List items
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Just improves on everything the first game did and gets rid of my main annoyances, while still having rough edges and difficulty spikes that I think are necessary to avoid turning a strategy game into rote repetition. It's a longer campaign, too, but manages to stay consistently more interesting than the first game did as well. I love some small scale tactics scenarios.
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First time actually playing all the way through this myself (tho i watched most of metal gear scanlon) and I'm legit blown away how well this game captured the AAA story focused "prestige" game formula 25 years ago. The stealth was a bit hard to get a handle on initially (mainly cuz I'm a baby and the sneaking stresses me out) but after the initial bit it flows so well from cutscene to boss to a little bit of exploration back to the next cutscene. The codec is such a good tool to put hints into the game itself instead of forcing outside guides and the game has enough roots in adventure games that you get a ton of really interesting interactions between your items and the world and your enemies throughout. METAL GEAR.
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Still don't fully know what to make of this game in terms of coming to a thematic "point" but I love the way Remedy is embracing their design and aesthetic sensibilities. Just a dozen of the coolest moments I've ever played in a video game in this thing to the point where even the needlessly stressful combat couldn't put a dent in. Love this world and these characters and so so excited to see what Remedy can do next now that they're operating at this level.
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The problem with every pikmin sequel is that the first game was a perfect, singular, complete thought that just happened to be about half as long as a full priced single player game is expected to be. Pikmin 4 is by far the best at adding layers and progression and treadmills to that base formula while still keeping a focus on exploration (which is the entire appeal of the series for me) and it really got me hooked on that treadmill for a good week or 2 but looking back after beating it, I enjoyed the time limited Pikmin 1 style Olimar side story more than anything in the main game. Getting rid of co op is a bummer but I like how oatchi adds layers to puzzles as well as micromanagement & the new pikmin types and their interaction with the world was all around really fun.
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Love the basic concept & execution of attacking/visually syncing to a beat, but the game adds too many layers and systems to that that distract from that great foundation. The most aggregious is how much it relies on color coded enemies & even worse needs you to cycle through 3 assists in order to deal with them which really interrupts the flow (also a wild decision to put them on a cooldown, but the timer is fast enough that it's mostly not an issue). The way it doles out upgrades felt really stingy until I realized (at the final mission) that there's a place in the hideout that gives you money based on achievements and suddenly I had every basic ability unlocked. Story is totally fine, I like Macaron & CNMN a whole lot, and I love the cartoony, dreamcast aesthetic but found it a bit at odds with the fairly standard pop-rock music selection. I saw a combo video online that replaced the music with a JSRF track and it hit so much harder for me. Still, this is a really strong realization of a type of game I've wanted for a long time & pulls it off way better than I expected for a first attempt.
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Astonishingly competent. New character designs are great, and returning ones almost all look and feel great too. Best balanced year 1 of a competitive fighter imo but parts of the drive system seem a bit too skewed and it overall benefits all arounder style characters that were likely to be top tier anyway more than it lifts up the weaker cast. Wish the art style was going for something more interesting but really happy with it so far overall.
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Love some authored, bitesized tactics puzzle missions. Initial tutorial and missions set up a much bigger scope, though, so I spent most of the game waiting for it to "open up" before realizing that the missions are intentionally designed to not give you the full ruleset & I think that's the right decision. A lot of the missions did feel kinda samey though & the fog of war stuff stayed pretty frustrating (especially the 3 missions against Sonja, whose CO ability just negates the whole fog of war system anyway)
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I'm a bit disappointed that the gameplay is mostly isometric/top down, since Signalis is clearly pulling so much from ps1 era survival horror and one of the most impactful parts of early RE & SH games was the really dynamic fixed camera angles you had to navigate (signalis feels like it kinda knows this, since it plays with other perspectives throughout the story, just not in general gameplay). Aside from that, when it's in that mode I think this is the closest a game has come to creating the same flow of tense exploration & stragetic resource usage that I love from those classics.
Unfortunately, while most games emulating that era tend to play a little too easy & forgiving, Signalis feels downright mean with its balance. This is a recurring problem I have with Horror games (especially big modern ones) -- mechanical tension demands punishment for failure, which usually means getting pushed back to a checkpoint and repeating an encounter, but that repetition robs tension, both atmospherically & mechanically; the challenge is never going to be as meaningful the second time, the monsters aren't going to be as scary. A perfectly tuned survival horror is great at getting you to accept losses and continue forward, on the edge of death, low on resources, but just continuing to scrape by. Games that skew more lenient lose tension as you build a reserve of health & ammo, but in a game that's tuned too difficult, the player is encouraged to repeat content and min/max to reach the same ends, but more tediously.
All that said, the atmosphere mostly holds up here & even on easy combat difficulty, the game is fun to explore. The areas aren't nearly as big as the mansion or police station from RE1&2 but they are intricately connected and planning routes to complete puzzles and unlock new paths is as satisfying as any game in this genre. Unfortuantely, like the camera angle, the enemy & area design stays pretty same-y throughout the game, it's industrial dystopian retro sci-fi hallways all the way down & it doesn't make much of a difference if you're in an apartment complex, spaceship, or abandoned mine, you never get the equivalent of the nurses or babies from Silent Hill that make areas and goals feel unique. I really feel like I'm nitpicking at this point, though. The game is so painfully close to the classics of this genre that every percent that isn't quite there feels like a big deal.
The actual big deal, and the reason that this is a 4 star instead of 5 is that the story doesn't pull off what it's going for. It's clearly aiming for a SH 2 tone, with heavy surrealism, a lack of clarity until the end of the game, & an adjacent take on the idea that the world is filtered through the psyche of a single person's trauma (tho the way the sci-fi concept literalizes that instead of just letting it be spooky & unexplained undercuts it a bit) & it ultimately doesn't land. The premise of love & pain spreading like a disease, psychically infecting & corrupting entire planets of sentient robots is cool, and there are touching moments between Elster & Arianne, but getting the rest of the story through text files & static npcs makes everything feel very stiff & cold, while SH2 is remarkable because its strange interactions feel very human and emotional (full voice acting & animation helps, & is not quite feasable on this budget, but it feels like Signalis took that limitation as an excuse to not even try, or maybe because it's about robots they wanted things to be a bit more stiff but then centering the story on this grand power of love metaphor is at odds with that). There's also some themes early on about corporatization & capitalism but they never really step to the forefront, and as a backdrop didn't feel as effective in the later areas as they did in the mines. Ultimately it's a story with some strong sci-fi ideas and a beautiful little tragic romance but there isn't enough to carry a game this long. More interesting than the story, though, is that the whole vibe here is really shooting for the moon, the mood in the cutscenes and first person segments rules but that too is undercut by how many references there are in the visuals, worldbuilding & literal text of the game. The premise is inspired by the King In Yellow which shows up physically in the game, the anime character designs make things feel less human, some of the coolest cuts of animation are lifted directly from Ghost In The Shell & Evangelion, the robots are called replicants & gestalts straight from Nier, I'm sure there's a ton of other ones I didn't even get and I'm not sure what the point of all that "homage" is. People who get really into the internet detective-ing say the story is commenting on all that but I don't see it & I don't enjoy engaging with media like a puzzle to be solved. The vibe here is strong enough on it's own, but pointing to outside influences makes it feel a bit shallow & insecure in a way that it just didn't need to.
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All time great sim-cade game feel on a controller. I've got some issues with the AI and wish there was so much more to the progression, but just as a game about the Gran Turismo idealized car-brochure experience of driving it's an incredible achievement. Look forward to revisiting it throughout next year whenever I want to listen to an audiobook.
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It's hard for me to get into a tetris-like cuz the initial impression is always "well it's not tetris" but I've got over a hundred hours logged now and I'm pretty into it. Biggest problem for me is that it doesn't ever get all that fast, which is great and I love that they wanted to make an action puzzler that doesn't just inevitably get extremely frantic and stressful but the flip side of that is that most of the modes have a time limit (which i personally find extremely stressful even in an otherwise chill game) or the endless mode that just feels like a test of patience and mental endurance, since I've had runs that can go well over half an hour and it just gets kinda monotonous by that point. All that said, this is my go to steam deck game when I just want to play something while watching/listening to something else and don't want to get turbo stressed playing Tetris Grand Master or I know I don't have an hour to spend playing Lumines
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DLCs
Foundation: Moving away from the brutalist architecture and main characters of the base game kinda killed the vibe a bit and I didn't care too much about the new mechanics, combat is still as rote as ever. Also the environment made it really easy for me to get lost. I like the insight of the supernatural connection at the base of the building and the way that expands the lore, but I could have got that from a youtube video and probably enjoyed it more.
AWE: Now that's more like it! Love the way it ties in the Alan Wake stuff into the story, probably even more than I like Alan Wake 1 as a game & makes for a great prelude to Alan Wake 2 while reminding me of all the incredible aesthetics, wild tonal shifts, and just bonkers storytelling that made me love Control and Remedy games in general. Never been more excited by a game studio embracing its identity.
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Appreciate the course correction from 2's super heavy dungeon & combat focus to closer to the exploration that made me love pikmin 1 so much, but it's also much more handhold-y and never really feels like it opens up the way that first game does. Co-op is great, though, with a few quality of life complaints (vertical split sucks, & no camera angle/zoom controls really hurts playability in some places) it feels like it was built for it since the 3 captain team makes it super easy & fun to split up and tackle different parts of a map. Kinda lame that a lot of the puzzles straight up require all 3 captains as soon as you get them, though, that made the co op dynamics a lot less freeform. Really I just wished there were more open spaces and more to explore, the game ends basically as soon as you have a full squad and that's a bummer.
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We have Marvel vs Capcom at home (complementary)
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Camera and control layout makes it a bit frustrating at times but I love the simple gameplay and time trial structure
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Shorter than I expected but just 100% on its bullshit the whole time. Interesting that it chose to have such a different mechanic set from level to level instead of building up more cohesively but even with the short runtime I was kinda ready to be done with it by the time it ended.
None of that matters though, because the vibes are off the charts. Really makes me want to go play a bunch of Jeff Minter games.
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just an incredibly smooth metroidvania. Challenging platforming but not too challenging, constant progression and fun traversal ideas (tho the dimension swapping gets annoying sometimes), fun combat that with forced arenas just a little too often, but fundamentally nothing all that groundbreaking or interesting once you're out of the flow
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Fun and breezy, great music, colors, aesthetic. Does everything a 3D platformer should and I like the constrained camera that suggests a top-down or isometric view, but also doesn't do anything all that novel or exhilarating mechanically.
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All time peak stoner game. Once you understand the mechanics and get in the groove it's easy to kinda keep playing indefinitely, though, so play sessions only last as long as your high from the aesthetics allow.
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Love that someone made a riff on rhythm heaven & the general vibe here is great. Some of the games are hit or miss in terms of how intuitive they are but all of them had a nice flow once it clicked. I think the Practice mode is actually overcorrecting for that issue though, and ends up being my biggest problem with the game - In rhythm heaven, you practice the most basic input and then the actual level mixes and escalates and changes that in interesting ways, but here outside a handful of exceptions, you practice every type of interaction the mini game will expect, and then just do them all for longer in the actual game. I think this partially stems from budget, tho, rhythm heaven puts a ton of unique art and animation into every minigame and even more into the remixes so there's no way a small indie team can match that. All in all I had a good time, really hope the team tries to add on to this or make a bigger more fleshed out take on this game with higher production. The world needs more rhythm heaven and i'll take it anyway I can get it.
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Not a good game to play in the slightest (ended up just watching a let's play for the back half because I was so bored with the combat) but it's honestly incredible how absolutely bonkers they let the story get and I'm really glad I played it to get a grasp on where the modern Remedy sensibility kicks off.
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Focus on dungeons and combat over exploration & time management drags things down a lot but it's still pikmin, still charming as hell, & having 2 commanders makes the base gameplay more engaging, just wish it had committed to bigger, more involved level design to reinforce the gameplay loop instead of side stepping it for more combat.
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Great vibes, fun level design tho it's always hard to tell which way is the side route to get collectibles. Might be higher up if I liked platformers more but being bad at the jumping and having to restart from the checkpoint a bunch dragged the otherwise great flow down a bit.
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Fun take on the QWOP thing. Short & sweet (took me 74 mins) and I actually felt myself understanding the physics and getting some momentum, tho not in the same way people can develop a rhythm in qwop. The Heist aesthetic is genius & makes the slow control really pay off.
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Hits and parries feel great but the enemy & level design gets old despite having only 5 levels. I like the arcade+progression structure a lot, but the requirements to permanently unlock abilitys felt a bit too grindy & the stuff you're unlocking feels a bit stale, it's all very boxed in to this idea of what a martial arts movie should be and that holds it back from doing very much of anything interesting or capital-F Fun. You really just never get to style on the enemies the way I want out of a beat-em-up game.
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A bit more strategic than E4 but the gameplay isn't enough to make up for the massive chasm between the 2 games' vibe levels so this just can't compete. Probably the weakest Mizuguchi game I've played but most of those other ones are close to all time favorites so that's not that much of an insult.
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It's RE inventory management as a puzzle game and does that pretty well. Slight annoyances towards the end with combining items & stuff as the grid got big and things got a bit complex but mostly just does what it says & doesn't overstay its welcome
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played about 20 hrs when it came out and got bored, decided to hop back in while recovering from surgery around the time it was winning a ton of GOTY awards, and had more fun for about 30 additional hrs, trying to spend more time experimenting with builds and stuff but still just fundamentally find it kinda boring cuz the payoff for the exploration is always more same-y combat & the items you get from each dungeon have such a low chance of actually being applicable to my build
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Decent driving feel & mediocre to actively bad progression
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I'm too old for how fast it wants you to move between lanes (I was never very good at lane swapping sections of games anyway, they stress me out for some reason) but I really like the vibes here
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I like the concept of building a game around more involved climbing, but it ends up still feeling a bit automatic (hold a direction and alternate LT, RT) to the point where it's more tedious than games where climbing is just glossed over as a means of traversal and less engaging than games about actually methodically navigating a space like Mudrunner or Death Stranding, kinda a worst of both worlds. The world and story and aesthetic didn't do much for me either, I appreciate the work and artistry that went into it, but it just feels like Journey with less energy and charm. Grow Home would never.
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Love the idea and theming but the core upgrade > explore loop didn’t work for me and that’s maybe the most important part of a game like this.
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