Recent reviews by eagleflo

For a person of certain age this game is an overdose of nostalgia. It's really fun taking the electronics of a bygone age apart and fix them for someone who really treasures their device.

I hope this game inspires many to buy a broken portable console and bring it back to life in real life. (Or even just to fix the stick drift in your DualSense controller on your own.) You can fix things.

Someone described this as "Wikipedia rabbit hole as a game" and yeah, that fits the bill. Cool idea! Wish we had more games like this.

The start of the game is slightly chaotic -- while you're trying to learn what's going on and how to even play the game, the story wants to proceed at a relentless pace through the audio interjections. It creates this air of pressure, which is *not* indicative of what the rest of the game feels like, thank goodness.

The story is rather captivating. I think I pieced together some of the parts a little too early for my own good, but I enjoyed it regardless. I played with the "Reduce hints" option on, which was apparently added after release. I don't know how it affected the gameplay, but I wasn't stuck very long in any part. It's not a very long game: slightly more than 5 hours for completion. Well worth the price, especially for fans of the genre.

Another great puzzler by the folks behind The Roottrees are Dead. This one is a reimagination of a text adventure made by William Rous, with full voice acting & beautiful art now included.

Make it more challenging to yourself by going to settings and toggling off showing the "connections". You'll be fine without them.

I played it through in one marathon 9½ hour sitting -- some of the best gaming hours I've had in 2026.

Original. If I had just one word, that would be it -- this game is something increasingly rare, an original idea in a sea of safe variations on a theme.

I played this originally in English and later replayed the Director's Cut in Japanese. English script is the original, but it truly helped me appreciate some parts of the script experiencing them in Japanese instead.

Let's start with the big one. "Walking simulator" was used well before Death Stranding came out as a pejorative for games where the player pretty much "walks around" while experiencing some sort of narrative. The core gameplay loop of Death Stranding is nothing less than a walking simulator in the true and serious sense of the word. More accurately, it's a 歩荷/ bokka / Sherpa / mountain porter simulator -- walking around, carrying things, worrying about weight distribution, trying not to fall over. Using ladders and ropes to scale places originally beyond human reach.

A lot has been written about MGSV and Kojima's breakup with Konami. This was the first game from Kojima Productions. They no longer had access to their previous Fox Engine, so they had to shop around for a new one. Guerilla Games offered their in-house engine and branded it as Decima after 出島, the Dutch trading post in Edo-era Japan. Excellent choice: the visuals are some of the best I ever saw on PS4.

The story takes a pretty long while to kick into gear. This is a Hideo Kojima game, full of his auteurship and idiosyncracies. It's weird on purpose. It breaks the fourth wall. It knows its a game. If you loved MGS, you'll be right at home -- it's not telling the same story, but it's full of the same sort of stylistic quirks which have come to define what a Kojima game is. I'd imagine most negative reviews for the games are from people not at all aboard with what Kojima wants to do. The game is mechanistically close to what MGSV does, open world and all, which a sizeable chunk of the fanbase didn't like at all.

The game is not afraid of taking its time establishing the world. There is an open invitation for the player to also chill a bit and take your time with the game. You can speedrun through the plot, but you'd miss half of what this game has on offer -- it's the quiet moments between the big story beats where this game shines the most. I got lost in just making deliveries -- not aiming to five star connections on purpose, it just happened as I was exploring around each area and connection. At times I had to force myself to advance the story so as to not completely lose my main story momentum, a common occurrence for me in open world games.

Use of "real music" in the game is one particular point in common with MGSV. It's used sparingly, but with some breathtaking results. Whenever the camera pulls back while a song starts to play, open yourself up to the experience. Some of the most memorable song-length bits of gaming I've had the pleasure to experience.

Death Stranding does a really good job of gradually introducing more tools for the player just as the previous gameplay style risks becoming stale. Adding vehicles, floaters, roads and ultimately zip-lines was a stroke of genius -- each one of them allows you to dramatically expand your reach and changes how you do deliveries.

What's more, as you expand the chiral network structures from other players appear in your world. This is nothing less than Kojima cracking how multiplayer can feel awesome without any direct interaction with other players. I've grown so tired of competitive multiplayer games with utterly toxic atmosphere in the playerbase -- this turns that completely on its head. You get rewarded for creating well-placed structures for others. It starts small, with a well-placed ladder or a climbing anchor, but it evolves from there. I took a 20 hour diversion of finishing every single piece of road in the game and got showered with hundreds of thousands of likes from strangers for doing that. Especially with zip-lines, being able to build on the work of others in the mountains feels like a blessing.

There are obviously some flaws as well. First: you are a repatriate, meaning you can die and come back over and over again. The game wants you to die at least a couple of times. Sadly, when that happens via a giant BT, it leaves behind a huge voidout crater. It's a cool idea conceptually, but these craters don't allow movement or building structures inside them, becoming semi-permanent obstacles for the player instead. I'd rather just load the game than deal with that.

Second, too much of the story is conveyed in writing via emails and logs. Absolute key details for piecing it all together are hidden in these text dumps. In a game that is so heavily reliant on cinematic delivery, it feels a bit out of place. That patience is well-rewarded, but I'm not surprised people skip these and then later say the plot is all over the place and the world-building doesn't make any sense. There's a kernel of truth in that criticism, but the text logs gave you a ton of additional detail...

Third, the game doesn't really know what do with the shooting mechanic. It's at odds with itself -- you're much better off not killing anyone in this game. Bola gun is a strictly superior way of dealing with human opponents. Why allow creating lethal weapons in the first place? It's not in the character of Sam to start murdering mules en masse. (I guess it's there for late game exploration and "just having fun" with the game.)

These are small shortcomings which are easy to overlook given the grand vision of the work. It's a surprisingly wild ride even for someone very familiar with Kojima's work.

Death Stranding 2 was all I hoped for.

In the years after playing the first Death Stranding, it has grown on me considerably -- a starkly original game that stands out in a sea of safety, or even mediocrity. It was a big risk game in a world where AAA game studios are taking fewer and fewer risks of any kind.

Let's get this out of the way first: this is a continuation of the original game. It's almost by definition not going to be as risky. It's audience now both knows what to expect and come in with expectations. Satisfying these is less risky than presenting something completely original.

There's a whole lot of satisfying fans of the original. The game just works better mechanically. They've been working on the engine quite a bit, first with the Director's Cut upgrade of the original and now DS2. The gameplay feels more fluid than before. Menu navigation is less... baroque. The controls are refined. There's a whole host of small improvements.

The sum of these improvements is a game that is a joy to play. It cuts down on some of the excesses of the first game, clearly not taking quite as much time to ease you into the world and its systems. It wants to set you free pretty early. There are very frequent moments where the game pretty directly tells you to go rest -- not to Sam, to you, the player. The game works really well in small increments, almost a foreign way to enjoy a game like this these days.

This game is beautiful. I'm glad I waited for the PC release. Nixxes did a great job. Still, even on PC, play with a DualSense controller. The game takes advantage of it everywhere.

It's a Hideo Kojima game. He is still as referential as ever. He does whatever he wants. Not all of it fits together neatly. The game has strong themes and a sure footing, but it also regularly interrupts itself. There are wild swings from completely serious to utterly carefree levity. Breaking the fourth wall has been one of Kojima's favorite moves since the early days of his career, and he does that all the time here. The game also loves to state the completely obvious to the player as if it was a huge revelation -- is this what mansplaining feels like? The character names are, as usual, such a joke that it overflows and becomes serious again. We've come to expect that from Kojima.

I'll raise the same point I made in the review for the original, because it's even more prevalent in this game: Kojima's use of music in set pieces inside the game creates some truly spectacular moments. Low Roar in particular is back... in a truly haunting way, as Ryan Karazija, the artist behind the project is no longer with us. The posthumous songs hit the hardest.

The game adds a third enemy type beyond humans and BTs. It's a fun addition. In a fit of love towards tokusatsu, melee combat is actually more than viable this time around. Zip-lines can curve, you don't have to do millimeter-level optimal placement anymore.

It was an easy decision to play this game in English first. But it feels once again like I didn't get the whole story that way. More than ever, there is a lot of untranslated Japanese in this game -- it expects you to vibe with it. Clashing language spheres is one subtheme explored in this game. I will surely replay this in Japanese.

One huge word of caution: the game presents a difficulty choice when you begin. If you're a seasoned gamer, and especially if you played through the original with no trouble, seriously consider picking To The Wilder. It's the only chance, as I soon learned by picking Brutal and then lamenting that choice ten hours in. The game gives you so many new tools to work with that it actually takes some restraint from the player side to not completely trivialize it, draining it from challenge and thus a large part of the fun. This is not gloating in disguise, the game is genuinely too easy otherwise.

One odd feeling in the back of my mind was that with all these tools, vehicles, roads and railways that spread via the chiral network... I was thinking back to the beginning of the first game and the feeling of unspoiled nature. Just walking. I'm sure this was on purpose. I leaned in on it and used dozens of hours just to map out the Australian continent ahead of the chiral network expanding there, living off the land with cryptobiotes. The game doesn't directly suggest you do this, but all my best screenshots came from these treks. Meditating with Sam... or through Sam?

I was playing early enough that I got to share my trip with hundreds of others. We were building the continent together. I quickly maxed out my Strand Contracts, people I chose to prioritize in my game. Tasteful and useful building placement by strangers is a weird thing to see in an online game, and feels strangely hopeful after years of toxic abuse in competitive games. Making the online parts enjoyable is some truly visionary work in both Death Strandings games -- real chance for just a bit of metta in a video game.

Really rewarding deduction game with fake late 90's Internet. Well done for such a small team, well worth the asking price. Decent built-in notetaking tools. Sleuthing from home doesn't quite match the visual grandeur of Return of Obra Dinn, but it scratches a similar itch nonetheless.

This was my first Trails game, after almost a decade of hearing about the series here and there, even buying some of the games on Steam sales in preparation of playing it Some Day. The original PC version on Steam does not support Japanese or feature any voice acting added in the PS Vita version, although supposedly unofficial mods exist to add them in -- I never got around to fiddling with multiple mods on top of playing the game on Steam Deck. Now I'm glad I waited.

The game leaves a deep first impression: this is a good old-fashioned JRPG with an extremely impressive world-building and characters. Every NPC seems to have their own lives they're living, with frequent small updates. The world feels very lived in. You can get lost talking to NPCs for hours on end.

Our protagonist Estelle and her sidekick Joshua have a very good dynamic going on from the very first scenes onwards. The stakes are initially very low, with our duo being just fresh out of school and starting their internship as Junior Bracers. It felt like a refreshing change of pace from so many other JRPGs.

The game rewards patience and taking your sweet time with it, living in the different cities you come across on your journey and solving troubles faced by normal citizens of this kingdom Liberl.

The battle system is an evolution from the original, taking cues from the later games in the series. It feels great and the orbment system has enough depth in it to allow yourself to really tinker with the builds.

Once the story really picks up, it's hard to stop playing. A word of caution: this is by no means a self-contained game. It starts a trilogy and the soon-to-be remade second chapter continues directly from the events of this game. I am going to continue the story on PS Vita version of SC right away -- there is no way I could wait another year for Trails in the Sky 2nd.

Now that I've been dabbling with the PS Vita versions of the original games, it is very clear to me that this remake sets a new standard as to how to lovingly and faithfully recreate a 20-year-old game in a modern 3D engine. I honestly think this is the best way to enjoy this game right now: the facial expressions and animations add so much to the storytelling. The party banter is a new addition that really enriches the characters.

The voice talent has been almost completely recast from the PS Vita version; I don't yet have an opinion as to which version is better, but this new cast worked really well for me overall.

There is one small downside to this new remake that I have to mention: there are less voice acted scenes than in the PS Vita version. Initially it felt very jarring for voice acting to just drop completely at some points, especially when only one character is voiced in a discussion -- I don't think I've ever seen that before. Ultimately a small blemish in what is otherwise a masterpiece.

Overall, I now get it why people have been drumming up this series so much. I'm now fully on board -- I'm going to play through all of this series.

I've played this more than Factorio.

What a pleasant surprise. Sandfall, a new French studio is now releasing a bona fide JRPG set in a wildly imaginative world as their debut game.

The game borrows from many Japanese games that have come before it -- I see a lot of Final Fantasy X and XIII in the world-building and level design, Persona 5 in the turn-based combat system spiced up with dodges, parries and jumps from Sekiro out of all places. Despite strong influences and some clear homages the game doesn't feel the least bit derivative -- this is an original work of art. The Belle Époque motif works really well and feels rather fresh.

The soundtrack by Lorien Testard and Alice Duport-Percier deserves a special mention -- it's just one banger after another, beautiful French soprano & choir accompanied by strings and piano. I stopped advancing just to hear the rest of the song quite a few times. The way the music is woven into the story and characters feels extremely well done. There are even multiple different battle themes per area. The voice cast is also amazingly stacked, with Jennifer English (Shadowheart from BG3), Charlie Cox (Daredevil) & Ben Starr (Clive from FFXVI) in the lead roles.

It's honestly unbelievable that this is the debut game of a studio staffed by only around 30 people. The game doesn't feel at all like it was made by such a tiny team! Compare that to the 4000+ people working on GTA VI right now. It's an amazing showcase of what a skilled team can do with Unreal Engine 5. It's striking how strong impression the game leaves in every area of its presentation.

As I'm very close to 100% completion while writing this review, I can confidently say that this will be my Game of the Year 2025. In this world where AAA budgets have gotten completely out of hand and both developers and players suffer, it's a shining beacon of hope for more tight and focused AA-sized teams being able to deliver their completely uncompromised artistic vision.

Criminally overlooked when it first released, still the shooter with the best movement in 2025. The guns feel great, the sound design & atmosphere is through the roof. TTK is short as it should be, no bullet sponges here. The servers were ruined for years by hackers but now work again.

In short, the good bits of Apex Legends can be tracked right back into this game. The serious compromises and nerfs made in Apex Legends for console audience & mass-market appeal are not here. The skill cap is extremely high, and that means that you'll get wrecked when you first start playing. Just take it in stride and learn.

There is also a great single player campaign. This game is easily worth it for that alone. BT-7274.

There is a reason why everyone wants Respawn to make Titanfall 3. Unfortunately, the people behind this game have left the studio.