Recent reviews by Citrinate

Just a really good game. The hidden gem of hidden gems. One of those rare games capable of leaving a lasting impression, as evidenced by this unprompted review I'm writing two years after playing it.

At times Elden Ring can feel so close to being a really good game. It's got all the pieces of a good game, but it's been put together the wrong way.

You play as one of the only characters with any sort of agency left in a dying world. Your task: to determine the future of this world by killing all of the actors in a story you're just catching the end of. Actors, who's only remaining involvement in their own story is to just sort of sit around and wait for you to kill them.

This story is such a blatant rehash of Dark Souls 1/2/3 that it feels foolish now to say I expected more, but I did. Given FromSoft had already shown a willingness to try something new in Sekiro, given George R. R. Martin's much marketed involvement, and given that this game isn't called "Dark Souls 4"; it was actually really easy to trick yourself into thinking we might get something a little different storywise. In typical Dark Souls fashion however, the story doesn't beg for your attention, so while it's hard to get too invested in it, it's also hard to get too annoyed by it.

In what was probably a joke, Steam users are labeling this game: "Relaxing". They're actually onto something. Half of the game is genuinely relaxing; the half where you're sitting on a horse.

There's an encounter near the start, right after you get your horse, where you're guided down a narrow corridor filled with archers. Probably the most dangerous situation you've come across so far, and then a Giant drops right on top of you. Your instinct is to run past. I've watched a number of people play through this section. They all run, and running works. The game teaches you early on that if you don't feel good about some fights you can just skip ‘em.

The amount of mobility you get from your horse makes you feel invincible. Nothing is fast enough to chase you down and ranged attacks are easily dodged. It's possible to get knocked off if you do take damage, but the amount of damage needed is high enough that it never happens outside of consensual combat. You're more likely to be accidentally dismounted when the game misreads a button press than to be forcibly removed from your horse. If you are dismounted, you can instantly resummon the horse with little penalty.

The open world is filled with Dark Souls stuff, but when you're on a horse it doesn't feel like Dark Souls. Early on you're told by an enemy to "Cower in fear. Of the night". It's unclear what was meant by this, because while there is a day/night cycle, the night doesn't feel any more dangerous. There’s a few unique bosses that only appear at night, but because you choose all of your battles these are more opportunities than threats. You can rest until daytime if you want, which I did, but only because it's easier to see during the day, and not because playing at night ruins the relaxing vibes.

The amazing power of the horse is too tempting not to use, but you're free to refuse it. The game might actually be more interesting without it. Most FromSoft games have issues like this, where feature X is poorly designed. Feedback from fans tends not to focus around improving X, but to instead declare: "X is a crutch for bad players. People who use X are playing the game wrong". The horse is different from X though, because "Dark Souls with a horse" is what we all signed up for.

When you came across an optional mini-boss in Sekiro, you wanted to kill it because you knew it had something you needed: health upgrades. In Elden Ring, optional bosses drop equipment and spells, but because there's so many ways to build a character, the most likely outcome is you'll get something you can't use. Killing optional enemies also gives you souls which can be used to level up your character, but so will killing non-optional enemies. Getting effectively nothing from optional content is discouraging, and it can only happen so many times before you decide to rely on the Wiki to tell you where to go.

Meanwhile, the items every character wants, flask upgrades, are left scattered around the surface of the open world, and are completely unguarded. Exploring the open world can easily become all about running around, snatching up all the items that were left out for you, enjoying the sights, and killing very little. After you're done exploring you'll want to continue with the main quest, but you'll run into a problem. While the game doesn't give you enough reasons to want to do optional content, it still expects you to do some arbitrary amount of it. Your experience forward will vary wildly depending on how much you've done.

While exploring I discovered a lone tower guarded by a few enemies. I cleared it out and climbed to the top. At the top there was a portal that teleported me into an empty castle keep. There was a bonfire next to where I appeared, and close to the bonfire was a boss. I put in a few failed attempts on the boss before deciding, "This isn't something I expected to find right now, I'll put it off until later". When I finally returned I was so strong that each of my light attacks took away 20% of his health. The boss died so fast that he almost didn't make it to his second phase. This was how I experienced one of Elden Ring's big baddies; one of the few bosses to be built up by the game's opening cinematic.

The developers can't know what level you're going to be fighting bosses at. They can only guess, and sometimes their guesses are very wrong. FromSoft's signature "tough but fair" boss fights might be here, but I didn't find them. Bosses in Elden Ring can feel too easy or too hard, but never just right. Even if the difficulty was spot on it would still feel wrong, because Elden Ring also uses a number of dirty tricks you'd only expect from an inexperienced developer producing a cheap Dark Souls knockoff.

I'll be exaggerating here, but only slightly. Every boss does too much damage and has too much health. Every boss has a frenzied AI, constantly attacking and never leaving themselves open for more than 1 or 2 of your light attacks. Every boss has attacks that will start, wait some arbitrary unit of time, and then deal damage. Every boss has an attack that will kill you from full health. Every boss with two phases doesn't really have two phases; it's just two boss fights in a row with the bonfire in-between taken out. You'll die more in this game than in any other FromSoft game, but you won't feel better when you win, because artificial difficulty just isn't as rewarding as the real thing. In what feels like an admission of guilt, you now respawn right next to most bosses when you die.

The two worst boss fights FromSoft has ever made are in this game. Anyone who’s beaten the game already knows exactly who I mean. These are the sorts of bosses that, if you only knew they existed, you'd feel pressured to build your character around, because they're not optional. These are the sorts of bosses that would ruin any section of game they're placed in, and one of them is at the very end.

Elden Ring features a new summon mechanic where you can choose from a variety of NPC minions to level up and use during boss fights. Going in I decided not to use them. I wanted to play the game the "right" way. Halfway through you’ll run into the first of the two worst bosses, and that's when my attitude towards summons changed.

While summons might've broken previous Souls games, summons fix Elden Ring. Not all the way mind you, but it helps. Summons in Elden Ring are meant to be used liberally and without shame, because that's just what you're meant to do, and because not using them doesn't make you a better or more interesting person. Most importantly, summons are used to unlock the game's only good ending. In what is clearly a feature and not a bug, using summons during the very final boss will sometimes break the AI completely. The boss just sort of sits there, and waits for you to kill it.

Cyberpunk might not run on 2013 hardware, but it still feels like a game that could've been released 7 years ago. Far from the next stage in the evolution of open world games, it's just one more for the pile.

Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle, individual levels tied together with tarmac, masquerading as an open world. If you're as tired of this formula as I am, Cyberpunk will do nothing to win you back. I avoided as much of the hype surrounding this game as I could. I went in with very little information, and I don't think my expectations were too high. All I wanted was just a little something new, but I didn't find that here. It feels like something made entirely from pieces of games I've already played before, both in its design and story.

I knew nothing about the existing Cyberpunk franchise going in, and still don't. So many of its ideas have been explored elsewhere that it's unclear what this game gains from its source material. Despite being set in an anarcho-capitalist hellscape and partnering you with a left-wing extremist, this game is, paradoxically, not very political. The main focus is instead on surviving this world rather than challenging it, which might be disappointing if you were expecting something deeper. There's still plenty of good story moments and characters, but this doesn't feel like an introduction to a rich world the way the Witcher games were, and it didn't leave me wanting more when it was over.

My attitude towards side quests in general is that if they don't pique my interest, then I don't do them. The game's method of trying to tease you into side questing through short text messages and phone calls usually meant there wasn't a lot of bait on the hook. This, combined with the strong sense of urgency the main story constantly asks you to give it, resulted in me doing very few side quests over my 30 hour playtime. This destined me to get the game's bad ending, and it felt like I was being punished for taking the main story seriously. I've now heard positive things about the side quests, but the ending left me soured, and even though there's plenty left for me to do, I just don't feel like doing it anymore. If I could change one thing about my playthrough, I wouldn't have given the main story so much attention.

I played on the "Hard" difficulty and would describe the gameplay as looter-shooter-lite. There's health bars and floating damage numbers, and your inventory is filled with guns, but it never gets too crazy number-wise. Enemies get stronger at a gradual enough rate that you can hold onto a weapon for a really long time, and bullet sponges don't really exist outside of boss battles. Character progression is handled through attribute and skill points, which are easy enough to fully grasp on a first playthrough, and intertwined in such a nice way that I didn't feel the urge to horde either of them.

Item progression is gated by money and a stat called "Street Cred". Street Cred only seems to exist to stop you from purchasing certain items until you've done the appropriate amount of grinding. Money is hard to come by, and you won't get enough of it to buy some of the more interesting items if you stick too closely to the main story like I did. There's a simple crafting system, and while the game showers you in crafting materials, it otherwise doesn't do much to convince you it's something you ought to be doing.

My gameplay style was Stealth, which in this game is tied to the "Cool" attribute. That might set certain expectations, however while encounters do feel like they appropriately accommodate for stealth gameplay, they don't feel like they're appropriately designed for it. The options and challenges provided for stealth players are just too few and underwhelming. Too often the game would set up scenarios that seemed to have no obvious stealth approach. I'd observe the situation for a while and try to piece together a plan, but then wonder, "maybe I can just walk around all of this and go in through a back door?". The back door strategy always works, but I never felt cool for using it.

While a level might have multiple entrances, once inside your options for navigation tend to be limited. Occasionally there'll be a locked door you can open if you've invested enough attribute points, but even these are surprisingly rare. Security cameras should be an extra caution for stealth players, but they can always be disabled from a safe distance at no cost. There's a non-lethal option, but it seems to exist only for role-playing. The game won't reward you if you complete an objective without being seen or without killing. There's a mechanic for hiding bodies, but it felt broken, and every "body found" alert I got felt like a bug. Certain enemies might pose unique threats in combat, but outside combat they'll operate like plain enemies. Nearly every enemy can be killed with a stealth takedown, and so from a stealth perspective they all feel the same, even the bosses. The tutorial hints at special enemies that would break out of your stealth attacks, but I never encountered any of these in my 30 hours.

Bosses are super aggressive and battles tend to start with you already in combat. You wouldn't know by looking at them, but boss battles do allow for stealth. A stealth kill on every boss plays out exactly the same way: run away until they lose aggro, sneak up from behind for a takedown, and repeat until dead. The stealth boss kills are so disappointing and so poorly executed that playing this way feels more like an exploit than an intended strategy.

For me, the Deus Ex games set the mark for stealth gameplay, and Cyberpunk misses that mark by a wide margin. By the end of the game I'd transitioned away from stealth and into a long range sniper setup which I had a lot more fun using. If I could change a second thing about my playthrough, I wouldn't have invested so heavily into stealth.

I did encounter some obvious bugs, but none were so bad that I couldn't look past them.

There's a lot of negativity surrounding this game, but I'm also seeing people who got a lot more out of it than I did, and I'm genuinely envious of them. I'm left with the feeling that I just so happened to pick the worst possible way to play Cyberpunk, and that it deserves a second chance. Cyberpunk didn't surprise me, but it still succeeded in holding my attention and keeping me entertained for 30 hours. It's probably hard to tell given how negative this review is, but I did enjoy Cyberpunk. I just might have enjoyed it more 7 years ago.

It's widely regarded that Shenmue was ahead of its time when it was released in 2000. Yet in 2020, a future where open world games are plentiful, I think it still holds true.

Shenmue 3 is a game that follows the formula of its predecessors so closely that it feels like something out of a time capsule from the early 2000s. Too many open world games have gone in the direction of creating big empty violent playgrounds with just enough filler content to pad out their playtimes and give customers their $60 worth. Shenmue 3 contrasts this with an open world that's small, detailed, grounded in realism, steeped in mundanity, and all with a homely feel. It succeeds in creating that world, but fails to use it to its full potential.

There's no hiding that Shenmue 3 is a bad game, and I'd have a hard time recommending it while looking a person in the eye. It's even a pretty bad Shenmue game. The hybrid health/stamina system is not a welcome addition, the combat is a step backwards, and the story fails to clear the low bar the previous games set out for it. The dialogue still sounds like it was both poorly translated and poorly written, new story elements join old ones that still don't make sense, and side content still lacks depth and quantity.

This game can be easily criticized, but there's undeniable passion and effort here, giving its flaws a campy feel that you can still find enjoyment in if you're open to it. I do, however, believe Shenmue 3 does enough right that I'm not only enjoying it just because I can laugh at it.

The game is segmented into days, in the morning you'll open your notebook and be given a main goal for the day that'll slightly advance the story if you choose to do it. Even if you finish the day's key item, you'll often get free time to spend on optional mini-games and side quests, or you can just skip to the next day. There's a time limit for completing the game, but it's generous enough that no one should reach it naturally. The game won't even tell you it exists unless you're getting dangerously close. A different game would've told you near the start, giving every moment a sense of urgency, but that's not what Shenmue 3 is.

Shenmue 3 is very slow, and very repetitive. It'll happen multiple times that the big thing you do for a day is something mundane, something like catching chickens. Yet even without the threat of impending doom, Shenmue 3 still does a good job of making you think of time as a resource, and getting you to care about how you spend it. You'll feel a certain way knowing you could've spent the day in the noble pursuit of martial arts, but instead you were out save scumming the gambling mini-games. You'll go home to your platonic roommate, she'll ask you how it is you make your money, and you'll lie.

It's easy to fool oneself into thinking this game's world is deeper than it actually is. Problems within the world are solved intuitively by engaging with the world. The result is an environment that feels less video-gamey than bigger budget alternatives, even if there's less to do here.

This isn't a game that relies on maps and quest markers. If you need to know something you ask someone, anyone, literally anyone. Shenmue 3 has lots of NPCs, and most of them have voiced responses for nearly every step of your main quest, sometimes multiple responses, and not in a cheap "go over there" kind of way either. NPCs will frequently respond in ways that are unique and explicitly referencing of the thing you asked about, sometimes they'll even throw in a line or two of flavor text. Having NPCs be this useful makes them memorable.

All of the NPCs have names, and they look and sound unique enough that I never noticed any obvious clones. Many of them have unique daily routines, and you'll see them often enough at different parts of their routines to begin to piece together stories for them. It's really pleasing to play an open world game filled with NPCs wandering around, and being able to pick a face out of the crowd and think to yourself "hey I know that guy!". There are limits however, and in terms of actual interactions you can have with NPCs, most are limited to only the main-quest-related dialogue options.

Of all the characters, the star in this world is Shenhua, a character only just introduced at the very end of Shenmue 2, whose grand role in the story is so far a mystery. Each day is book-ended by interactions with Shenhua, and she'll be the only character you can talk to in what this game's idea of branching dialogue trees is. These interactions quickly became the highlights of my days, and the later half of the game suffers as she fades into the background. She'll still accompany you, but nightly conversations will be replaced with early bedtimes, and the peering in of windows as one sleeps.

Ultimately, this game has two sides to it which appealed to me, the one being that it's "so bad it's good". It's from this side that I was amused upon hearing, after almost two decades, that Shenmue 3 wouldn't be a grand farewell for the series. Yu Suzuki has a vision, and he will not compromise. That's not to say that commercial and critical failure hasn't at all tempered his expectations. The originally planned 16 chapters of the Shenmue epic has been refined down to a modest 11, still enough to get us to a possible Shenmue 5. I was amused by the ending we got in Shenmue 3 and I'm eagerly awaiting a possible sequel.

The other side of Shenmue 3 lies in the feeling that somewhere within the Shenmue formula there's a great game. Even if none of the Shenmues fully realize it, if they're the only ones out there trying, then they're the closest we have.