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Having just beaten Ori, it's easy to see why this game is so beloved. It is an incredibly beautiful and well-paced game that does most things right, but I think it suffers a bit when put under the microscope in a few aspects. Not enough to make it bad, not enough to warranting a thumbs down or not recommending it, but enough to prevent it from being a masterpiece.

First, praise where praise is due. Let's start with the visuals, which, for the most part, are absolutely top-notch. It's been a while since I've seen a 2D game look that good. The parallax and depth of field is insane, always gorgeous and making you feel you're actually inhabiting a real world, not a 2D slice of one. The environments are varied, and the animation for all characters (but in particular for Ori) is mindblowing. The gracefulness of its movements is something you don't see every day. Effects overall are also really well done. My only criticism in regards to visuals is also a criticism I'll come back to when talking about combat - there's a bit too much visual noise at times to allow for effective combat/platforming. This was mostly an issue when enemies shot projectiles at me, and I either couldn't see them against the background or against all the visual effects already on the screen. While this is not game-breaking in regular gameplay, I can see that being a MAJOR issue if you're going for the no-kill achievement.

When it comes to sounds, there's nothing groundbreaking here, but what's on display absolutely delivers. Ori mostly features an orchestral score that dictates the mood of each scene and action sequence without being too intrusive. It's beautiful, it's haunting, it can get your heart pumping in the right moments, and in summary, works. It does what it has to, but is not a soundtrack you'll be remembering for ages, I guess. Could be good background music for studying or meditation, but hardly rises above that.

The lore is partially delivered via short sentences and long visual storytelling. The devs excel at 'show, don't tell', and it's pretty easy to follow what's happening and get invested in the world and its characters. I was still a bit confused about what really set all the events in the game in motion and I'm not sure I know the answer to that, having beaten the game, but that never prevented me from enjoying the story or getting excited about its developments. Personally I don't think Kuro works as a great villain / antagonist, but that's probably more a matter of personal preference. Last but not least, I thought the endign was a bit abrupt - I was sure there would be a final dungeon after you beat the three legacy ones, but no, credits rolled when I was still craving for more. The pacing towards the end is a bit unclear and I think the tension doesn't build as high as it could if you're expecting that kind of final challenge gauntlet, so the whole endgame experience was a bit jarring for me, but I can also see that being an issue for how conditioned I am with Metroidvanias pulling the point-of-no-return-last-dungeon trick over and over.

And finally, the area where I reserved most of my criticism - gameplay. I always review Metroidvanias saying they have three jobs that MUST be done right - combat, movement, and exploration. Exploration is the easiest so I'll start there - Ori is fine. There is a lot to find around the world, and most of it is not super hidden, so you immediately know there'll be backtracking. The map is really useful in keeping track of it for you, but the abilities that you get to unlock further exploration feel a bit tacked on - it's like, you know there's a breakable wall as soon as you start the game, and eventually you get the breakable wall ability, so it's a key fitting a hole and not an eureka moment. It works, but is not incredible.

Movement is 8 or 80: moving around with Ori is a blast for most of the time, in particular as you start to combo abilities. Bash is one of the most incredible moves ever created, and combined with double jump and hovering, it's a lot of fun. What brings movement down for me is that some areas (in particular chase sequences) don't communicate really well what they want from you, requiring prior knowledge of the obstacles in order to avoid them. I hate when you get to a point and die to an unfair obstacle without any chance to avoiding it, and I hate when the game uses that as a way to teach you what to do in the next attempt. A fair game will always let a skilled player clear a challenge like that in the first go, and Ori refuses to do that in pretty much all escape sequences. It's a bit frustrating that such a good moveset is hampered by somewhat obtuse level design, but it's not enough to abandon the game.

And finally, combat. Which is the weakest link. Combat is just not satisfying here, and I'm glad it's not a bigger part of the game. What you do is spam the attack button, since enemies are spongy from the beginning to the end of the journey and you don't get significant improvement on your combat options outside of Bash. To make matters worse, there's not a huge variety of enemies. There's the guy that jumps and you run under, the armored guys that rush you, the guys that rush you and explode, the slugs that don't move and shoot bullets you can bash, and the slugs that move but which bullets you cannot bash, the frogs and the owls. And they just keep repeating over and over and over with different palettes but the same strategies. To make things worse, some projectiles are bashable and others aren't, so even bash is not dependable throughout the game. Combat is at its best when you're taking full advantage of your moveset to avoid enemies mid-air and hitting them with their own projectiles, but very often you'll be on ground having to hold on to ledges to take poke shots at enemies while barely seeing their attacks. Again, it works fine for a regular gameplay, but I can see that being infuriating in a one-kill playthrough.

Overall, Ori does many things right and while hard, can be a good first Metroidvania for people getting into the genre. It's beautiful to look at and to listen to, there's an engaging and well told story, exploration is fine, movement is quite expressive although level design frequently plays against it, and if you can endure combat here, it mostly only gets better in other games of the genre. It's a great game that stops a few steps away from being a timeless classic.

The inspiration for Balatro. Finally managed to play it. It's fun, in a kind of brainless way. It feels that most of your decisions are micro-decisions, like "Should I pick another symbol or skip?", "Should I remove a symbol?", "Should I re-roll?", and it might seem the game is limited because of that, because of the limited choice of verbs you have to interact with the game. But when you learn how to make combos and start to try your hand at building them, it gets really funny.

My first two runs were blind, one on Floor 1 and one on Floor 2. I lost on Floor 2 and decided to read a guide, and the tips helped a lot to beat it in my third run. After all, it's not a super stimulating game, but it's a game I can see myself playing while I have Youtube running in the back, since it doesn't require a lot of attention. I'm playing on itch so luckily I can only see the cheevos in game, otherwise it would bring me severe anxiety hahaha

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I really, really tried to give it a fair chance, but Semblance never rises from the status of "cool-idea-on-paper-but-not-enough-to-justify-a-full-priced-game". The premise of shaping the world to complete your platforming goals sounds great, until you start to notice the controls are not finely tuned to challenges/mechanics, and you're suddenly trying to beat the controls, not the levels. This reminds me a lot of Hue, a cool gimmick that become a chore when it's forced into a full game.

The main issues with Semblance are that you can't finely control how you deform the ground, and that later on it requires precise timing without giving you precise controls to achieve that. It's one of those games where you're presented with a puzzle screen (puzzles hardly are bigger than one screen), look at it for a while, and probably is able to figure out what to do in a few seconds, but take minutes to actually achieve it with the given controls. In the worst case, you look at the screen and has no idea what to do, and decide to just try everything to see what sticks.

This is a puzzle design philosophy that is the opposite of great games such as Baba Is You, Snakebird, or Stephen's Sausage Roll. Those games are evergreen puzzle games for a reason, and it is because they take out all the mechanical difficulty of a puzzle (be it precision control or timing), relying solely on BRAINZ. Which is not what could be said of Semblance.

Arguably, the visuals are pretty good with great use of color and minimalistic, geometric environment and props, and the music is quite atmospheric and relaxing, fitting the game's world really well. Some say the best stories are told wordlessly, but Semblance's plot fall to the ground if you try to inspect it too closely. If the gameplay was good, I would be willing to overlook all of that but in the current state, it's not a puzzle game I'd recommend

Played on GOG. I'm trying to play all of Supergiant Games I own, which is all except for Hades II.

First on the list was naturally Bastion. It's definitely a solid game and I had fun most of the time (except when I decided to equip more Idols, and the difficulty ramped up too quickly, but this was quickly addressed by removing most of them and proceeding to beat the game without a hitch). I really enjoyed the narrative, although as a non-native English speaker I rely a lot on subtitles, and it's impossible to pay attention to lore dump during combat, so I missed a lot of important stuff. The structure of the game with the constant return to the base and the range of systems available for upgrades is really fun, and you'll be getting new weapons almost all the way to the last level. By the way, the weapons are all very different and pretty fun to play with. The combat system was the weakest part for me, mostly because there's no punishment for holding the shield all the time besides being vulnerable from the back, which you also is without the shield so no big deal. I felt combat was mostly positioning and managing attack timing vs. proper parrying or staming management as some of the more modern games in the action-adventure genre. Anyway, it's enjoyable and I really liked it.

Very excited to play Transistor sometime soon!

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"There is no Light (TinL)" is a freaking hidden gem and one of the best games I've played this year. It looks absolutely fantastic, sounds great, and has one of the most frantic, aggressive, over-the-top combat sequences I've ever experienced. If other Soulslikes favor calm and composure, TinL rewards split-second reactions and a complete mastery of your toolset, which is mostly fixed - you can choose how to upgrade your character, but everyone will end up maxxing out every skill and having to rely on everything to survive.

Let's break it down, starting with the graphics. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen how juicy that pixel art is. The animations are smooth as butter, the visual language tends to be remarkably consistent within each level, but also shows a lot of variety between levels. If you're looking for 2D pixel-art gorey, horror-driven world building, this is your jam. Enemies are monstruous and have limbs where they shouldn't. Walls have tentacles and multiple eyes coming out of them. Enemies crawl out of cesspits dripping blood. Everything makes sense in this twisted, dark world, and the game never gets old to look at.

To complement the visuals, we have a really good soundtrack. It tends towards atmospheric while you're exploring, and picks up pace once you're in combat. You can usually hear the enemy grunts before you see them, and I love how chatter builds up as you walk around populated areas, with you hearing rumbles that transmit a mood without being specific words. It's good stuff, although I doubt I'll be listening to the soundtrack on Spotify.

The lore and worldbuilding is also quite nice. If you spend the time needed to read all the lore books and to talk to everyone, as well as engage with the sidequests, you'll find a fascinating world filled with a rigid class hierarchy, religious domination, fanatism, blind faith, and a pretty harsh critique of some of those elements. At the same time, the farther away you venture from the starting area, you'll start to come with the best and the worst of the world - from the inhabitants of the Abyss and the darkest circles of hell, to a society that learned to live in peace with monstruous spiders. It's compelling and well realized, even when it didn't need to. The weakest part for me was the final stretch of the game, as the game's resolution is not that satisfying and ends on a kind of weird cliffhanger, but the rest of the stuff is good enough to make you overlook that.

And last but not least - gameplay. Oh man. This is the good stuff. The game is mostly split on exploration and combat encounters. Exploration is supposed to be the easy part, but given how big each area is, how many branching paths you have access to, and how zoomed in the camera is, it's extremely easy to get lost. You'll mostly be dashing around and there's some light platforming that can get on your nerves, but if you die, that's usually fine - you'll just be sent back to the last checkpoint and face no further consequences. Which is good, because while you might be dying a bit on the exploration side of the game, you're guaranteed to die a lot in the combat encounters. Combat starts and ends in a heartbeat - most boss fights took 20-30 seconds to beat, and sometimes I would die within 1-2 seconds of getting into the arena. It's that quick. Part of it is because you have very little health, hence, little room for error. Part of it is because health flasks do not recharge, so you cannot spam them at every battle - you have to decide if the odds are tilted enough in your favor that you can wrap the encounter with the remaining health, because otherwise you just wasted a flask. And if you really want to dish out a lot of damage (a plus early in the game, a must later since enemies regenerate health if you leave them alone for a few miliseconds) you'll have to be constantly attacking, charging your special meter, and blasting specials on them almost non-stop. You'll collect additional weapons as you beat main story bosses, and learning to rotate between those is crucial since using the special ability of an acquired weapon introduces a cooldown. Also, your attacks (and specials) can be used to break enemy's stance (based on the indicator above their head). It sounds like a lot to take care of during combat, and it is, but once you get in the flow and choose the right buffs for your build, it's addictive. My favorite / most frustrating fights were Avarice (enter the arena, take the first three hits within the first second, I'm dead) and the Son of Fly King. Seriously, this game has one of the best combat systems I've ever seen, and I just beat Elden Ring.

It's a crime that this game does not receive more attention, so I'm hoping this review helps to change that.

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I first heard about Umurangi Generation from ErrantSignal on Youtube, and the premise of a photography game was interesting enough that I decided to buy it and try it. Gameplay wise, it's fine - the levels are small, but dense and varied and have a lot of detail for us to scour through. The bounties are fun, and while some of them are a bit arcane/obscure, it never goes into frustrating territory. The side-objectives are constant throughout all levels, but they are usually entertaining, although hunting for films is a bit of a chore in the darker levels. But again, never too frustrating. And I loved the music, it really complemented the whole vibe the games was going for. What felt really weak was the movement, which was quite janky and unenjoyable, too slow and too sensitive at the same time. You'll frequently be sent flying into the air for no reason, or fall through the geometry or get stuck under objects, but you'll usually be back at the game in no time and without much consequence.

And if the game stopped here, it would be a weak recommendation. Good premise, interesting levels, solid music, janky movement, charming overall.

But there is a deeper layer to Umurangi Generation, which requires knowing a bit more about some external factors such as the dev's history, the development context, but also take a deeper look at the events portrayed in the game and all the environmental storytelling. While it's never made extremely obvious, Umurangi Generation is a game about the end of the world, and how your government and the world institutions are failing the last existing generation, and this is all meant to reflect the current state of affairs in the present world. Made in 2020, after the Australian bushfires painted the sky red for weeks on end (hence the Umurangi - Red Sky in the Te Reo language) and, of course, the Covid pandemic hit and was mis-managed across the planet. Umurangi Generation explores the point of view of a generation that was born into those crisis, never were responsible for creating them, but are the ones that will experience the worst effects of it, while the earlier generations (Boomers and Gen X) created the crises, destroyed the world, and will be gone by the time the worst effects are felt. This is all enhanced by in-game grafitti, corporate advertisement, posters, newspapers, and the constant UN peacekeeping force presente throughout the levels. To quote SuperBunnyhop - "it's the angriest videogame ever made".

Once you know that, it becomes a bit easier to overlook the gameplay jank and focus on the storytelling and narrative design, and start to appreciate the game a bit more. It's a game that asks a lot from the player, and gets better the more you give to it. I recommend it regardless, but keep that in mind if you decide to buy it.

Incredible puzzler. Perfect for those 5 minute breaks where you can tackle one, two, or five missions. Difficulty progression is pretty good, with tricks learned early on relevant later on. Now for the real challenge, the OG game

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Played this 20 freaking years after it was released and it's still fresh as it was back in 2005. TLDR: Seeing a 20-year old game that costs $2 being better at almost everything than recent $70 titles is literally mind-blowing. RIP Monolith, you guys had gold here.

This game looks incredible, with the exception of some character textures that are noticeably low-res (in particular Norton Mapes) and some external areas (e.g. the city as seen from the chopper or from the rooftops). Outside of that, environments are beautiful, well-lit, and full of prosp that react to your gun fights. Enemy models are detailed and well animated, and the scenario is reactive enough that anyone walking into a room after a gunfight knows there was a gunfight - there will be bullet marks on the walls, scorch marks where grenades went off, broken glass and crates, exploded barrels, reams of paper on the floor, and viscera splattering the walls. It never ceased to amaze me how beautiful and cohesive everything looked like, even after hours and hours playing the game.

Not only it looks good, it also feels good. Damn, gunplay is so much fun, part because of the portfolio of guns you're given, part because of the enemy AI. No gun is wasted here (except, maybe, the SMG), and I felt myself using the akimbo pistols as often as I did with the plasma rifle or shotgun. My personal favorite is still the penetrator which nails enemies to walls, but all of them are useful and fun to play with. If I have one gripe, is that there are not enough scenarios where the ASP Rifle excels, and ammo for it gets very scarce towards the latter end of the campaign. Enemy AI has been talked about through and through, and what I can say is that the small enemy variety is more than compensated by how vicious they are. The fact you're usually fighting squads instead of single enemies always leave you on your toes, and the game is highly lethal, with a few mistakes costing you a lot. Luckily checkpoints and health pickups are plentiful. The only enemies that suck are the turrets (and the drones to a smaller extent), but they are not super frequent so that's fine. Enemies move very fast, so using bullet time is almost a requirement for effective gunplay, as well as leaning to avoid incoming fire.

The sound complements the atmosphere created by the visuals, and it's always fun to hear the chatter from the enemy squad once they see their numbers falling, followed by radio silence once all are downed. There's a plot here that justifies some creepy sequences, but if this game was a series of linear corridors with nothing more than squads to destroy, I would still love it. Play it now, play it again, and just keep playing, this is too good to be true

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Morbid is a mid-game that is almost acceptable, but falters near the very end. TLDR: beautiful to look at, a chore to play

Let's be honest, it looks great -- the artstyle is detailed and consistent throughout, and there is enough variety in enemy designs and locations that you almost always know where you are and what kind of enemy you can expect to find there. The maps are nicely done, not showing everything but showing enough to keep you entertained. The sound design is generic but not objectively bad. And the designer intentionally keeps the lore cryptic, delivered through item descriptions, which at this point is an old trope, but kind of works here.

But that's the extent to which we can praise the game. The most important part of any action game is the gameplay. I wouldn't really mind the lack of a proper plot that interested me if the moment-to-moment gameplay was good, but alas, it is not. Combat is incredibly simple, to the point of being boring and repetitive. There's very little variation on what you do in combat. It usually is a game of positioning instead of a game of timing and reflexes. Attacks are very high commitment and, for the most part, incredibly slow, so you need to know where you are in relation to your enemy and how long will it take for it to reach you, in order to know whether you'll have enough wind-up to hit your foe before it retaliates. Writing it that way makes it sound acceptable and even fun, but playing it is anything but. Besides a strong attack, you have no variation in your arsenal.

You do get a lot of different weapons, but all play the same and feel the same. Even in terms of power creep, you end the game fighting like you did at the beginning, with your health similar to what you had at the beginning, with similar damage numbers you had at the beginning. Enemies get more health and stronger punches, but you hardly get stronger as the game progresses. Sure, you have Blessings to customize your build, but it's so hard to upgrade them and they are so generic that one can't help but wonder if the game wouldnt' be better without them. You have dodge and parry, but parry timing is not super easy to crack and I always tried to avoid it when I could, except in some enemies that absolutely need it to close the gap (like the ones that shoot missiles up and Lady Tristana). Attacks take too much stamina vs. running and dodging, so you'll be out of stamina more often than not

Add to it a small inventory that can be completely taken over by three or four weapons you find in the path, a lot of buffs that only stack up to 10 so you'll be constantly using things you don't need to be able to pick up more, or leaving loot behind. There's a sanity system that adds close to nothing to the whole ordeal, and a very linear map that tries to pretend it's super interconnected, but it's just a bit annoying to navigate.

I would be willing to overlook all of that if it wasn't for the last battle. Not only it's a 3-phase juggernaut, it's just too slow to begin with, and when it picks up pace you'll probably already be tired of it and depleted of resources, at which point the difficulty just ramps to 11. I almost dropped the game after literally 7 hours because of how much I struggled at the last boss. It's not a challenging fight, it's just annoying and boring. Lady Tristana was the only fight I genuinely enjoyed in the game and she would make a much better last boss than what we have here.