Welcome to This Is Not A Review. In these articles we discuss general impressions, ideas and thoughts on any given game, but as the title implies, it’s not a review. Instead, it’s an exercise in offering a quick recommendation (or dismissal) after spending enough time to grasp the ideas and gameplay of a thing without necessarily playing it from A to Z.

The subject of this installment: Pathologic 3: Quarantine, developed by Ice-Pick Lodge and published by HypeTrain Digital.

The original Pathologic is a survival experience that challenged players to withstand twelve days in a small town of the Great Steppe that’s been wracked by a deadly (and possibly sentient) plague. The task is to contend with infection, obviously, but also with the societal decay that such an epidemic invites, all while searching for a possible cure and making difficult choices about whose lives to prioritize along the way. It’s survival horror in perhaps the most literal sense and a singular experiment in storytelling through mechanics and systems.

The premise is unique enough that the series’ trajectory since has been to revisit and expand upon the same setting and themes. Pathologic 2 was essentially a remake of the first entry, and it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played, but it only features one of the original three playable characters. Developer Ice-Pick Lodge originally intended to add the other two as DLC, but that project appears to have grown into yet another standalone entry in the series.

So, later this year we’ll be returning to the Steppe once again in Pathologic 3 to see how the updated engine affects the Bachelor’s side of the story. In the meantime, a free prologue, subtitled Quarantine, serves as an appetizer.

A full Pathologic campaign takes a couple dozen hours to complete and adheres to its own schedule, allowing players to largely travel where they want, when they want, even if it means missing key story events. Quarantine, which takes only a couple of hours of complete, is a much more rigidly guided experience. We’re given pieces of the story as we jump to various points on the timeline – before, after and during the outbreak – and we’re introduced to some new mechanics that differentiate the Bachelor’s path from that of the Haruspex in the previous entry.

Since the Bachelor is a doctor, his methods are more scientific than those of the Haruspex, who divines by examining entrails. As such, the standout sequence of Quarantine has us diagnosing patients by compiling lists of symptoms through both interviews and physical examination, giving us a glimpse of how we might save lives in this particular rendition of Pathologic.

The rest of Quarantine reminds me of the shortform Marble Nest that was released in the lead-up to Pathologic 2. Many of the strengths of the full game are evident here – particularly the script’s sharp wit, bolstered by an exceptional translation – but they feel somewhat muted without the chance to see Pathologic‘s systems evolve and interact on a large scale over an extended period of time. Pathologic being fatiguing is part of the experience, and it’s something we just don’t get in a prologue that can be completed in a single sitting, which is why it’s hard to judge Quarantine as a complete work.

Given that it’s short and free, though, it’s worth a look for anyone interested in Pathologic 3, if only as a vibe check — and if the third entry is successful enough, perhaps we’ll finally be able to play as the Changeling again in a prospective Pathologic 4.

Play Pathologic 3: Quarantine now for free – PC

The post This Is Not A Review – Pathologic 3: Quarantine appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Stepping into [redacted location] for the first time.

LOW A pretty obnoxious summoner boss in one of the sub-dungeons.

WTF Count Ymir’s whole deal.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review covers the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC only. For a more complete description of Elden Ring systems and general information, please see our main review.

*

We have officially reached the point where mainstream videogames are so massive in scale that their DLC is the size of an ideal standalone release. Featuring an entirely new open-world map that’s maybe a third the size of the main campaign, and hosting a self-contained story quest that took me over 30 hours to complete, Shadow of the Erdtree — the first and only expansion for Elden Ring — feels unusually ceremonious, even by FromSoft standards. That it improves an already fantastic experience should come as no surprise given the developer’s track record with DLC, but what’s most impressive is that it feels almost like a miniature Elden Ring in and of itself.

The expansion (accessed from Mohg’s boss arena after defeating both he and Starscourge Radahn) concerns Miquella, one of the most enigmatic figures from the main quest. Supposedly one of the more benevolent of Marika’s children, all we know going into SotE is that he has discarded his corporeal flesh and retreated to another realm called the Land of Shadow. Much like the Lands Between, it resides under a massive tree and has already been ravaged by war before we arrive. We don’t immediately know where Miquella is, but others have come seeking him as well. Naturally, their stories often unfold whether we’re around to experience them or not.

SotE is large enough that it requires its own difficulty curve, and immediately there’s a problem. This is explicitly endgame content, meaning that by the time players are even able to access this expansion, they’re likely at the point where their build is beginning to plateau and leveling up has less impact. To counteract this, the devs added collectible items that can be used to boost player stats, but they’re only effective in the Land of Shadow. They’re typically found near major landmarks and after defeating bosses, so the player’s power level in SotE will depend in part on how thorough they are. It feels less organic than earning experience and fine-tuning a build, though I’m hard-pressed to think of a better way to do it.

There are all manner of new weapons and spells to play around with, but SotE feels mostly familiar, perhaps overly so at first. One of the most common complaints I’ve seen about the base game is that it felt emptier than previous FromSoft releases — that the open world added dead space between places of interest. Those folks will likely feel the same way about SotE, and I’ll admit that for the opening hours, I worried that the spell was breaking for me. I was seeing plenty of the usual suspects — oh look, another Ulcerated Tree Spirit — and the rewards for careful exploration were often crafting materials, smithing stones, or nothing at all. Even some of the early dungeons read like Elden Ring leftovers, such as a small castle on the initial horizon that feels a bit like a warmed-over Caria Manor.

As I delved deeper into the Land of Shadow, however, I came to realize that FromSoft had found new ways of hiding their light under a bushel. They can no longer surprise us with scale — not after the core campaign disguised the size of its map and hit us with a Z-axis expansion — so instead they rely upon our existing understanding of Elden Ring to wow us with some of their wildest, most colorful and varied landscapes yet, and with them some extraordinary additions to the mythos. Miquella may be the focus of the expansion, but other factions that were previously under-represented are elaborated upon here.

FromSoft is often criticized for a relatively hands-off storytelling approach that relegates most of the relevant details to item descriptions, but I see it from a different angle. The lore enriches the experience for those with the drive to seek it out, but FromSoft stories tend to be simple in nature and more about the personal journey. The unique amount of information that each player absorbs is part of that. We’ve been wanting to know more about Miquella for more than two years, and now that I’ve played SotE, I believe I have a decent understanding of him. However, that’s only based on the incomplete picture that I have, drawn using whatever details I happened to pick up. I have zero doubt that my understanding will continue to evolve when the community gets its hands on the expansion.

There are few things I value more in videogames than a sense of discovery, and FromSoft can scratch that itch better than nearly anyone. They know how to tempt us with a tantalizing silhouette on the horizon. My character’s voyage through the Land of Shadow was dictated almost entirely by me seeing something cool in the distance, wondering how to get to it, figuring it out, and being rewarded. Sometimes that reward was just a gorgeous view, but that can be enough. Anyone able to even reach this DLC certainly understands by now the value of slowly opening a massive door to reveal a beautiful vista on the other side.

I wrote in my initial impressions of Elden Ring that its free-roaming nature and almost total plotlessness made it feel closer in spirit to early Zelda than nearly any other modern title. That’s doubly true for SotE, partly because it’s more compact, and partly because FromSoft hasn’t leaned this hard into abstract space in a while. SotE‘s centerpiece legacy dungeon, for example, never once feels like a practical dwelling, but its gimmick is something we never saw in the main content — it’s a castle with numerous entrances and exits that requires multiple passes to complete and acts as a conduit between other parts of the map. That’s worth the trade-off, and it’s part of what makes SotE unique from even the base game, where the regions were largely arranged in a line.

Of course SotE isn’t a metroidvania, but it shares some common DNA in how vertically aligned it is and how often it dips, overlaps and doubles back on itself. While it’s not as impressive a feat as the original Dark Souls perfectly positioning its levels and skyboxes in such a way as to create the illusion of an open world, it’s not far behind. There’s something satisfying about skipping a seemingly non-optional dungeon by finding an obscure side route that spits me out at the back end.

The new bosses (of which there are many) are also almost uniformly great, which should come as good news to those who found Elden Ring‘s original rogues’ gallery a bit lacking. I can’t elaborate much, but there are delightfully few gimmicks to be found here — these are simply well-tuned battles in visually stunning arenas. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there is a higher number of great boss fights in SotE than in the entire base game.

There’s a caveat, though. A new FromSoft release always comes with the advent of a new Ultimate Opponent, and SotE‘s main quest culminates in a final boss that I suspect will break a lot of people. I haven’t decided whether it’s tougher than Malenia, but the fact that I’m even considering the possibility should be all the information that anyone needs. The encounter itself is an awe-inspiring story moment, so to a degree it’s earned — this isn’t so much a criticism as me issuing a “buyer beware.” Miyazaki’s stated goal with Elden Ring was to make it their most accessible game ever, and I do wonder if their ongoing quest to find every player’s pain threshold is at odds with that.

FromSoft frequently quotes its own work, and in the spirit of Elden Ring being something of a victory lap for them, SotE unambiguously references pretty much all of their recent output. Even fans of Bloodborne and Sekiro will spot some familiar imagery, all remixed to feel fresh and of a piece with the universe of Elden Ring. It’s a nice way to cap off a tremendous winning streak and reaffirms that the modern FromSoft catalogue is something we still so rarely see in this medium — an actual body of work defined by a unifying vision.

Given that Shadow of the Erdtree is roughly the size of what a standalone FromSoft game used to be — it took me longer to finish this than, say, Bloodborne or Dark Souls III — I imagine that it will be received like one. While it took some time to find its footing, it emerged not just as a great expansion, but as a great entry in the studio’s catalogue, period. It’s a shame that the barrier for entry is so high, because I’m already looking forward to revisiting it.

8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco. It is currently available on XBO/X/S, PS4/5 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 35 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. The entirety of play was spent with multiplayer features enabled.

Parents: According to the ESRB this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes and Violence. There are a couple of suggestive character designs throughout and a bit of mild profanity, but the violence is where Elden Ring earns its rating. This is arguably FromSoft’s most gruesome game to date, with severed parts and mutilated corpses littering the landscape. While it’s fitting with the tone of the world and tastefully portrayed, it’s not for children.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. Audio cues are frequently used to notify players of either points of interest or approaching enemies, and the game doesn’t offer any sort of visual representation of these cues. The lack of visual cues renders an already-obtuse game even more difficult, and forces players to be even more alert. As such, this game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Looks gorgeous, but at the cost of 60fps on console.

LOW A torturously unexciting puzzle gauntlet midway through the campaign.

WTF Key story beats presented like the holographic recordings from Tacoma.

In developing the original Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Ninja Theory famously consulted with mental health experts in creating a sympathetic portrayal of a character with psychosis. I’m not someone who experiences visions or hears voices, but I’ve had my own struggles with mental health, and I saw parallels between this Pict warrior’s acceptance of who she is and my own. Like so much great art, Hellblade had a specific and intended meaning, but could also be appreciated on broader levels.

As such, it gives me no pleasure to report that Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II made me feel very little on any level. Whatever their faults, I would never accuse Ninja Theory’s past titles of lacking a clear sense of direction, but I suppose it makes sense that their first sequel would be the one to break that streak. Every multi-part narrative, given enough time, eventually reaches the point where things just happen for the sake of having more story. With Hellblade, we’ve reached that point by episode two.

It’s difficult to pinpoint where exactly Hellblade II goes wrong when, on its surface, it treads closely to the original formula. One might expect Ninja Theory’s first major release under the Microsoft banner to be their most bloated, but initially it almost feels praiseworthy for what it doesn’t do. There’s no open world, no resource gathering or crafting, no skill tree that adds an extra 3% damage to Senua’s strong attacks, and no upgradable bracer that increases her parry window by a fraction of a millisecond.

In a climate where seemingly every major release is a months-long commitment, there’s something refreshing about a triple-A videogame that can be completed in a weekend and doesn’t force its players to learn a hundred new systems. If the mission statement with the original Hellblade was to offer big-budget production values at a modest scale and for a modest price, the sequel at least upholds the tradition of not wasting too much of our time.

However, while Hellblade II avoids many of the most frustrating tropes of modern gaming, it struggles to fill that space with anything else of substance. It can’t be overstated how much of Hellblade II is spent simply traipsing along linear paths with literally nothing to do but stare at the pretty scenery and wait for Senua to reach the next cutscene. My instinct is to say that an experience this beautiful and empty tends to arrive at the start of a console’s life cycle, when there’s new tech to show off and not much else to play, but that’s being unfair to forgettable launch titles. At least the action in Ryse: Son of Rome heated up more than once an hour.

The original Hellblade was admittedly light on mechanics, but it was story-first fare that trapped us in Senua’s version of hell and made us question what was real, going so far as to gaslight players into believing that their save files were at risk. It was a mean, oppressive, and grueling experience. It played with audience expectations up until the very end, when it beautifully tied the experience together with an empathetic message about accepting loss and living with — even embracing! — what can’t be changed.

Hellblade II, in stark constrast, has no edge and no sense of purpose. With Senua’s psychosis now mostly under control — the voices and visions are still there, but nowhere near as overwhelming — she’s forced to wander the “real” world, engaging in bland heroics and preaching messages of love and acceptance across a desolate landscape of pillaging and plundering. My most charitable reading of Hellblade II is that it reworks the sinister imagery of its predecessor into what feels like a morality tale for children — light versus darkness, love versus hate. I’m sure there are people out there who aren’t yet convinced that empathizing with one’s enemies is a more productive solution than enslaving them, but I doubt Ninja Theory will be the ones to change their minds.

I would go further, though, and argue that Hellblade II actively harms the franchise’s standing as a well-researched and sympathetic portrayal of mental health. The original lucidly visualized the invisible demons that people with mental health struggles deal with on a daily basis. Although it ultimately taught us to see Senua’s psychosis as a feature rather than a bug, it didn’t mince words about how self-destructive the mind can be, and how torturous such an existence often is.

That’s why Hellblade II largely lacking any sense of danger has repercussions beyond the game simply being boring. It portrays Senua as a singularly gifted force of good, but that’s rarely reinforced in any of the things that we’re actually doing as players. Without spoilers, there’s an excruciatingly long sequence midway through the campaign in which Senua is searching for something ancient and forbidden that can only be unearthed by “proving” herself. These trials are hyped up to be The Ultimate Test, and the ground is littered with the corpses of those who’ve failed.

Once there, it turns out that The Ultimate Test is just a series of rudimentary puzzles that largely involve flicking switches in the correct order. Putting aside the arbitrary nature of these puzzles — the rune-hunting exercises in the original Hellblade weren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but at least they served a thematic purpose! — they’re just insultingly easy. Even someone with no intuition for this sort of thing could bumble through using simple trial-and-error, yet Ninja Theory treats completion of this task like a show of worthiness on par with lifting Thor’s hammer. It’s infantilizing to both the player and to Senua herself, who’s seen by everyone in this world as some sort of mystical fairy child for essentially completing a dungeon from a junior-level Zelda clone.

As expected with Ninja Theory, presentation is not the problem here. They’re industry leaders when it comes to performance capture — working with Andy Serkis will do that for ya — and the way its animations seamlessly transition in and out of cutscenes is remarkable, even given how much we’ve been spoiled by modern tech. Hellblade II‘s announcement predates COVID-19 lockdowns, and while its long development cycle doesn’t feel evident in the scope of its story, it’s at least evident in the visuals and the level of polish.

On another positive note, the combat is still enjoyable. It’s simple and easy to grasp, and the camerawork, effects and sound design sell the power of every sword swing. It worked in the original as one of Ninja Theory’s tools of oppression and claustrophobia. Here, I just appreciated the jolt of energy in an experience where I was often pausing every few minutes to get up and pace around the room in order to stay awake. Sadly, while the fleeting combat segments are the only time Hellblade II builds any momentum, it’s never sustained for long. The climactic moments, for all of their flash and pomp, feel gamey and artificial, like the multiple instances in which Senua must run from cover to cover to avoid insta-death. That kind of thing would be a lot easier to forgive if I were engaged in the story, but alas.

Until now, I’ve liked each new Ninja Theory game more than the last, and I can never deny the craft on display. Given that this is their first major release since the Microsoft acquisition, I credit Hellblade II for not feeling compromised by corporate interests, but that only makes it more baffling that it lacks any real vision that I was able to discern. It’s not an offensively bad experience, and yet I can only offer one of the most damning criticisms imaginable — I have no idea why it was made.

Rating: 4.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Ninja Theory and published by Xbox Game Studios. It is currently available on XBX/S and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on both XBX and PC. Approximately eight hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence and Strong Language. Not for kids! This is a spooky, sinister game full of impalements, dismemberments, and human sacrifice.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles can be altered and resized. Considerable attention was paid to make Hellblade II more accessible in this department than its predecessor. I don’t recall any sequences in which hearing audio cues is an outright necessity, and the game includes a number of accessibility options such as closed captioning, menu narration and speaker direction. I believe this game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

The subject of this installment: Dead Ink, developed and published by Offwidth Games.

In a market oversaturated with soulslikes, it says something that Dead Ink stands out. While much of the basic vocabulary belongs to From Software, one-person studio Offwidth has embellished it with one of the more enticing settings in recent memory. It’s at once calming and terrifying, it wastes no space, and an acrophobic top-down camera system (imitating a wide-angle lens) finds new ways to both share and deviously obscure valuable information. First impressions are quite strong.

Dead Ink‘s story is light on concrete details (to its benefit, as it gets by on atmosphere alone) but the basic gist is that we’re a transhuman construct navigating some kind of tower. Anyone who gets an endorphin rush from opening a shortcut back to an old bonfire in the Souls games will appreciate the intricacy of this place, with a seemingly endless number of alternate routes, hidden paths and secret backdoors. In a climate where major studios only ever seem to be concerned with making games as big as possible, it’s refreshing to see something like Dead Ink get this much real estate out of a relatively small space.

I want to spend more time talking about the setting, and if Dead Ink was worth recommending, I would. Unfortunately, the many things that Dead Ink gets right are rendered moot by the one thing it gets terribly wrong – the combat.

The main problem is that there’s very little way to mitigate damage. The AI doesn’t seem to know how to do anything other than make a beeline for the player, and since nearly all of the enemies in Dead Ink can run at least as fast as the protagonist, maneuvering around them is largely impossible and the only option is usually to face them head-on. There’s a regenerating stamina meter but it only applies to defense, so enemies have no incentive to do anything but close in and wail away until someone dies. Nobody reacts to getting hit in Dead Ink, either, so the simple act of landing an attack and avoiding damage from the inevitable counter-blow often feels like it comes down to luck.

There are ways to make the rank-and-file enemies manageable, at least, by upgrading equipment or spawning with extra items — more on that in a moment. It’s the bosses that killed any desire I had to see Dead Ink through to the end, because there doesn’t seem to be any way to defeat them other than to just endlessly kite them around, chipping away at their massive health meters while praying I never took any damage in return.

See, Dead Ink has one of those healing systems that forces players to come to a complete standstill for a moment. This makes sense when combat allows for natural downtime, but since these enemies and bosses don’t provide any breathing room, I’d wager that roughly 90% of the times I’ve tried to heal during combat, I would just immediately get hit again. It’s a classic example of a developer pulling one of FromSoft’s ideas without really examining why it was implemented in the first place.

Compounding the frustration is the way experience and leveling works. Souls in this game are “ink” and checkpoints/bonfires are “printers.” When the player saves at a printer, they deposit all of their current ink into that specific terminal. Respawning from that point costs a certain amount of ink depending on what the player wants to equip. A weapon and shield cost extra, and players can bring as many healing items, grenades, and so forth as they can afford. Dying repeatedly at the same spot without banking more ink means the printer will eventually run out, at which point the player will have to spawn from a terminal that’s farther away, trek all the way back, and fill it up again.

So, if I’m stuck on a boss, not only is it a hassle because the combat itself is lackluster, and not only do I have a lengthy run-up before every attempt, but I can only die against the boss a certain number of times before I need to do some mandatory ink-farming. The game does give players the ability to recover their lost ink from their “bloodstain,” but the boss chambers lock players in, and so any ink lost during a boss fight is effectively lost forever until the guy is killed once and for all.

And just to raise the stakes even higher, there is permadeath in Dead Ink. If the player runs out of ink across all discovered printers, they can no longer respawn, and the save file is lost.

There’s a reason the system works like that, admittedly, because one of the things I love about Dead Ink is how compact it is. The player is never geographically very far from anything, which is why the checkpoint system is, at least on paper, more reasonable than it sounds. It’s meant to test our mental map of the environment, and in a game where the combat was better or at least more forgiving, I would honestly be praising this. Hell, I’m not even entirely sure why this game even has combat to begin with other than to check a box.

Again, the attempt here is admirable. Plenty of larger, more prominent developers have tried to crack FromSoft’s code and failed to come as close as this does. With some major tweaks to the combat, this could have been one of the precious few soulslikes to earn favorable comparisons to Dark Souls. It’s heartbreaking that I can’t recommend Dead Ink, but I’m excited for Offwidth’s next project regardless.

The post This Is Not A Review: Dead Ink appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH When the highest location on the map is also a climactic story beat.

LOW Scarlet Rot, this game’s version of the “toxic” ailment.

WTF That thing under Stormveil Castle.

When the embargo for Elden Ring dropped a few weeks ago, the number-one thing we were all echoing was how unfathomably massive the game is. I correctly estimated at the time that with 40-50 hours clocked, I was only about a third of the way through it. However, From Software are masters of hiding their light under a bushel, and despite our warnings people are still being caught off guard by the sheer enormity of what this team has produced.

What’s more interesting, though, is that every time Elden Ring presents an Anor Londo-esque reveal — a moment when FromSoft raises the curtain just as players think they’re getting a handle on the game’s scale — it’s welcomed as a good thing. In an entertainment industry that’s grown increasingly focused on prolonged engagement where the average new triple-A release looks more like a list of chores than a relaxing way to unwind after a tough workday, it’s refreshing to see something that actually earns its status as the only videogame we’re expected to play for months at a time. It’s a game so good that it makes other games difficult to go back to.

I wrote up some impressions of Elden Ring back when the embargo dropped. I’ve since tripled my playtime and finished the game, and I’m pleased to report that nothing I’ve seen has dampened my initial enthusiasm. My opinion hasn’t changed — it’s a masterpiece. What has changed is that Elden Ring has since become a massive mainstream success. This may seem to be coming from out of nowhere to anyone who’s been scared off by the studio’s ‘hardcore’ label and dismissed their past work as niche. But to those who have been following FromSoft’s work since they launched Dark Souls, this particular entry feels like the natural conclusion to a years-long journey on the studio’s part.

While the term “soulslike” has been heavily misused in recent years — usually to simply describe any action-RPG that happens to be tough — it’s undeniable that director Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team have essentially created an entire subgenre with its own cadence and vocabulary (souls, bonfires, flasks, etc.). We’re increasingly seeing other developers attempt to emulate the formula, and while there have been scattered successes, playing Elden Ring is like sipping my favorite craft beer again after years of nothing but domestic swill.

In fact, part of the reason that Elden Ring works so well is that FromSoft has the basics down for a while now. Most crucially, the combat is more-or-less perfect. The rapidly-recharging stamina meter has always been a particular stroke of genius in the way that it lends an element of decision-making to every offensive or defensive maneuver. Victory hinges not just on reflexes, but on the player’s understanding of the fundamental rules by which everything in this world abides. Downing a tough adversary under such conditions makes me feel both powerful and smart.

The most immediate upside of moving the FromSoft formula to a truly open world, then, is having a seemingly endless number of ways to engage with that satisfying combat loop. While there are some repeated fixtures throughout the Lands Between — the catacombs with their environmental puzzles, or the mines that yield upgrade materials — everything is individually authored and houses unique rewards. I can boot up Elden Ring, microdose on some of that Souls gameplay I know and love, and always end my session feeling productive.

Although Breath of the Wild isn’t a one-to-one comparison — players cannot literally go straight from the tutorial to the final boss, for example — the spirit of Nintendo’s benchmark is in full force here since the overwhelming majority of Elden Ring is optional. A player’s specific route to the endgame rests entirely on how much of the world they want to see and how easy they want to make future battles via doing more prep work. The game is almost like a FromSoft buffet table, allowing us to pick and choose the components of our perfect meal.

Bolstering that flexibility is a returning emphasis on character builds. While there’s an undeniable joy in games like Bloodborne and Sekiro forcing us to master new tricks, bringing shields and magic back into the fold goes a long way in making this hundred-plus-hour behemoth palatable. Those who like to study boss patterns and minimize the number of hits they take can do so, but tanking is viable again, as is slinging projectiles from across the room. Whatever type of action-RPG we want Elden Ring to be, it can be.

The wealth of options expands beyond how we build our protagonist. The ability to simply bypass entire groups of enemies has never been easier, thanks to both the openness of the world and the presence of a surprisingly reliable stealth system. Is it the silly variety of stealth that mainly involves crouching in bushes? Sure, but it’s amazing how much that doesn’t matter when developers stop striving for cinematic realism and treat these spaces as the abstractions that they are.

Elden Ring becomes more linear in its final hours, as objectives decrease in number and all paths begin funneling toward a conclusion. That’s where I finally started hitting walls, but by that point I’d collected so many tools and learned so much about the systems that I needed only switch up my strategy. I could experiment with new weapons or even respec if necessary. I could summon a Burger King cosplayer to fire lasers at it, or unleash an AI-controlled familiar as a distraction to buy some breathing room. Or, as ever, I could just find something else to do and come back once I had a bit more confidence.

The free-flowing structure of Elden Ring is made possible by a story that is, as always, happy to stay in the periphery. The lore is extensive and fascinating, with new details constantly being pieced together by the community, including further work on at least one genuinely unsolved mystery. However, it’s only there for people who care enough to go looking for it. Everyone else will be focused on the real story, which is the same story that all FromSoft games have — the epic tale of a shriveled-up little weirdo who slowly and steadily works up the power to topple gods, for no other reason than they wanted to.

The overwhelming mainstream success of Elden Ring has resurrected old questions about the approachability and user friendliness of FromSoft’s work that diehards have long stopped caring about. All I can say is that it never occurred to me not to jump down the deep, perilous hole in which the game hides its tutorial, nor does it strike me as bad design that Elden Ring is full of obscure secrets that no one player could ever hope to find on their own. These games simply have their own language. The darkly humorous trolls are part of that language, as is the steep learning curve and the communal experience of sharing notes.

That may sound like an excuse, but it’s hard to argue with the results — FromSoft has stuck rigidly to this formula, and their fanbase has exponentially grown. More and more people are learning the language.

Elden Ring has already become too big for rival developers to ignore, and I worry that many of them will seek to emulate its surface-level qualities while ignoring the real lesson here — that some of us want games made by artists, not algorithms. Chasing trends may lead to short-term gains, but it’s no substitute for a developer spending more than a decade fine-tuning a creative vision so singular that it defies our usual metrics for what can be considered “good” or “bad” design. Whether Elden Ring is perfect is beside the point. What matters is that it’s the ultimate expression of a blueprint first laid out in Dark Souls. It’s made my favorite game of all time feel like a practice run.

Disclosures: This game is developed by From Software and published by Bandai Namco. It is currently available on XBO, XBX/S, PS4/5 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 160 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. The entirety of play was spent with multiplayer features enabled.

Parents: According to the ESRB this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes and Violence. There are a couple of suggestive character designs throughout and a bit of mild profanity, but the violence is where Elden Ring earns its rating. This is arguably FromSoft’s most gruesome game to date, with severed parts and mutilated corpses littering the landscape. While it’s fitting with the tone of the world and tastefully portrayed, it’s not for children.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. Audio cues are frequently used to notify players of either points of interest or approaching enemies, and the game doesn’t offer any sort of visual representation of these cues. The lack of visual cues renders an already-obtuse game even more difficult, and forces players to be even more alert. As such, this game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Elden Ring Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

If Elden Ring were the size of a normal From Software game, I’d have finished it by now. I’m 30 hours in — longer than my entire first run of Bloodborne — yet I’d be surprised if I were more than a third of the way through.

Every time I begin to feel as though I’m getting a sense of Elden Ring‘s scope, it continues to expand. Tiny blips on the map can encompass an entire Boletarian Palace’s worth of dungeon-crawling. New maximum altitudes are discovered at an alarming rate. There creeps a slow awareness that every single patch of land that can be seen on screen is a location that can be visited — and as the sheer size of the thing unravels, it gives me chills.

So, unfortunately, our full Elden Ring review will have to wait, as I still have a long way to go, and our editor wants me to make sure the final boss doesn’t pull a Sekiro before I hand out a perfect ten.

Elden Ring is very possibly my new favorite game of all time, and I don’t say that lightly. It presents what feels like the best possible version of what my previous favorite, Dark Souls, established. It takes the mechanics that influenced a decade’s worth of action RPGs and presents them on a scale to rival Breath of the Wild. Every second of it feels perfect, nothing is redundant, and there is so much of it. I can’t remember ever playing a game that felt so tuned to my specific tastes.

And believe me when I say that I’m not falling victim to hype here. Despite my status as a longtime FromSoft fan, I followed none of the pre-release coverage outside of the initial trailers because discovering a FromSoft game is part of the appeal to me. After the network tests a while back, I’d heard it described as Dark Souls 4, which is both accurate and misleading. That makes it sound like it’s in line with the previous two installments, when it instead restores a sense of wonder to a now very familiar formula.

Get used to the “Dark Souls meets Breath of the Wild” comparisons, because that’s exactly what Elden Ring is. Games are so big these days that it’s not worth comparing hard numbers. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey may very well have the greater square mileage, but few points are given for that when it’s the same handful of activities duplicated ad nauseum. The thing about Elden Ring is that regardless of how many virtual acres it contains, it feels as big as anything I’ve ever played because all of its spaces matter. It never stops being interesting.

I will add that the atmosphere rivals that of a Team Ico project — beautiful, mysterious, dead, and overwhelmingly massive. There are times when Elden Ring’s sense of scale legitimately made my stomach drop, and it’s partly because I know that none of it is set dressing. If I see a massive structure casting shadows over mountains in the distance, it’s not just there to look cool. I’m going to be exploring that entire thing at some point in the future.

In fact, I would actually say that Elden Ring feels closer in spirit to a modern rendition of the original Legend of Zelda from 1986 than anything else, even including Breath of the Wild — partly because it invites exploration by being so seamless and unsegmented, and partly because it’s the uncommon triple-A game with the guts to go (more or less) completely plot-free. Previous FromSoft titles have had branching paths, but they’ve remained linear enough to funnel players past some semblance of a story. In Elden Ring, we’re set loose to absorb any flavor of the world, in any corner we choose. It’s pure adventure.

Speaking of which, players really can go anywhere right from the start, and I’m stunned by the level of trust that FromSoft places in the player to follow, ignore or miss cues. I skipped over a building at the beginning because a particularly nasty enemy was patrolling near it, and wound up going 25 hours without knowing how to craft as a result. A bit farther down the road, I missed a turn and wound up bypassing the Lothric Castle-sized dungeon that was obviously meant to serve as the proper opening level. Instead, I landed in a tougher area first, resulting in a greater sense of satisfaction when I got through it anyway.

While we’re on the topic of difficulty, FromSoft has been slowly narrowing its audience by ramping the challenge of their titles higher and higher, while making it the point. As an example, I’ve abandoned multiple late-game replay saves in Sekiro — a game I otherwise love — because I decided it wasn’t worth forcing myself through those irritating final bosses again.

However, I’m pleased to say that they’ve eased off the gas significantly for this installment. In fact, it’s a little shocking just how smooth and frictionless Elden Ring is. It’s appropriately brutal, of course, and full of the evil pranks we’ve come to expect from this team, but the sheer openness of it means there’s no wall to run up against. If something’s too difficult at the moment, there are a million other options.

Besides the flexible difficulty curve, FromSoft has made changes in other related aspects. For example, there’s zero item degradation that I can detect — meaning no risk of a my favorite weapon breaking. Sekiro skeptics will be glad to hear that Elden Ring has the world’s easiest parrying system. Players will slide into a groove with remarkable ease, and once we’re on our way, it doesn’t try to impress us with big-name actors and exquisitely mocapped performances because it knows that an adventure this rich makes for a good story in and of itself.

Speaking of story, I’m not sure why George R. R. Martin was involved during Elden Ring‘s creation process. As far as I can tell, Hidetaka Miyazaki hired him to write material that feels like it could have come from Miyazaki himself. It’s a bit like when Ennio Morricone was asked to score The Thing, and it sounded exactly like something that John Carpenter would have come up with on his own. That’s not to say that Elden Ring’s lore isn’t fascinating — it is — but it’s interesting in ways that don’t feel notably different from previous FromSoft titles.

There’s so much more that I want to say about Elden Ring, but for now I leave its prospective players to discover it for themselves. The full review will come when I’ve rolled credits, but I hope I’ve made clear that this is the dream game of any FromSoft fan. And to those who’ve felt that the recent Souls games and soulslikes have clung too hard to the git gud angle, my guess is that that they’ll be surprised by how flexible Elden Ring is. It’s an incredibly generous experience, and I have yet to find a single thing that I don’t love about it.

Assuming FromSoft doesn’t completely blow it a little further down the line, this may be their crowning achievement. And considering the developer’s resume, that is frankly staggering.

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2021 was a year that broke our brains just a little bit. You don’t need me to tell you that, and I’ve already spoken about this elsewhere anyway. I finished fewer games this year than any other year in recent memory. As a critic, I’ve generally believed that I should at least make a valiant effort to complete a game before judging it — the more of a work you’ve seen, the more informed your reaction to it will be.

This year, though, sanity won out, and I found it unusually easy to dismiss stuff that wasn’t grabbing me. Even the games that I did like often still offered friction, usually thanks to random mood swings. Very little stood out in 2021, which made it difficult to fill a list of ten. So this year — and hopefully only this year — I’m waiving my usual rule that I need to have completed a game for it to qualify for my list. If I enjoyed a game and I’m confident enough that it won’t suddenly soil all of my good will toward it in the eleventh hour, it’s eligible.

Late arrivals that I need more time with:

Chorus (PS5)

Exo One (XSS)

Inscryption (PC)

Praey for the Gods (PC)

I recognize that these are good, but they just didn’t grab me:

Chicory: A Colorful Tale (PC)

Death’s Door (PC/Switch)

The Forgotten City (PS5)

Sable (XSS)

Wildermyth (PC)

Honorable mentions:

– Hitman 3 (PC). This was easily the weakest of the trilogy for me, with the level design not quite hitting the same consistency that it did in the previous two. But even a middling Hitman is a delight compared to most of what’s out there.

– Knockout City (Switch). Creating a new multiplayer IP that’s both easy to understand and wholly unique is tricky, but this one pulls it off. It didn’t have the longest legs but I had a blast with it over the summer.

– Metroid Dread (Switch). A terrific side-scrolling action game, but merely an okay Metroid. The former is more important, though, and after the series has been on hiatus for so long, it’s just a relief to see it working on some level.

– Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PS5). I have very little experience with this series and only played this because it came with my PS5 bundle. Having said that, it’s good! A bit too safe and ordinary to land on my top ten, but Insomniac is one of the most consistent AAA developers in the business.

– Skul: The Hero Slayer (PC). Feels a lot like Hades in terms of both structure and the distribution of variables, albeit without that game’s groundbreaking approach to continuous narrative. One of the best roguelikes of 2021, especially for genre fans who like to tune out the story as they play.

The Top Ten:

10. Unpacking (XSS)

This here is a calming puzzle game with an uplifting hidden narrative about the things we choose to retain in our lives. I will admit that I’m attaching some personal bias to Unpacking, as it’s one of the few videogames this year that my girlfriend and I bonded over. She’s still relatively new to the medium, having bought a Switch in 2020 primarily due to quarantine boredom but not having used it for much outside of Animal Crossing. I believe this was her first official brush with the “activities that are tedious in real-life but make for weirdly hypnotic videogames” genre. I can’t wait to introduce her to House Flipper.

9. Shattered: Tale of the Forgotten King (PC)

As mentioned, this was a year in which I actually completed so few games that I had to waive my usual rule about a title only qualifying for my top ten if I’d seen the whole thing. As such, anything that nevertheless did hold my attention until the credits rolled deserves special consideration. A great soulslike is both intimidating and enticing in equal measure, and while developers have no trouble grasping the former, they frequently struggle with the latter. After a relatively mundane first couple of hours, there came a moment in Shattered when understood the game’s true scope and felt a sense of wonder similar to what I felt looking around the skyboxes of Firelink Shrine for the first time. It’s an overambitious, janky thing, but then that’s just part of the Souls charm, isn’t it?

8. Eldest Souls (Switch)

Our editor-in-chief Brad Gallaway hates this thing. When I told him it was getting good reviews, he said, “I don’t believe for one second that people actually like that game, they’re just afraid to say it’s too hard.” Naturally, I adore it — but then I am a weirdo. I tweeted that it was a boss rush game in which my death count had me averaging fifty tries per boss. I stated this with the intent of communicating that I was enjoying myself. But naturally, people took this to be a bad thing, because that’s what a normal person would do. A normal person does not enjoy repeatedly bashing their head against a brick wall and smirking every time the crack gets just a little wider. I’m the guy who likes pain. No coffin please, Eldest Souls — just wet, wet mud.

7. Before Your Eyes (PC)

One of the most conceptually interesting releases this year, Before Your Eyes is a narrative adventure controlled entirely by blinking. Seriously — you hook up a webcam and advance the story by closing your eyes when prompted. It sounds gimmicky, and I know this sounds like a cop-out, but trust me when I say that developer GoodbyeWorld Games uses this mechanic to tell a story that simply wouldn’t have had the same impact otherwise. I also say this as somebody who, unfortunately, had to constantly pause and re-calibrate the sensor, likely due to both the position of my computer and the light reflecting off my glasses. It was worth it, because beneath the technical annoyances I found a beautiful requiem on the value of life told in a manner that no other medium could. This is interactive storytelling working on a level I’ve never seen before and will likely never see again.

6. Loop Hero (PC/Switch)

When it released on PC earlier this year, Loop Hero was dangerously addictive. When it was ported to Switch not too long ago, as my friend McGarnical put it on Twitter, it should have come with a surgeon general’s warning. The genius of Loop Hero is that it distills one of gaming’s basest pleasures — getting a steady stream of new loot — into something nearly involuntary. It almost feels like we have as much control over our hero’s adversaries as we do over the hero himself, merrily setting up barriers for him to push through. There’s no growth without struggle, after all — yet is there ultimately any growth at all, or does Loop Hero trap us in an endless cycle, promising a conclusion that it will never provide and keeping us distracted with a steady stream of treats in the meantime? I don’t know and I don’t care. I just know that Loop Hero transfixes me every time I boot it up.

5. Griftlands (Switch)

One of the coolest roguelikes in quite some time is also one of the worst-tutorialized — especially on Switch, where navigating an interface that was clearly designed for a mouse and keyboard feels like learning a new language. But players who push themselves over that initial hump will be rewarded not just with a super crunchy and flexible deckbuilder, but also with an ambitious experiment in interactive storytelling. “Moral choices” became cliché a couple of generations ago, and they’re so mundane at this point that we barely even register them, but they’re a natural fit for a roguelike where there are actual reasons to act in self-interest because hours of work can be undone in a second. The way that necessity funneled me down uniquely dark corridors throughout every single Griftlands run had me thinking that the roguelike genre has only just scratched the surface of what it’s capable of.

4. Returnal (PS5)

Here’s one for my very specific and weird taste — not just a roguelike, but the git gud kind. With very little in the way of permanent upgrades, there’s no safety net in Returnal — no guarantee that the player’s time investment will ever amount to anything if they don’t learn the enemy attack patterns and find a play style that suits them. The visual design and ambience strongly reminded me of Metroid Prime, and I was particularly impressed with how some of the more sprawling biomes (particularly the second and third) were able to maintain a sense of place even amid the procedural generation. The plot eventually indulges in one of my least-favorite tropes, but it’s also kept vague enough that you can largely just ignore the implications of what the story is actually about and just enjoy the protagonist’s downward spiral as a sort of tone piece. This is the first AAA roguelike that I’m aware of, and that alone makes it worth a look. That it looks and plays as good as it does only sweetens the deal.

3. Halo Infinite (XSS)

In a year when we were all craving comfort food, no list of 2021’s greatest successes would be complete without mentioning the glorious return of Halo. I’m still working on the campaign (which had the audacity to release the day after Endwalker), but while I’m generally against the open-worldification of every major franchise, enormous outdoor play spaces have always been Halo‘s forte and they flourish here. And in any case, Infinite already secured its spot weeks prior when the multiplayer dropped, feeling so familiar and natural at this point that we can all practically slide into a trance while playing. This one just barely inches out Returnal purely for the fact that Infinite has Chief fall into a coma and literally sleep through all of the stupid nonsense teased in Halo 5‘s ending.

2. Deathloop (PS5)

This year I’ve become what I hate, as my top four games of 2021 are all AAA releases. Notably, they’re all entries that march to the beat of their own drum, using bigger budgets to either expand their own niches or explore new territory altogether. Deathloop feels like both of those things at once — a natural progression and crown jewel for Arkane Studios (low-key one of the best developers for years running, further perfecting their near-monopoly on the immersive sim genre here) and simultaneously something completely unique, both in terms of flow and vibe. There have been other time loop games, and there have possibly been better time loop games, but none have so perfectly captured the measured confidence of Bill Murray successfully executing a robbery in Groundhog Day just by knowing exactly when the bag of money appears and when the people around it are all looking away. No one does lived-in environments like Arkane, and the slow, simple process of getting to know Blackreef — and using that knowledge to devious effect — was one of 2021’s purest joys.

1. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker (PC)

In isolation, I don’t know if I could actually claim that Endwalker was the single best new release that I played all year. It’s an expansion to FFXIV and comes saddled with all of the flaws inherent to it. But Endwalker doesn’t exist in isolation, and taken with the understanding that anyone who can even access this campaign is obviously okay with said flaws (or else they wouldn’t have spent hundreds of hours with the damn game to begin with) it’s not only FFXIV‘s best expansion to date, but a triumphant conclusion to what must now surely be the greatest comeback story in the history of the industry. The fact that we can now take a step back and view this enterprise as something resembling a whole — however long it’ll continue trucking along after this — means there’s no greater time to celebrate FFXIV as the monumental achievement that it is. Yoshi-P and his team (with special marks to main scenario writer Natsuko Ishikawa) have done a remarkable job of making this all feel like a carefully-laid plan, and when you consider the mess that they were handed, that’s a stunning feat.

Thank you for reading, and I hope that 2022 treats us all just a little better.

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If you’re a frequent and longtime reader of GameCritics, you may have noticed that my output has dried up significantly over the past year. Take a look outside and I don’t think you can blame me. While the hope for a better tomorrow was what kept me running (albeit mostly on fumes) in 2020, that better tomorrow never came, leading to a 2021 in which energy-sapping depression seeped into every aspect of my day-to-day life, right down to my gaming habits. Up became down, hot became cold, and I got way into an MMO for the first time in my life while stuff that would have grabbed me under normal circumstances failed to gain any traction.

Since I’m grateful for anything and everything that made the sting of 2021 a little easier to bear, I’m doing two year-end lists this time. The one where I actually make a conscious effort to celebrate the year’s biggest successes is still to come, so here’s some stuff that didn’t qualify for that list, but meant a lot to me anyway. Maybe it was a re-release of an old favorite, maybe something got an important update, maybe it was just good enough at the right time. Here’s the list of my not-favorite releases of 2021.

10. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut

When Disco Elysium — comfortably one of my all-time favorite games, and one that I regret not giving a perfect score — was finally released on consoles this year, I expected a wave of newcomers to be swept away by its brilliance. That… didn’t exactly happen. It’s not really the kind of game that should be played on a console, for one thing, and a story centered on self-loathing probably wasn’t what most folks were looking for in 2021 (even if its eventual message is rather optimistic and hopeful, once it arrives at its destination). Still, Disco Elysium remains the best-written game I’ve ever played, and a seamless integration of narrative and play. This wasn’t its year, but I hope every seasoned gamer discovers it at some point down the road.

9. The Ascent

There is absolutely no reason for The Ascent to look as good as it does. Stripped down to its barest wireframe, it’s an almost shockingly basic twin-stick shooter that barely even tells a coherent plot. I keep seeing it compared to Diablo, and I must assume that this purely comes down to the isometric camera angle, because Diablo had actual depth. Why did something so simple need to be the prettiest game of 2021? I don’t know, but damned if it didn’t work on me, because I just loved existing in this world — taking in the views, the neon lights, the constant rumble of activity around me. Granted, it wasn’t enough of a pull to get me past the eight- or nine-hour mark, but I enjoyed what time I spent with it.

8. Oh look, it’s Tetris Effect again

It feels like this is the fourth year in a row where Tetris Effect has been eligible for year-end consideration. It’s a game that was essentially perfect in its most basic form and I was happy to leave it at that but they keep finding new ways to rope me back in. First it was Tetris Effect in VR, then it was Tetris Effect with other people, and now it’s Tetris Effect on a handheld as the game made its Switch debut earlier this year. Which means now I can bring Tetris Effect to bed with me and just sort of vibe myself to sleep. I think that’s every possible variant for the time being, at least until they figure out a way to beam Tetris Effect directly into my brain.

7. Necromunda: Hired Gun

I was in a real funk earlier this year, and believe it or not, Necromunda: Hired Gun was what pulled me out of it and made me love videogames again. It’s not even very good — it’s barely stable on the technical front, it’s full of extraneous systems and weird lurches in pacing, and it’s seemingly completely unaware of why people play games like this. But, anything that can give me even 10% of the rush I felt playing the 2016 reboot of Doom for the first time knows the way to my heart, and when Hired Gun is at its best — embracing over-the-top action in maximalist industrial environments that look like heavy metal album covers — it’s a thing of beauty. This is the most I’ve ever gotten into the Warhammer 40k universe, and it seems that the trick was just to make it really stupid.

6. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (on Switch!)

I talked about this recently on a podcast I did with Richard Naik where we just kinda rambled for an hour, but whenever I restart KOTOR, I think that this will be the time I go for a Light Side run… and then I immediately meet Carth and I just can’t go through with it. I cannot be morally aligned with Carth. The choice between Light Side and Dark Side is an illusion when the path of good is represented by Carth. So, taking this classic RPG as the Sith simulator that it is, I enjoyed revisiting it for the billionth time in this close-to-perfect Switch port. By today’s standards, the cities that once felt so sprawling probably now look like glorified hallways, but I can’t overstate how thrilling it was in 2003 to explore the Star Wars universe on such an intimate level. It was such a staple of my teen years that it still feels elemental today.

5. Death Stranding: Director’s Cut

There were two major triple-A titles to get the “director’s cut” treatment this year, and both play fast and loose with the term. The idea of Ghost of Tsushima getting a director’s cut was laughable to me, because it suggests that the game was made by people instead of algorithms. On the exact opposite end of the spectrum, I don’t know how anyone played Death Stranding and assumed that we were witnessing anything but Hideo Kojima’s uncompromised vision, nor do I understand how adding a racetrack (in a game with notoriously bad vehicle handling) brings us closer to said vision. In any case, this was a bold, delirious, imperfect masterpiece two years ago, and it’s no less digestible now that its themes have taken some sort of corporeal form in the post-COVID age. I’m glad that this one has endured conversation, and I think we’ll be continuing to talk about it for some time to come.

4. Umurangi Generation, because you ignored it last year

This was my number-two pick in 2020. I ranked it above Hades, for god’s sake. It was the most relevant release of that year, which means it’s only gained relevance by the end of 2021, as things have not gotten a whole lot better. I let the lack of commotion surrounding Umurangi Generation slide when it was a niche PC title, but this year it came to Switch and now, officially, you have no excuse. If you’re a fan of chill arthouse hangout games with slow-boiling, cut-to-the-bone political messaging — or, hell, if you just trust my taste — you owe it to yourself to check this out at some point. Seriously, just put it on your eShop wishlist and wait for a sale if you need to. It’ll still be there when you’re ready for it.

3. Forza Horizon 5

I’ve never been a big fan of Forza Horizon because it’s just a series where you drive around and look at pretty environments, but it just so happens that this new one rolled along when I was in the mood to just drive around and look at pretty environments. As someone who seeks out challenge in videogames, I’m almost diametrically opposed to the completely frictionless Forza Horizon experience, which does everything it can to make the player feel like a king at all times. But yeah, casually cruising around Mexico while listening to Hot Chip and Wolf Alice hit me in a surprisingly direct way this year… at least until Halo Infinite stealth-dropped its multiplayer a week later and I forgot all about Forza. But that was a really good week, though!

2. Castlevania Advance Collection

There’s almost nothing that goes down quite as easy for me as a good Castlevania game, and now that Konami is done revisiting the era that I’m not as fond of — the ones with the fixed jump arcs — they’ve moved on to that wonderful post-Symphony phase. Circle of the Moon remains my vote for the most underrated entry in the series (and one that’s only improved with time, now that we no longer need to play it on the unlit GBA screen), and the immediacy with which the soul system in Aria of Sorrow clicks reaffirms why Igarashi returned to the idea in Bloodstained. I’m still waiting for the DS games to get their due, but with the release of this compilation, the job is at least halfway done.

1. Final Fantasy XIV

Not only was this the game that I spent the most time actually playing this year, but it was my big COVID project. I wouldn’t be so dramatic as to say that FFXIV saved my life, but it gave me comfort and structure during the absolute worst episode of depression that I’ve ever been through — and since it got mandatory story patches in the lead-up to Endwalker, I’m counting it as a 2021 release under the “ongoing game” qualifier. It’s funny that this is the one Final Fantasy game that plenty of fans will permanently rule out playing purely on the basis of it being an MMO, because once you’ve spent as much time with it as I have, it feels like the only Final Fantasy game that matters.

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HIGH The visuals.

LOW The visuals.

WTF The visuals.

One could look at a few screenshots of Grime and believe that it’s something of a fever dream, or a trip through the surreal. It’s got some of the wildest character designs in recent memory, often taking parts of the anatomy that we’re familiar with and arranging them in an illogical order, creating things that have no reason to be. And in a few choice moments that look stunning on the Steam page, Grime has the dazzling environments to match.

But when I think back on my time with Grime, all I see is a grey blur. It’s both a failure of the art direction to capitalize on its best ideas, and a failure of the rest of the project to match the creativity of whoever designed its monsters. For as bizarre as developer Clover Bite wants me to believe their work is, it feels identical to a hundred other releases I’ve played.

Grime is yet another side-scrolling action-platformer that borrows the most popular characteristics of the metroidvania and soulslike genres — namely the map design of the former and the combat of the latter. Copyright laws being what they are, Souls fans will need to spend a few moments familiarizing themselves with all of the new terminology for the same old mechanics. The regenerating stamina meter is “force,” souls are “mass,” bonfires are “surrogates,” and so on.

In a rush to raise the challenge level and earn the respect of the git gud crowd, Clover Bite has landed in the same spot that many other developers of recent soulslikes (including From Software itself) have landed, in that countering is a near-mandatory component of the combat. A successful parry, or “absorb,” will instantly kill smaller enemies and badly injure stronger ones.

Beyond damage, there are two major benefits to countering. The first is that Grime’s equivalent of an Estus flask (i.e. the player’s main healing item) can only hold one charge at a time, and can only be refilled by absorbing foes, so there’s a risk-and-reward rhythm whenever players are down on health.

The other benefit is that repeatedly absorbing the same enemies will eventually allow us to inherit their traits. It’s a bit like the soul-collecting mechanic from those two Castlevania games (as well as the more recent Bloodstained), albeit less exciting because (A) the traits we absorb are passive in nature and (B) they can only be unlocked using special skill points earned by defeating bosses and mini-bosses that don’t respawn. So, for all of Grime’s talk about absorption being its defining feature, it largely manifests as a run-of-the-mill upgrade tree.

The only other relatively unique idea is “ardor,” which is essentially an experience multiplier that rises when players defeat opponents and falls when they take damage. Players keep all of their acquired experience when they die, but their ardor resets to zero unless they can return to their bloodstain — sorry, “lost vessel” — and reclaim their spot.

And that’s about all that Grime has going for it — a counter system that’s tied to both health and upgrades, and an experience multiplier that incentivizes taking as little damage as possible. While I take no issue with the way Grime handles — and in fact I appreciate the generous parry window given how central that mechanic is — the truth is that there isn’t enough innovation here to distinguish this title from the countless others just like it.

The few good Dark Souls copycats in existence have recognized that atmosphere and interesting spaces are as core a component of the formula as the mechanics themselves, but while Grime does offer an occasional breathtaking outdoor vista or odd encounter with a quirky NPC, much of the running time is spent exploring nondescript caves and the like, nearly all of which pull from the same hopelessly washed-out, mostly-grey color palette.

Not only is this unappetizing to look at, but the samey visuals hamper navigation. While there is a map, it doesn’t start autofilling until we locate a beacon in each region. Before we do that, we’re steering blind. Developers, please don’t start thinking this is a good idea just because Hollow Knight got great reviews. It sucked there and it sucks here. Without a map, we need distinctive visual landmarks to maintain our bearings — something Grime is sorely lacking.

There is some intrigue to the lore, though “intrigue” is as far as it goes. Nearly everyone in this universe is made of stone, and many of the characters intentionally look like children’s drawings of Easter Island heads, all crooked and misshapen. Our muscular, symmetrical protagonist is one of the few genuinely good-looking specimens, and the other characters either admire him for it — calling him “chiseled one” — or seem to resent him.

And that’s pretty much all I can say about Grime’s plot with any degree of confidence, because Clover Bite favors the same vague, piecemeal storytelling style that we’ve just accepted as standard for this genre. I’m okay with FromSoft continuing to do this because they’ve got a community able to collectively piece it together and regulate a wiki, but the moment a small indie game asks me to figure all of this out for myself is the moment I stop paying attention to the story altogether. This approach is no longer charming to me. It just feels like I’m being given homework.

Grime is a game of gaping contradictions. It is one of the most visually striking releases of the year… and also one of the ugliest. It’s one of the most imaginative games in some time… and also one of the most generic. For all of Grime’s talk about chiseled stone, the experience feels like a half-finished sculpture — occasional details reveal tantalizing glimpses of the creators’ vision, but it’s largely an indistinct blob.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Clover Bite and published by Akupara Games.It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately ten hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated Teen and contains Fantasy Violence and Animated Blood. There are some occasional spooky monster designs, but otherwise it’s pretty harmless.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Dialogue is limited entirely to text, which cannot be altered or resized. Audio cues are never vital to play — I spent much of the game without sound on and had no problem. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Grime Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Our accumulated skills coming together in the final level.

LOW It’s easy to forget to save.

WTF Copenhagen?

I’ve long held that scoring a videogame isn’t a mathematical equation, where we start at ten and subtract for every tangible blemish. A deeply flawed game can still be a masterpiece, while a game that’s a perfect expression of what it sets out to do can still fail to leave a lasting impact.

Ynglet is a case of the latter. Anyone who plays it is signing themselves up for an hour or two of stark hand-drawn animation, unique movement systems, and a dynamic soundtrack that reacts to the player’s behavior. It’s a game that achieves exactly what it sets out to do. I have essentially zero criticisms of it — and yet, perhaps due to the abstract nature of its visuals or its complete lack of any narrative thrust, I remember only generalities about my time with it. I was frequently delighted while playing, yet afterward it left my mind almost entirely.

Ynglet is a difficult game to describe. It is, as its Steam page claims, a side-scrolling platformer in which there are no platforms. Playing as some sort of micro-organism, we traverse levels by moving from one bubble to the next. While we’re in a bubble, we can swim freely in any direction, but as soon as we exit, gravity will yank us toward the bottom of the screen.

In this situation, ‘jumping’ is a matter of propelling ourselves out of one bubble with enough speed to reach the next bubble without falling to our deaths. Ynglet only utilizes one button, and it’s mapped to a chargeable dash that we can use to either add distance to a jump or to correct ourselves in mid-air, since we have very little control of our character when it’s not swimming through a bubble.

Ynglet gets a surprising amount of traction out of its one-button approach — we encounter red walls that only become corporeal if the player is dashing through them, blue walls that are only solid when the player isn’t dashing, bubbles that phase in and out of existence each time the player dashes, and so forth. By default, we only get one dash when we’re out of a bubble, but interacting with some of these objects refills our charge, leading to sequences in which we’re executing multiple steps in a single jump.

Despite its mellow presentation and a save function that can be activated anywhere (the player simply needs to sit still for a moment and Ynglet will create a checkpoint in that bubble) things get surprisingly tricky during the final few levels when it tests us on everything we’ve learned all at once. Ynglet squeezes just about every mechanic it can out of the single button that it uses, and then proceeds to find every possible combination of said mechanics, all in the space of roughly an hour and a half.

While Ynglet is clever in this mechanical sense, the truth is that it’s also largely forgettable, if only because the levels themselves are so general and homogeneous. The hand-drawn visuals are lovely to look at, but they’re just indistinct shapes hanging in a featureless void. Although there are weird, intriguing little details sprinkled throughout (like the main hub being a map of Copenhagen) I doubt there’s any motive beyond creating an entrancing audiovisual landscape.

Ynglet includes a “2013 game jam prototype.” I don’t know if the game has been in ongoing development for all of that time, but the care and confidence in Ynglet’s presentation indicate to me that this is meticulous labor of love. It’s a shame for something so beautiful and pure to leave me so emotionally cold, but it’s a tight, wholly unique platformer nonetheless. At five dollars, it’s an easy game to recommend… just a difficult game to truly love.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Nifflas and published by Triple Topping. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately two hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: As of press time, this game has not been rated by the ESRB. There’s no violence or anything objectionable. It’s fit for all ages.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Outside of a few written tutorial prompts, there is no dialogue in Ynglet, spoken or otherwise, and audio cues play zero vital role in the game. It’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Ynglet Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.