Sahil Games 2024
ranked list of every game i play this year
List items
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Exists in a weird space between the top down, almost arcade-y feel of mgs1 and the full on third person "3D" interactions of later games, which makes a for a bit more of a tedious stealth system (I'm not a huge fan for full on stealth games in general) with some clunkiness around hugging walls and switching to first person aiming leading to a few points of frustration. The stuff I knew about the game before hand made it seem like the internet & meme related stuff would be a much bigger thematic point but I came away more impressed by the way the game is reckoning with it & the previous games' inherent glorification of military violence throughout its story. I love the implication that there's a second, more exciting game happening in the background with everything that snake's going through & I like the way it uses Raiden as a character to drive home those points but I also just didn't care for his relationship drama much at all (shoutout to emulators with a fast forward function) and on a general tone & vibes level I liked the first game a lot more. Still very glad I played through this game myself after absorbing so much of it second hand over the years.
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Like this one so so much more than the prequel. Really love the way it frames a large part of the Norse pantheon as a dysfunctional family dealing with an abusive patriarch and all the small relationships and conflicts that arise from that dynamic. Kratos' development and the game's reflection on his past actually feels earned here, and Atreus works really well as a believably shitty teenager but also is given enough depth and agency to be taken seriously rather than just a dad-game prop. Unfortunately, I think I like the combat even less here than I did in the previous game, since the way it doubles down on rpg systems and cooldown timers pulls away slightly from the only redeeming value of the last game's combat, which was the just raw brutality of the axe and unarmed animation set. I genuinely would have enjoyed the game much more if I could have just skipped all the combat. (I even enjoyed the puzzles in most cases, surprisingly)
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The best video games are the ones where you roll a ball. Really love the time trial structure here but didn't care for the larger levels where deliberate pathing becomes more important than the core movement & unfortunately those seem to become more and more common the deeper into the game you go.
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I like the setup and the aesthetic (especially when it gets more supernatural or escoteric) but this ultimately ends up feeling too similar to other visual novels that lean on meta narrative about the nature of choice and games and stories that I've played before. Also the way the metaphysics are described to the player makes it hard to keep up with what the actual final choice/boss fight is actually asking. Maybe I just missed the point but it felt like a there were a lot of conflicting, abstract ideas without enough clarity to reject some of them without embracing others unintentionally.
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