The Jimquisition
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Final Fantasy XVI is all over the place. It’s a game of incredible highs and distasteful lows, boasting such a narrative trainwreck of disarranged ideas it’s borderline incompatible with itself. Endeavoring to tackle themes of fascism and slavery would be laudable if the result wasn’t inelegant at best and offensive at worst. The frustrating, exhausting nature of XVI’s miserable narrative is countered by notably enjoyable combat, impressive setpieces, and truly stunning boss encounters. When it’s not boring, it’s exhilarating. When it’s not exhilarating, it’s insulting. When it’s not insulting, it’s delightful.
Street Fighter 6 has made me the happiest I’ve been with a game in quite some time. As somebody who always wanted to play fighting games but whose neurodivergence prevented them, the new Modern controls and consistent approachability is simply joyous. Brimming with personality, immensely gratifying, and packed with a shocking amount of content, I’m still rather shocked by exactly how hooked I’ve become. It’s just a shame Capcom’s insistence on pernicious monetization lets the welcoming effort down, because besides that I have no notes. Street Fighter 6 is the fighting game I needed.
Amnesia: The Bunker is a pleasant step up from its predecessor Rebirth, but it all too often falls into the problem many horror games have - resource management and monstrous harassment are balanced in such a way as to inspire annoyance more readily than fear. For much of its campaign, The Bunker is an absorbingly gloomy experience with a nice sense of rhythm to its progress and an effective illusion of dynamism in both its monster and environment. This is somewhat offset by enforced backtracking, a piddling inventory, and an embarrassingly rubbish flashlight. If it had expanded its promising ideas and balanced its threat-to-tedium ratio better, this could have been a fantastic experience. But, y’know, it didn’t do that.
Daedalic had an opportunity to prove the cynics wrong when so many people wondered what the hell the point of a Gollum game would even be. Instead, they handled this with such utter clumsiness they likely ensured a game like it will never happen again.
I’m thrilled Respawn gets to make full, single-player Star Wars games. I want to see more, and I want more Jedi installments, but I desire a far more compelling baseline experience, and I bloody need the official cantina game that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has inadvertently filled me with a longing for.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is indeed a game with two faces - one welcoming and the other viciously hostile. While it features a wealth of content, brilliant innovation, and genuine incentives to play with its toys, the spectre of its predecessor’s pernicious encroachment on fun is dispiriting in its ubiquity.
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun absolutely delivers on its promise of 40K-meets-Doom. Its guns are deliciously punchy, the chainsword is a consistent thrill to wield, and everything is presented with fantastic period graphics and a suitable riff-heavy soundtrack. The game’s overzealous commitment to one single note is a sadly undermining affair, eventually transforming an exciting experience into one that runs out of content long before it runs out of levels. Nevertheless, it’s fundamentally entertaining for as long as one remains invested, and I definitely had enough of that entertainment to feel like I got what I wanted out of it.
As a mindless distraction played while mentally checked out, Dead Island 2 has merit. It is enjoyable for good periods of time, and it’s done a solid job of refining the messy hack n’ slash of the original game while improving ranged combat alongside it. As fun as all the zombie slaying can be, however, an intense lack of variety coupled with dreary exploration is outright exhausting at times, and I wouldn’t blame any player for moving on long before finishing the story. It’s not a game that’s entertaining while it lasts - it’s entertaining while you last.
Dredge reeled me in to the point I sunk hours into it, and even if my patience floundered at times, the net experience was fun to tackle. While its content isn't stuffed to the gills, it’s hard to be crabby with a gameplay loop that had me hooked, and the intriguing horror angle perched on top of a swimmingly good adventure is worth wading into. It doesn’t have to fish for compliments, but since I’m trawling for puns and you’re probably salty about it, I’ll wave goodbye and say that Dredge isn’t crappie. Sea you later!
Again though, I really must stress that this is a great game. It’s more serious, and suffers in comparison as a result, but its wealth of additional content, its few minor adjustments to an already terrific combat system, and the sheer excuse to enjoy Resident Evil 4 in another way makes this is a worthy title indeed.
Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is an interesting snapshot of a time gone by, but that’s essentially the only intriguing thing about it. More an historical curio than a game worth playing on any kind of merit, its torturous pace and general lifelessness absolutely murder any sense of tension or basic intellectual involvement. A plodding narrative, as well a disgraceful amount of backtracking, serve only to enhance the ennui.
Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe is a great time. The remake is faithful in the ways that count and adds enough new content to be well worth revisiting, even if that content isn’t universally brilliant. I could take or leave the theme park conceit, and I wish the Mecha ability was as good as Sand, but with an enjoyable epilogue campaign and a bunch of unlockable masks that I couldn’t stop thinking about, there’s no denying this is a remake that puts the work in to justify itself. I like it when things do that.
In all the ways “open world” could be used as a pejorative, Forspoken excels.
Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line is a delight, and a massive time sink that I don’t regret spending hours on. From its colorful visuals to the excellently presented music and the simple yet challenging rhythm action itself, there’s a ton to love about the latest game in a series I was already hooked on. The massive collection of characters to unlock and loot to gather enhances the game tremendously, while the rewarding multiplayer is just a lovely extra on top. If the DLC wasn’t so vast I’d have almost nothing to criticize outside of a desire for more considered accessibility settings. Even then, the base game truly does have more going for it than the majority of mainstream games charging twenty bucks more.
Metroid Prime Remastered is a faithful beat-for-beat recreation of the GameCube classic with a comprehensively polished visual makeover. It remains a solid adventure shooter, even if its straightforward approach to player progress is a little unexciting these days. I’ve certainly not hated my time with it, though I do hate its refusal to properly credit the team that worked on the original.
Everything good about Dead Space 2023’s basic gameplay, combat, and narrative is a result of what Dead Space 2008 built. Most of what this remake adds is either less appealing artistic alterations or side content that generally amounts to unnecessary padding, and quite frankly I’d have been more interested in a remaster than a glitchy new take that’s less enjoyable and costs more. When you add the repulsive context of EA benefiting from a series it once destroyed right down to the developer, you get a game that leaves a sour bloody taste, even if it’s an acceptable mimicry of its predecessor.
Lil Gator Game is charm incarnate. Deftly, exceptionally charming. With its sincere, sweet little story and perfectly dorky humor, it provides a wonderfully enchanting adventure that kept me grinning and tittering all the way through. More importantly than anything else, Lil Gator Game made me happy. I’m damn happy this adorable goofiness exists, and while I’m sad I ran out of things to do, I’m delighted by everything I did.
Choo Choo Charles reminds me of a movie by Full Moon Studios - like Demonic Toys, Hideous, or Head of the Family, it’s an entertaining “what if?” concept that just isn’t enough to support an entire piece of media. With basic gameplay comparable to any number of low budget horror titles, it’s a fun idea and absolutely nothing besides. I wish it had more to offer, but like so many joke games before it, we already got the punchline when we saw the trailer and there’s nothing the gameplay adds on top of it. To be brutally honest, Choo Choo Charles would have been better as a fake game, or at the very least nothing would have changed if it was.
The most fun I had with High on Life was watching the entirety of Tammy and the T-Rex on an in-game television, and that’s not a compliment. It’s indicative of a game that doesn’t know how to exploit the interactivity of videogames and settles instead on yelling ideas as unsubtly as possible. With its relentless avalanche of jokes and screeches, it’ll talk your ears off but has exactly zero bite to go with its cacophonous barking. Its best ideas are borrowed from elsewhere. Its worst ideas are borrowed from elsewhere. The aggressively layered comedy is a smokescreen for the fact it's got nothing else going for it. It’s a clamorous joke delivery vehicle in which your role as a player is to passively observe and occasionally shoot stuff. You might as well sit down and watch TV.
The Last Oricru is a masterpiece of bad design. When a game has to warn its players not to invest in half the available skill points because they’re worthless, you know you’ve got something special, and that’s what Oricru is - special. It’s so profoundly wrong it deserves to be studied, dissected, remembered for years. Its creators should tour universities and give talks about their artistic philosophies so future generations can learn how never to make a videogame. If you’d told me aliens had developed it, I’d struggle to argue, such is the incomprehensible absurdity on display.