An ambitious soulslike that was sadly massively overshadowed by Lies of P, releasing less than a year beforehand and getting nowhere near the same amount of attention. Steelrising is an action game centered around an alternate history depiction of the French Revolution, where King Louis XVI managed to suppress the political uprising with a massive army of automaton soldiers. You play as Aegis, a seemingly sentient robot dancer who roams around the city of Paris saving a veritable who's who of 1790s-era French political figures from anachronistic fates.

Right off the bat, I want to talk about what I think this game does really well: Utilize the unique attributes that come from playing as a robot. I've played a couple different games that feature android protagonists, and most like Nier Automata and the aforementioned Lies of P just treat the characters as superpowered humans, fighting with incredible strength and speed but in a way not too fundamentally dissimilar from a regular person. Steelrising goes in a different direction, both aesthetically and mechanically.

Every little bit of your character’s presentation exaggerates her robot characteristics, Aegis’s limbs contort and snap in impossible ways when she swings around weapons, healing is performed through different kinds of maintenance oil, and the game features a thoroughly unique take on the soulslike stamina system. Your stamina gauge is treated as your core overheating, and once you've completely run out of stamina you can perform a precisely timed button press to “rapid cool” your core and instantly restore a portion of the bar. The interesting part of this system is that successfully performing a rapid cool will also self-apply roughly 60% of the freeze status ailment, so performing too many coolings in a short time will result in you immobilizing yourself. Attempting to cool the core too early will also cause it to jam, disabling any stamina-related actions for a couple of seconds. I generally really liked this system, especially since Steelrising plays pretty fast by soulslike standards and thusly fights are pretty dodge-heavy. Another element of the gameplay I enjoyed was the surprising emphasis on movement, Aegis moves quite fast and with suitable grace both in and out of combat and you're given a jump+aerial attacks from the start of the game, in addition to obtaining both a grappling hook and an air dash after beating major bosses. Unfortunately, though the feel of controlling your character is pretty excellent, the combat itself isn't the best.

Enemy balance is all over the place, it often felt like regular enemies would either die in 2-3 hits or absorb a massive amount of punishment before going down. Weapons are similarly inconsistent, light weapons feel infinitely more useable than heavy ones, since for some reason the heavy weapons are incapable of filling the enemies’ stagger gauge that makes them open to a critical hit. The weapon variety was also a spot of disappointment for me. The game technically has just under 30 unique weapons, but in reality there are less than 10 unique types with the rest being slight variations in speed and what special move they have access to. The weapon movesets are also fairly plain, they typically consist of three light attacks and two heavy attacks that can be charged, with little differentiating their usage beyond range and damage. Bosses are pretty easy across the board, the only one I had trouble with was the first major fight I encountered, and after that I didn't die to a single one of them including the final boss (which I didn't realize was the final boss until I had beaten it). I will again give compliments on the aesthetic side of things, as I felt that virtually every enemy and boss design was pretty fantastic, seriously hats off to the art/animation team they did a great job.

The last thing I want to touch on is the story, since although it features a pretty high amount of cutscenes by soulslike standards I found it thoroughly unengaging. Steelrising has a similar writing problem to the Nioh games, in that it's a fantastical story that's based on and requires a fair bit of real world history knowledge to be fully appreciated. As someone who isn't overly familiar with the French Revolution and the key figures involved, it felt like the game would constantly throw new people into the story who I couldn't tell apart and who had no distinguishable traits or story function. It also ends up feeling weirdly inconsequential, as since the game is adamant to end with the same result as the real-world events, none of the named NPCs can die even in scenarios where it seems like they probably should have, and once you notice this pattern it becomes really grating and takes the tension out of any given conflict.

Steelrising is a game that I can't help but like. It feels like the developers had a really specific idea they wanted to accomplish, and gameplay/story gripes aside I think they were pretty uncompromising in their creative vision and it resulted in a product that at the very least exceeded the expectations I had for it. I've played so many “tough as nails” dark souls wannabes that something that both feels a little more relaxed difficulty-wise and has a much stronger identity is a very nice surprise. A welcome diversion for the week or so it took me to beat it, I would recommend Steelrising, if nothing else just to experience its absolutely wonderful aesthetics.

6.9/10

I do not follow the gaming industry and pop in and out every couple of years. I tend to think: well, I've missed the last X years of gaming - what's cheap and good? I can deal with some rust-bucket graphics since my reference point isn't much better than Gamecube.

Call of Juarez met that standard - overwhelmingly positive reviews and dirt cheap. It was... fine. I'll start off with the good I guess.

The gunplay is pretty alright. It's not as weak as a Bioshock but not as good as a modern boomer - maybe a bit weaker than a CoD. There aren't many weapons, but they do cover the range: short-range pistol, medium-range pistol, long-range pistol, repeat for large guns. I found myself sticking to the same guns the whole game. The game is pretty chonky feeling overall, so I thought a shotgun would do well, but most of the fights are too long-range for it to shine. There are some additional things too - throwing dynamite for example. The gunplay is supported by a basic leveling system which lets you specialize.

The premise of the game is truly brilliant. You are playing through the memories of a old west bounty hunter. He narrates the missions, but his memory is hazy and he needs to go back and revise things ("no wait - the guy was 10 feet tall, not 6"). This creates gaps and remixes in the story which you need to play through which are really cool. You only get a taste of what it can do, but it does get into some silly situations at times. The story itself is nothing to write home about - chasing dudes around for bounties. It's very linear.

Level design is just okay. There are maybe 4 different styles of level. The levels are oddly open considering the game is linear. I found a way to get lost in one of the mine levels and got myself way off track from the story. This led to wandering through lots of nothing as the story only spawns enemies at certain beats.

Gameplay centers mostly around shooting. The AI is not good. It comes from the era of duck-and-pop AI where you sit there and wait for the idiot to pop up to shoot them. It gets tiring quickly, but I persevered for the sake of completion.

The other big gameplay element is a quickdraw minigame. I hated this thing. It's a mix of "keep the cursor on the box while it moves" and quicktime events that was just tedious. It was fine if you got through it quickly, but having to repeat some of these a half dozen plus times was rough.

I wish I could say more about the game, but I really can't. It's a goofy game that tries to do goofy things, and most of them don't quite work. The core gunplay is okay but feels behind the curve. The game feels repetitive. The narration really is the carrying point even though I didn't give a damn what they were saying. Hard to recommend honestly, but maybe the intent of the game was the arcade play all along rather than the story. After the story, I had to put it down as I was pretty sick of the game even though it's short.

I've been hearing about this game ever since it came out and I had a strong idea about what it was and how it worked. While it sounded interesting, those pre-conceptions kept me from giving it a shot - but when I finally did, they turned out to be almost entirely wrong.

I usually enjoy narrative games (though they are rarely my first choice), what made me not pick up Citizen Sleeper earlier what I thought the gameplay would be like. After hearing many comparison to board games and that the rounds are called "cycles", I imagined a very rigid, formulaic structure, with narrative elements woven around it.

In reality, the gameplay is quite freeform, where you can explore a big map and find various activities. The core gameplay loop is basicially resource management. Every day ("cycle") you get a number of dice to roll. High rolls will yield better results, so you want to use them for higher risk/reward actions, while also trying to aim to resolve various quests. This is not very complex, but honestly fun, at least until the late game, when you will have everything optimized.

The meat of Citizen Sleeper is, of course, its narrative, about which I had another misconception - I thought it would be yet another anti-capitalist dystopia. I like the genre, but there is just so much of it out there these days (for a reason...) and it feels unoriginal.

As it turns out, yes, there are strong anti-capitalist themes running throughout the game (big corporations are basically the source of all evil), they are not that central - in my opinion, the narrative is more interested in questions about identity and sentience. The nature of our character, who is basically an imprint of someone's mind put into a robot to create a legal slave (corporate loophole, since creating sentient AI is otherwise forbidden to prevent just that) provides and excellent framing for those topics.

Crucially, though, the game is very distinctly not a dystopia. Yes, the world and especially the space station we are at is decaying, but the overall tone is very optimistic. This is because of the very humanitarian messaging you will find all over the game. Almost every character you meet is compassionate and, well, good in one way or another. My choice was to simply trust everyone and that trust was very rarely betrayed. I believe that the most important thing the authors wanted to convey is that even in the most dire setting, human spirit and compassion will perservere against all odds. This may sound a bit banal, but it is convey in a way that I can only call beautiful.

My overall reception of the narrative was very positive, I havent encountered one this good since Disco Elysium (and that's the highest praise there can be). However, I do have a couple of issues with the game that keep it from being a truly timeless classic.

The first one is pacing. The game starts with a lot of tension and time pressure, that is then suddenly resolved quite early (around 1/3rd of the game I think?) and you are left with... pretty much nothing, apart from occasional timed questa. I do believe that this was intentional choice by the devs - they convey your character settling in the world this way - but it still makes the experience less consistent.

My second issue is more serious. Typically, I'm not a kind of person who obsseses about choices in games, in fact, I tend to prefer more linear, hand crafted plots. That being said, Citizen Sleeper is an exact type of game that SHOULD be based around deep, meaningful choices, but there are way too few of them. There are many factions and conflicting interests throughout the game and over and over again, whenever you feel like you are building up to having to side with one of them, the conflcting sides magically reconcile and you don't have to choose anything.

The last time the game does this, near the finale of the DLC, it is so blatant that it actually made me think that this was also intentional, maybe some sort of commentary about free will/social determinism. If it is, that was not the right call, as it makes the game less interesting by greatly decreasing the stakes.

Despite the above, I still had a great time playing Citizen Sleeper. In a vacuum, Id give it 8/10, but given it's very cheap even for and indie game, I'd say it's a must-buy for anyone who enjoys narrative games.

RELEASE: 2025

TIME PLAYED: 7 Hours

PLATFORM PLAYED: PC (STEAM)

SCORE: ★★

Hated It | Disliked It | Liked It | Loved It | All-Time Favorite

(The bolded score is the one chosen for this review; the rest are simply to show what the scale is grading on and what the stars mean to me.)

THE BREAKDOWN

+Gorgeous art and environmental design with a unique stop motion animation style

+Hazel is a fantastic lead, with a likeable personality and fitting flaws for a teenager

+The story attempts an ambitious look at the trauma and mythology of the Southern US, an underserved setting

+Cinematic and visually arresting boss fights

-Combat is awkward, poorly paced, and overly basic

-Writing is clumsy and important themes are frequently rushed through and not given the nuance they deserve

-Many of the story's crucial elements are wielded as a blunt instrument

I so desperately wish I loved South of Midnight as much as I love what it's trying to do.

Born and raised in Gulf Coast Texas, I'm well-acquainted with the stereotypes - some founded in fact, others not - about the deep south. I've joined neighbors who refused to evacuate from deadly hurricanes at their pre-storm barbeques, had two-faced family members put on the perfect face of southern hospitality while espousing the most rancid beliefs possible in private, and been taught that the Civil War was about 'States' Rights' from a middle school teacher who wore confederate flags whenever possible. I'm well-acquainted with the ugliness and the beauty alike, from a queer cousin who adopted racist views to fit in to a grandfather who spent his retirement doing free carpentry work across town because that was what it meant to be a good Christian. All of this is to say that South of Midnight's spotlighting of southern culture and mythology immediately appealed to me, and was a big part of why I purchased the game. An underserved setting in media, the deep south is host to rich stories and terrible trauma, and Compulsion Games' action-adventure makes a sincere effort to dive deep into both. Unfortunately, it's beset by so many problems in the process that I was never able to quite click with it.

The premise is compelling enough: when a devastating flood sweeps away her home with her mother still inside, protagonist Hazel desperately attempts to chase her down, only to be confronted with a strange corruption, manifesting as twisted strands, that is slowly consuming her entire town. Discovering a set of enchanted tools in her estranged grandmother's house after the latter tries to restrain her, Hazel finds out - from a giant talking catfish, obviously - that she's a Weaver, someone who can see the Tapestry that binds creation. With her newfound powers, she sets out to not only rescue her mother, but battle the Haint spirits that are spreading and find the source of the corruption.

Between the strong opening sequence and the graphics, my first impression of the game was very positive. South of Midnight is utterly GORGEOUS, with both gameplay and cutscenes boasting a stop-motion inspired animation style that works especially well for supernatural beings like the aforementioned giant catfish. It's a joy to look at and I don't have a single complaint about the aesthetic or visuals from start to finish. The creative talent is on display from both developers and cast, with the voice actors doing stellar work to bring their characters to life. The soundtrack is vibrant and fitting, blending orchestral work with banjos, flutes, and southern choirs for a very authentic sound.

Unfortunately, the fantastic presentation wound up setting me up for serious disappointment. My earliest point of unpleasant friction was with the gameplay. I was halfway through the combat tutorial when I realized that attacking enemies as Hazel simply felt terrible. Despite exaggerated animations, there was no sense of impact to my blows, and enemies were difficult to read due to their often inhuman shape. Hazel does get some activated abilities to propel herself around and crowd control foes, but it's seasoning on a combat system that just doesn't feel good. The game itself isn't too challenging, and various difficulty options - including one to remove combat entirely - ensure the experience is customizable, but while I appreciate the option, there's something to be said for the fact it even had to be presented - and that it was tempting enough that I considered enabling it before long. Still, I'm one of the biggest suckers for narrative-based games in the world; some of my favorite games of all time - Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, and more - have middling combat or worse, and that didn't stop me from loving them. But as much as I tried to meet South of Midnight on its own terms, I wound up no happier with the writing than I was with the gameplay.

It took me a little while to piece together exactly why I bounced so hard off South of Midnight's storytelling, but by the end of the game, I had figured it out: there's simply too many plot threads, and the narrative suffers immensely for it. See, while the framing of the story is Hazel trying to find her mother, she actually spends most of her time addressing smaller mysteries - mysteries often rooted in the generational trauma of the deep south. Part of being a Weaver is guiding the spirits of the lost and troubled to rest, and Hazel wastes little time in doing her duty, both because that's simply the kind of person she is and because these spirits often hold clues to her mother's location.

There's an admirable effort to weave (heh) the primary narrative together with these side stories, but South of Midnight simply rushes through them so quickly and approaches them so bluntly that I never found myself able to get attached. For example, early in the game, that catfish I mentioned earlier is being held in the air by an enormous tree possessed by the spirit of a young man who suffered a betrayal I won't spoil here. The tale of what happened to him, discovered through a blues song that adds more lyrics as the player progresses and ghostly images of the past, is undeniably tragic...but it wound up simply not hitting for me due to a combination of the song lyrics being almost comically blunt about what had occurred and there only being a handful of flashbacks before Hazel resolved his issue. After I had freed his spirit, I felt like I'd been rushed through a rollercoaster version of a Grimm Brothers story. From start to finish the entire sequence was maybe twenty minutes - most of that spent climbing and fighting - and this just kept happening. I'd enter a new area, find out about some horrible past trauma that left a troubled spirit behind, then fix it so quickly that I had barely processed what had happened. If these were the side quests in an RPG, I'd consider them shallow but interesting, but they're effectively what strings the main plot along in South of Midnight, and the substance just isn't there.

This isn't to say that South of Midnight's story is entirely bad - it has a strong final couple of chapters and some downright wonderful set pieces including a battle against a gigantic eldritch owl and a musical dance number in the underworld - but it's just too diluted and unfocused for how short the game is, trying to tell a half-dozen meaningful stories in as many hours (and that's if you don't skip the padded combat encounters). As much as I wanted to love it, I walked away dissatisfied, like I'd sampled a variety platter without ever actually having a meal to fill me up. Constantly gorgeous and occasionally brilliant, South of Midnight is a wonderful attempt at an artistic endeavor in an underserved setting, but as both a game and a story, it unfortunately disappointed me.

Repost with hopefully fixed spoilers

I'm going to be honest with you, I only decided to play this game because it had more awards on TGA than any other game. Does this mean it's better than Sekiro, Baldur Gate 3 and Last of Us 2? Maybe not, but it definitely put very high expectations from me. I know it's probably not a healthy mindset, but what can you do?

Gameplay here is turn based, but with some active elements. You have to manually aim ranged weapons, do QTEs for many spells and actively defend yourself. I wish the attacking mini games were more varied than 'Press A' at right time, like in Stick of Truth. The defensive mechanics here mostly consist of dodge with wide timing and parry with narrow timing. The idea is that you dodge at first, learn the moves and parry for counter damage. I played on hard mode and only died once on several bosses. If you have decent reaction time, it shouldn't be a problem. The stat leveling seems flawed because defense and health are effectively the same thing, letting you take more damage. I put one character into maxing one or two stats, and agility is by far the most important because it lets you have a turn more often. But honestly, if you can dodge you can make do.

Visuals in this game are very pretty. This current PC is very strong, but I'd probably enjoy the artstlye even on medium graphic settings.

Story starts when the Paintress woman Thanos snaps everyone at the ripe age of 34. Our team is sent to hopefully stop her from genociding all the humans.

>!&gt;!Then the story gets all twisty. Turns out there humans not affected by the erasing Gommage, and one of them even joins your party. What started as Kill God quest ended up being a personal story of one family. I think it's neat subversion of how JRPG stakes tend to rise, especially since Yaldoboth and Sephiroth ended up disappointing me. If I understood this correctly, the world the story takes place in is like a Matrix, or a pocket dimension. The various family members tried to cope with loss in their own conflicting ways. I ended up siding with Verso in the last choice, because he represents accepting the tragedy of life and moving on, whereas Maelle wanted to live in the Matrix, which is inherently not real!<!<

Overall, this was an interesting story, even if I didn't quite understand some details. The characters were a bit of a mixed bag for me

Gustave's glove felt like it takes too long to fully charge and only worthwile on bosses. >!I was genuinely shocked when they killed Gustave not even halfway into the story. He looked like the main character and had his own gimmicks, but then poof. I think his death upped the stakes immediately!<

Maelle's stances incestivised frequent switching in theory, but in practice I always tried to enter Virtuose stance and stay there as much as possible. Her defensive stance was second best because I was hit a lot. >!Maelle was an interesting case. She was actually the main character all along, but her amnesia kept us in the dark. She is a hurt girl who can't even speak in the real world, and her family wasn't the best. It's no surprise she gets attached to the painting, where she has health and people who care about her a lot. I felt bad beating her in the finale, but it felt necessary!<

I never played Devilman Crybaby, but Verso definitely reminded me of Dante. I think he has the same problem as Gustave, where it's hard to get the ball rolling. Every new enemy brings unfamiliar dodge timings, so you're not holding onto high ranks. By the time you are fully ready to parry everything, the area is over. >!Verso wasn't the guy who died, but merely a projection of him. I think it's noble that he wanted his sister to live on, even if he was an ass about it!<

Lune was my goated healer and elemental mage, probing enemies for weaknesses. She also apprently has levitation powers but that never came into play. I mostly played as her in exploration because of her nice feet.

Sciel was either godlike or godawful, depending on whether enemy could resist Darkness. I think her gimmick was the easiest to exploit because I used a weapon that always applied 10 cards regardless of spell type. >!I wonder of her husband comes back like she wanted if Maele wins!<

Monoco was annoying to level up because you have to have him in your party for new enemies, but playing as him as insanely fun since he transforms into enemies when mimicking their powers. Shield piercing combo was my favorite move of his.

In conclusion, this game actually lived up to hype for me. I'll have to buy it on my Steam account one of these days.

I recently picked up this TRPG/SRPG since it seemed like a more simple and focused tactical experience compared to something like FFT. I was thinking why not try something more streamlined and shorter.

And in general this was a pretty... average game tbh - it doesn't do anything particularly revolutionary, nor is it the best at anything, but it's a highly consistently okay experience that is just kind of there, existing... until the very end where it manages to shit the bed somehow.

What I liked

• The overall presentation - the game has a chibi artstyle with warm and strong colors, solid music and sound design, nice visual stage design, alongside a fitting UI aesthetic to tie everything up nicely. It felt comfy to play, so to say. On top of that the animated cutscenes when important story events happen are wonderful, although most of them are concentrated at the beginning (budget and time constraints, I guess).
• The simplicity of the combat system - the combat system is a classic grid-based tactical battlefield system, with 2-7 units being controlled, depending on the mission. Other than the basic "attack from the back" positioning bonuses and units being different classes (or rather characters being specialized in different stats), there's also some neat supporting mechanics that award some forethought in combat, even though they aren't that game changing.
• The structure of the game - it being a handheld game originally owes itself well to 10-30 minute sessions, since missions are literally just a single battle before you're able to save again (most of the time). There's 36 main stages/battles and then optional content which unlocks on the world map as the story advances.
• The skill gem system - enemies drop skill gems which can be used by characters, and which give either active skills or passive bonuses to them. Basically like materia from FF7, but with the ability to combine gems and get new ones. This all feels more versatile than character classes, but unfortunately there's a negative in it which I'll get to.
• The transformation mechanic - 4 important characters have armlets which grant them story-related transformations, which completely heal them in combat, give them stat boosts and new abilities. It isn't a particularly deep mechanic, but it's a nice tactical layer with which risk calculating is made easier and more fun. On top of that these characters get a momentum mechanic where when they kill an enemy they get an extra move - chaining these is very satisfying when everything is properly set up.

What I was neutral about

• The story & characters - I found the story pretty meh. What is interesting is the concept of demons in the midst of war between France and England with historical characters being present, but the story itself is just... whatever. Especially the way some characters act at times is on a saturday morning cartoon level of stupid and dramatic.
• Side characters - most of the side characters in the early game pitch in and talk often in story related events, but later on they (especially those that are introduced near the end) just never say anything in the story almost. I guess time constraints on the game's development again hindered this aspect of the story. Made a lot of side characters apart from like 3 of them (La Hire being my favorite) bland.
• The save system - you can save the game on the world map or just before a battle, and a warning will be there that once that the game is saved before battle, it's impossible to come back to the world map. I found that that warning was kind of lowkey for some reason so a softlock is possible if the game is saved at an impossible battle lol. Didn't happen to me, but it surely can and did to some people, and the very possibility of such a thing is kind of stupid game design. Just autosave on world map when entering a battle like what's the point of leaving that possibility up.
• Boss fights - they're usually just normal mobs beefed up, I found nothing interesting nor different in them, and a lot of them were not much difficult from normal encounters.
• The skill gem system - characters are kind of predetermined, because sure everyone can technically use all skill gems, but you're not gonna put a fireball skill gem on a brute wielding an axe that has like 70 magical attack, while you have 2 mages with 300+ magical attack ready to be used for that purpose. It has the illusion of choice 90% of the time, since Jeanne as the most OP and main character is versatile in both melee and magic.
• Stage design isn't all that different or interesting - stages have no height differences 90% of the time, and when they do all that is is just a longer way of getting to high ground, the high ground itself doesn't give any bonus to attacks or range. Stages all boil down to clumping your characters together, since enemy aoe is sparse, and going through the stage like a giant dungeon crawling blob.

What I disliked

• The major thing which made me drop the game on the second to last mission is the atrocious difficulty jump on the final boss, which then required me to go grind levels for hours on end to even stand a chance. I think what happened is that I leveled all my characters (around 11 or 12 of them I think?) equally, which the game doesn't signal as a bad thing, meaning they all ended up at around levels 50-53, while my main character (Jeanne) was lvl 60. This is nowhere near enough for the final boss fight in particular, but it is more than enough for the entire rest of the story leading up to it, including the battle before the final boss which doesn't have a save point after it, meaning I lost like 3 hours of my life while attempting to do an impossible fight a couple of times. I'm not sure what the point of a difficulty spike this large was, but I'm not about to grind for hours and get 7 characters to level 70ish+ just so I can finish the game lol.
• The variety of the combat system in combination with the game's pacing - so the combat is simple and that's fine, but the problem is that the game felt like it was going on for longer than that combat simplicity could support it. In the last 3-4 hours before the final mission I was starting to autopilot through combat encounters, dealing with every single one in the same way as the previous ones - there's basically no new enemies introduced, no new abilities, no interesting new playstyles... It all gets mushed together at some point.
• Difficulty - in the early game the game feels okay, a bit easy but that's fine since it's the beginning. In the early mid game it feels balanced, combat can require adequate planning (especially with the turn timer limit for finishing combat) and it's engaging. Starting from the later mid game and late game the game is just a loop of pressing on Jeanne (who is highly OP and almost incapable of dying) and ordering her to attack. The game becomes braindead easy for around 60% of its run, with losing combat becoming near impossible. And a cherry on top of this balance salad is the final boss which randomly and without any telegraphing skyrockets the difficulty, but not in any interesting way, rather only requiring high levels/stats on characters to actually be able to adequately damage the regenerating final boss.
• Most optional areas are just either mind-numbingly boring and non-threatening, even on level-appropriate characters (the dwarf mines/mountains for example) or just stupid and impossible (the Altois Praire side mission with random level 30+ mobs and 2 700HP dragons while your party is like level 18 what the fuck is that about, it's just softlock save-bait lmao). They all feel like padding, although I did most of them since their rewards seemed to be worth it more often than not, yet I still didn't have enough levels for the final boss even with that optional grinding done along the way.

This felt like a very sterile experience, even ignoring the final boss difficulty spike the rest of the game itself is very average when looked at as a whole experience. It does nothing particularly bad, it either does things okay or meh. It's too easy most of the time and at one point it started being such an autopilot experience that it became a 2nd monitor thing. Not finishing it left me indifferent, I just kind of said to myself "well, that's impossible" and left it there lol.

I spelt it wrong because ofcourse I did

Khazan is a souls like, nioh like, a good game like game. That focuses on fast action rather than slow combat.

Let's talk gameplay first, it has 3 weapons a duel blade, great axe and spear. All three play differently with different skills and combos but are all unified by a parry, dodge, special parry and extra special parry.

The game is mission based with each mission more or less following the same formula of linear to semi linear level ending in a boss.

The game has a hefty boss roster which are definitely the highlights. Post Elden ring it must be tempting to make bosses difficult the way it did but I am happy to say khazan doesn't. The bosses have consistent attack chains and consistent windows to do damage and the game is still very hard. And you will be thankful they are consistent because the game expects mastery of the bosses with a big ass health bar on all of them, very hard to just stumble to victory. In the whole game there was just one boss I hated, which is an achievement in itself.

There is a healthy amount of enemies, tho the normal ones you will see are pretty normal looking too, human and humanoids with basic weapons. The elite enemies do bring out the a grade design along with a handful of normal enemies. Which is not a big problem because most of the time normal enemies will be mist before they even get a chance to attack. But if you do let them attack they have well designed move sets too.

The game is a soft looter slasher, not to the level of nioh but you will farm bosses if you want to make some of the best armor sets, and armor sets are great with gameplay altering buffs that incentivise to try something different even with the same weapon you have been using for hours. They are all designed beautifully too.

And so has the game. I really like the art style of this game, semi cell shaded with hard black lines give it a manga like quality. And while I wish the color pallate was a bit more varied overall I am a fan of the artstyle.

All this makes the game very fun to play but in many aspects there is this feeling of "been there done that" in the game design itself. Like the out of combat systems of how loot works how forging works how you change your weapon attributes etc etc is just nioh, plain and simple. All the consumables you will expect are neatly there with normal easy to understand names in an easy to use list. It feels like the game is telling you to not engage with it on a secondary level and just go fight some more bad guys.

Which is definitely a good thing when you are looking for just gameplay but in many ways like nioh it feels hard to get immersed in the world itself. Tho I will say nioh still does a better job of it.

Overall tho it is a very solid game, I started a second play through almost immediately so it's definitely fun and I would recommend it to anyone who likes games like these. Especially if you like Nioh

To my knowledge it was Diablo 2 that made the skill-tree popular in gaming. I don't care who did the concept first, and I'll admit to never jiving with the Diablo genre, but it is what it is. Many games that are long enough will have some kind of progression system, sometimes a couple of them, and they exist to empower the player and open up new avenues of play. The reasoning is that new players would be overwhelmed if every skill and move were dumped on them right after pressing the Start button. There's also that small jolt of endorphin every time you earn a little new perk. Hell, there's an entire genre of games on Steam devoted to filling out skill-trees after every thirty seconds of play.

But some games screw up the formula. Either the trees are lacking in any spice or have no real reason being in the game. Instead they just exist to give illusion of depth or choice, a sexy selling-point on the back of the box before the modern hellscape killed game boxes. This is the handful that come to mind.

Batman: Arkham Origins (2013)

The one scene I remember from this game is where Batman saves a gangster by pulling him off a torture-rack, only to then torture the man himself by kicking him repeatedly and threatening to short-out the man's pacemaker. Batman is a massive asshole in this game in a manner that doesn't line up with his characterization in the other titles. For instance Batman is far more civil in Arkham Knight, where he gently interrogates a henchman by rolling the wheel of the Batmobile over his head in a bid to jog the man's memory.

All in all, Arkham Origins is a weak link in the series given the muddled plot, lackluster level-design, and scathing loss of polish after the second game. Way down the list of sins is the skill-tree. In Arkham City you earned skill-points by playing normally and spent them on whatever you needed. You need body armour? Then buy body body armour. Want to augment your combo modifier? Then purchase any skill you want that strengthens your combo.

Arkham Origins shares many of the same skills as Arkham City, but screws it up by arranging them in a skill-tree with no rhyme or reason. For example you can't augment your combo until you buy all the body-armour upgrades. There's this batarang gadget I never got to use because it was tied to performing different stunts while in a predator-room. Since predator-rooms are limited in number and can't be replayed in a game with no manual-saving, I lost out on the upgrade for no reason. Just an ill-thought system thought-out in a game full of such odd choices.

Assassins' Creed: Unity (2014)

Thanks to over a decade of hindsight I'm able to arrive at the conclusion that this game is still pretty fucking bad. Sure, the late 18th-century Paris is a fun sandbox to explore in all its parkour glory, but that's only one leg of the chair. The combat is horribly sloppy with no flow-state and the stealth is akin holding three twigs to one's face in a grassy field and pretending to be Welsh. The story also has this bizarre Royalist bent that shits on the French Revolution and attributes its causes to some dumb conspiracy over the more interesting historical record.

AC Unity was the eight installment in the series and the first to try out a skill-tree to upgrade your protagonist Arno. The issue here is that all these "skills" are basic actions that previous player-characters could do right from the start. Throwing money on the ground? Two skill points. Air-assassinating two enemies? Five skill points.

Bear in mind that most skills are locked until you finish the first-three quarters of the campaign, and the skill points themselves are awarded only by completing main quests or randomly found in co-op missions. So unless you bee-line the main plot of this open-world then your basic move-set will be gimped for no reason. Where Arno Dorian with us today I doubt he'd be able to flush a toilet unless he spent three points on the Social Courtesy skill.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (2017)

Xenoblade 2 is a one-hundred hour game where forty of those hours are spent in the menu. The game was rushed in development and they hadn't the time to make a shorter game, so a long game had to suffice. Your five main party-members are called "Drivers", and they each have a skill-tree with fifteen nodes apiece. I'm not sure why they bothered since the upgrades are anaemic and priced linearly, ranging from 200 points to over 5000.

In addition to your drivers are their "Blades," which are technically slaves except Anime. Each Blade has a skill-tree that fills up automatically as you progress the game. It's a pretty neat concept, but the tree only updates when you check on them. A lot of goals on the tree aren't retroactive either, padding the playtime further, and they can be quite esoteric to fulfil. What the hell is a Scud Buggler and why do I have kill 5 of them? Do I really need to cook all these dumplings just so a Blade is 5% more effective in combat? Sweet Jesus, did people actually waste 20 hours trying to get that Blade with the polar bear a recording contract?

Mass Effect 2 (2010)

Gameplay-wise, Mass Effect 2 is a far more polished game that the first, ditching the empty open-world in favour of linear, hand-crafted missions. The overarching plot is completely stupid but delivered with awesome gusto, capping off with the greatest finale in gaming history. To compensate for the sheer spectacle, the game had to fulfil it's shit quota and bog it down with a resource-mining system nobody liked, as well as including a guy called Jacob.

Mass Effect only got skill-trees right in third game. The first game has a lot of options on show, but it was mostly illusory chaff and there was very little meaningful delineation between classes and squadmates. The second game has skill-trees for each squadmate, but they're so barren as to be non-existent. Three active skill and one passive bonus, arranged in four tiers. The second active skill is only unlocked by sinking points into the first skill, and the third active skill is gated behind that squadmate's personal mission, usually involving daddy issues. Had they not even bothered with skill-trees I wouldn't have a problem here.

Bethesda (2011, 2015)

Both Skyrim and Fallout 4 have the same issue with character-progression, in that you earn one universal perk per level. These perks can be spent on a pool of over 250 choices where the majority are fancy but situational, while a minority are boring but mandatory. What's more important? Having a 10% chance that an enemy's bullet will ricochet back at them, or your own gun being 20% stronger? Has anyone who ever played Skyrim ever bought a single perk in Lockpicking or Speechcraft? Lumping every facet of character-progression into a single blob just leads to a more homogenous style of play. In Skyrim sooner or later you'll become a stealth-archer and you'll be utterly gimped in Fallout 4 if you don't invest in crafting perks. Even fans of Fallout 4 prefer to mod out the asinine level requirements preventing you from earning any wild or interesting perks early on in the game,

By comparison a game like Fallout: New Vegas lets you define your character through their attributes, skills, perks, and traits. Your character is made up of an interesting series of choices that intersect and cross-over each other. That game is balanced around you hitting the level-cap, and there isn't a surfeit of crap to pick at any one time. I don't ask for every choice in an RPG to be hardcore or impactful, only interesting.

Recently I finished playing through Disco Elysium! I went in almost completely blind, with the knowledge I had coming from random comments I had seen about the game, most of which praised its story as one of the best in gaming, if not in all of media. After playing through myself... I would not agree. Perhaps it's because I read a lot already, but I found the game rather disappointing as a story, and to not really feel like a game even.

Personal Shock
In a rather boneheaded move, when I bought the game, I didn't really check the gameplay much. The steam page just listed it as an RPG, so I was shocked to find it's more of a visual novel with RPG elements. Not a bad thing, just something I wasn't expecting. Though I would've preferred a visual novel tag on the Steam page.

Look
The game has such a beautiful and unique art style. It definitely is something that stuck with me, because it has so much personality in the way everything looks and feels. Definitely was the best part of the game to me.

Gameplay
As I mentioned above, the game is like a visual novel with RPG elements; you can cater your character to certain stats or traits that can lead to better odds in dialogue interactions / unique interactions. I think the strongest win from this system is that it really does feel like your choices impact the story, which is always a great feeling. However, this also means that the game is almost completely reading. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think DE handles this the best way. I found most of the dialogue trees to be excessively verbose and teetering on pedantic, where it felt more of a chore to actually finish all the possible dialogue. Lots of what the characters are talking about never felt THAT important or interesting.

Story
Since the gameplay is mostly dialogue and descriptions, that would result in the story being the make-or-break for the game. While playing through though, I didn't find it very compelling. While not many games take time to have an expansive mystery story, many books, TV shows, and movies do. And the actual story of DE was not anything especially creative or artistic to me. It felt like another show of a downtrodden cop solving a crazy crime, just with more internal monologues. And the actual prose and writing style of the game wasn't doing much for me. It felt like DE was trying to cram mostly intellectual jargon, rather than actual write in artistic manners or with actual meaning.

Conclusion
I probably wouldn't recommend this game unless you enjoy visual novels and are looking to scratch a detective itch. It's not a bad game, but I wouldn't say it's a must-play. And realistically, you could just watch a detective show or movie if you really wanted to scratch that itch.

This was my first review! Let me know if you guys agree or not.

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

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

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

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

So, I finally finished Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on PC, after having done a New Game+ playthru of the first game and the Miles Morales "1.5th" game. Having just finished it about 30 min ago, I am...of two minds about it. There are some really terrific aspects about this game, and...some really irritating aspects about it. I gather it also had somewhat of a troubled development cycle, but because I didn't follow it at all (since I don't have a PS5 and don't plan on getting one), so I didn't track the ups and downs. And it looks like, thanks to Sony's current maneuver to discontinue "prestige" PC game ports, I'll have to be a "patient gamer" again unless and until they release games like Wolverine and the inevitable sequel on PC...if that ever happens.

Still, we've gotten 3(ish) games in this franchise out of them, and I'm happy with them...mostly.

The Good

To begin with, I loved Marvel's Spider-Man, and very much liked the Miles Morales game. Spider-Man felt truly epic with an enjoyable "Arkham-Lite" combat and stealth system, decent boss fights, and a truly (ahem) amazing story. The acting quality was top-notch, the visuals were excellent (there must've been a ton of mocap), and Insomniac's takes on Peter and his rogues gallery was fresh and interesting. The combat system was especially enjoyable to me, a late-40s gamer who has never been worth a damn at fighting games (except Soul Caliber. I was pretty damn good at that.).

With Spider-Man 2, much of what made the first 2(ish) games enjoyable is repeated here. The story and acting are, again, start-to-finish top notch. Truly, this is a fantastic cast, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of the returning characters, as well as the addition of new ones. They totally sell their characters, and it sucked me into the narrative every time.

The story itself is also mostly good. I enjoy the twist of Harry as Venom (and "Agent Venom" kinda). Kraven poses a genuine, pervasive threat for the first half of the game, and Venom and the symbiote army pose a threat in the latter half. The narrative is probably at its best in navigating the relationships between the main characters, and is most grounded in Pete's joy at reconnecting with his long-lost best friend, and the impact that has on his life and the other characters around him.

I thought I wouldn't like splitting time between Pete and Miles, but I actually found myself enjoying the mix of the two and then seeing them come back together again. My only wish is that there was more team-up work, and I think there is (was?) the most possibility for innovation in actual teamwork both in terms of narrative design and gameplay loop...but Insomniac focused on building on what it had, which makes sense from a business perspective, but which I think falls short. More on that in a bit.

I'll also say that the visuals continue to be excellent, but that's not a huge surprise. I also liked expanding the scope of the city to include newly accessible boroughs not featured in the prior game, while also being smart enough to include effective fast travel and fast traversal options. The addition of the web wings was awesome and a fun callback to the old school roots of the comic and the costume designs, but it also had a terrific impact on the game, allowing you another way to zip around the city, only a bit faster than web-slinging.

The Middling

Combat was, for me, a strength of Spider-Man 1 and of Miles Morales, although I kinda prefer the slower pace of combat in Spidey 1 than MM. MM added the venom abilities, which was a nice touch that introduced a bit of additional complexity, but which came at the cost of Pete's array of gadgetry. In that sense, it felt like it was just "alt gadgets." In Spidey 2, though, that is no longer the case. Gadgets are still streamlined, but both Pete and Miles get multiple additional powers, which can be further expanded upon and swapped around, albeit in ways that I thought didn't quite make narrative sense and created a bit of ludonarrative dissonance.

This mostly comes in when you get the "antivenom" suit, which I thought felt more like gameplay leading the narrative than gameplay supporting the narrative. Like, "Hey these are cool new powers, and we need to maintain them, so find a reason they come back." Pete's Anti-Venom suit looks cool...but is it a new symbiote on him? Except it has a mask he can pull off like his normal suit? What the hell is going on here? It wasn't clear, and as a result, felt like the powers were there because the powers were cool, and the narrative was thrown together to justify it.

The pacing of the story was also off. The build-up to Kraven, which occupies something like 2/3 of the game, felt pretty great, and scaled well. After that point, when Venom kicks in felt waaaaaay to abrupt. The side quests ended up feeling...off as well, especially when the symbiote nests show up. To help make it make sense, I took down the symbiote nests before the final battle, both to get some of the in-game meta-currency needed to upgrade my abilities, and because to me, it'd make sense that doing so would "weaken" the symbiote system...which is why it sort of surprised me that the game didn't bother with that. Ultimately, the thing that really ended up selling the last act of the game was the quality of the acting and, to a lesser extent, the writing. Even though it felt like things were moving too quickly, the actors' delivery sold the urgency and emotion. I just wish the whole narrative had a bit more time to breathe, because I think it would've also allowed for greater gameplay variety.

The Bad

This brings me to what sucked about Spider-Man 2. For all the good stuff -- and there is a lot that I love about it -- the bad stuff is...really not great, in my opinion.

For one thing, the combat was not my favorite, which is a shame because I love the combat in the first two games. This is primarily due to three basic factors.

1. The increased complexity of combat. The Miles Morales game added a bit of complexity, but it was manageable, in part because your venom powers kind of "took the place of" Pete's gadgets from the first game. You still had gadgets, just fewer of them. Numerically, it may actually be that you end up with the same amount of abilities, but the mapping of them on the controller, coupled with the new "parry" mechanic really threw me.

Much of the time, I found myself trying to parry, only to accidentally activate a special ability that I didn't want to use. I ended up downloading a mod for the final few fights that simply made the undodgeable/you-must-parry-these attacks and turned them into dodgeable OR parryable attacks, which actually made that aspect of the game a hell of a lot more fun. The "button mashing" issue also showed up in minor ways in the doubling of the button for the web wings mapping on the same button that let you do web-strike takedowns. I am sure some of this is just because I'm an old gamer who cut his teeth on a joystick with one button playing GORF on a VIC-20 (look it up, kids), but my recollection is that both MM and the Spidey 1 games handled this better. This made the controller mapping feel more cumbersome, and I think a bunch of that is due to embiggening the power sets.

2. Encounter design simply got harder in this game, and harder in a way that I think the actual game engine struggled to deal with. I mean, I recognize my own limits as a gamer. My reflexes ain't what they used to be. But a lot of the time, it felt like I was fighting the system itself, as it would inadvertently lock on to an enemy I wasn't trying to target (and may not have even been looking at), or where the camera would end up pointing in some direction I didn't want to be because it had reoriented somehow mid-fight. The jump ability also felt nerfed from the last game, and felt more like a "hop" without doing a powered jump.

Mostly, the big issue with the encounter design is the overlapping threats. The quality of the threats you face was interesting, but the implementation of it was just frustrating much of the time, I think due to the combination of the number of enemies and the fact that the game would throw multiple enemies executing "dodge" or "parry" attacks at the same time. I'm fighting a sword hunter right as a fist hunter throws a punch at me, and one of those perched-shooting hunters is taking a shot, and there is just literally no way to get out of the way of all of them.

This gets worse when the symbiotes show up. Symbiote enemy design was interesting in that each type of symbiote presented a different threat, but they all just kind of show up at once and all of a sudden, so you have to kind of learn how to beat them on the fly, and by the time you do, the game's already over. Not great. Normally as they introduce new threats like these, you'd expect the game to highlight it and give you a sense of effective counters, but instead you have to figure it out yourself. The symbiotes were also more resilient than the other enemies you fight, able to better shrug off a lot of my go-to moves or at least shake off whatever debuffs I hit them with faster. That's not a bad thing, because it keeps the game fresh, but when coupled with what felt like encounters designed to simply overwhelm you, it got frustrating. Again, some of this may be me, needing to learn the game, but some of it felt like gameplay pacing issues as well to an extent.

By gameplay pacing, I mean introducing new enemies to counter, new abilities to use, etc. This stuff all felt very rushed and as a result, more complex than it probably is. It was really only by the end of the game that it started to gel for me how the gadgets could recharge your focus and your special abilities, and vice versa. I don't recall that being explained in the game prompts at any point (though I may be forgetting).

The absolute worst element of the game, though, has got to be the absolute dogshit boss fights. Pretty much every single boss fight seemed to play out the same way, and once I saw the pattern, I couldn't unsee it and it came across as incredibly one-note. Dodge, dodge, parry, do a bunch of punches, then do this for 3-4 sequences with big emotional speeches laid overtop the whole thing. Ugh. This was especially true after Kraven is defeated. The Kraven fight was mostly good. An arena fight that made sense because, duh, of course Kraven would want to fight you one on one in an arena. That fits the game. But then every boss fight after that played out the same way, only with the boss having 3-4 "health bars" that you had to deplete in the same boring-ass way.

The environment played far less of a role than I'd have liked, the variety of moves and such was limited, in that the enemy would often just shrug off stuff that'd work on other enemies, etc. Plus, half the time when you went to go use some environmental thing, you couldn't because the enemy would just hit you with multiple "MUST DODGE/PARRY" attacks that you had to deal with. Even your special abilities could get interrupted all too easily.

By the end of the game, I'd had enough, and actually found myself just wishing (and even saying out loud) that I wanted the whole sequence to just be done already. Literally, "Oh come ON!! Don't tell me I have to do ANOTHER fucking arena battle..." Truly, it was just no fun, and actually makes me think that, before I bother to do a New Game+/Ultimate run, I'm gonna download the hell out of some mods to alter gameplay and make it more fun. I gather there's one that makes the Focus system work more like it did in the first two games, which would help a bunch.

Oh, and for the love of Stan Lee, NO MORE GAMEPLAY SEGMENTS WITH NON-POWERED CHARACTERS. Nobody liked these in the first two games. I did not like them in this game, either with the sole exception of the one with Hailey, and that was more just a cool exploration of Hailey's world in a low pressure setting. The MJ stealth segments? Fuck that. I get that we want her to be an integral part of the Spidey-gang. But playing as her, even in this somewhat more powered up version, sucks and I hope they finally drop it in any potential sequels.

Overall:

The thing is, overall, I really, really like this game.

But I don't love it like I did with the first one or even with Miles Morales (which has grown on me over time).

And that is almost entirely due to the game's shortcomings, chief among them (for me) the boss fights. They just fucking suck, man. They really, really suck. The most interesting one other than Kraven was the Lizard, and even that was mediocre. After that, I guess the fight against flying Venom, but only because it offered some fucking variety, and barely at that.

There's so much good in this game, but it's held back by a few really glaring issues that, while I would rate Spider-Man 1 a 10/10, and Miles Morales a 9.5/10, I'd give this one more like a 7.5/10 overall, with 12/10 elements (again, the acting). But those elements aren't enough for me to be excited about another playthru. Not yet, anyway.

I was always a little curious about Call of Duty games, but I didn't have a console that could play them growing up. Recently I got my hands on COD: Black Ops from 2010. I remember thinking that it looked cool when I saw others play it and it reminded me a bit about Spec Ops: The Line, a game I do like.

So I thought I'd try it.

Man, it was bad. I understand that COD has a reputation for having kinda thrashy, low attention, flashy even jingoistic narratives. But to actually see it was kinda chocking. Not that it had those things all the time or didn't have cool moments too, but it did feel like someone took a cartoon like GI Joe, mixed it with a political thriller and then made it PG-13.

The villains are two stock Russians that plan to use a nazi invented poison to attack the US with sleeper agents using a secret broadcasting station. And you play an amnesiac, (formerly?) brainwashed American CIA soldier. You win by going to Vietnam, Russia, the Phillipines and shooting everything that your companions shoot at while cool rock music plays and occasionally the US air force shows up to bomb every enemy in sight (*badass rock music plays*)

Your CIA handlers says that you are on the brink of war. I would assume we already are at war considering how many times US forces intruded into Soviet territory and killed its soldiers, but what do I know.

Overall, 5,5/10. No real interest to play again but I didn't mind finishing it.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been on everyone’s radar at least once since its release. You must be living under a rock if you haven’t heard of Expedition 33 yet. It’s a good game, it won Game of the Year 2025, I’m not here to argue that it’s not. Having recently finished my first playthrough, I’d like to discuss what I liked about the game and what I didn’t. It’s no secret that the game took inspiration from JRPGs such as Final Fantasy. But by God, I felt like I was experiencing the original Final Fantasy VII for the first time again. 

Background

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was developed by Sandfall Interactive and released in 2025. The idea for Expedition 33 began in 2019 as a passion project from Ubisoft employee, Guillaume Broche. Guillaume sought to make a demo, contacting a group of developers he already knew, and looked for voice actors via the now iconic Reddit post. Wanting to focus on the project full-time, Guillaume left Ubisoft and formed Sandfall Interactive, kicking off the team with only five other people (which would soon grow to a team of around thirty people and more helping from the outside). 

As stated earlier, Expedition 33 took inspiration from older games in the Final Fantasy franchise, specifically stated to be VIII, IX, & X. Sandfall wanted to create a high-quality turn-based RPG. A genre that they felt was ignored by larger developers in this day. Aside from Final Fantasy, the game also drew inspiration from the Persona series and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice for its parrying mechanics. 

Story

Every year, the ever-present Paintress counts down on her monolith. And every year, people who share their age with, or are older than, the number on the monolith are erased from existence. This has been the normal for the past 67 years in the city of Lumiere. But Lumiere does not just accept their fate. The Expeditions were formed to take the fight to the Paintress. To stop her from counting down further and prevent further lives from ending prematurely. Today, Expedition 33 begins their mission. 

Gameplay

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a turn-based RPG. I do not like turn-based RPGs. Sure, I played Pokemon as a kid and loved the series, but I just cannot go back to these games now. It’s hard to find enjoyment in battles when you are just taking turns hitting each other and watching an HP bar slowly whittle away. It’s boring, put plainly. All of this is to say that I loved Clair Obscur. 

Much of the gameplay is bog-standard for a JRPG. As an aside, I’m going to keep calling Clair Obscur a JRPG. It’s not Japanese-made, I know, but it shares a majority of characteristics with the genre. You have a party of characters, and you choose three to act as your main party in battles. Each time you win a battle, you get experience and level up once you gain enough. You are thrown onto a big world map that is dotted with named locations where you can explore further, on a smaller scale. Each of these locations are functionally dungeons. There are a number of enemies inhabiting the area, items to be found, and a boss at the end of it all. The world size feels perfect, by the way. The game wasn’t a bloated mess, and it didn’t leave me wanting more from it. 

Clair Obscur wouldn’t be a JRPG if it didn’t have different weapons and items to equip your character with. Each piece of equipment changes the character’s stats and typically will have a passive effect during battle. I must particularly laud the “Picto” system in this game. Each character can be equipped with three different Pictos. Each Picto will boost two or three stats, such as health, speed, or critical chance. But in addition, every Picto has a passive that will impact your character in battle. These effects can range from “Start the battle with X status effect,” to “Do 15% more damage when enemy is burned,” to “Attack twice in a row.” There’s really a lot of these; it’s cool how creative some of them get. We’re not done yet, though. If you win four battles with a Picto equipped, you “learn” the Lumina. This allows you to equip the Picto’s passive onto any character, bypassing the three-Picto limit. Now this is only the passive effect, not any of the stats associated. But these Luminas allow for some crazy feats. It honestly reminds me of Materia from FFVII with how you can combine them in unique ways that will break the game. But, be careful with these, you can end up ruining some battles in the story if you use a game-breaking build too often. 

I already mentioned my distaste for turn-based RPGs, but I will admit there are some exceptions. Some games in this genre keep battles interesting enough so that you aren’t just waiting half of the time. Final Fantasy VII is one I love, for example. Each turn is based on time instead of a designated order, creating a sense of urgency in each battle. I was always trying to plan my moves so that I could execute them quickly before the opponent had a chance. So how does Expedition 33 keep battles interesting? That would be in its parrying (and dodging) mechanic. 

Whenever an enemy attacks, you don’t have to just stand there and take it. You are given the ability to dodge, or parry, their attacks and avoid all damage. Should you choose to parry, and successfully parry every attack in the enemy’s turn, you can launch a powerful counterattack. This mechanic does so much to speed up the pace of play and keep you engaged the whole way through. I cannot emphasize how satisfying it is to pull off a counterattack, and this feeling never goes away. I don’t think it’s perfect. As you progress, the game can start to ask too much from you. Enemies can combo upwards of eight hits together, and you have to parry each one if you want the counter. Not to mention how enemies have quite a few feint attacks. This is frustrating, but it’s understandable. It does feel gratifying once you actually learn the attack pattern. Sometimes the game will hit you with a cinematic slowdown though. This one I can’t make excuses. I get in the rhythm of parrying and right when I go to parry the last attack, the camera slows down and I end up parrying early. At least feints feel like they’re in my control; the camera slowdown is just completely arbitrary.  

Gamefeel

Expedition 33 succeeds in what I love most about the JRPG genre. The story is played completely straight. There is no self-aware humor, no quipping. All the characters are completely earnest in their dialogue and beliefs. I no longer want to defeat The Paintress because that’s what the game is telling me to do. I want to take down The Paintress because I see the impact she has had on the Expeditioners and their lives. Experiencing the Expeditioners, a group of (mostly) adults, providing genuine support for each other during their journey. It is such a breath of fresh air in the world today, where everything seems to be made with some sort of irony or cynicism and a cast of characters that borderline hate each other. The character interactions in Expedition 33 never lose their sense of sincerity. This is one of my favorite things about the game. 

Another one of my favorite things about Expedition 33 has been the music. Holy shmoly is the soundtrack to this game great. I have been playing the OST in my car on my drives to and from work every day for the whole week. Many have made their way onto my main playlist as well. A lot of the songs aim for a classical sound, but then you’ll get a few that are jazzy and then some with an electro beat. My favorites from the OST are the symphonic rock songs. All the tracks tickle my ear in the best way and send shivers down my spine. I’m already looking into buying this soundtrack physically and crossing my fingers that the Painted Symphony tour makes its way to the USA. 

If I have one point of contention about the overall game feel, it would be some of the character animations. This is not regarding any of the battles; all of the animations in-battle look amazing. But when you’re in camp, unless it’s a cutscene, the characters can be a little stiff when talking to each other. Some of the things they’re saying are juxtaposed by their body language. Additionally, there are some hard cuts so that the developers could get around having to make an animation for this one specific scenario. I can understand this being a little half-baked; these are small moments in the game. On the other hand, these moments have a lot of character building in them. It would have been nice if it was a little more fluid. 

Conclusion

I’m not sure what to write in conclusion. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a great game; this isn’t a big secret. I haven’t been talking about some hidden gem for the past 1,564 words. Because I have more limited time nowadays, I was worried about sticking with Expedition 33 the whole way through. I ended up being worried for no reason, I was fully immersed in this experience and spent every day looking forward to playing it when I got home. I don’t think the game is perfect, but I do think it was really fucking good. 

My Other Reviews

Pseudoregalia

DREDGE

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin

Baba Is You

The Elephant Collection

This game is so good. It's a 3rd person stealth/action game in a similar vein to MGSV or Ghost Recon, only rather than having a full open-world the missions instead take place in large, self-contained maps, which is honestly how I prefer it. It's also a little rougher and simpler than those games, but I don't see that as entirely a negative either - personally, I can appreciate a game that focuses on the essentials and doesn't bog itself down with unnecessary layers of mechanical complexity and menu management.

On the essentials - you've got your three stances of standing, crouching or prone and an over-the-shoulder camera that adjusts to just the right zoom based on each, a three weapon loadout of a scoped rifle, side-arm and pistol, an item wheel for your healing and explosives, some basic climbing and instant melee finishers, and a sort of light cover-system where your character automatically presses up against nearby walls. Pretty standard stuff, and all in all it feels good - a little stiff (it is Rebellion, after all) but responsive and punchy. In particular I really like that you can sprint while crouching, it feels very natural in combat.

Obviously the sniping is the star and I'll admit, I only became moderately competent over the course of my playthrough but it is quite satisfying to get the hang of manually compensating for drop-off and wind direction and the sound effects and feedback are great. The automatic guns aren't very accurate and have tons of recoil, yet they're still pretty useful because the enemies are very reactive to getting shot at, flinching at near-misses and stumbling around when hit.

The AI is both smart and dumb, in the right ways in my opinion. Their hearing and peripheral vision aren't great but they can see pretty far and their uncertainty period after spotting you only lasts about half-a-second before they alert everyone in the vicinity to your presence. Individually they're not much of a threat - their aim's pretty bad, they often run out in the open and they're easily overwhelmed by gunfire - but linger in any one place for long and soldiers will quickly start filtering in from all over the map and trying to snipe/flank you, and the semi-realistic damage means they'll kill you fast. Luckily, while it's very easy to get spotted it's also pretty easy to slip away, as enemies will usually default to attacking the last place they saw you - all you really have to do is break line of sight and go somewhere else, and the environment easily facilitates this in most cases with lots of different paths to take through the level and opportunities to double-back.

Something about the balance of the whole things just feels subtly brilliant. It can be difficult to avoid getting into a fight between the limited selection of silenced weapons and how quickly you get spotted, and those fights can quickly turn deadly. However, it's not that hard to get out of a fight if you move quickly and there are plenty of places to run - but also, plenty of Nazis everywhere else you go. The game weaves seamlessly back and forth between stealth and action and while neither feels the most polished or deep they both work well enough and compliment each other really well. Playing through it in my sloppy way felt like a proper action movie far more so than a lot of more "cinematic" games to me oddly enough.

The only issue I really had, and this could just be a consequence of playing on Authentic Plus, is that I often didn't know where to go for my objectives. In some cases this was fine - I was able to figure it out just by playing through the level and paying attention to context - but in others I'd wind up clearing out most of the map and running back and forth across it for 20 minutes looking for a fuse box or something I'd missed.

This game was so interesting to me. For context, Blue Prince is a roguelite game where every day you enter a house and are presented with 3 doors. Each time you choose a door, you are given 3 room options, and you choose one to slowly build the house, with the ultimate goal of reaching room 46. At the end of the day, the house is reset, and you begin the process again. You collect gold, keys, and gems along the way, which allow you to progress further into the house and unlock more rooms and house upgrades along the way. It sounds way less fun than it actually is. I promise.

 

Then you get to room 46 and realize the ultimate goal is way more complicated than that.

 

What I find fascinating about this game, and other puzzle games like it, Obra Dinn for example, is that it was primarily made by one person. From what I've read, a few people were brought in at the end to help with refinement, but it was mostly one person. This means that each puzzle was designed based on how that single person thinks and how their mind functions. Which can be good or can cause you to dead end because your train of thought may be completely different from the creator's. This is why I brought a friend.

 

I played this entire game with my wife. She managed the controller while I took notes. And being able to bounce ideas off of each other, and pointing out things that the other person did not notice, or did not think was important, was really cool. Solving puzzles together made the game flow really well, and we eventually reached room 46 without a guide, which I am super proud of. I strongly recommend playing this with a friend. Then we tried to go a bit farther and dig deeper into the puzzles, and that's where the wiki came in clutch, because we enjoyed navigating the house and solving puzzles, but some things were so well hidden that we would miss something critical and not know where we missed it, and rather than hopelessly looking around, we looked up some hints. The sanctum keys are a good example of this.

 

I don't know how deep to go in my analysis, so here are some spoiler filled points:

 

• >!WHAT ARE THE GLOBES FOR AND WHY CAN I SPIN THEM!?!<
• >!I cheated so hard on room 8. My mind did not work that way.!<
• >!The game really opens up once you reach the Blackbridge Grotto and can remote into the lab from any computer and customize your available experiments. Game changer. This was such a great concept to add to change up the gameplay focus.!<
• >!If you passed the exam in the end without looking up the answers, you deserve all the praise. That was a legit test that you had to really study for and learn this world. Really cool idea, but I cheated.!<
• >!I think everyone should attempt to fill up the directory. The amount of rooms and how to trigger some of them is really clever.!<

 

Overall, this was an incredibly tightly designed game that rewards you the more you play. You start out with no money and 50 steps. By the end I had more money than I could spend, and I was regularly filling every square in the house as I tried to trigger my experiments as much as possible. For the average player, finding room 46 is probably enough; for those that want a never ending rabbit hole, there are few better options.

This recent discussion of Morrowind as an 'overlooked gem' got me thinking about the earlier Bethesda titles that, unlike Morrowind, actually do tend to get overlooked in retrospectives on the company. I recently replayed The Terminator: Future Shock, and given that it was Todd Howard's first gig as producer it's not surprising that it shares a lot of DNA with Bethesda's later releases. Additionally, despite its obscurity it showcases a number of features that would subsequently become FPS staples.

Overview

Future Shock is a DOS first-person shooter set in the post-apocalyptic Californian wasteland of the Terminator franchise's 'future war'. While the game has easter eggs connecting it to the films, it is content to just occupy the setting rather than lean on fanservice.

The game follows the typical FPS structure of discrete missions with weapons and ammunition carried over from previous ones. The weapons follow the classic FPS pattern, with a pistol (well, machine pistol), rifle, machine gun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, and a couple of exotic energy weapons. There's an added wrinkle in that many of these share ammo- for instance, the machine pistol, rifle, and machine gun all use 'bullets'- but the bigger weapons consume exponentially more ammo in return for only modest increases in damage and fire rate. So there's a bit of an ammo economy to the weapons, but in practice it doesn't make a tremendous impact to the gameplay.

The enemies are a wide variety of robots, mostly invented for this title. The titular Terminator doesn't show up until several missions in, and most of the fighting is instead against floating kamikaze drones, bipedal armless 'raptors' with lasers, and flying hunter-killers. There are a bunch of other killer robots including a tank robot, a wheeled rocket robot, a giant spider robot, a flying robot with swords for arms. The enemy visuals and their weapons are varied, and there are several dozen different enemy types, but there's nothing too exciting or innovative in behavior. Enemies make a beeline for the player on sight (with mediocre pathing if line of sight is broken) while continuously shooting or attempting to engage in melee.

Credit where it's due, this game does make the Terminators feel like a serious threat- they're tough and hard to hit thanks to their narrow profile, and can do a lot of damage in a hurry if you're not ready for them. Skynet's forces in general are tougher than most FPS enemies, don't have flinch/pain states, and explode into shrapnel on destruction, so it's necessary to engage cautiously and maintain distance.

Mission objectives largely consist of getting to an exit, or pressing a button and then getting to an exit. There's some mid-mission player character dialog, but for the most part the narrative is conveyed through text-based pre-mission briefings delivered by animated character portraits.

So far this is a pretty standard 90s FPS, but Future Shock has some notable elements that stand out.

Innovations

First, for a 1995 title it's impressive that almost the entire game is 3D. It uses sprites for weapon/health/ammo pickups and minor environmental details, but every enemy is a 3D model using its own volume for hit detection, and the level design makes heavy use of its fully 3D design. There's a lot of verticality in level design, with hills and canyons, craters, multi-story buildings, and jumping across rooftops. All of it is texture-mapped, and the engine supports dynamic lighting, with rocket contrails and explosions lighting up the environment.

While System Shock had achieved an explorable 3D environment a year prior, Future Shock blends indoor and outdoor environments into a semi-open-world design. Most levels are large and non-linear, and every intact building can be entered (after a short loading screen). The game doesn't often position ammo and health directly along the path to the objective, so it's necessary to explore for supplies both in the overworld and in buildings. Interiors are all unique, not procedurally generated. A garage has cars on stands, a corporate building has offices and a central atrium, a Skynet facility has computer banks and machinery. None of it is particularly interactive outside of a few setpieces and there are some wonky layouts, but effort was put into making this feel like a real environment. Outdoors, it's sufficiently well-done that when the briefings reference landmarks to navigate by, it's actually practical information.

Unlike System Shock, the game natively supports mouselook and it only takes a few minutes to set up a modern WASD control scheme. It even has throwing grenades as a separate function rather than treating them as a discrete weapon, a paradigm that wouldn't become popular until Halo six years later.

Although most of the missions are on foot the game also has drivable vehicles. There's a Resistance jeep, which handles about as well as you would expect a jeep in a 1995 FPS to handle, and a captured Hunter-Killer for a couple of flying missions. Neither of these are particularly remarkable in their own right but they do add some fun diversions from the core gameplay.

Overall, while the moment-to-moment shooting is just okay, Future Shock shores it up with great presentation and atmosphere. It shines in moments like following a ruined highway in the jeep at full throttle while being pursued by hunter-killers, using a makeshift bridge on a roof to reach a building whose ground floor is inaccessibly irradiated, or suddenly hearing the telltale hydraulic noises of an active Terminator while exploring and scrambling to figure out where it's coming from. When the game hits its stride it's a remarkably immersive experience, a recognizable prototype for the fully open worlds that Bethesda would subsequently build.

Problems

And then there are the fucking sewers. And the robot dungeons, and other areas where the game's semi-open-world and verisimilitude give way to enclosed and functionally linear but frustratingly confusing mazes that pit you against exploding bullet sponge enemies in close quarters.

Worse, some of these involve jumping puzzles, which highlight that the physics are not as sophisticated as the visuals. There's a 'floaty' feel to the jumping, and a tendency to just slide down the side of a platform if reaching it from the side rather than straight down. It doesn't help that the game runs poorly indoors, and Dosbox slowdowns are common mid-jump. If the player gets stuck in the geometry- which can happen even on seemingly innocuous surfaces like ramps- the game's solution is instant death.

In some of the indoor levels, triggers that open doors can also break entirely, forcing a reload to an earlier save, or restarting the mission if no save before the missed trigger exists. There's no apparent rhyme or reason to this and from what I can gather it was a problem with the original DOS release too, so isn't just an emulation issue. Some of the actions needed to progress can be unintuitive as well, so without looking up a walkthrough it can be tough to figure out if the game has broken or if you haven't figured out the solution. The map is completely worthless, and there are no mid-mission objective reminders.

The game also has a major gameplay issue relating to the time travel concept of the film. As the game progresses, Skynet starts sending robots back in time to intercept the player. Interesting concept, but in practice, this means enemies increasingly appear literally out of thin air, often right in front of the player. Since as mentioned before enemies are fairly tough and don't have any sort of flinch state, it means guaranteed lost health every time it happens, and ruins the cautious pacing of the exploration and combat.

Conclusion

So overall this is an ambitious semi-open-world FPS with okay gameplay carried by good style and immersion, let down by bugs and some baffling design choices. Yup, it's a Bethesda title alright.

It seems that reviews on release were highly polarized, with some praising all the good elements I mentioned above, others focusing more on the bugs and high hardware requirements or criticizing the control layout as unintuitive. Both perspectives are legitimate, but unfortunately so much of what it did well by 1995 standards is no longer novel or unique. Unlike Doom or even System Shock, where you can still find a lot to appreciate despite their age, in Future Shock the problems loom large over what the game does get right.

The game would receive a sequel- though it's really more of a standalone expansion pack- in the form of Skynet (1996). This added a new campaign with some fun setpieces, CGI cutscenes, adorably cheesy FMV briefings, networked multiplayer, and no obnoxious late-game time-travel whack-a-mole. It's an improvement, but fundamentally it's the same game with the same bugs and sewers, not substantially iterating or offering anything really new.

So is Future Shock worth playing? I'd say only if you fall into one of two categories: If you enjoy exploring old games just to appreciate how they fit into gaming's evolution, or if you really want a Terminator-future-war game and didn't feel 2019's (also janky) Terminator: Resistance scratched the itch. Either way, bail out if/when it starts feeling frustrating and you'll have seen everything that's worth seeing.

&#x200B;

Release Date: 2017

Developer and Publisher: KEMCO

Genre: Visual Novel

**Story**

Raging Loop is a visual novel in which protagonist, Haruaki ends up in a small isolated mountain village. After meeting a colourful cast of characters, Haruaki works to fix his motorcycle and leave, but is suddenly prevented from doing so by a strange mist enveloping the town. Haruaki finds himself entangled into a death game where some of the villagers have turned into villains who kill their fellow townspeople under the cover of night. Due to the laws of what is known as the Feast of the Yomi Purge, the only way for the villagers to fight back is to vote to hang someone every day, hoping to discover the traitors. However, things don't end there for our protagonist who soon discovers that he is forced to undergo this "game" over and over again.

**Gameplay**

Raging Loop is a visual novel, meaning the entire game is essentially reading what is happening. There are a few points in which the player is invited to make a choice. However, as will quickly be discovered, choices are not actually choices in this game. Essentially, almost every choice leads to a "bad end" or to the continuation of the story. Getting a bad end will sometimes give you a "key" which is needed to unlock other options at the choice point. Almost every bad choice will need to be selected to complete the game and most of them cut off pretty quickly. The story is actually very linear and it is not a "your choices matter" kind of game. After you finish the game, a few little epilogue stories unlock for you to view and you also unlock a "Revelations" mode you can turn on to see some hidden scenes and read different characters thoughts and chats that happened through the game.

**Characters**

There are 15 main villagers and aome side characters. They are almost all villagers with their own histories together and the game centers around the lore and history of the village as a whole. These include a stern old man and his teenage granddaughter, a superstitious old lady, the woman in charge of all of the village meals and her two teenage sons: one a genius and one a punk, the hard working man in love with the mother, a senile old man, an eccentric teen with strong intuition, the unlikeable village head, a clumsy religious figure, and the main love interest. In addition, there is also our protagonist, a journalist and her photographer, and a strange girl who wandered into the village.

**Review**

I simultaneously have a lot to say and nothing to say about this game. I think if I had to pick a word it would be "frustrating." I am a bit frustrated with the way the game chose to go about things. It fell short of its potential. Having a death loop game is a gun premise and, even if you aren't going to go all out with player control in the game a la Gnosia, I would have lived to have *some* output. There were very few times when you could actually make a choice in the game, reason for yourself, or try and put the pieces together on things like who to vote for. Instead you are just watching the main character do it all for you.

Something else I found frustrating was the inconsistencies. I am all for a mystery game that doesn't reveal all of its cards and hand waives the things that don't make sense, but Raging Loop went out if its way to try and reveal every piece of the puzzle, which made the inconsistencies all the more glaring. The characters had a ton of potential to he fleshed out and interesting and it fell short. The game even introduced the concept of characters changing their behaviour with their roles, but it didn't matter much. Again, there were a few choice points a bit over halfway through the game but the game does not let you fail. Picking the wrong option either ends the game very quickly or gives you a key to progress. There's no intertwining narratives that would make any of the choices mean anything. The last section of the game is the protagonist leaving the player out of the loop (hehe) while dragging them along the plot before they masterfully reveal all of the puzzle pieces.

I really wanted to like this game more than I did. It was good enough to finish and play, but it is not something that will stick with me or that I would highly recommend.

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

Mad Max (2015)

Developer: Avalanche Studios

Genre: Racing (but with combat and crafting), Open world

Platform: PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, XbOne

Why should you care: Mad Max came out the same year as Fury Road, probably hoping to capitalize on the hype train that the franchise was building. For those unfamiliar with the setting: you're driving around a post-apocalyptic wasteland in a car you build up piece by piece, running raiders off the road, scavenging scrap, clearing out camps. There also seems to be a fair bit of car customization going on - engine swaps, armor, mounted weapons being just some of that.

This genre is not really my cup of tea, so I'll leave further recommendations (or the opposite) for those who actually played the game. One interesting tidbit I noticed is that the same studio is responsible for the Just Cause series, which might be a plus or a minus for you - depending on how you feel about that series open world formula.

What is GotM?

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

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

July 2026's GotM theme: Desert - this theme is covering games primarily set in the desert. The desert setting needs to be the bulk of the game, or at least central to the game. Being one of many themed levels/areas doesn't count!

After seeing so many people putting bioshock in their top 10s best games list, I was curious what the hype was about and decided to buy a trilogy pack on switch when it was on sale (Bioshock, Bioshock 2 and Bioshock infinite). Full disclosure, I have played Bioshock Infinite when it came out, and I did enjoy it. The designs were great, the environments and atmosphere were exactly what I was into at the time, and from what I remember I did generally enjoy the gameplay feel.

Because so many people were saying that infinite didn't hold a candle to the originals, I had to try it at least once. So I booted up the game, and went for it, knowing that it was an old game, so it probably had a little jank to it. The environments were great, the atmosphere of going down to rapture for the first time is unique, I love all the storytelling in the details, the mystery of 'what the hell happened here and who is this guy that keeps talking to me' is intriguing. Even the soundscape constantly makes me feel like I'm being watched and is unsettling in its own right. A+ on that department.

What I couldn't get myself to enjoy though, is how the game feels to control. I was playing on a controller and every time I looked around there was this weird acceleration where you start out slow and then the camera suddenly shoots into high gear and whips around the room. This made aiming at enemies incredibly hard and clunky, and made me not want to use guns at all. Talking about enemies. Those guys show up from nowhere, and start battering you or shooting from across the room, while I try desperately to control my aim and shoot them to no avail. I know there's the tech of shooting lightning to stun them, but even that relies on you being able to aim properly. Then there's the healing button which I found myself pressing by mistake, making me use up my valuable [healing and mana] items. When I faced that big daddy for the first time, it really felt like I was just having to cheese the whole fight rather than actually beating him, because I still couldn't handle the controle properly.

All in all I wish this game got a remaster just in terms of controls, because the atmosphere, environmental storytelling and character designs are very intriguing to me, but the way I felt during every fight made is a bad experience overall.