They're creepy and they're kooky
Mysterious and spooky
They're all together ooky
The Addams family

Their house is a museum
When people come to see 'em
They really are a scream
The Addams family

Neat
Sweet
Petite

So put a witch's shawl on
A broomstick you can crawl on
We're gonna pay a call on
The Addams family

They're creepy and they're kooky
Mysterious and spooky
They're all together ooky
The Addams family

Strange
Deranged
The Addams family

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I SOMEHOW FORGOT TO ADD THIS GAME TO MY LIST BEFORE PUBLISHING DESPITE BLUE PRINCE BEING THE GREATEST DAMN THING I PLAYED IN YEARS (besides Fester's Quest)

PLEASE FORGIVE THIS TRANSGRESSION AND LAME "REVIEW"

This game is drop dead gorgeous to look at and a pleasure to play through due to the engaging storyline and interesting characters.

The combat feels great despite being a variation on rock, paper, scissors, where you change stances to better murder the enemy variants and provides a fairly diverse arsenal to fit your tastes even though some feel distinctly "inspired" by (aka straight up copied from) Assassin's Creed. The stealth mechanics can feel a bit underbaked in certain mission scenarios where it becomes apparent the developers intended a combat approach due to the enemy becoming omniscient and homing in on you. I stopped doing an attempted pure-ish stealth run and moved to a more hybrid approach and the game felt immediately better to play.

I sometimes find myself getting fatigued towards the end of some open-world style games (Hi Ubisoft!) due to the repetitive nature of clearing all of the little icons from a giant map to get 100% completion. I know, I know, sacrilege! This game was no exception to having an abundance of things to find and do outside of the main and side quests, but it wasn't egregious about overstuffing the map with filler crap. Only the fox shrines started to wear out their welcome as I was wrapping things up, but it was offset by how goddamn adorable those little catdogs are, so I forgive them.

All in all, a very highly recommended game from me and I'm looking forward to the sequel whenever I manage to get around to it.

Note: I didn't touch the multiplayer content as I'm waiting on a friend to play it with, so no review on that element, unfortunately.

One of my all-time favourite games got a remaster, huzzah!

It's done by Bloober Team, huzz-ahhhh...?

I mean, they're okay, I've enjoyed the Medium, Layers of Fear, Observer, etc... but this was going to be a big ask from them.

Thankfully, they absolutely nailed it. This was a project that was tackled with respect and reverence for the original source material and it shows. Despite all of the changes made to combat, the environments, and enemies to modernize a classic game, it still ends up feeling very true to the original which made me so happy while doing my playthroughs.

Yeah, playthroughs. So this remake comes packed with all of the original endings and bonus endings, and Bloober added a couple of their own. I don't really think it added much to the experience, unfortunately, but it was fun looking for the new collectibles in new game+ to unlock them along with some nostalgia nods they sprinkled everywhere called glimpses of the past.

Hopefully I get to see SH1 and SH3 get a similar treatment!

Let me preface this by stating that I am a pizzaholic. I will eat just about any pizza put in front of me and I will enjoy it thoroughly, no matter how mediocre or sub-par it is. You would literally have to do some heinous things to a pizza for me to not love it.

Now, on to the commentary.

Rift Apart is a beautiful game, best looking one of the series graphically. The main storyline is fine, although it can be pretty cutscene heavy, which I'm not super nuts about in any action-oriented game. Maybe a symptom of Sony trying to do the whole R&C movie flop. The weapons were probably the most disappointing part for me. There's a lot of them, but there was this odd feeling of a lack of "oomph" from the vast majority of them. I think that stems from the enemy designs though. Certain enemy types were overused far too much, while others were barely touched, so combat ended up feeling kind of repetitive in a lot of sections. Even accounting for increased health from playing on highest difficulty, too many enemies felt like bullet sponges.

Levels were... okay. The rift mechanic was interesting, but felt like an excuse to avoid designing more varied planets in favour of doing a boatload of asset recycling. The replacement for the ship combat segments found in previous games was not fun to me at all, and basically a disappointing one-shot with bad controls. The mini-games, which are usually "fine" in the previous games were pretty underwhelming and not very fun, but thankfully not too common. I even found myself missing the racing from previous games, of all things.

The collectibles, which are usually one of my favourite aspects of these games due to being concise but at least somewhat challenging is rendered completely lame. They put almost no effort into hiding gold bolts, outside of a handful, to make them a challenge to collect. Half the time it was more of "Do I take the obvious route forward to continue the stage, or take this side path, and yup, there's a gold bolt just sitting there." Not only that, but the couple that I did have to look for a bit more thoroughly ended up showing up on my map to give it away once you got in proximity to them. Sure, I could just not look at the map, but I only wanted to see if there were any unexplored areas left, not have my hand held through baby mode. I play on the highest difficulty settings for a reason, I don't want the game to "help" me.

And that, I think, is ultimately a big part of the problem I had with this game overall. It felt like a game trying to appeal to a much, much younger audience. It's one of the weaker mainline R&C games I've played in terms of gameplay/fun.

The Ratchet & Clank series is my gaming pizza, and I love Rift Apart more than it likely deserves.

Onto a game that I thought I was not going to enjoy and ended up loving!

If I see card mechanics in a non-card based game my immediate initial impression is of uninspired and lazy design. That was my initial impression of Marvel's Midnight Suns, when it was first revealed to use cards for their combat mechanics. They took the X-Com out of my highly anticipated Marvel-skinned X-Com game!

Turns out, that was just fine. It still ended up being oodles of fun!

The combat segments were closer to trying to solve a semi-randomized puzzle, which is right up my alley. While some of the other challenges were straight up puzzles, which was even better. The rather large cast of characters all brought with them a diverse set of moves and mechanics, with some being more fun/useful than others, but even the weakest seeming heroes were incredibly powerful when paired correctly with more compatible teammate move sets.

Speaking of the characters, the social system was.... definitely different and not at all what I expected. The dialogue was made as gender neutral as possible (since your custom hero main character could be either "body type"), but it still resulted in a lot of awkward but hilarious quasi-flirty dialogue as I built stronger bonds with each of the other heroes to level them up.

The home base was shockingly deep, able to be built out with all kinds of upgrades to boost just about every aspect of combat. It also featured a massive area to explore and find all sorts of lore and backstory elements, along with nods to Marvel stuff in general.

My only complaint was that the grind got to be pretty bad when trying to level up and/or maximize your skills and base components in the late game. Some of the components you needed would be random spawns on the base grounds that you'd have to hunt around for, with a couple being exceedingly rare spawns. The currencies (yes, several) that went into different upgrade systems were also a pain in the butt to farm for, often requiring doing several repetitive generic missions to build up enough for what you needed. I should point out that these were mostly completionist problems though, as there was no real need to maximize every single thing to get through the game.

All in all, for what I paid for the complete edition and all the DLC, this game was an absolute steal and good value. Highly recommended.

There were quite a few cheaper VR games on the PSN and when I found a puzzle-based one, I had to give it a go.

So the premise is that you need to take fruits or berries from plants and put them into outputs to process. There are sometimes things you need to do with the fruit to change them before they are valid outputs, like skewering them together in various ways, but it's all very straight-forward. In theory.

The fun part is that you record yourself performing actions within a time limit to create a stationary robot that clones those movements on a loop. By cloning several robots that interact with each other, you create a chain of events like some derpy ass Rube Goldberg machine that eventually meets all the requirements of the level's puzzle.

I feel like I'm explaining this horribly, let me just paint a picture for you.

Recording 1) Grab a ripe fruit from a plant that is on one side of the room then toss it across the room to where you expect your next recording to be, near the output.
Recording 2) Stand near the output, watch as your first recording throws fruit at you and try to catch it so you can drop it in the output. Then pull a switch to process the fruit.
Success!

That's if you want to do the bare minimum that is. Levels have efficiency goals, which is where the chaos/fun comes into play. Tossing one fruit at a time to a robot to gently deposit is all well and good, but I want a far greater rate of fruits getting fed into that output chute. Time to re-record!

Recording 1) Start near several plants, start madly grabbing them in each hand so you throw two at a time directly into the output bin, trying to get 4 fruits tossed per recorded loop. Get frustrated and call it "good enough" when you've got two in and two "close enough"
Recording 2) Start near more plants and do the same thing as recording one, so now your receiving bin area is being bombarded by fruit from multiple directions where only some of it is actually going in.
Recording 3) Stand near the output bin and record yourself panic snatching the fruit from the air that didn't quite hit the mark while also trying to find time to pull a lever to ensure the fruits that do go in are being processed.

Suffice to say, you look like a complete idiot while recording and re-recording these actions and it's fun as hell. I even ended up accidentally punching my tv during one especially awkward catch that had been thrown wide, thankfully no damage except to my pride.

Do you like weird as hell dystopian settings? Do you love frying things in pans? Do they necessarily need to be edible things? No? Then this is a game for you!

Arctic Eggs is a strange, but fun trip. A trip to visit weird characters with weird dialogue and even weirder appetites. Playing this consists of a very laser focused gameplay mechanic taken to frustrating and absurdist levels.

It starts off innocently enough, you want to escape this Antarctic colony, but the only way to leave is to satisfy enough people's hunger by cooking them food. Your first task is to prepare some eggs. The cooking is simple enough, you have a magically heated frying pan that is non-stick in a way that Teflon only wishes it could be. These eggs are only kept in place because the pan has some edges to it to prevent them from sailing off to their doom. To cook them to satisfaction you need to flip the eggs to ensure even cooking by flicking the pan and letting physics do it's thing.

So this is where the fun and challenge lies. Not only are you trying to keep the world's most frictionless pan from spilling it's contents which results in an immediate do over, you also need to manipulate the pan in ways to adjust what's being cooked, but not too hard, or you'll launch something into the stratosphere which again, is a do over. You frequently need to cook several items at once, so you'll find yourself needing to carefully flip one out of three eggs since you only managed to get the other two to flip earlier, but oops, you flipped one of the eggs that didn't need flipping instead because the physics hate you... It's all very very fiddly and fun.

Okay, eggs are done and this person is satisfied. Wait, this next person doesn't want eggs? They want... pufferfish? That bounce randomly in the pan as you cook them? Oh hell.

...and so it goes. There are a number of different objects besides fried eggs that you'll need to cook, all with unique properties and challenges. All the while talking to the plethora of NPCs that live out their dreary Antarctic lives spouting their funny and often nonsensical dialogue at you.

The best part is how the game's difficulty changes things in such a simple but evil way.

Easy mode = Pan with high walls, like a wok
Normal = regular frying pan
Hard = crepe pan with nearly non-existent walls

Hard mode was.... fun. A fun I'm glad I made it through, but I never ever want to play through again.

I'm not a Harry Potter fan, at all. I've never read the books, I've only watched one of the movies in theatres (and it wasn't even the first one) only because I was going with a lady friend that had no one else to go with. I think I fell asleep at some point and made a pretty poor impression on her. Suffice to say, I didn't get into this game because I'm a Pothead or whatever the fandom calls themselves.

I saw what looked like a fairly well done open world game that had a ton of collectibles and went "Yup, that's my kind of game" and guess what? While I'm still not down with witches and warlocks with funny accents, I really enjoyed the game for what it was.

I'll skip past all the plot-related stuff that pertains to references and whatnot, because I honestly wouldn't know them to recognize them any way. Whether it's true to the original material, or characters are written well in context, not a clue. Doesn't matter to me, at least. This will be a review/summary from a complete outsider to the franchise.

The main school of Hogwarts itself is straight up incredible as far as the design goes. I'm sure if I knew more of the lore going in, I would probably be impressed even more by how well it appears to be represented in this game. So many weird architectural choices and fantastical decorations and elements, it feels like it's appropriate to the source material. The game has a very well implemented guiding hand mechanic to help direct you to your next objective that I greatly appreciated. I would have been so insanely lost in that wacky castle many times without it. They probably could have made an entire game that only takes place in this building and maybe the surrounding school grounds and it would have been perfectly fine.

But no, instead they create a whole massive region surrounding the school, that was shockingly larger than I ever would have expected, and fairly well crafted on top of everything. So many things to collect and find! A smorgasbord of bullshit to find and activities to perform!

And there lies my one big criticism of this game. While it suffers from Ubisoft levels of diarrhea of the collectible/filler activity, I still embraced the collectathon! Hundreds of chests, hidden pages, etc... spread throughout Hogwarts and the surrounding region. The egregious part is that there's a gating system in place where you'll be questing/collectible hunting in an area where you can only access some of the collectibles, because others are barred behind locked barriers that are tiered. Oh, you only have level one unlock spell? Better come back here later arbitrarily just to get this chest. I don't like that and I think that's bad game design that only serves to inflate time spent in a game in a non-meaningful way.

Otherwise, the rest of the game is fine. Combat feels fun with the variety of spells that you get as attacks, I do like that there's something of a good/evil choice mechanic that dictates whether you even get access to certain spells or not and feels meaningful with respect to what I could grasp of the lore. The story was pretty good, not good enough for me to want to go and read/watch the source material, but very solid for a game setting and I would recommend this to both fans and the ambivalent like myself. Probably not full-on haters of HP though, as this game is oozing with all things HP throughout.

Seems a bit silly to avoid dropping spoilers for a game that's been out for 5+ years now, but that's what I'm going to do and tell you to avoid spoiling this game for yourself and just get it and play it. It has a very cool gameplay mechanic.

That said, I was a bit off-put by the very beginning section of the game, thinking "Oh damn, I was lied to and this game isn't all that interesting" but once I was able to put everything into context after the first 20-30 minutes or so, it clicked with me. I burned through this game, exploring every planetary object inside and out, from top to bottom, over the span of 2-3 days. Finding things I'd missed and eventually piecing together the puzzle until I had learned everything there was to learn and figured out how to achieve the various endings that were possible.

The DLC is equally impressive in many ways, and slightly less in others, but I would recommend it as well.

Simply put, it doesn't really do much more than it's predecessor except add a couple of new gadgets and makes the boss fights more interesting, otherwise, same core gameplay.

Not much more I can say about it. If you liked Ape Escape, you will like this. If not, it's not going to change your mind.

Edit: YOU'RE LUCKY I BRAINFARTED ON BLUE PRINCE BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T EVEN DESERVE A COMMENTARY