally dissatisfying, contrived plot point which seems like it has had too much material cut and fails to make sense without the story. For example, at about the midway point of the game, there's a sudden and drastic attack which feels like it has no set-up and lots of holes. And late in the game, a key battle takes place off-screen leading to a sudden and colossal loss, which is barely even commented on by the characters. It has always seemed to me that this battle was meant to be in the game and unfortunately cut due to development concerns.
In addition to these, does anyone like Kai Leng? Anyone!? He's by far the worst, most artificial character in the entire series. He has no backstory, serves little point other than to rile the player with cheesy one-liners. Go away, Kai Leng. Nobody likes you. In addition to this, the Illusive Man loses all the nuance which made him such a fantastic, morally gray character in Mass Effect 2. This poor character turn was extremely disappointing to me.
Those criticisms aside, the two arcs I previously mentioned as being excellent (one in particular, involving synthetic hivemind robots and certain aliens who must wear suits all the time due to their failing immune systems) are a couple of my favorite stories in gaming history. I've been playing games for nearly 35 years, now, and I still tear up at portions of this game because of how strong the emotional impact of the story is, and how much history I've built up with these characters over the past two games.
With Mass Effect 3's writing, you've got to take the good with the bad. Some portions will fall flat—Sure. But the portions that strike you are so damned good that they're enough to elevate this game for me. It may not be as consistently well-written as the first two games, but it's damn close to hitting the same highs. And for me, that's more than enough to suggest this game.
I'd be remiss not to mention the gameplay, too. Mass Effect 3 plays easily the best of the three games in the trilogy. Shepard is granted added mobility, cover finally works well, and friendly AI is hugely improved from Mass Effect 2. It's so much fun to play as a Vanguard, for example, zipping around the map, blasting enemies here and there while creating biotic detonations. Ditto to Engineers, who finally get detonations of their own now, or Adepts, who are detonation machines. Soldiers are the same as always; lots of firepower and hardiness. And those who play Infiltrator can cloak and snipe all they want. It all works phenomenally well and is rather well-balanced.
In addition to this, Mass Effect 3 has the best set-pieces in series history. The scale is much larger here (for obvious reasons, if you know what occurs in the plot), but the actual enemy engagements are more varied than in previous games. Some of the situations which you are put into make you feel the moment so much more: Engaging in combat on a fallen planet with an orbital cannon firing and shaking the entire screen, deafening you. Or making a mad dash back and forth and trying not to get blasted by a giant laser cannon as an enormous enemy bears down on you. How about spacewalking, in vacuum, down a tube which is falling apart as a space battle rages on just outside. Mix in the fantastic combat with moments such as these and you find yourself fully immersed in an epic space opera like no other game has ever managed before. It's fantastic, even playing this stuff 8 years later. If you like space opera, the stuff in this game will blow your hair back, guaranteed.
There's so much variance with how to play this game. The plot changes due to all of the past decisions incorporated into it, your chosen character class will strongly affect how combat flows and which companions you use, even your Shepard's chosen gender will change things up. This kind of variance has led to me putting hundreds of hours into this game (500+ on console, 250+ on Origin, and now, Steam), replaying the campaign endlessly just because I enjoy the combat and its strongly affecting plot moments so much. I've never played and replayed a single player game like this before and I don't really expect to with any other game ever again. And, man, I don't even have enough space to talk about the multiplayer! It's great! I expected it to be tacked-on crap when I first picked this game up in 2012, but it's actually quite good. Give it a whirl if you get a chance!
Basically: If you've played the first two games, you've got to play this one. If you haven't, pick up Mass Effect and enjoy the ride. Maybe this trilogy will become your favorite gaming experience, as it has been for me over the past decade. And make sure you play this game with all DLC included. There are some really, really important lore reveals packed in with the DLC that should not be missed!
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.
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.
Stardew Valley is a towering achievement not in so much that it's a really fun game (spoiler: it is), but that it was made by just one person. And not only it that it was made by one person, but that every single aspect of the game was so expertly crafted.
The game looks and sounds beautiful, and from what I understand Eric Barone crafted both the art and the music himself. By itself, that's impressive. Then you consider that he programmed the entire game, balanced everything, wrote the characters and dialogue, and filled out this world head-to-toe with fun, satisfying, and interesting activities. If you have any interest in games as a medium beyond just playing and enjoying them, Barone's story is mindboggling.
There are numerous small examples of Barone's craft that make themselves known beyond what normal games of this type display. For example, the way people will allow you to pass them with a small shake if you press into them enough, or the sound effects that play when navigating the menus. These might seem trivial, but they're indicative of the quality of experience here. There is so much polish and character to every aspect of this game, and all of it adds up to make Stardew Valley a masterful experience.
Another example of this depth of quality are the character interactions. I'm a sucker for good character writing. In Stardew, each character that populates the town is expertly written, with deep character backstories that surprised me. Even the characters I initially disliked proved to have more going on underneath the surface. I went into Stardew expecting a pretty straightforward indie farm management experience and I got so much more.
Each pursuit is gratifying as well. I initially hated fishing, but soon grew to enjoy it once I gained basic acumen. Mine-diving and battling monsters provided a satisfying progression as well. And, of course, farming and building your home and land up from being overgrown to being a palace is not only incredibly satisfying but works exceptionally for what you'd expect. I put down Fallout 4 because its settlement system was so awful, Stardew Valley's--although it admittedly has much less going on--Is an absolute dream by comparison. And tying this altogether is the Community Center system, which requires you to plug in specific types of "loot" for various rewards. It's what finally got me addicted to Stardew, staying up way too late trying to catch that elusive catfish, or reading the wiki while at work so I could find out how to get specific Artisan goods.
If what you've seen of Stardew Valley has interested you in even the least, you should probably just give it a shot. I thought I knew what it was, but it proved far deeper and more polished than I ever expected a game made by one person could be. And if you liked its spiritual ancestor Harvest Moon, then you owe it to yourself to play this game. It's a phenomenal example of the power of a singular vision when creating art, and another example of the flourishing indie scene that's developed in gaming over the past decade or so.
Dishonored 2 is actually very similar to its predecessor, though a bit more polished with systems and mechanics that are further developed than in the previous title. If you liked the first game then you should definitely play its sequel, as it features more of the same fantastic gameplay, level design, and art style.
Dishonored 2 is a dream to play due to how deftly it weaves between being an all-out action game and a tense, satisfying stealth experience. Like the first game, each style of play is ably rewarded, whether you want to be a violent psychopath, or a complete ghost sneaking through each level and leaving no trace. The flexibility the game provides its players is one of the best things it does and why it's so worthwhile to play, and with the new game plus mode added post-release it's even more satisfying, as you can pick either of the two protagonists and choose to play in a different style from a past playthrough. I do also greatly enjoy that Corvo is voiced this time around by the timeless Stephen Russel. The silent protagonist of the first game was always awkward in my opinion and regularly pulled me out of the experience.
The other thing Dishonored 2 does extraordinarily well is level design. Most stealth games require very well-designed levels to function properly, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that Dishonored 2 has perhaps the most impressive level design I have ever seen in a game. I don't want to spoil it, but suffice it to say that I've never played anything as mind-bendingly engrossing as the Clockwork Mansion or A Crack In The Slab. It's simply phenomenal; fun to play, and the spaces feel real and functional, as if they could actually exist rather than being specifically designed for a video game. The genius of these designers is undeniable and they're setting a standard for which the rest of the industry can only strive to approach. Brilliant work, the best stealth levels I've played since 2005's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.
This game just feels good to play. The art style is gorgeous, the way you flow from one room to the next stealthily eliminating enemies, dominating all-out fights, or ghosting through via the use of gadgets and powers is almost always satisfying. If you screw up, you're still able to fight in a satisfying way, making save-scumming unnecessary. I prefer to play almost completely stealthily and I find myself losing hours whenever I boot this game up. The portrait work is fantastic, the soundtrack is eerily accurate to the tone of the game.
If there is a criticism I have, it's that the story feels very underdeveloped and seems as if it could have used some more polish. I was intrigued by the premise but too much of it felt contrived, and the ending is so abrupt and unsatisfying. I was fully enthralled by this game from pretty much minute one and never really felt any frustration or distaste until the very end of the game, which I found profoundly unsatisfying. One positive to note is the voice cast, which, like Dishonored, is filled with big name actors who do a superb job. Rosario Dawson is a particular standout, as is Vincent D'Onofrio.
Upon release the game ran incredibly poorly on my machine and many others due to Arkane's installation of the new Void engine in lieu of Dishonored's Unreal engine. It ran so poorly in fact that I had to put it down for several months while waiting for a patch. Thankfully Arkane have done right by their fans and not only added significant stability, but also added several features on top of this. I mentioned New Game Plus before but I want to mention it once more because it's a truly great addition to the game. The game runs very well now and is far more stable than upon release, so don't fret if you're worried about potential performance issues.
Dishonored 2 overcomes a threadbare story with amazing level design and satisfying gameplay and should be played by anyone with an interest in stealth games or bombastic combat. Excellent game continuing the tradition of the Thief franchise and I truly hope Arkane continues to make Dishonored games for as long as they wish.
Those of you familiar with my reviews know I almost always run up to the character limit in every review I write. I'm not going to do that this time, because I can't really review this game in-depth without spoiling everything, and I believe going in completely blind is imperative to ensure that this game has the biggest impact possible upon you.
What I can say is that these characters are incredibly well-written, to the point where even though I'm a Visual Novel neophyte I'd assume that they would stand up to characters in other games of this type. This game dives quite deeply into the themes it chooses to explore. It doesn't rely on any sort of cheap gimmick to heighten its impact, it has such an impact because it builds from the ground up using great characterization as its bedrock and taking things in unexpected directions from there. If you find the game a bit tedious to begin with, just continue playing. It will surprise you with its depth in the second hour, and it'll surprise you with some truly innovative story and writing beats afterwards.
In terms of the medium, this is one of the most inventive games I've ever played. I don't particularly care for the majority of horror subgenres, be they slasher, monster, body horror, etc. I have always, however, been a great fan of psychological horror (eg. The Shining, Rosemary's Baby, Psycho). And I can say with confidence that this is the single best psychological horror game I've ever played in my life. I'm an "old guy" among online gaming communities (I'm in my mid-30s and have been gaming for over 30 years) and I can confidently say Doki Doki Literature Club! is absolutely one of the most unique and worthwhile experiences I've had with a game, period.
Not a fan of anime or manga? Neither am I. Never played a dating sim or even a visual novel in your life? Me neither. And I still went through this experience in absolute disbelief of what Dan Salvato and co. were able to create here. This is a mind-bending, genre-defying treat, and the fact that it's free boggles my mind.
Don't read any other reviews, don't read anything about the game. Download it and play it through to completion. Demographics don't matter, tastes don't matter. Everybody needs to play this game.
