Disco Elysium - Review | A New Standard for Role-Playing Games

Disco Elysium is a role-playing adventure game from 2019 that takes heavy influence from isometric, point-and-click classics like Planescape: Torment and others of its ilk, but with a major twist being that it features no combat whatsoever. Instead, your character development and role-playing choices relate to the different ways in which you perceive and react to the world around you, with different skills granting you varying degrees of ability to empathize with other people, to deduce information through logical reasoning, to interpret dreams and premonitions, or to be able to dance like a badass disco king, among plenty of other things -- all of which will help you in different ways as you interact with NPCs and solve quests while exploring the fantastical-realist setting of Martinaise, Revachol. 

You play as a police detective waking up with a massive hangover from the night before, having partied so hard that you forgot literally everything, including who you are and even basic details of the world itself -- but you quickly come to realize that you were sent here to investigate a murder and team up with your new partner, Kim Kitsuragi, with whom you work together to figure out who killed the hanged man, and in the process prevent the city from erupting into a violent outbreak over the murder. All-the-while you're also trying to learn more about yourself in terms of discovering who you really are and what led you to drink yourself into oblivion, while also going around picking up the pieces from your drunken rampage the night before. Typical gameplay involves non-linear exploration of a small map searching for loot that you can equip to improve your stats or else sell for money that you can spend buying other equipment and healing items; rolling dice to perform active skill checks while interacting with NPCs and objects in the environment; and earning experience towards level-ups which will allow you to customize your character build by increasing various stats of your choosing. 

The thing that makes Disco Elysium so special, at least for me, is how it handles role-playing by really emphasizing character-based decisions, in terms of how you shape your character's personality; how you speak to other characters; how you internalize details about things happening around you; what options even exist for how you solve quests, or even what quests you're capable of triggering at all; and also just how your character thinks. These are aspects that I find critical for proper role-playing, that I feel have been under-represented in mainstream RPGs going on for a while now, where all too often they make their skill systems predominantly about what methodology you use to kill things with no other way to effect your character's background or personality through dialogue, or else with the scope of dialogue options being narrowly focused on a binary scale of some variation of "good or evil" with maybe a neutral option if you're lucky. That makes role-playing in those kinds of games feel a bit arbitrary and superficial to me, whereas Disco really leans into deeper aspects of how you play out your character, with several statistical systems and measurements that let you craft your own sort of character that will see and interact with the world differently than another.

SOMA - 10th Anniversary Retrospective

Note: SOMA is best enjoyed going into it completely blind. This review has minor spoilers for certain story elements and specific moments, but does not spoil any major twists or outcomes. I have also previously reviewed SOMA back in 2017; this is an entirely new review, completely revamped and improved, but you can read my original review here if you'd like.

If you listen to the internet, SOMA is one of the greatest video games of all time, a truly transcendent experience like no other game out there -- a flawless masterpiece of science fiction storytelling that sticks with you long after you finish, a life-changing event that forever alters your perception of yourself and the world around you. That's all a bit hyperbolic for my taste, but I do remember enjoying it quite a bit when I played it originally, not too long after its release in September 2015. At the time, I found its story strikingly thought-provoking and its atmosphere highly immersive, but felt the actual gameplay to be somewhat lacking, especially with it being advertised as a survival-horror game from the esteemed creators of the Penumbra and Amnesia games beforehand, which I had considered to be among my favorite horror games of all time. Still, it was an enjoyable experience overall that has stood out as particularly memorable in my mind, to the point that I was still recommending it to friends and family as recently as a few months ago. With its 10-year anniversary approaching and the game's subject matter on my mind as of late, I figured it was worth replaying to see how well it holds up nowadays, and if SOMA is still as good as I remember it being. 

In SOMA, you play as Simon Jarrett, a man in 2015 who survived a car crash with heavy brain damage that has shortened his life expectancy to just a few months. The game begins with you waking up in your Toronto apartment before you're scheduled to undergo an experimental brain scan that purports to be able to model a virtual simulation of your brain in order to test various treatments in a faster, safer environment. The idea being that, if all goes well, they'll be able to try more aggressive or unorthodox options and find a cure to prolong your life, and if not, then at least your contribution will help to refine and advance the technology so that it can help others in the future. So you sit down for the scan as a contraption is lowered over your head, your vision flashes white, and the next thing you know, the room has gone dark, with no sign of the doctor who was administering the test. After getting up and fumbling around for a light switch, you realize that you're in a completely different place, now -- an all-metal facility with high tech computers, environmental suits on the wall, blood on the floor, and strange growths protruding around the structure. You investigate further and find the place seemingly deserted and left in a state of disrepair, with a call log from an intercom system in which two people talk about sealing the doors to keep something out and making sure everything is set to run on standby for when they evacuate.

From there, the game becomes a matter of exploring the facility to figure out where you are, how you got there, and how you can get back home to Toronto -- if you even can at all -- with you piecing information together from computer messages, audio logs, and imagery on the walls, that tell the story of what happened to Pathos II -- the research station that you suddenly find yourself in, and that you now hope to escape from. Gameplay takes the form of a walking-simulator-style adventure game where you explore environments looking for ways to advance to the next area by solving simple puzzles, finding particular key items, and occasionally even dodging monsters who appear to impede your progress. It is meant to be a horror game, after all, what with the dark and spooky atmosphere, the disturbing monsters that you're forced to run and hide from, and a fair number of scripted scares mixed with a heightened sense of dread and tension as you worry about what might happen next. And yet, despite Frictional Games' reputation for creating excellent horror games, the horror stuff in SOMA actually takes a backseat to other far more compelling elements -- that being its deeply immersive atmosphere, and its incredibly absorbing story. 

The Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos - Review

The Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos is an open-world action-adventure role-playing game, based on the popular Gothic series, which was originally developed by Piranha Bytes in the early 2000s. As a total conversion mod for Gothic 2, created by fans and released near the very end of 2021, Archolos offers a full-length, standalone experience with up to 100 hours or more of content in an all-original map and story, plus tons of new mechanics and upgrades to the existing Gothic formula. It's therefore worth stressing that this isn't just a mod for Gothic 2, but it's an entirely new game altogether, one so extensive and professional in quality that it could easily be confused for an official Gothic game. It is completely free to download and play, so long as you have a copy of Gothic 2: Gold Edition on which to run it. The mod was originally written in Polish and features professional Polish voice acting, but includes English subtitles as well as other language options for the interface and subtitles.

While you could conceivably play Archolos as your first introduction to the Gothic series, due to it occurring chronologically first and being a mostly separate adventure that requires no prior knowledge of the Gothic series to understand, it's an experience that's probably best enjoyed if you've already played Gothic 1 and 2 so that you can appreciate the extra refinement that it brings to the established formula, in addition to all the small references and Easter eggs that set up future events in the series. 

The game takes place during a tipping point in the orc war against humanity, several years before the start of Gothic 1, as the orcs begin to seize the upper hand and as the war's effects begin to be felt among the common folk in the outer reaches of the kingdom. You play as a young man named Marvin, fleeing from your hometown with your brother Jorn to the island of Archolos, in hopes of escaping the war and starting a new life. While trying to integrate yourself with the local farming village, your brother is mysteriously kidnapped, thus instigating the main quest to track him down and learn more about the people responsible. The rest of the game involves exploring a densely-structured open world map where enemies and loot do not scale to your level; completing side quests for various NPCs and communities to gain their trust and earn valuable rewards; and leveling up your character by investing skill points in different categories so you can get better at fighting all the difficult enemies that populate the world. 

If you're familiar with the early Gothic games, then you'll feel right at home with Archolos, since it's based on the same engine and uses all of the same core mechanics, even reusing a bunch of the exact same audiovisual components. That simple basis does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of achieving that authentic Gothic feel, since it shares more of the same fundamental DNA than every other Piranha Bytes game to have come out since Gothic 1 and 2. However, Archolos does feature a certain "je ne sais quoi" in its design that extends a little deeper than simply copying those superficial aspects -- it really achieves an authentic feel in the tone and atmosphere, the early game difficulty and progression, the world design and exploration, as well as the general quest design and character interactions, with the added benefit of a lot of key improvements to various mechanics that weren't necessarily problems in the original games, but are all the more welcome to see in Archolos. This includes things like new quality of life improvements, new evolution on existing mechanics, all-new features and systems, and corrections for certain issues that Piranha Bytes never had the chance to address originally. You could even argue that some things are done even better than the originals, which is facilitated by the developers having 20 years of fan feedback from the original games to incorporate into Archolos. So in a way, it does kind of feel like "Gothic 2: Night of the Raven, But Better."

No One Lives Forever: Review + Full Series Retrospective (Replay)

Note: I had previously reviewed the full series back in 2016; you can read the original review here. This review is an updated version that's been largely re-written with updated and expanded thoughts, along with a full video version, seen here. 

The Operative: No One Lives Forever and its sequel, No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in HARM's Way, are a series of first-person shooters developed by Monolith Productions in 2000 and 2002, in which players take the role of 1960s secret agent Cate Archer trying to stop a villainous criminal organization from taking over the world. Typical gameplay involves combinations of run-and-gun action as you fight off hordes of enemy henchmen; sneaky stealth action as you try to infiltrate facilities undetected; exploring varied level environments to find hidden intelligence and bonus equipment upgrades; going undercover and mingling with civilians to meet with informants or interview suspects, occasionally even picking dialogue choices; riding vehicles through exotic locations; and watching cutscenes that progressively tell the game's lengthy story as Cate trots the globe to diverse and exotic locations to complete a variety of different objectives en route to saving the day. Both games also feature a strong humorous component with lots of genre-spoofing dialogue and jokes, thus lending them a much more whimsical and lighthearted tone than your typical shooter. Oh, and there's also Contract JACK, a stand-alone spinoff from 2003 that's loosely connected to the series, but uh, there's a reason it's not discussed much when it comes to the NOLF series and is perhaps better forgotten about, but don't worry -- I'll explain why in due time. 

 

Originally PC exclusives before seeing the first game ported to the PlayStation 2, the NOLF series received critical praise at the time but only ever achieved moderate financial success, having been overshadowed by so many other major releases in the surrounding years, and was soon abandoned by Monolith in favor of new series like FEAR and Condemned a few years later. A series of publisher acquisitions and mergers subsequently allowed the copyright to fall into no man's land, with none of the companies who MIGHT own it actually knowing for sure if they do or not, and none of them having any apparent interest in finding out, despite developer Nightdive Studios' best efforts in recent years while attempting to file for the license in order to do a remake. The games have therefore never been re-released beyond their initial run, nor made available for digital download on modern distribution platforms like Steam or GOG, while any attempt at a remake or legacy sequel has been shut down due to all the legal uncertainty, thus cementing the series legacy in the annals of video game history as lost, forgotten gems. 

Slay the Spire - Review 2025 | Why is this game so addicting?

Slay the Spire is a deck-building roguelike card game in the style of a turn-based dungeon-crawler, in which you choose one of four characters and try to ascend through a series of increasingly difficult combat encounters and random events so you can defeat the heart at the end and slay the titular spire. As a roguelike game, you will go through a different path every time, with randomized encounters therein, while also gaining different upgrades along the way, thus making each run feel totally unique, but with permanent progress being gained each time towards unlocking new types of content. As a deck-building game, you will always begin with the same starting deck of basic cards, and then progressively add new cards from a wide selection to hone that deck's advanced specialization for that one run. The challenge stems from seeing a bunch of different variables thrown at you each game, figuring out how best to adapt your current strategy to fit the current situation, and trying to play your cards just right, literally, to survive long enough to stand a chance at defeating the final boss. Win or lose, you will still earn some kind of reward for your efforts, perhaps the most important being lessons learned about strategies, tactics, and mechanics that you can apply to future runs so that you can hope to do better next time. 

To better understand the context for everything else I'm going to say in this review, let's start with an overview of how the game works and what you actually do in it. If you're already familiar with the basic gameplay concepts, then you can skip ahead to just get more of my thoughts on the game as a whole. 

Elden Ring - Review | How good is the open world, really?

Elden Ring is the latest "Soulsborne" style of action-role-playing-game by developer FromSoftware, who launched this sub-genre back in 2009 with Demon's Souls on the PS3. The emphasis of this series, which includes the Dark Souls trilogy and the PS4-exclusive Bloodborne, has always been about traversing assorted levels while trying to survive against difficult hazards and enemy encounters so you can defeat the level's boss, with a combat system that relies on learning to read enemy behaviors so you can know when to safely attack, dodge, or heal, and managing a limited stamina gauge while performing various types of attacks and defensive maneuvers. The series also incorporates RPG elements with a leveling system that has you increasing different stats of your choosing as you gain experience from defeated enemies, as well as choosing specific weaponry, spells, jewelry, and items that contribute to your own desired build and playstyle, which you find by exploring levels for optional side paths and hidden secrets, in some cases even completing NPC quest lines. All-the-while, the action-based gameplay is wrapped up with a wealth of deep lore and indirect storytelling, with item descriptions and dialogue that hint only vaguely at narrative concepts you're meant to piece together through your own interpretive reasoning and deduction. 

While some people may get a lot out of this style of storytelling and world-building, I would guess that for the vast majority of people out there, the real appeal of the Souls formula, and by extension Elden Ring, is simply the fun combat system and all the satisfying challenge it presents each time you're able to clear a level and defeat the boss waiting for you at the end. Elden Ring follows these Souls-like elements to a T, so much so that you could almost call it Dark Souls 4, or Demon's Souls 6, if you will, despite it technically being its own unique property. It's basically the exact same game, just with some of the names of things being changed -- for example, "souls" are now "runes," "bonfires" are now "sites of grace," "Firelink Shrine" is now the "Roundtable Hold" and so on, while other series staples like Patches the Hyena and the Moonlight Greatsword and leaving messages and bloodstains on the floor for other players to see, are all back again, as usual. 

As the latest installment in this long-running series, Elden Ring naturally represents the highest level of refinement and evolution to all of the core mechanics, with several new features like jumping, crouching, spell charging, spirit summons, guard counters, and more -- but the big change that it brings to the equation is shifting the world design from a more "Metroidvania-style" of linearly-structured levels with a beginning, middle, and end that progressively branch out from the starting hub and connect back to each other in different areas, into a true open-world format with massive landscapes that you can explore in all 360-degrees, in virtually any order you want. The open-world IS the defining characteristic of Elden Ring -- it's the thing that sets it apart from other Soulsborne games, and Elden Ring's execution of the open world format is commonly heralded as being among the best ever created. So if you're going to play Elden Ring at all, it's either because you're interested in the Souls formula and want to play the latest rendition of that experience, or it's because you're specifically looking for a good open-world gameplay experience.

Star Trek: Resurgence - Review | Some of the best Trek in DECADES...

Star Trek: Resurgence is a story-driven adventure game by Dramatic Labs, a studio created recently by former Telltale developers who wanted to carry on the tradition of games they were previously known for like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and countless others. If you're familiar with any of those games then you should already know basically what to expect with Star Trek: Resurgence -- a lot of cutscenes where you pick dialogue options and react to timed prompts, alternating with moments of limited exploration, light puzzle-solving, and scripted action sequences, where the decisions you make along the way influence the way the story shapes up. The story, of course, is the main draw, here, with it basically being like a good multi-episode arc from the 90's era of Star Trek TV shows, expanded into a 10-12 hour runtime that allows you to really immerse yourself in the setting and feel like you're actually taking part in a series of Star Trek, in more elaborate and involved ways than what would typically be shown in the actual shows.

Now, you don't necessarily have to be a fan of Star Trek to enjoy Resurgence -- at a minimum, you just have to enjoy "choose your own adventure" style video games and be open to an optimistic sci-fi space adventure story, which requires no prior knowledge of Star Trek since it revolves around an entirely new cast of characters trying to resolve a conflict between two entirely made-up, new-to-this-game species. The game is sure to explain any relevant lore details from the shows or movies that a new player might not know, or that an established fan might have even forgotten about, while other things can be easily deduced as you go along; for example you don't need to know what the Kobayashi Maru is to infer from the surrounding context clues that it's a notoriously difficult test, which is all you really need to know to understand the point of that conversation. So it should be fairly easy to follow along with everything even if you don't know anything about Star Trek.

Stardew Valley - 2024 Review | Why is this game so good?

Note: This review contains very mild spoilers for seasonal events, end-game content, and unlocked gameplay systems, but does not spoil any major character arcs or story events. I don't consider anything in this review to be a major spoiler, but if you're someone who wants to discover everything yourself then you should exercise caution with this review. (And probably shouldn't be reading/watching 45-minute deep-dive reviews in the first place, if so.) It is based on vanilla version 1.6.

 

Stardew Valley is an "open-ended country-life RPG" in which you create your own character and inherit your departed grandfather's dilapidated old farm on the outskirts of Pelican Town, a small rural town in the greater region of Stardew Valley. The core gameplay systems revolve around typical farming activities (which includes planting, watering, and harvesting crops, and tending to various livestock to process their produce, among other things); foraging for natural resources that will be used in various cooking and crafting recipes; fishing the local ocean, river, and lakes to catch assorted fish and treasures with rods or traps; mining for minerals and ore necessary to upgrade your tools and farming equipment while fighting the various monsters that inhabit the mines in an effort to survive its deeper and more dangerous depths; building your relationship with the local townsfolk by talking to them, giving them gifts, completing their requests, and making choices in their various cutscenes; and just in general exploring the town and its surrounding areas as you unlock new areas by advancing through the game, which in turn unlock new gameplay options, with lots of hidden secrets to discover.

There's no clear-cut "goal" you're striving to accomplish in the game, except for a few general suggestions, like restoring the Community Center as a cumulative symbol of your positive influence on the town, or earning your grandfather's blessing by achieving enough success in different aspects of your farm, or the various goals you set for yourself, like setting up your perfect farm layout that maximizes every square space on the map or achieving Perfection by having done literally everything possible in the game. None of these are exactly end-game goals, however, as each one unlocks some new avenue of gameplay possibilities, with the idea being that you can continue playing indefinitely, for as long as you desire to continue playing that save file.
 
As the introductory cutscenes establish, the point of your character moving to Stardew Valley and beginning a new life as a farmer (and perhaps, by extension, why you as a player choose to play Stardew Valley), is simply a means to escape from the pressing burdens of modern life while seeking out a more peaceful, fulfilling, "down-to-earth" sort of lifestyle. That, I feel, is where Stardew Valley really shines. Although it has many compelling aspects working in its favor (like lots of engaging gameplay mechanics with tons of depth and variety to experience and a really satisfying progression system), the real reason I suspect it has such strong appeal with so many people is likely just its charming, immersive premise, and its relaxing vibes and atmosphere. After all, it's a wonderfully idealized version of a wholesome life/setting that I think many of us yearn for, where you're able to live self-sufficiently with no bosses to report to, where hard work and dedication are guaranteed to pay off, with a tight-knit small-town community who come together for all kinds of special events and contribute to society in different ways, with just a hint of magical elements to make it feel fantastical and thus a little more exciting than real life.

The Witcher 3 - Review | The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Updated v1.1)

Note: This article is an updated version of my previous review from 2016, with extra sections and edits from my recent replay. You can view the original article here, or watch this article in video format on my YouTube channel. 

I've had nothing but tremendous respect for Polish developer CD Projekt RED ever since I played their 2007 debut, The Witcher. That game quickly vaulted its way into my short list of all-time favorite RPGs because of its deeply sophisticated quest design and its uniquely dark-fantasy-folklore atmosphere. Their 2011 followup, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, lost some of the original game's charm and appeal for me, but was still a solid game in most respects, and I especially admired how the middle portion of the game branched in completely separate directions depending on your choices. What they and their parent company have been doing with GOG.com, meanwhile -- picking up licenses for older games, updating them to work on modern platforms, and selling them completely DRM-free at reasonable prices -- combined with their continued support for TW1 and TW2 by putting a ton of effort into the Enhanced Edition of both games and releasing the updates completely free, has made them a shining example of a game company doing good within the industry and treating their customers right -- current controversies with Cyberpunk 2077 notwithstanding.

The 2013 and 2014 E3 previews for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt generated a ton of hype, leading many publications to declare it their most anticipated game of 2015 and cumulatively bestowing it with over 200 awards before it even released. Understandably so -- how could you not be excited over the prospect of CD Projekt's masterful storytelling and quest design applied to a vast open world, with such fantastic-looking preview footage and such high production value? I was skeptical when it was first announced that the game would be open-world, because I already knew from first-hand experience how badly the process can go when trying to adapt a beloved series to a huge open-world format in its third installment, but I held out hope that CD Projekt could pull it off, given their track record of success and how much they seem to understand game design. The Witcher 3 was subsequently released in May of 2015 to universal acclaim, and shattered records for the most "Game of the Year" awards ever bestowed upon one game. I figured, at that point, that CD Projekt had defied my expectations and managed to craft a huge open-world RPG that captured all the best elements of open-world games while still retaining the unique soul and elements that made The Witcher series so great in the previous two installments. And then I actually played it.

It turns out that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is not the perfect masterpiece so many people claim it to be. It's still pretty good, mind you, and I'd say it easily deserves to be in the conversation as one of the best open-world action-adventure-RPGs ever created, especially in terms of games with mainstream appeal. Though not among my personal favorites, I can definitely see the appeal that leads so many people to enjoy it so thoroughly. But that sort of praise and distinction don't shield it from criticism, and the fact remains that there are a lot of critical areas in which TW3 comes up short, outright disappoints, or else simply isn't as good as it could've been. There's a lot of stuff to talk about with a game this size, so I won't even try to craft this review into a paragraph-by-paragraph flowing essay; instead, I'll break it down into more targeted bullet points and categorize them based on three of Clint Eastwood's timeless criteria: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Horizon Zero Dawn - Great Ideas, Boring Open-World

Horizon: Zero Dawn is an open-world action-adventure game with RPG elements, set in a post-apocalyptic future after a cataclysmic event wipes out virtually all life on the planet, leaving humanity to start over as basically prehistoric civilizations while beastly machines roam the earth. You play as Aloy, an outcast orphan from a primitive hunter-gatherer tribe, who, while performing a Rite of Passage to join the tribe, gets attacked by a group of assassins who believe her to have a genetic link to one of the ancient ones who built the sealed metal vaults embedded in the mountains. The rest of the game sees Aloy exploring the world beyond her tribe's Sacred Lands, doing battle with fearsome machines, completing quests and favors for various people, gaining experience to improve her fighting and survival prowess, and collecting natural resources and machine parts to craft upgrades to her equipment or to trade with merchants, all while tracking down the assassins who tried to kill her, uncovering the mystery of what happened to humanity 1000 years ago, discovering her own identity and why she was orphaned at birth, and ultimately saving the world from another apocalypse.

There's a lot to enjoy in a game like this, with such a compellingly beautiful world full of interesting lore and backstory and a bunch of tactically exciting combat encounters against uniquely-designed robot dinosaurs, but there's also a lot holding it back and preventing it from reaching its full potential. The RPG elements and melee combat system feel underdeveloped and therefore a little underwhelming, for instance, but the bulk of the issues deal with its open-world design, where it feels like the developers relied a little too much on genre tropes when creating this world, while not putting a whole lot of interesting or worthwhile things to do in it. Admittedly, Guerrilla Games executed a lot more restraint with their open-world than some other developers, and the game is better for it, but I still had this lingering feeling throughout my whole playthrough like it wasn't quite as good as it could've been.

Until Dawn - Review | A Uniquely Chilling Horror Experience

Note: Until Dawn is best enjoyed going into it completely blind. This review has minor spoilers for specific situations and outcomes but does not spoil any main plot elements or twists.

Until Dawn is a cinematic horror game in which you play as a group of teenagers attempting to survive the night in a snowy mountain lodge after their winter getaway takes a sinister turn. Returning to the same lodge where two of their friends went missing one year prior, the group reunites and soon finds themselves trapped on the mountain with a murderous psychopath who's trying to torture and kill them off one-by-one. You play as one character at a time, usually partnered with someone else, switching characters between chapters and even between scenes, with a main objective of trying to make every character survive until dawn. To do so, you'll have to make smart decisions with quick reaction speeds, as the game's "butterfly effect" system can create far-reaching consequences for seemingly innocuous decisions that could ultimately lead to a character's death. The game plays like an interactive movie, where the bulk of the gameplay consists of making decisions and reacting to quick-time-events during cutscenes, alternating with sequences that give you freedom to explore your surroundings for story clues while trying to complete an objective. While lacking conventional survival-horror mechanics like health bars or resource management, each character has various stats that can be influenced by your decisions and which can affect the outcome of certain interactions. Ultimately, the potential life and death of each of the game's eight characters acts as a sort of resource management system of its own, and it's here where the game derives most of its survival-horror tension, since you'll fail the game (or at least get an unsatisfying ending) if none of them make it out alive.

I'm a huge fan of horror in all forms of media, and yet despite my love for the genre I find that horror games can be really hit or miss, usually missing more often than they hit for me. Part of the problem is that I'm just so desensitized to the genre that the usual tricks of jump scares, violent gore, and spooky imagery just don't phase me much; while I appreciate a good horror aesthetic, I find that I need strong gameplay mechanics to invoke a sense of fear or dread in me, which often isn't the case with a lot of modern horror games that basically amount to "haunted house ride, jump-scare simulators" where you walk around creepy environments while scary things happen at you. With Until Dawn's heavy reliance on cutscenes, quick-time events, and gameplay sequences that border on "walking simulator" territory, I was a little worried this might be the case, but it turns out the game's central "butterfly effect" system, coupled with the fact that the characters can all die in a variety of different ways, at different stages of the game, actually made this one of the more tensely engaging horror games that I've played in a long time.

Gothic Remake Playable Teaser - Feedback and Review

In a surprise news release that seemingly no one saw coming, THQ Nordic announced that they're looking to remake the original Gothic, and released a lengthy demo (or as they call it, a "playable teaser") as proof of concept, available for free on Steam to anyone who owns any of Piranha Bytes' games on Steam. This news follows seven months after THQ Nordic acquired Piranha Bytes, the small German studio responsible for the original Gothic trilogy, making them and all of their IPs official subsidiaries of THQ Nordic. The remake, however, is not being designed by Piranha Bytes, as they're presumably busy working on Elex 2 -- rather, it's being handled by THQ's Barcelona studio. The demo opens with a few slides of text from the designers stating that they're huge fans of Gothic and wanted to revamp some of its clunkier, more out-dated designs while "maintaining and strengthening" the "amazing atmosphere" of the original game, but rather than simply doing a straight one-to-one remaster, they wanted to treat the project like more of a re-imagining, adding a bunch of new content and expanding on existing ideas while putting their own unique twist on what they consider to be a "legendary game." The purpose of the demo is to showcase early ideas they're working with and to gain feedback from fans about the direction they're going with the remake -- upon completing the demo, it actually links to a survey where you can fill out responses and grade them on their efforts.

In essence, this development process feels like a more open form of Early Access and will hopefully provide the Barcelona studio the opportunity to shape the remake into something that will live up to the great legacy of Gothic, and which will satisfy fans of the original game while also introducing it to a new audience. While the demo showcases some promising new ideas, and I'm absolutely ecstatic for the opportunity to play a brand new Gothic game heavily-inspired by the original, the current version of the demo isn't really what I would want out of a Gothic remake, or even a re-imagining. Supposedly they're still very early in the alpha stages of development and nothing is set in stone -- a full release isn't even a guarantee at this point -- but early impressions suggest to me that, although they may have a lot of love and respect for Gothic, it seems like they don't fully understand what it was that made Gothic so unique and special in the first place, because there are a lot of design elements that seem to go directly against the core design philosophies of Gothic and which make it hard for this demo to truly feel like Gothic.

Metroid: Samus Returns - Classic 2D Gameplay with a Modern Finish

Metroid is one of Nintendo's most iconic and long-running series, though its releases have been somewhat sporadic over the decades, with frequent gaps between major installments and with development largely being handed over to studios outside of Nintendo, starting in 2002 with Retro Studios taking the reigns for the Prime trilogy, Team Ninja handling Other M in 2012, and now MercurySteam (known for their Castlevania: Lords of Shadow games) developing Metroid: Samus Returns, a 2017 remake of 1991's Metroid 2: Return of Samus. Starring the usual series protagonist Samus Aran, Galactic Federation bounty hunter, Metroid 2 takes place after the events of the first game, and sends you to the metroid homeworld, planet SR388 to wipe out the rest of the metroids. With that simple premise, Samus Returns plays like any typical Metroid game, where you explore a series of complexly-interconnected levels while gaining assorted power-ups that grant access to new upgrades and new areas, in addition to opening up new gameplay possibilities, all in the form of a two-dimensional puzzle-platform-shooter.

Risen - Review | A 10-Year Retrospective

Risen is a fantasy-themed open-world action-RPG by Piranha Bytes, a small German studio who were previously responsible for the first three Gothic games -- the first two of which are some of the best RPGs of all time. Following the colossal mess that was Gothic 3, Piranha Bytes split from their publisher, JoWood, who retained the rights to the Gothic name, thus forcing Piranha Bytes to create a new series which would serve as a spiritual successor to their beloved Gothic series. As such, Risen sticks pretty closely to the formula set up by Gothic 1 and 2, so if you're at all familiar with those games then you should know pretty much exactly what to expect with Risen.

Link's Awakening: A 25+ Year Retrospective

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was originally released in 1993, and I vividly remember playing Link's Awakening on that bulky, unlit, green-screened Game Boy while sitting in church and on long car rides as a young boy. It's probably safe to say that it was one of my favorite games in my early childhood, and I was overjoyed when it was re-released on the Game Boy Color a few years later with extra content. With the 2019 remake for the Nintendo Switch coming out, I figured it was time to go back and re-examine a classic that I used to love so much as a kid, and see how well it holds up 25+ years later.

As it turns out, Link's Awakening is still really good. Surprisingly good, actually, considering it's one of the oldest games in the series on one of the most primitive Nintendo devices. The only thing really holding it back is the sheer limitations of the Game Boy, only being able to render a very small resolution and only having two buttons to work with; otherwise, the actual game designs feel timelessly classic, which makes sense seeing as later games in the series seem to have taken a strong influence from Link's Awakening. Its impact on the series is especially noteworthy considering it originated a lot of elements that have now become Zelda staples, like playing songs on the ocarina for various effects, trading sequences, collectibles that lead to extra rewards, fishing, owl and companion characters, and more. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a quintessential Zelda game and ranks among the series' best, easily making my top five, and maybe even having a case for top three.

Gothic 3 Sucks -- A Critique From a Longtime Gothic Fan (Updated Ver 1.1)

Note: This article was originally published in January 2018, but has since been updated with extra content, including a full video review.

Gothic and Gothic 2 are two of my favorite games of all time, being two of the games that had the most influence on my young and developing mind when I first played them in the early 2000s. And yet I harbor virtually no love for Gothic 3. I've barely mentioned it in any of my Gothic articles because I don't even like to consider it part of the series; it doesn't connect to Gothic 2 very well, and the whole gameplay formula is a radical departure from what made Gothic and Gothic 2 so great. Even though it was made by the same developer, Piranha Bytes, Gothic 3 feels like a different game by a different group of people who had only a vague understanding of what the Gothic games were, and who were told to make everything "bigger and more epic" in order to compete with the likes of Morrowind and Oblivion. Spoiler alert: they failed miserably.

Gothic 3 is a classic case of a game being ruined by ambition, of a developer trying to reach beyond their own means and biting off more than they could chew. The game, besides being unfinished and under-developed, was a buggy mess upon its release, and it took years of fan-made patches to supposedly "fix" the game and make it functional. The community patch is now almost one-third the file size of the base game, and contains numerous bug fixes and stability tweaks, and also attempts to completely redesign and rebalance the combat system. I played the game at launch (late 2006) before the community patch even existed, and again a few years later with it, and while the patch truly does a lot to improve the game's overall playability, it doesn't (and simply cannot) fix the core gameplay design and story problems, which are the real reasons Gothic 3 sucks -- not just the bugs and broken combat that the patch supposedly fixes.

Normally I'd be content to dismiss the issue and move on with life (the game's over a decade old, after all, and I haven't even played it in about eight or nine years), but I find it surprising that, even today, people still speak highly of Gothic 3. With the recent release of Elex, newcomers to Piranha Bytes games frequently ask about their previous games and which ones are worth playing, and people readily leap to defend (or even recommend) Gothic 3, usually with the caveat that you need to play with the community patch. That's sound advice, of course, but I just can't justify recommending Gothic 3 to anyone because of how bad of a Gothic game it is, and how mediocre it is, just as a game in general. So in this article I'll be explaining my opinion on Gothic 3 and why I think it sucks.

Bloodborne Review: Interesting, but Ultimately Disappointing

Dark Souls has been one of the most influential video games over the last decade, with its unique gameplay formula and entire presentation becoming a standard of comparison whenever people talk about melee combat, level design, and difficulty in other video games. The Souls series has been such a cultural phenomenon that it's essentially become its own sub-genre of games, with the "Souls-like" term catching on as a way to describe other, similar types of games who've taken clear inspiration from Dark Souls. In 2015, between the release of Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3, developer From Software released Bloodborne, a main-entry "Souls-like" (or Soulsborne) game, which is basically just a spin-off from Dark Souls, taking the core gameplay concepts and mechanics from Dark Souls and giving them a complete make-over with a whole new setting and a bunch of mechanical tweaks on the familiar formula.

Speaking as someone who's played all four of the Souls games in order, starting with the original Demon's Souls, Bloodborne breathes a lot of new life into a gameplay formula that's become a little too tired and repetitive over the years, but ultimately doesn't set itself apart from the Souls series as much as I would have liked it to. In practice, my experience playing Bloodborne started with excited optimism as I relished the positive effect many of its changes had on the core gameplay formula, until about halfway through when I started to feel like I was just playing Yet Another Version of the exact same game I've already played four times previously over the last decade -- this now being the fifth. And the more I played, the more I started to feel subtly disappointed and underwhelmed by some of the game's other design elements, and by the missed opportunities to do something more with the potential that a spin-off game could have.

Gothic 1+2: Masterpieces in Immersive Design

Gothic 1 and 2 are some of the best open-world action-adventure-RPGs of all time, and part of the reason why is their uniquely immersive gameplay designs. Developed by the small German studio Piranha Bytes and released in 2000 and 2002 in their native Germany, Gothic 1 and 2 were truly ahead of their time; while not the first to implement scripted NPC scheduling and reactions, they were already doing so years before Bethesda supposedly pioneered that concept with Oblivion, while some of their other design elements like in-world skill trainers and the process of forging weapons aren't really seen in other games, even to this day with almost two decades of industry advancements since the original Gothic. Some of their design elements may be a little quaint or antiquated at this point, but for the most part the immersive design of Gothic 1 and 2 is timelessly brilliant and contributes to a feeling of atmospheric immersion that often isn't found in other games.

The Importance of Gothic 1+2's Music: A Review of Kai Rosenkranz's Soundtracks

A lot of different components go into making Gothic 1 and 2 such great games, but one of its more subtle, understated triumphs is the excellent quality of its soundtrack, composed by Kai Rosenkranz. Music is something that I feel often gets overlooked when it comes to video game reviews, because most gamers aren't music critics, and aren't very knowledgeable about what goes into making great music -- we just know what sounds good, and what doesn't. The thing that makes Gothic's soundtrack so good, to me, is that it strikes a perfect balance between melody and ambiance -- it has enough melodic structure that you can pick out themes and quickly come to recognize its motifs, while also serving as an ideal backdrop to set the tone of your adventures, without crossing too boldly into the foreground and calling too much attention to itself.

Resident Evil 2: Great, But Imperfect

The Resident Evil 2 remake has been possibly the most-anticipated release in the Resident Evil series, considering how well the original game is beloved by fans. Ever since the first game got remade on the GameCube in 2002, fans have been clamoring for a similar treatment of the sequel, which many actually consider to be the better game. Two decades later, we finally have the Resident Evil 2 remake, but it's maybe not quite what people really wanted, at least not initially. Gone are the pre-rendered backgrounds, fixed camera angles, and awkward tank-controls that were so iconic and representative of the first three games; in their place we now have an over-the-shoulder Resident Evil 4 style third-person shooter perspective in a fully three-dimensional environment. While the shift in perspective may make it seem to have more in common with some of the more recent Resident Evil games, rather than the game it's supposed to be based on, the remake is definitely more of a classic survival-horror game in the vein of the original trilogy than a modern action shooter. In fact, it's probably the most old-school survival-horror game to be released by a major publisher since, well, Resident Evil 7, and the remake is even more of an old-school survival-horror than Resident Evil 7 was.