Recent reviews by GentleHoovy

TL;DR: Papers, please is fantastic game where you get to finally live the dream of escaping to a class-8 dwelling in the heart of an authoritarian dystopia, while being forced to solve ethical dilemmas each day in a job you didn’t choose, to keep yourself and your family alive. You don’t even get paid for it. This game is a gruelling but rewarding (and surprisingly addictive) experience that saps your concentration like a leech. It’s bad if you have ADHD, and worse if you have Dyslexia. Get it.

Steam deck review: The steam deck is possibly the only handheld console on earth that can manage to actually play this, thanks to the trackpads. But still, just don’t – it’s twice as hard and you’ll get awful cramps. Other than that, it runs fine.

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Papers, Please is a game that will immediately stand out to you the moment it’s booted up. You get hit by a tidal wave of patriotic music almost immediately, without any visible way to turn it down. You eventually surrender yourself to the game, and after 4 austere lines of text, you’re thrown into the thick of the game without much help – much like the poor guy you’re playing as.

For a man essentially in charge of two differently coloured stamps, you’ll be quick to realize how much responsibility you have – your actions can lead to anything from bad press to a full-blown epidemic. Combine this with a game where your speed matters arguably more than your effectiveness, and the need to feed a growing family, and the result you get is possibly the most stress inducing 86mb you’ll ever install on your hard drive.

By this point, Lucas Pope is well known for expecting his players to have a sharp eye for detail – and papers please expects no less of you. The game expects you to find slight flaws in everything and throws an evolving and increasingly complex set of paperwork (like any good bureaucracy) at you to scour as fast as possible. This game will turn you from a disorganized and forgetful wagie into a robot, one who has memorised every detail they can and is able to scan and cross reference paperwork in seconds. The game is deliberately reticent in telling you anything it can get away with omitting, leaving you suspicious of every detail. It starves you of space and aid, forcing you to come up with the most efficient systems you can muster with your space and tools to get people through the checkpoint faster. Early on, I scoffed at the game offering me an office upgrade that would replace having to click on a corner of the screen with the spacebar, thinking it was just a waste of time. Now, I don’t know if I could live without that upgrade.

The obtuse, minimalistic nature of Papers, Please is a bit of a double edged sword. Under time pressure, figuring out how to report discrepancies you already know exist can be annoying and waste a lot of time. The game never truly presents its rules to you, so this makes it hard to truly know when you can circumvent them, especially when under time pressure. Making matters worse, the game is less forgiving with time wastage rather than mistakes – especially if you get hung up on the details mentioned above. The game for me felt impossible to finish, at first – I originally picked it up in 2019 but couldn’t make it past the first two weeks, so gave up. I would appreciate a system where you earn less “per passport” but lose more per mistake. Additionally, the lack of most traditional game settings, such as volume etc is a bit of a terrible choice in general. I’ve had to leave discord calls just to play this game because of how loud it is.

Surprisingly, Papers, Please is able to adeptly tell stories through its medium. I love how consistently this game changes and breaks its own rules, without ever truly diverting from what it is at its core. There will be a lot of interesting characters you meet at the Grestin checkpoint, some of them loveable and some of them not. Side objectives routinely appear and make each of the 30 days different, or special, in a way. The fact the game has 20 endings, few of which are similar to one another, should clue you into how much the game can branch out and change based on your choices. Some of the stories are incredibly compelling, and Lucas Pope once again amazes at me at how inanimate sprites of faces are able to get me so invested in their lives. Something also has to be said about the realism with which this game manages to capture the realities of work like this, especially given Papers, Please is such a satirical take on the soviet union that it makes Death of Stalin look like a documentary.


Papers, Please is not for the faint of heart. It’s not an easy or pleasant game to play, but it is surprisingly fun for what it is. If this is your day job, you don’t like reading, or have dyslexia, I can imagine that sawing your own leg off might be a preferable alternative to playing through this game. Hell, even the ingame NPCs routinely remind you that they don’t envy you in the slightest. If you don’t fit into the one of the categories above (or you do and want to play anyway) and think you might enjoy sorting through paperwork (that isn’t your tax returns) in your spare time, then I implore you to give this little gem a go. Glory to Arstotzka, comrade!



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TL;DR: SOMA suffers from the classic Frictional ailment of fantastic storytelling and atmosphere that is held back by incredibly dry gameplay (I do realize the irony of calling this game dry). Still, this game is a good example of how gameplay isn’t the be all and end all of what makes a game great. SOMA tackles some novel existential questions in an easy to understand way. The story is gripping, the world is fascinating, and the ending makes trudging through the ocean's empty seascapes and frustrating encounters absolutely worth it. Give this game a go!

Steam deck review: It runs well, but SOMA is definitely suited to a big screen, so play docked if you can. The more immersed you are in this game, the better.

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This review is gonna be a short one and frustrating one for me, as I’m almost entirely unable to talk about the genius of the writing without spoiling the game. I’m a complete amateur when it comes to philosophy, but I feel like this game was able to help me understand some very nuanced existential topics in a way that wasn’t belittling or confusing. Although SOMA originally seems like it reaches for the same exhausted old topics that every other piece of science-fiction media resorts to (are robots… actually people? I want my reddit gold now), it soon veers off into a completely new, very unexpected, and enormously refreshing direction. The choices and ideas presented were enough to spark heated debates between my partner and I on what is right, and the ending brought long nights reflecting on how romantic ideas triumph over logical ones in our brains.
The story’s vulnerability to spoilers means I genuinely can’t say much more, but if you enjoy a light side of existential horror with your doritos, then I recommend picking this game up. It might be one of the only games I’ve played that handles philosophy well, which is such a strong point.

In addition to the grander topics SOMA tackles, its immediate story is just as powerful. Characters feel less typecast and crazy but feel like a bunch of intelligent and kind-hearted coworkers driven to extremes by slight philosophical divides, and other context I can’t speak about. The story hooked me like one of the many fish you will see during your time playing SOMA and refused to let go until the very end. The problem is, like with real fishing, after I got hooked, I had to go through a long, painful, and pointless struggle.



I’m not sure if the OG Amnesia emboldened Frictional too much, or they genuinely don’t know how to make games, but SOMA suffers from the same problem as every other frictional game post-penumbra and pre-Bunker: it’s a walking simulator with the occasional puzzle or badly programmed enemy. I understand the idea of taking agency away from the player to heighten fear, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at least give me something to do! Every time this game feels like it’s going to introduce a new mechanic and finally become fun, that mechanic disappears as fast as it was introduced. The only consistent gameplay features are puzzles so easy they feel like they belong in a Lego game, and a swathe of enemies that are scary once, and annoying thereafter. SOMA even wins the award for the worst enemy Frictional may have ever designed, a monster that hurts you for looking at it, which of course is one of the more common enemies. I genuinely considered playing SOMA on easy mode and fully committing to it being the walking simulator it’s trying so hard to pretend it isn’t. Enemies are inconsistent, janky, and unpredictable, and running for your life is the best option for survival nine out of ten times. Even with its incredible story and my insatiable curiosity about SOMA’s world, there were many times I found it hard to continue, knowing the frustration that lay between me and my goal. This is almost never how you want to make your players feel, and it's holding me back from truly singing the game's praises. Maybe the intense friction between awesome story, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ gameplay was Frictional trying to be meta and live up to their name.

Luckily, the gameplay wasn’t bad enough to ruin everything. Frictional’s object manipulation and physics engine is fun to mess around with, there are a couple fun enemy encounters, and some of the puzzles were fun, at least. The game also occasionally presents you with interesting choices, somewhat making up for your lack of agency everywhere else, although these choices seldom have any impact on the story. Maybe the fact that it is very short helped it out, but I can’t help but feel SOMA is a strong example of how gameplay isn’t all that matters to a game’s quality, as I still wholeheartedly recommend this game regardless of its flaws.


Overall, SOMA is a well-written, thought provoking, and absorbing slog. If you want your horror game to be full of tense, teeth-gritting moments, SOMA is not for you. If, instead, you’re happy to forgo a bit of time and fun for SOMA’s brilliance in writing, then I highly recommend you play this game asap. Let’s just hope that coin toss lands the right way up.




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TL;DR:
The Looker is an extremely rare example of a parody videogame - that is a game that spends 100% of its efforts just making fun of another game, and what a parody it is. This game captures everything stupid, pretentious and odd about the witness and makes fun of it masterfully, while ultimately paying homage to its source material. Even had you not played the Witness, I'd strongly recommend trying this game out, it's that good. The best part is that the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who made the Witness hates this game. All is as it should be.

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The Looker is one of the sparingly few examples of a parody game - that is a game that dedicates 100% of its time parodying something else. What makes it even more special, is that it's a phenomenally good parody. This isn't made by somebody with a vague interest in the Witness, this is made by somebody with hundreds of hours in that game, someone so engrossed in the community that they know all of the memes, inside jokes, and quirks of the source material. This game isn't just a parody either, it's a full blown ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and one of the most cosmic-brained ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I've ever engaged with, at that. The fact someone sat down and spent the dozens, hundreds of hours it takes to make a game making this thing still blows my mind.

I can't speak much more about this game's humour without going into specifics, but jokes like these can easily be spoiled, so instead, I'll just tell you to trust me and try the game out. The best part is you don't even need to have played the Witness


The most surprising thing about the Looker is that it's just a damn good game, parody of not. This game pays such a great homage to the source material and captures how incredible the Witness itself is. The puzzles are enormously creative and the puzzle premises become wilder and wilder as you go along. The final puzzle, fittingly the most impressive, managed to completely blow me away and was perhaps even more surprising than anything the actual game of the witness managed to pull off. This said - the Looker is still short and not without its flaws. Some puzzles are certainly of questionable quality, and one could argue the entire game's existence is owed to another title. That still doesn't stop it from being a damn good puzzler, though.

What's even more surprising is that a lot of the jokes hold up, regardless of whether you played the Witness. This game isn't just a funny parody, it's just funny as ♥♥♥♥ anyway. The humour is always perfectly timed, and manages to be just as zany, creative and out of left field as the game's puzzles. Of course, having played the source material just makes it that much better, and the witness is a great game - so if you want to play the witness and have found this game first - GO DO THAT.

Perhaps the most crazy, 5D chess part of the Looker is the fact that I think the whole reason this game has been made was to piss off the Witness' creator, Jonathan Blow(hard). Blow is a man so far up his own arse that the person who manages to get him out should be named king Arthur - someone who is an undisputed genius, yet is also incredibly pretentious and allergic to criticism. The Looker manages to straddle the thin line between poking fun and light criticism at the artist, while making a loving homage to the art, and that's probably the greatest of all the Looker's qualities.


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Dagon is a fun little walking simulator that retells one of Lovecraft's earliest published works, a story that really sets the scene for the style Lovecraft would embrace in his later years. It's notoriously difficult to put Lovecraft's words onto paper, but Dagon succeeds at this surprisingly well, capturing the essence of this story in a neat little bubble.
Dagon will not offer much to you other than a good introduction to Lovecraft's work - and in the case you're already familiar with the story, seeing a visual interpretation of it is refreshing. The secrets hidden around the game are fun to find, and surprisingly well hidden - and provide interesting context I was not aware of about the story and its author.
Lovecraft was, to put it lightly, a divisive figure - and my one criticism of this game is that it sometimes slips out of respect and into reverence for the author, with any acknowledgement of the original author's abhorrent views scrubbed clean. This certainly cast its own shadow over my enjoyment of the game, even as someone who thoroughly enjoys Lovecraft's work, when it's not trying to convince me that Hitler had a point.
The game is free, short, and an excellent introduction/representation of Lovecraft's work, so although it is nothing particularly special, and far from perfect, it's still worth your time. Just don't go insane.


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TL;DR:

I genuinely don’t understand where the love for Bastion comes from, and the quality of this game almost made me reconsider playing any other games by supergiant. Other than a mildly entertaining combat system, Bastion had remarkably little to offer, failing spectacularly at the things it attempted to do. A narrator annoying enough to warrant muting, wildly inconsistent balancing, and a generally directionless and morally questionable story left me feeling swindled out of my time and money. But at least the game is somewhat short if you insist on giving it a go.

Steam deck review:

This game feels made to be portable, and its existence as an IOS title all but confirms this. Even with the option of a big screen, I think a smaller format suits this game well, so the steam deck is an ideal console for it. No complaints on optimization or controls either.

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Bastion markets itself as “redefining storytelling in games”, and from the looks of the game’s status as an “indie darling”, it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t had an impact. The crown jewel of this innovation is lauded as the game’s reactive narrator, who has something to say for pretty much everything you do. Although I acknowledge the enormous effort writing something like this takes, and the fact that a lot of games might owe Bastion for this idea (Disco Elysium, Baldur’s Gate 3, for example), I can’t say I liked it here. The narrator seems intent on both explaining every last thing the protagonist chooses to do, almost as if to make a point that the devs put a lot of effort into it. He goes about this in a more than mildly infuriating manner, constantly using a tone that sounds like an off-brand Scorsese movie narrator. The narration got so tiring so quickly that I had to completely mute him, and switch to subtitles as soon as my first playthrough was complete. If this was really the best Bastion had to offer, it wasn’t a good start.

The story and writing of bastion feels like it too was wrecked by The Calamity along with the world it narrates. I struggled to form any emotional connection to any of the four characters, no less because their one-dimensional personalities were being told through the sardonic voice of the narrator. Ideas are introduced minutes before they immediately become central to the story, giving the player no chance to think about the world or where the story will go next (the choice at the end, for example, is only presented to you right before you finish the last level). Worst of all, it’s morally questionable: how do you feel about committing a minor genocide to what is seemingly another race of people just because “they’re too stupid to understand what you’re trying to do”. Sure, this would be fun if I was playing Stellaris, but I’m supposed to be the hero here. I bring this up, because I feel that even if there was no narration, the story is bad enough that trying to engage with it becomes annoying, so I chose instead to simply dismiss and ignore it.

On its own, a story so bad it’s actively annoying is a death knell for story-driven games, and even with the best gameplay in the world, Bastion could not recover. Sadly, bastion is far from having the best gameplay in the world, either.



Unlike the story, I didn’t immediately give up on having a fun time playing Bastion when I began. The combat in this game – at the very baseline level – is kind of fun. The weapon variety is good and between the tonics, idols and skills, there’s a lot of different approaches to your average scuffle.
Or so I thought. You see the thing is, the further you get into this game, the more you realize how mediocre its combat is. Build variety is significantly tightened the harder the game gets, until at max difficulty only a couple of weapons are even remotely useable. Entire mechanics are functionally rendered useless by gross oversights in later game stages: parrying, for example, is directional and autotargeting, making it useless against enemy groups of more than 2 (I.e. most of your combat). The idol system, while interesting at a base level, tends to make half of your arsenal pointless in later stages. Tying tonics to levels is equally as baffling – meaning when you actually need to think about which tonics to bring, you are able to bring them all anyway.
The creatures you bring this arsenal up against is just as mediocre. Enemy “variety” consists of multiple versions of the same enemies with slightly different attack patterns and colour schemes, and some enemies are remarkably annoying to deal with no matter your skill level. Although I appreciate the low-budget nature of bastion, if the devs can pay a voice actor to describe the main character’s movements with the assiduity of an overprotective parent, they can do a bit better than scaling up a jpeg, slapping a green hue on it, and giving it a nigh undodgeable spinning attack.

Even the finer details are complete misses in bastion. The art style is certainly pretty, but it’s a crime to put as much visual clutter as Bastion has in a game where fall damage is your biggest opponent. Even the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ music sucked. Apart from a couple of decent tracks, the bastion OST is repetitive, forgettable and sometimes even actively annoying.


I don’t have much else to say about this game, apart from the promise that this isn’t my last dance with Supergiant. Although it’s fair to say I did not enjoy this game, I can appreciate it as a polished work of art and not a lazy, soulless cash grab. I still look forward to engaging with Hades, Pyre and Transistor, and anything else Supergiant puts out sometime in the future. If you love Supergiant enough, this game is short and cheap enough to warrant buying, but to anyone else somewhat unsure, my answer is a resounding no.



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TL;DR: NieR: Automata is the perfect illustration of why I desperately want a “mixed” option available for steam reviews. My enjoyment of this game was akin to a rollercoaster, one that went through highs and lows but ultimately leaves you questioning whether the time and money you spent on it was really worth it. NieR automata has all the qualities and makings of a masterpiece, but feels hopelessly fumbled when it comes to the most crucial parts, which makes this review all the more difficult to write. Keep in mind that while this review smashes NieR Automata to pieces, I still think the game was a decent title, and a good JRPG. It could just have been a whole lot more than that.

Steam deck review:
It runs perfectly fine, had a couple of frame issues but nothing serious – It’s almost worth playing at 30 anyway as the cutscenes are locked to that framerate. This game does, however, warrant being played on a big screen, in an immersive environment. Try and prioritise that if you can.

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I have a troubled history with NieR:Automata - I've tried many times in the past to get through it, before inevitably losing interest. I kept coming back, simply on the wider internet's promise that the game would eventually get better. Now, with my right to an opinion in the form of a 100% and the game finally behind me, I can safely say that it never really did

Automata is one of those games that can trick you into thinking it’s finished, when you’re actually less than halfway through. For the uninitiated, NieR games are split into stories told over multiple “endings”. In Automata, this story is told from multiple perspectives, some of them happening concurrently, while others leapfrog each other or even retell the same events from another angle. I generally love it when stories are told this way, as they lend themselves well to challenging the assumptions of the player, while bringing interesting plot twists and developments. These kinds of stories also lend themselves well to videogames, which can tell longer and more nuanced stories without requiring ungodly amounts of assets to do so. Sadly, Automata’s story layout feels like a consequence of the latter reasoning, not the former. Many of the “different perspectives” fail to provide context to the story, or bring any kind of doubt to the assumptions you make at first. One character’s storyline, in particular, is just a worse rehash of the previous storyline, with occasional out of context cutscenes sprinkled in, and a couple new, but very underwhelming, mindless action sequences. The consequence of this is that the switches become tiresome, and feel like an artificial way of fluffing out the playtime to make the game seem larger than it actually is.

Story layout aside, the actual writing of Automata leaves a lot to be desired too. NieR Automata makes the risky play of tackling philosophical topics (something that in my opinion usually backfires when attempted in games) – in particular, the fun topics of nihilism and existentialism. The problem with the game tackling these topics is that it constantly feels like it’s trying to manipulate you into believing a certain worldview. Characters often seem to go through Olympic-grade mental gymnastics to finish at the conclusion of suicide, making the game sometimes feel like a parody of a philosophical piece rather than a serious one.
Cheap attempts at manipulating the player’s emotions is maybe my biggest problem with Automata as a whole, and it trickles down deep: even things like the worldbuilding is affected.

Much like a lazy D&D DM will invent rules to keep his campaign on track, the rules of Automata’s world are constantly subject to change: Androids will make a big fuss about irreversible death, before being revived with all their memories mere hours later. Machines will be seemingly in the process of discovering language for the first time, before it’s revealed that they were actually able to speak like normal humans hundreds of years ago. If anything, NieR Automata has made me appreciate the power of good worldbuilding: The game’s complete lack of it made it incredibly hard to form a connection to the story, when I knew the rules could be rewritten whenever needed.

Regardless of the serious writing shortcomings, I have to appreciate the sheer amount of effort that went into trying to make it work. When the writers manage to pull what they wanted to do off, the storytelling shines: Heart wrenching moments – like discovering the story of Simone, or watching 9S slowly get consumed by grief – shone like diamonds in the general rough of the rest of the game’s story. If a bit more time had been taken on editing, this game’s brilliance would have been incontestable.


Similar to the game’s writing, the general design of NieR Automata is plagued with issues that bring it crashing down. I can’t talk about the gameplay problems though, without first mentioning how fun this game can be at times. A lot of the design in Automata is flawless: Great build variety with a fun build system, awesome animation detail, and really fun combat with a load of variety. I also have to mention the MUSIC. Not only are the individual tracks in this game phenomenal, but the music is incredibly dynamic, with different layers, vocals, styles kicking in when needed. The mad lads even recorded every song in chiptune – which slides in like butter whenever you start hacking an enemy.

When these things come together in the right way – as they often do, the game is untouchable. The bombastic prologue of this game comes to mind in particular, a masterclass of how to open a videogame while getting the player immediately hooked. The enormously frustrating thing about NieR Automata, is even with all of these amazing ingredients, the final dish just didn’t work.

I touched briefly on the brilliance of this game’s music – but what I didn’t mention is that the dynamic music system doesn't work properly. Usually, your first visit to each area will introduce you to the track perfectly, but the moment you return for sidequests, you’ll be trapped with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ combination of ambient and vocals, or just a low backing track. Some songs you won’t ever get to hear properly, as they’ll only play for “emotional impact” at the end of a sidequest, before immediately being overridden by whatever you do next.
And on the topic of sidequests, what a disappointment. I genuinely don’t think I can recall a game where I’ve dreaded seeing the red “uncompleted quest” dots appear quite as much. How can you expect to engage your player with each side character when their quests invariably consist of doing enormously mundane tasks: Fetch quests, running across the map over and over, and one where you literally have to comb an entire desert for hidden items.
Even the combat has glaring issues. Enemy balance in this game sometimes appears to consist of just giving enemies unbelievable amounts of HP, while not making them any harder to fight, which means many of the game’s more “difficult” fights consist of you senselessly chipping away at a health bar for a few minutes without having to do much else.

If you’ll spare me a final analogy, playing NieR Automata is much like panning for gold: Even though the great majority of your time is spent sifting through mud, occasionally you come across a nugget of something so great it makes the whole experience worth it. I just wish I could say that in the end I had managed to find a little more gold in this beloved game. Maybe the real reason it’s so popular is 2B’s butt, after all.


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TL;DR: Celeste is one of those games so good that it breaks your limitations in taste, being one of the only platformers I actually enjoy in a genre I normally avoid like the angry ghost of a hotel manager. I genuinely have nothing bad to say about Celeste, it simply doesn’t do anything wrong. Just keep in mind that although this game is supposedly about overcoming anxiety and grief, those are the two emotions that would best describe my feelings when thinking about the harder challenges this game has to offer.

Steam deck review: It runs perfectly, and with its excellent haptic design the experience may even be better than on a desktop PC. My only gripe is that of generally playing with a controller – this game requires some rapid and precise inputs towards the harder parts of the game (we’re talking C-sides and farewell). Controller is just not that capable of fast changes in direction or input chaining as rapid and as precisely as a keyboard. Towards the end of the game, I’d say 1 in 10 deaths were due to a mis-aimed input, or not being able to move the stick fast enough (I died over 16000 times total; you do the math). If you’re planning a 100% or at least on finishing the DLC, may God save your poor soul getting that keyboard and mouse muscle memory might just make it that much easier for you.

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I’m gonna get the obvious part of this review out of the way first. This game is hard. You are going to die. A lot. What makes this fact less of a hurdle, and more of an asset, is how smooth Celeste’s difficulty curve is. There are a couple of peaks and troughs (*Cough* C7 *Cough*), but for the most part, the game’s difficulty increases at roughly the same pace as your ability. The death animation and reset is quick, and the checkpoints are (with one NOTABLE exception) numerous, so you rarely get stuck bashing your head against the same wall for a long time, and rather the game’s difficulty adds a general feeling of resistance and struggle during each level, much akin to the constant struggle of climbing a real mountain. The game has accessibility options but unless you need them, I’d keep it as it was designed. The story doesn’t hit the same if you breeze through everything.


Although it’s easy to forget it during the endgame grind, Celeste is not a pure gameplay-focused game. Its story is not just important, it’s all-encompassing. Madeline, the main character (no, she isn’t called Celeste lol) Is somehow a strong character in her own right whilst also being a vessel for the player to place themselves. Famously, Celeste fans knew Madeline was trans before her creator did – and that just goes to show the diversity of experiences she can represent.

Madeline isn’t the only metaphor, either. Pretty much all of Celeste hinges around the classic metaphor of climbing a mountain to overcome mental health difficulties. Although often overused, it’s absolutely spot on here. And what a mountain it is. Mount Celeste is described as "a strange place" in the first few minutes of the game, A place that can magically transform its metaphors into real manifestations. The same metaphors are reflected in the world design, gameplay, even the level design: Madeline’s introspection and untangling of emotions happens within a disorienting labyrinth of mirrors and darkness, her fight against her self-doubt within a ridge where the wind constantly pushes you back.

Most impressive of all is that this story is married perfectly with Celeste's gameplay, like a pairing of fine wine and cheese, where neither overtakes the other (as so often happens in even great titles), but the two are working together to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Any fine dining establishment puts extra thought into the details: a good plate, table, décor – and Celeste doesn’t disappoint here either.


One of the things I never see mentioned in reviews of Celeste is the level of fine tuning and polish that went into it. Madeline is a breeze to control – She’s fast but not floaty, snappy but not jarringly so. The game introduces mechanic after mechanic yet keeps the control scheme simple – letting you gain the much-needed muscle memory much faster than games throwing new buttons at you every few hours. The graphical design is this simplistic, pixel art design that manages to communicate everything effectively without clutter, and the sound design is crisp, detailed and effective. The game has a staggering amount of depth though, with hidden mechanics so complex you only get tutorials for them in endgame levels.

Finally, I won’t get away with writing this review without mentioning the game’s gorgeous soundtrack, music that – just like everything else, has had a staggering amount of attention to detail put in. It ebbs and wanes with the level, changing to suit the atmosphere perfectly without becoming tiresome or jarring (maybe excepting a couple B-side tracks). Some parts of Celeste use their music to time the movements of enemies, obstacles, or to even create entirely rhythm-based sections.


Celeste kept its focus on quality throughout every aspect, while still managing to become a long, elaborate, and challenging experience with a beautiful and mature story – whilst never becoming tedious or overbearing. It’s no wonder that this game is listed almost everywhere as one of the best games of the previous decade, and you’d be doing yourself a massive disservice for not picking it up immediately. If you’re ready to brave the climb that has driven many a player insane, that is.


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TL;DR: Deep Rock Galactic sets the bar for everything a cooperative shooter should be. It’s a game that pushes teamwork above all else, and its ability to create lasting bonds through this choice is fantastic. It’s a game with a personality so endearing, it’s nigh impossible to resist falling in love, and joining the cult that is the game’s community. Finally, underneath all the goofiness, DRG is just a damn good horde shooter with nigh infinite replayability and wildly customizable builds. It’s even fun solo! If you have the small amount of money this game costs, and either free time, friends, or preferably both, you’ll want to pick this up. ROCK AND STONE!

Steam deck review:

DRG has native controller support that is excellent, so the game is certainly playable, especially since the trackpad can emulate mouse well. That said, the game runs surprisingly poorly at the moment, needing to be set to low graphics to run at a decent framerate. The game’s frantic nature also doesn’t lend itself too well to a controller format, with scout in particular becoming much tricker to play without access to a keyboard and mouse. I still play it on mine and can vouch that it works in a pinch.

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At its heart(stone), DRG is entirely built around the concept of camaraderie. Teamwork is built so fundamentally into the heart of the game that even the community’s memes rely on it (more on that later...). Each of the four classes of deep rock are designed to be powerful, but reliant on others to draw out their true strength: Scout is prone to breaking his own legs without an engineer to build underneath him, while Engineer can’t figure out where to lay his platforms and turrets without scout lighting the room. Gunner can’t cosplay an infantry troop without a driller to dig his trenches, and Driller can’t do his job at all without teammates to kill.

Similarly to the class system, but less talked about, is the clever design of DRG’s missions to encourage team play. Missions never have a single objective that needs to be performed by one player, instead, everything is spread out, with enough side objectives and distraction to occupy all players without anyone getting left out. Leadership is optional but not needed, and players tend to fall quickly into their class roles without realizing. Then a swarm happens, and all the players will (hopefully) materialize out of their holes and fight as a group.
All the game’s features share this fundamental tenet, and this in turn encourages players to work together. I have never seen another game with average players as friendly as DRG’s. Apart from the occasional grumpy greybeard who treats the game like an actual job, most randoms are a pleasure to play with (something I would never have imagined myself saying). The community is close-knit enough that DRG even has its own unwritten code of practice, with all somewhat experienced players abiding to rules like “No double dipping on ammo resupplies”, or “check everyone is ready before progressing the mission”. Even DRG’s memes need teamwork: Teams of four will spam voicelines such as “We’re rich”, “Mushroom”, “Goo Sack” etc… with a quasi-religious zeal. The community did this so much, in fact, that the devs added voiced responses to this behaviour from the game’s terminally burnt-out manager.


Now the burning question you might have in response to the first section is “GentleHoovy... what do I do if I have no friends to play with?” Between the aforementioned friendliness of randoms, and the game’s hyperactive discord community that guarantees other missions and voice-chats to join you shouldn’t have a problem. If you’re still misanthropic enough to want to play this game exclusively alone, you’d be surprised to find that, even then, the game itself is simply just fun!

To briefly touch on solo, the game replaces your teammates with a drone that does essentially everything they could do (albeit usually not as efficiently). Solo is fun, but not as fun as multiplayer –my point here is more so that the game itself is fun no matter what.

Deep rock has a gem of a progression system, and such a strong focus on replayability that it actually has me worried for the day I finally run out of content. Maps are random, every mission can have random events, different hazards, modifiers, enemy spawns, etc… No two missions will ever be exactly the same. Your builds are highly customizable, and the overclock system reworks your equipment so heavily that they may as well be different weapons (the same gun can shoot homing purple piercing bees of death, or lay mines on the ground – depending on your choice of OC). The game has excellent inbuilt modding support, with mods sorted into categories based around your ability to play with vanilla players and whether balancing is significantly affected. It can also be HARD – at first, even Hazard 3 (out of 5) will feel tough to the average greenbeard. Once you get good enough that even the highest difficulty feels lacking, there are modded difficulties to keep you suffering on, even then. Online games are at their absolute best when you and your team are pushed to your limits over a shared goal, and DRG tends to do this a lot.

To use the words of your average IGN journalist: teammates or not, DRG really makes you feel like an alcoholic spacefaring dwarf who’s been suckered into high-risk employment. This is due in no small part to the game’s dedication to its own premise.


Probably the first thing that would have stood out to you upon loading up the store page for the game is the ridiculous premise this game has. To say the idea of spacefaring dwarf contractors for an interstellar mining conglomerate is “creative” is a gross understatement. This game feels like an idea cooked up by the mind of a bored literature student during a cannabis-fuelled evening.

What makes DRG special, though, is how much the game commits to this unorthodox idea. The dwarves have an ungodly quantity of different voice lines, each as legendary as the next. The game provides you with a selection of different beers, some of which buff you, to drink before each mission, but drinking too many and you may end up drunk on the job. The reason why this is so important to me is that I think this is the last key ingredient to Deep Rock’s fantastic community and the collective brain cell we share. The devs commit so hard to their stupid, goofy, lovable universe, that we have no choice but to follow their lead. It’s such a huge part of what makes a game’s community great, it’s the catalyst behind the inside jokes and memes that form the very glue holding us together, and it’s what makes me keep coming back, even after I’ve squeezed this game of all but the final drops of its content. Screaming ROCK AND STONE in unison to the game’s banging soundtrack while mowing down bugs with three total strangers will always be fun in an age where adults are getting lonelier, and game communities are becoming more and more toxic. It becomes a recourse, a safe place to go where you know your fellow dwarves will have your back no matter what. Leave no dwarf behind is the golden rule, after all.

TL;DR:
The age-old axiom of “size doesn’t matter, it’s what you do with it” couldn’t be more true with Furi. This game hardly lasts more than an evening, yet it has been permanently lodged in my memory for years now. A seamless combination of banging tunes and tight gameplay over an awesome boss rush will have you killing the same 10 enemies over and over again without ever getting bored. If you’re even remotely interested in Furi, I implore you to grab the nearest credit card and buy it. You’ll thank me later.

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Review:
I Actually finished with Furi a very long time ago now, and have been sitting on this for ages since. Ever since my first clear of this game I’ve known it deserved a perfect score, and even after putting the blood, sweat, and tears into the 100% run, I’ve struggled to find a single thing wrong with the game. The reason then that this review has taken years was not that I couldn’t decide how I felt about Furi, it was simply that I couldn’t figure out how to describe how good it is.

The size of your Furi doesn’t matter.

Video games in the last decade or so, especially the AAA side of the industry, struggle with a scope problem. Games are always trying to be the “biggest”, “longest”, “most innovative”. In a society where we are time strapped as is, it’s always amazed me that marketing a game to have over 100 hours of playtime is seen as a valid strategy. Even some of the best games in the last 5 years even have this issue (cf. Elden ring, a near perfect game that was just too long). Furi, however, does not.
If you didn’t glean it from the store page, Furi is a boss rush. There are 10 boss fights, plus a couple of DLC fights, and that’s it. Every second of Furi’s time is accounted for, like the game went through an overly harsh edit over and over before finally releasing. I’m sure I don’t need to go into how much of a breath of fresh air this is. If you want to experience Furi, you’ll need to dedicate at most a couple of evenings to get the game over with, instead of removing yourself entirely from the outside world for a month. With how short, even compact it is, you can be sure that every second of Furi’s playtime has been accounted for, made use of in some way. The game even manages to tell a somewhat compelling and well thought out story, something the average 100-odd hour Ubisoft game struggles with. It might be initially surprising to you then that a large portion of Furi is simply just walking, walking that can be done automatically so that you can just set the controller down to watch and listen. These sections give the game space to slowly build up each boss fight, giving them the introduction they deserve, while the music works on introducing you to the next song on the legendary soundtrack.

Furiwave.

I normally try to avoid talking too much about the OST in my game reviews, the soundtrack of a game is massively important to me, but my knowledge of music rarely goes beyond “it’s good or bad”, only becoming important to my review if I feel like it drastically affects the game in some way. That said, I can’t talk about Furi without talking about this game’s soundtrack. Normally in a game, the gameplay takes priority over the music, and the latter is molded, bent to fit the former. Furi does this the opposite way. Sometimes this game feels like it was designed specifically around each track, almost as if it was just a clever interactive way for the artists to show off their songs. Those boss “buildups” I mentioned earlier? They introduce you to the boss, but more importantly they allow the soundtrack to slowly set the scene, allow it to build up and reach the biting point as you slip into each fight. I’ve never seen a game that manages to hype up each boss in such a way, while giving you a subconscious idea of what you’ll be expecting. It’s great. The music also changes mid-fight, flowing and changing from each phase to the next, mirroring the action perfectly. During my personal favorite boss fight, the high speed synthwave track slows to a slow grinding beat when you enter melee portions of the fights, while during another fight, a slow, dark, and simplistic track suddenly gains a powerful beat as the boss enters the “desperation” phase of the fight. Even if you’re skeptical about the bullet hell/parry gameplay style of Furi, if you like synthwave/electronic music, you NEED to play this game, just for the music. Luckily the game has some very well-tuned difficulty settings so that you can just enjoy the music and story without having to worry about the fighting if you choose.


Furier.

On the topic of difficulty settings, I wanted to talk about the hardest one. I’m sometimes a little skeptical of difficulty settings, as I think too many can often just undermine the quality of balancing (although I appreciate the accessibility, they provide to people without the time to git gud). Furi is one of those cases that proves difficulty settings can be amazing if done right. Furier, the highest difficulty in the game, is absolutely nuts. The bosses aren’t buffed in the classic sense, instead they’re almost entirely new bosses. The highest difficulty feels exactly like it should do – a much tougher challenge destined for those who’s mouths are watering for more Furi. I 100%ed this game, as I tend to do, and the run to complete Furier on S rank was a grueling, tiring one that took countless hours of practice. What it wasn’t, was frustrating. I’m sad that this game flew so under the radar as I think even juggernauts like Fromsoft have something to learn from how Furi handled it’s balancing. Furi is a game that gives back as much as you put into it, and the devs themselves understood this: As they put it: Furi is an instrument, and it was designed for players who practice it till mastery.

I hope by reading this little love letter disguised as a review you decide to give it a go. There’s really little more I can do to sing this game’s praises other than buying the game for everyone who seems remotely interested, and I’m a little too broke for that. Furi won’t have you immersed for hours, but if you’re aching for a challenge, a new soundtrack to listen compulsively to, or a little of both, then this little hidden gem has you covered. Just remember, the Jailor is the key, kill him and you’ll be free.



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TL;DR:
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a game so committed to its blisteringly fast, in-your-face, anime styling that it lets any pretext of restraint fall by the wayside. The result is a game that was so ahead of its time in the real world that I struggle to understand how it was ignored for so long, a game that somehow combines both seriousness and Irony without seeming cynical in the slightest, and a game that could unironically be described as an album with a free videogame attached. Sadly, just like Mr. Lightning bolt himself, the wonderful writing and brilliant combat system designed for the game seem to have outrun the capabilities of its own developers, meaning that while Metal Gear Rising is a hilariously fun hack and slash that’ll have you singing as much as swearing, just keep in mind that the pain-inhibitors won’t always be on, especially if you attempt the 100%.

Steam Deck opinion:
Unsurprisingly, this game was designed for a controller, and with how old it is now, it could run on a potato, so no worries when playing it on the deck. Perhaps playing docked is best, simply to be properly immersed in the ridiculous amounts of action this game throws at you. And to make sure you don’t smash your deck on your attempts at the VR missions.

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Review:

When Sekiro released back in 2019, those that actually put in the effort to beat the game lauded it as a giant leap forward for the art of combat design. Although I’m of the personal belief that Monster Hunter beat them to the punch, it’s hard to argue that Sekiro set anything but the gold standard for what combat in an action RPG should feel like. Even four years later, it feels like other studios are still clumsily trying to catch up. Now, you might be a little confused as to why I preface a review of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance with a potted history of a largely unrelated game – but I think this story helps illustrate quite how extraordinary MGR is. MGR is a game that nails its base combat system so well it’s one of the few titles that deserve serious comparison with Sekiro. It’s a game that is enormously relevant to our current world, including a quasi-worshipped ultra-libertarian American politician who uses the phrase Make America Great Again. And, astoundingly, it’s a game that was released in 2013.

My Sword is a tool of JUSTICE!
The first thing that stands out about MGR is how unapologetic it is with its style. Right from the title screen animation, you can tell the game makes no attempt at restraining itself from channelling its inner 13-year-old, fedora-wearing, plastic katana-wielding energy. Complimenting the weeb aesthetic is a bombastic soundtrack that seamlessly mixes metal and dubstep – not only are literally all the tracks certified bangers, but the music is dynamic, with lyrics or guitar riffs kicking in only at the most intense moments of combat. And the best thing about it? It works: Cutscenes can be so ridiculous you can’t hold yourself back from that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ grin from spreading over your face, and the music is so ridiculously edgy you can’t seem to hold yourself back from singing along. Other than the complete lack of restraint, what also makes MGR’s styling work is the obvious self-awareness of the developers. One character will spend 10 minutes lecturing the player about memes, while another appears to pioneer the jack-o pose. Much in line with how ahead of its time it was in context and combat, MGR’s sense of humour has only flourished in the last couple of years. Most unbelievable of all is that under all these layers of irony, removal, and humour, the game still delivers an effective critique of American politics.

Make Metal Gear great again (pls Konami if you’re reading this).
Although some of MGR’s political commentary feels eerily relevant and familiar to the modern player, the game’s story is very much rooted in early 2010 politics – decidedly a member of the post-war-on-terror-ism movement. Although Armstrong is clearly reminiscent of Trump, he appears to be some kind of attempt at a caricature of Bush. This isn’t the only time this game appears to miss a target just to hit another one it wasn’t aiming for – A fairly important part of the critique revolves around the now antiquated idea of “memes” – ideas transmitted between generations that slowly change and evolve, a bit like DNA or Chinese whispers. And yet because of how archaic the term is, everyone who plays believes the various characters are referring to your typical internet jokes, giving the game’s sense of humour an absurd and almost unintentional angle. Perhaps most amazingly is that the game pulls off one of these miss-and-then-hit jobs on its own combat system.

Sekiro: Lightning never dies.
The reason I’ve bought up Sekiro countless times in this review is that MGR’s combat is remarkably similar. The system revolves around overwhelming your opponent with aggression, and the inclusion of both blocks and dodges as aggressive tools (the block and attack button are literally the same thing, in this case). Just like Sekiro, the game forewarns you of attacks exempt from the typical parry response and rewards the player for reacting appropriately. Just like Sekiro, the game feels awkward, confusing, and unwieldly at first, but once the appropriate playstyle has been learned, the combat becomes so cinematic and flowing that it bears little difference to the QTE cutscenes that intersperse it. If Sekiro and MGR’s approaches to the design of a base combat system are similar, the way enemies and encounters are designed are almost entirely different.

Now is also good time to reveal that I employed a wee bit of poetic license in my review’s first paragraph. When MGR’s combat works (which it mostly does), it really works, but MGR’s combat does not always work. There are a bunch of segments in this game that shocked me with how poorly adapted they were: Forced platforming, impossibly hard combat sections, bosses that spam unblockable moves, and the ungodly VR missions which have permanently scarred me, to name a few. My only possible explanation for this is that the pure genius of MGR’s combat system was overlooked by its own developers. Important abilities – such as the perfect-parry, or the dodge, feel overlooked and brushed to the side, even though they’re the cornerstone of combat. The game has a stealth system, and apparently wants you to use it, even though Raiden is about as suited to sneaking as a panzer is suited to highway patrol. The combat system is almost exclusively made for one-on-one fights, and yet the vast majority of non-boss encounters the game throws at you contain too many enemies to handle elegantly. Another sidenote about MGR’s combat is that it’s accessible in a way other games of its ilk aren’t. The difficulty options allow you to settle into the combat, while the lack of enormously complicated combos help wet the feet of those interested in more complex games like Bayonetta and DMC.

The journey through MGR was a mad, out of control blitz through dizzying highs and frustrating lows, but something has gotta be said about the quality of the game if I managed to stick through the hell that was the 100% run without giving up. Probably the best comparison to this game is Raiden himself – an incredible and ahead of its time piece of work that had the potential for a lot but was held back by a few small shortcomings. Standing here, I realized that Metal Gear Rising Revengeance wasn’t trying to make history, and yet somehow it did anyway. If you want to experience some of that history – be it the proto-Sekiro combat or the source of all those funnies, you don’t want to miss this game.


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