Reloading BR

With a more arcadey touch to its game design and a bigger focus on the lore and narrative surrounding the DOOM Slayer, I'm not sure if this new direction represents something marginally worse or better than DOOM 2016. But after killing thousands of demons, I can definitely attest that DOOM Eternal is, very much like its predecessor, one of the most fun and impressive shooters of the generation.

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Journey to the Savage Planet is a good way to start 2020. A fun adventure that has found the right balance in the size of its map and exploration incentives. The main story beat is rather uninteresting, but the whole funny script they wrote around the beautiful world is a delight. The lackluster combat also hurts it a little, but exploring and experimenting with the game's mechanics to solve puzzles and traverse the world was quite fun.

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It is curious that this game clearly understands the strong aspects of the property on which it is based on, and in that spectrum it delivers a lot of personality, offering one of the best Star Wars adventures to date, but when it comes to gameplay and game design aspects, it has trouble deciding what it wants to be. Many influences are suited for the nature of the I.P as the decision to create maps with a great focus on exploration and implement bombastic action sequences, but the combat ended up suffering from inconsistency between excellent and mediocre aspects. In summary, Jedi: Fallen Order is a good game that establishes a strong base for Respawn to continue to improve and find its own identity for this sub-series.

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Superliminal is a hard game to talk about without being able to go deeper into the details of why the experience turns out to be so brilliantly designed, but trust me that this is a curious and clever game, that also carries an unexpected dose of positive messages by the end.

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I was legit impressed by some of the production values in Monkey King Hero is Back, especially the animation and how they marry that aspect with the combat, but overall this is a game that brings very little to the table. Maybe I’m being too harsh on a game that’s not only mostly aimed at kids, but also something aimed at whole different country and culture to make them adopt the PS4, but this feels like a product of the past, and even then this wouldn't have been considered anything especial.

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It's no wonder that Untitled Goose Game was a hit even before it's release. This small game is adorable, comical, accessible and one that asks it's player to use their most chaotic instincts to find fun solutions to it's puzzles. I hope all this success means that this is only the first of many adventures to come starring the unnamed goose.

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Control is an amalgam of Remedy's recent work. A game that is not afraid to be weird and show all the personality that is contained in its design philosophy and world building. A title with such an entertaining gameplay flow that even though I've done and explored everything the story and enviroments have for me, I still find myself traversing the halls of the Oldest House facing the remnants of The Hiss and hoping to find some unexplored corners. Control is one of my favorites of the year as well as my favorite Remedy game, and I can't wait to see where Sam Lake and friends will take this property moving forward.

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With a fairly solid use of known tropes of the thriller genre, ERICA's highlights aren't necessarily its story or characters. But it's a well-crafted and interesting enough tale to present what is in fact the most special aspect of the game, which is the way Flavourworks has found to increase player engagement by creating a layer of extremely natural mechanics and interactions on top of live-action elements. It is a product that builds a new, more interactive base for FMV productions, opening new potential for the genre.

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In it's best moments, My Friend Pedro delivers memorable action sequences in a fun and exciting gameplay loop that resembles Max Payne's shoot-outs or even John Woo's movies scenes. It's very creative in introducing its items, many that at first glance might not even make sense for an action game, and the mental exercises we have to do to find the best combination of weapons and moves for each situation brings a good challenge. Unfortunately, this is not the experience throughout the whole thing, with some stages far below in quality compared to it's best sequences. Overall it's a good game, but one that fails to maintain its highs during some of its stages.

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It's not that Observation brings revolutionary mechanics to its gameplay or narrative, but what makes this a special project is the incredible execution and use of the interactive nature of video games to tell an intriguing Sci-fi thriller. It may sound cliché, but the in-game situations are so well implemented and contextualized that you really feel as an important and operative part of this story.

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A Plague Tale: Innocence is a good game, which unfortunately looses steam in its final chapters, preventing it from concluding as a great one. Although it has a very promising and pleasant first half, it ends up stretching itself unnecessarily, delivering samey gameplay sections without much inspiration through it's middle, and chapters where the story becomes much less interesting towards the end. These factors take away some of the brilliance of what is still an impressive work of world-building and narrative that Asobo Studio introduced in the early hours of this adventure.

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Despite being a different game from the ''Souls series'', Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is equally fantastic for the same basic reasons: excellent world-building, deep and challenging combat and incredible game design. And even though there are still some small game design decisions that continue to bother me, in return I increasingly fall more in love with the general design philosophy of From Software every time I step foot in another one of their worlds.

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From the moment I saw Baba Is You for the first time I already knew it was something I would be into a lot. After playing it for several hours and having gone through almost a hundred stages I found myself very addicted to it's gameplay loop and impressed by the quality of the puzzle design put inside the game. Baba Is You is one of the most creative games of recent years, a collection of systemic puzzles with a clever and challenging game design.

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It's very clear where Vane draws it's influence from, the problem is that despite beeing a beautiful a project with satisfactory puzzles, it can not at any time reach the level of its predecessors, and worse than that, it inherits from these projects a bunch of technical problems that here are even worse. There are very good things inside VANE, but the sum of its factors does not result in anything remarkable.

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GRIS will hardly demand quick reflexes or make you scratch your head thinking about the solutions to it's puzzle platforming. It's a short game (about three, four hours), that's fun to control and simple and very accessible in terms of gameplay, that possibly will leave a little to be desired in terms depth for those seeking greater challenges. But I think above all this, it is a moving experience thanks to its artistic and narrative combinations. I loved my hours interacting, listening and watching the beautiful journey of Gris.

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Call of Cthulhu has an ambitious proposal, and in the brief moments that delivers on such proposal, it is a very enjoyable experience. The opening chapters have realized the vision of bringing to video games a pen-and-paper investigative RPG with a thrilling atmosphere and mechanics involving choices that really impact the direction of the story. But when it departs from these proposals, becoming a game that leans more on linear psychological horror, the experience becomes generic, with little to offer beyond the intriguin nature of the cosmic myth of Cthulhu. If at the beginning of the adventure I could see myself playing multiple times to see how different decisions would lead to different resolutions and consequences, in the end, already tired of the poorly paced and shallow sections of gameplay in the back half of the game, and unable to connect more deeply to this world, I cared little about the direction of the narrative and its characters. It's a shame that Call of Cthulhu doesn't maintain the quality found in the first four hours throughout the game.

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Flipping Death is one of the alternatives of modern puzzle adventures that most resemble the classic quirkiness of LucasArts games, bringing in my opinion even funnier and more absurd situations that such classics while also achieving to be less obtuse with their puzzles resolutions. If you enjoyed the spirit of those games and also Stick It to the Man, you more than likely will have a lot of fun with Flipping Death as well.

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Dead Cells is one of the cases where the gameplay loop itself is pretty much flawless. The number of variables and systems within the game could disrupt the simple combination of moves, but in fact, they enrich the combat's density, making the player have critical thinking and extremely fast decisions to match their present abilities and get out of those dungeons alive. This is one of those games that I will not delete from my system anytime soon because I'm still playing and I'm sure I'll continue to visit it several times in the future.

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God of War is a special project. It is celebratory to attest the high level of technical and creative work put here during its five years of development. From the way they reconstructed the combat, how they opened up the scope of its world design geared towards exploration and gameplay experimentation, how they delivered an excellent narrative with a good script, good dialogues and characters that are not one-dimensional and even the way they present the credits, all of its aspects are almost untouchable. Santa Monica Studio was able to completely change my perception of this property, something that only a masterpiece of this high-caliber would be capable of.

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Minit basic gameplay premises are super simple, but in many ways, it is super sophisticated in the way that its design had to be thought to work in an instance that was challenging but still fair and pleasant enough to convince the player of its proposal. I loved the premise, the jokes, the secrets, the fantastic soundtrack and pretty much everything that constituted this little adventure.

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