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The simple tl;dr is that the hype is real - objectively, D:OS2 is probably the best modern CRPG. It has something for everyone. It's chock full of content; you'll probably spend 100 hours if you try and hit most of the side quests on Classic difficulty.

That doesn't, however, make it a perfect game. D:OS2 is a very consistent game; it frequently hits above average marks on just about everything it does. And that feels great. For a while. But the more you play D:OS2, the more you realize that for every good feature it has, there's usually an accompanying frustration or nagging deficiency that becomes increasingly more glaring the longer you spend with the game.

The best thing D:OS2 does is get rid of the "adventuring day." CRPGs, by and large, were born from efforts to emulate the tabletop roleplaying experience of D&D. Part of D&D's mechanics revolve around managing resources during a dungeon delve; you only have a certain amount of spells you can cast before needing to rest. CRPGs have never handled this well. They're littered with save scumming to avoid random encounters, or wasting time backtracking to safe resting places, or boring trash mob encounters to expend your resources, or annoying time limits, or artificial limitations on the amount of times you can rest... No matter the implementation, it always sucks.

D:OS2 throws that concept of an adventuring day out the window. Once you're out of combat, your armor regenerates, your cooldowns quickly reset, and it's relatively easy to heal yourself. This is awesome. It means that every battle is meaningful.

Act 1 of D:OS2 is brilliant. It is 20 hours of curated, cutthroat open world tactical RPG fun. This initial section of the game feels perfect in every way. You're criminals sent to a horrid, squalid prison for dangerous people called 'sourcerers' who have the ability to tap into eldritch magic. You're meant to labor, rot, and die. Nobody has ever escaped Fort Joy, but your mission is to defy expectations. It's miserable in all the best ways. They nail the tone perfectly. You start in rags with few abilities. You have to cut your teeth scrambling together gear. Every new ability you can buy from a vendor feels like a triumph. As you mix together potions and bake food items and craft new arrows, each new recipe you learn helps you edge out your opponents and make fights go that much more smoothly. There are four or five ways to actually get out of the fort, and you can take any one of them. When you inevitably do get out of prison, it feels like a hard earned victory. As someone who bounced off the first Divinity: Original Sin game, I was ecstatic.

But then, after Fort Joy, I started to see the cracks in D:OS2's veneer that made me give up on the first game.

D:OS2 doesn't use classes. You have various Combat Abilities that you can put points into as you level up; putting those points in various skills, like Aerotheurge or Geomancer for spellcasters or Huntsman and Warfare for physical attackers, lets you use Skillbooks you get off corpses and buy from vendors to give your characters access to new abilities. Defenders of D:OS2 will tell you that this lets you flexibly build your characters in a wide variety of different ways - more options, more freedom!

But then you get into Act 2 and suddenly you have too many skill points. And you realize that adding another point into Huntsman isn't really doing anything for you. Why not put it into a different skillset? One that would open a whole suite of new abilities? And then you ask yourself why everyone doesn't have 2 points of Aerotheurge, because that gets you Teleport, which is probably the best crowd control skill in the game. And, actually, why don't all of your characters have Necromancy? Your characters are much more powerful if you a dip a little bit into most of the skillsets. And now all of your characters are extremely homogenized save for a few key skills.

Around 40 hours into D:OS2, I started to wonder how much of the game was tactical and how much revolved around understanding and exploiting its obtuse systems. You don't notice these things in Fort Joy because you're just trying to eke out an existence; trying to survive, trying to get small advantages where you can find them. Once you have a plethora of resources, the gameplay turns into a monotonous... checklist of tiny advantages - most of which are outscaled relatively quickly.

You start to realize that despite purporting to be something of an open world game, D:OS2's level scaling system is extremely unforgiving. Encounters a level above you are deadly. Encounters a level below you are a breeze. So you have to play the role of Goldilocks, searching for quests and dungeons and areas that feel "just right." And it's so easy to fall behind on experience if you aren't meticulously exploring areas, leading to situations where you're desperately searching for some smidgen of experience so that you don't have to cheese an encounter a single level above you.

There are tons of revelations like this throughout the game.

Equipment scales on level, so you have to hunt through vendors every time you gain a level of experience to make sure your gear is up to date. Your "Gauntlets of the Ancient Godkiller" quickly become outright useless after you level up once or twice. With 10-11 slots of gear to keep updated, this is a constant nuisance.

As you get further in the game, you have to spend time before every encounter carefully separating out your party members and pre-positioning them before shooting at the enemies, because if you just walk towards them and listen to the dialogue, they're going to bombard your characters with area of effect abilities immediately.

I haven't even touched on the Physical and Magical armor system, which feels like a really bad design choice to try and circumvent the issue D:OS1 had with everyone constantly being stunned, knocked down, or otherwise CC'd.

The writing is actually really good. D:OS1 has a problem with not taking itself seriously and being too tongue in cheek, but D:OS2 does a really phenomenal job of balancing serious storytelling with beats of comedy and levity. The worldbuilding feels unique and interesting. The individual characters you can recruit are much improved from D:OS1; they're genuinely charming. The overarching narrative and subplots both have a lot of bite to them. It's too bad D:OS2 doesn't seem to want you to enjoy any of these things! You're ferried from one plotline to the next by a rotating cast of irrelevant, quickly killed off NPCs. Bafflingly, your characters don't acknowledge each other exist. Even if you are intrigued by what's going on, the game inundates you with a scatterbrained drip feed of new story content inbetween dozens of hours of side quests. By the end of Act 2, I literally couldn't remember what I was doing or who was on my ship because it had been nearly 20 hours since I even heard a whiff of the main plot.

There's just too much. Everything gets muddied after Act 1. Too many sidequests, too many areas, too many ideas stuffed into one place. It's not that D:OS2 is a bad game. It is, however, a game that proves too much of a good thing can be bad, though. That's the rub with D:OS2 - it's a good game, but there's just so much thrown at you without any sense of organization. It's like they were rushing towards a playtime milestone first and trying to create coherency and pacing as an afterthought.

D:OS2 is a wicked good CRPG. In spite of all my criticisms, I'd still say it's probably the most commercially approachable game out there. But I'd probably go back and play Pillars of Eternity or Baldur's Gate long before I considered giving D:OS2 a second look.

Marvel Snap is not only a great and exciting card game, but it has the most interesting and fair free to play model I have ever seen.

Most card games, digital or otherwise, are built and balanced around a competitive atmosphere that assumes players have access to all the cards. For whales who aren't concerned about the amount of cash they're dropping, this isn't really a big deal. For people who are more budget minded or are understandably dubious about investing hundreds of dollars in a new game, this creates a lopsided experience where they're constantly beaten down by more expensive decks.

Some games mitigate this by having daily quests and other opportunities to acquire currency you can use to buy packs and cards in game. Most non-digital games just expect you to suffer because "that's just how these things are." Either way, this grind is tedious and not fun.

Marvel Snap completely does away with this paradigm. The progression of your collection is the game. Earning new cards and building new decks and playing new interactions is the intended experience. You're not supposed to have all the cards; you're supposed to make due with what you get and play against people who have roughly the same sized collection as you. Sure, you might play against someone that has cards you don't - but you also probably have cards in your collection that they don't.

So far, I've spent $20 on this game - two purchases of their monthly battle pass - and I've felt like the progression is not only extremely fair but also outright exciting. I like playing a few games a day and playing with the new cards I get. I like getting to experience new things in a slow drip of progression. I don't mind having to wait for new cards (not "better" cards - but maybe more advanced ones) because the gameplay with the cards I have now is compelling and fun.

The cards are separated into different "pools." As your Collection Level advances, you unlock new pools of cards. Everyone at Collection Level 214 will have all the same cards, which encompass the starter cards and Pool 1 cards. Everyone at Collection Level 474 will have all the same cards, which will include the starters, Pool 1, and Pool 2 cards. But the order that you unlock cards within a pool will be different for each account. The cards in these various pools aren't better - they're just different, perhaps more advanced, perhaps a little trickier, perhaps a different twist on a familiar archetype.

It feels great. It makes the game feel new and fresh with each card you unlock. I never felt overwhelmed, but more importantly, I never felt like I wasn't getting out of Snap for the time I invested. The battle pass is super generous and you get even more free goodies if you do well in ranked, which is completely reasonable to achieve no matter what cards you have access to because you never have to play against people whose collections are too far ahead of yours.

I haven't even talked about the card game itself - which is quick and snappy and satisfying. Decks are 12 cards and feel tight; there are no duplicates and you immediately feel the impact from deck changes after a couple games because of how small your deck is. Games last about 3 minutes, during which you play cards on an energy curve (turn 1 you have 1 energy, turn 2 you have 2 energy, etc.) to vie for control of three locations. You have to control 2 of the 3 locations by the end of the match to win. The locations have random effects that influence the cards that are played on them.

There's certainly some randomness, but Snap mitigates the sour feeling of getting "RNG screwed" by the its eponymous snapping mechanic. You start each match gambling a single cube on the match - literally, a cube is point of your ranked score. Once per match, at any point during the match, if you feel like you have your opponent beat, you can "snap" and double the stakes on the next turn. Your opponent can do the same thing. And if you play out the final turn, the stakes are automatically doubled again. So you could have anywhere from 1 to 8 cubes on the line for a given match.

But here's the trick - you can also retreat from a match at any point. If your opponent snaps and you know they've got you beat? No big deal; just retreat from the match and let them have your single cube. Have a bad draw? No big deal; just retreat. But maybe you see something your opponent doesn't - maybe you know you can win; so you snap back. It's a great way of letting players hedge their bets or leverage a perceived advantage. It's a simple bit of psychological, Poker-esque game theory that really puts each match of Snap on a different level.

I love competitive card games. I wish I could play more of them - I think they're incredibly fun - but spending that much money on something that might not have longevity is really tough. Marvel Snap solves all of my problems with TCGs and battle passes and free to play models and it's an insanely fun game to boot.

My only experience with platform brawlers is Smash - everything from silly free for alls on the N64 as a kid to an unflattering attempt at playing Ultimate competitively at local events. Under no circumstances do I have a professional, in-depth eye for the minutiae of these games, but as a casual player I've really enjoyed MultiVersus since it came out.

Mercifully, this game is actually playable online. I cannot fathom ever playing 2v2 Smash Ultimate with randoms and not watching a slide show. The netcode absolutely isn't perfect, but after almost 20 hours I can count the amount of times that lag has felt intrusive on one hand.

MultiVersus is just all around good fun. It has a great cast of characters that are lovingly implemented into the game. Hearing Kevin Conroy drop classic lines as Batman and quip about Shaggy's off the chart power level gives this game a really charming flare. All the characters interact with each other, from comical comments at the start of the round to battle quotes throughout a match. All the characters I've played have felt fun and are consistently appropriate with their source material.

If there's a miss on the implementation of the characters, it's probably with the music. There's some real clunkers in the soundtrack and a handful of missed opportunities. Imagine how thrilling it would be to hear Simple Plan's theme for What's New Scooby Doo or Hans Zimmer's Wonder Woman theme in this game. Instead, we get a lot of pretty generic and tonally awkward orchestral tracks that frequently feel out of place.

There are a couple of gameplay complaints I have that probably wouldn't affect anyone's casual experience, but they're worth pointing out because it's clear this game needs some work before it hits a genuinely competitive standard. The biggest issues are with the hit/hurt boxes on characters and the seeming lack of a hit priority system, both of which combine to make the game feel wonky and unpredictable at times. But you definitely wouldn't see or notice this unless you were really looking for it - some characters will just feel a bit indescribably better because of it.

Finally, while I understand that the Battle Pass structure is much maligned when it comes to multiplayer games, I think MultiVersus does the free to play model well enough that I can't lodge any serious complaints. I've played for nearly 20 hours and have completed 150 matches, most of which were 2v2s. Considering that this was done more or less over a weekend (meaning I didn't get the benefit of daily quests), I think it's pretty reasonable to have enough resources to unlock 3-5 characters depending on their cost without spending any real money. There is also a weekly cast of free characters. None of the paid-for content gives you a benefit or advantage that would make MultiVersus remotely "pay to win." All this stuff is aesthetic, so I have no idea what people are complaining about.

Overall, this game is wicked fun and if you're even vaguely interested, you should pick it up and give it a try.

It breaks my heart to give Symphony of War a thumbs down, because it's clearly a passion project from an enthusiastic and attentive indie developer. I want people to play this game and support the developer, but I was disappointed by Symphony of War's execution in almost every meaningful way.

I'm going to get the "indie game" criticisms out of the way: The art is extremely mismatched, the writing is rough and uneven, the UI is very clunky, the game doesn't handle resolution scaling well, the voice acting is awkward, deeper gameplay mechanics are largely unexplained, and that is just the start of my list of nagging annoyances. All of this bothered me, but none of it would have mattered if the rest of the game was stellar.

It's not.

Symphony of War is a marriage between Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle with unexplored hints of Advanced Wars. On paper, this premise seems incredible and it immediately sparked my imagination. But the more I played Symphony of War, the more I felt like the developers never took the opportunity to be critical of Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle. By the end of my time with SoW, I felt like it was a game that was blindly copying some of the worst elements of these two franchises rather than improving or innovating on them.

The most egregious problem I have with Symphony of War is that the barebones basics of the squad-based mechanic never worked for me and it only got more muddled as various unnecessary complexities were layered ontop of it. Ultimately, if you're not impressed by what Fire Emblem games do as tactical RPGs, SoW isn't going to change your mind. SoW plays on an even flatter 2D map than Fire Emblem. It's beholden to player/enemy phases rather than a turn clock for each individual squad. Maps are big and mostly empty with enemies that don't move unless you come within their range, so there are several empty turns where you're moving towards the objective or setting up against the next group of enemy squads. Most enemy units are fragile and die within one or two attacks but can also decimate one of your units if you're not careful, which further exacerbates all the problems with the rest of the Fire Emblem mechanics.

Outside of the auto-battler mechanic, SoW eschews everything that makes Ogre Battle unique or interesting. And I would argue that the Ogre Battler auto-battler mechanic makes the Fire Emblem formula worse. For better or worse, Fire Emblem is a game where you are constantly playing on a knife's edge of minute calculations. How many enemy attacks can I survive? Can I hedge my bets that I'll avoid the statistically average amount of attacks? Am I willing to risk getting hit by an enemy crit? But the squads and auto-battles in SoW muddy these calculations significantly. You can't predict what is going to happen during a single attack, let alone predict a whole phase of defending against the enemy. I prefer tactical games to be played based on intuation rather than the calculation heavy approach Fire Emblem takes. But it feels like SoW's design emphasizes the calculation-driven approach while also blindfolding you from making those necessary calculations.

The balance is all over the place in SoW, too. You're supposed to be making meaningful choices about the composition of your squads to try and counteract the enemy, but your choices are oftentimes hollow or outright meaningless. The auto-battler just isn't great. Because all of your units attack at the same time, I constantly watched as pikemen who could one shot a unit of cavalry ganged up on a single guy, or saw a sorceress waste her one attack doing 12 damage to a priestess with high magic resist, or lamenting having group of rogues attack an enemy squad's backline and split their attacks so evenly that they kill nothing. And honestly? I don't think the developers could even fix this if they wanted to - it would make the auto-battler feel even more swingy and in favor of the attackers if your squads had precise targets. By the end of the game, these issues are exacerbated by the fact that you're fielding big squads with 8-9 units each.

There's so much that is out of your control in SoW. Encounters oftentimes feel outright pointless because everything does so much damage or is so random that it doesn't matter what tactical nuances you're taking into account. To make the reliance on blind chance worse, all of the items and recruits available at shops every chapter are completely randomized and inconsistent. There are also weather effects that change your battle prowess and character affinities that affect growths and supports and a morale system and artifacts that you can equip to squads and a tech tree and resources and limited special powers on the tactical map and all sorts of other things I'm probably forgetting. But none of this ever felt like it actually mattered. By the end of the game, the Ogre Battle mechanics transformed from neat and novel to unpredictable and irrelevant. There were even times where I stepped away for a refill during enemy phase because the stakes were that low.

I wasn't thrilled about the scenario or map design, either. In just about every map, SoW sends a lot of expendible junk units at you to whittle at your insanity and HP pools. The entire game is played in a consistent cycle: Approach a group of enemy squads at the very edge of their reach. Let them get a couple of attacks against you on enemy phase. Decimate them on player phase. Heal up and proceed to the next group. And SoW bogs this down with things like bonus objectives that rely on keeping suicidal AI alive or out-of-the-way resource nodes that are required to upgrade your units or largely underwhelming treasure chests.

Finally, I wasn't happy with the difficulty. Normal was never challenging and felt like a testament to why Fire Emblem games need perma-death to remain tactically interesting; SoW demonstrates that you can constantly throw away your units and 100% clear the maps with scarcely any effort otherwise. Hard adds the aforementioned permadeath mechanic, but it feels hastily tacked on to please a niche audience and transforms SoW into a slow, plodding experience that revolves around praying the auto-battler is kind to you and ensuring all of your units are revived before you complete the final objective of the map. This is a game that needs its mechanics rethought in order to introduce difficulty; adding a 50% bonus to enemy damage isn't going to suddenly make it a strategic masterpiece, it's just going to make the swinginess of the damage more problematic and progression even slower.

Symphony of War is a game all about executing alpha strikes to decimate enemies so they can do minimal damage to you and then setting up for a safe enemy phase. People that are enthusiastic about a familiar gameplay loop like this are probably going to love Symphony of War. But for people like me that are tired of Fire Emblem's grip over the market and frustrated by its homogeneous gameplay across decades of titles, Symphony of War feels like an unwieldy experimental clone. SoW is a game with a severe identity crisis; it doesn't know if it wants to be a tactical game where you have to fight tooth and nail to achieve victory with squads that take attrition losses over time or if it's a careful calculation simulator with permadeath that resembles Fire Emblem. In trying to be both (and neither), it provides a disappointing experience that lacks strategic stakes and feels bloated by unnecessary content.

There are moments where I thought Symphony of War really came into its own. The best parts of the game are when the objectives push you to move out your forces while discouraging turtling or when the attrition mechanics actually feel meaningful. I desperately wanted to love Symphony of War, but in the end, I can't even bring myself to recommend it with all its many flaws and inconsistencies.

Although Legend of Runersia is not without its flaws, this is one of my favorite games of all time. The notion that a PS1 game would get a worthy successor after twenty years of fantasizing about the possibility is astounding.

This is a grand strategy RPG with an emphasis on combat on hex grids. You choose from one of six nations and guide them towards defeating their enemies across a continent. Your army leaders, called Rune Knights, can fight in groups of three and are accompanied by a retinue of summoned monsters that range from trickster gremlins and healing unicorns to enormous dragons and sea serpents. As your knights and monsters level, they "evolve" into new, stronger versions with better stats and additional abilities. Economic management is extremely minimal; you can move around your knights and monsters, equip them with gear that you've obtained from questing, and summon additional monsters. But the bulk of the gameplay takes place on hex battlefields when you or an enemy attacks a neighbor. There's no diplomacy - it's all war.

There are a huge variety of ways to play this game and many settings that you can adjust to increase or lower the difficulty. There are post-game challenges and two additional modes outside of the story mode for additional replayability. Each of the nations can play wildly different than the others - there is a lot of variety to the knights each nation gets (both unique and otherwise) and the monsters they start with or can summon within their territories.

The story is okay - the translation is mostly good, but there are some clear typos and some of the writing can be juvenile. There can be a lot of joy in seeing the quirky cast of each nation play out their stories, but this game isn't going to win any awards for its writing.

This is a really addictive "one more turn" affair. It's thrilling to slowly watch as the continent crumbles under the weight of the knights and monsters you've spent hours with. You develop a fondness for that one dragon that survived at 7 HP during his first battle and eventually grew up to be a towering, impenetrable ancient beast.

If you like games with tactical combat, you should give Runersia a try, because this is a wildly unique game with a lot of charm and character.

For better or worse, Trails in the Sky FC is the JRPG equivalent of rushing home from school and watching your favorite anime on Toonami as a kid. Trails is a safe game, but it's also consistent. For most of its playtime, you won't be shocked by what it's doing, but if you give it a chance you might find that you're frequently enjoying yourself.

It's hard to talk about a game that starts a twenty year old franchise that has a pedigree for being a must-play experience, but you have to understand going into Trails that this is a JRPG that has no compunctions about being Sidequests: The Game. At no point does it shy away from the reality that its main characters are running around doing fetch quests for locals in order to become senior members of a continent-spanning brigade of problem solvers and monster hunters. Trails is also awash with anime tropes from the 90s and 2000s, not least of which is its tendency to inundate you with goofy filler. A few hours into Trails in the Sky, I was making jokes about how it needed a chapter completely devoted to a martial arts tournament. This is a game that crawls in its first ten hours and never really picks up until the last ten. You also have to bear in mind that this is a text heavy game - you're going to be doing a lot of reading, and most of it isn't going to be action packed.

If you're not comfortable with any of the above characteristics of Trails in the Sky, this might not be the game for you.

And yet, as safe and oftentimes boring as Trails in the Sky was, I'll be damned if I wasn't consistently impressed by how well it executes on those 90s anime tropes. The English localization is really good, even if the source material is predictable and a bit mundane. Every character feels like they have a consistent voice, even as they grow or their perspectives change, which is a trick that most games can't pull off. I also found the pacing to be pretty good considering how often this game feels like a fetch quest simulator. There's a ton of text, but the game never keeps you from fighting things for too long. Any time I felt like a subplot was overstaying its welcome or felt a character's gimmick might get tiresome, Trails usually did something stupendously cool that made me realize how much potential this game and its characters had - and reassured me to trust that the designers knew what they were doing. For a game that seems to do so little, Trails in the Sky feels really deep and intentional by its conclusion, even if the first half of the game drags pretty heavily.

I could inundate you with more details about my experiences with this game - like the fact that its graphics feel pretty timeless or how much I regret playing on Normal (it was a cakewalk) or how I dearly, dearly appreciate the turbo feature - but the reality is that your love (or hate) for Trails in the Sky is going to boil down to whether or not you're Falcom's intended audience.

If you're the kind of person that still goes nuts when Yusuke is joined by his friends on the street before confronting Yakumo, this game is for you. If you still think that the Frieza saga is the best arc in any shonen anime, this game is for you. If you're someone who wants to cheer when Han swoops in at the end of A New Hope despite seeing the movie a hundred times, this game is for you. If you remember begrudgingly letting a friend convince you to watch a few episodes of Bleach only for you to then spiral into an obsessive, two hundred episode binge watch, this game is for you. If Freckles plays and you're inexplicably possessed to belt out the lyrics with more enthusiasm than you thought you could muster, this game is for you.

But if you aren't someone who is enthusiastic about the JRPG gameplay loop or you've never really understood why people play those old 16- and 32-bit games, Trails in the Sky isn't going to change your opinion about the genre or its tropes.

Listen, there's literally a moment where a character goes, "gah, I can't believe I was duped by your shadow clone jutsu!" It also has a small, hidden Seinfeld reference. Love it or hate it, Trails in the Sky is just that kind of game.

I can't speak to whether Trails in the Sky is "worth playing" for the sake of getting to the rest of the Trails series, as I haven't played any game other than this one. But what I can say is that this game knows its target audience incredibly well. If you're not that audience - people who have a sense of nostalgia for the tropes of older anime - you'll probably find this to be a run of the mill, skippable JRPG that isn't doing anything worthwhile.

Yet, for all its quirks and issues, as the final chapter rolled around, I realized that Trails in the Sky had me at the edge of my seat. I was invested in these characters and this world. Yes, the twists and turns were predictable, but they're executed in a way that kept me engaged and excited. Yes, it's a game that takes 40 hours to get where most games get you in 10, but I appreciate that by the end of the game, I felt like the time to let the world simmer paid off in dividends. Yes, the characters are all woefully familiar anime tropes, but somehow this game made me miss characters when they were gone and hyped whenever they returned. During one scene in the final chapter, I literally cheered when a character came on screen. I'm not sure if I can come up with a bigger endorsement for Trails in the Sky and its vibe.

Trails in the Sky spends a little bit too much time in the lead-up and I genuinely worry that subsequent entries will continue to cling to its sidequesty structure rather than embracing all the narrative threads it has laid out. I personally enjoyed the 45 hours I spent with the game. As a stand-alone product, I think that anyone who has ever been enthusiastic about JRPG owes it to themselves to give this a try and see if it hits the right buttons.

This is one of those moments that I wish Steam had a "yes, but" review feature, because Ark of Napishtim is a great game that is held back by really archaic and questionable RPG mechanics.

That said, I'm genuinely impressed by how well Ys VI has aged. Its presentation and controls hold up despite being a game that was originally released in 2003. The fixed 3D environments are crisp and easy to read. The sprite work is excellent and each character has their own unique portrait. The controls are smooth and simple; you have access to a number of attacks that have different uses which you master as the game goes on. The bosses are big and dynamic and have patterns that are rewarding to learn. The story isn't spectacular, but the dialogue writing is actually surprisingly good and the characters are overall charming in spite of how basic they are.

But man, everything Ark of Napishtim is doing with its RPG mechanics - leveling, upgrading armor, smithing your weapons, etc. - actively works against the otherwise great gameplay and boss design. The statistics are so lopsided; the difference between having one extra level, one armor upgrade, one new accessory, or one extra improvement on a weapon is so extreme. I never felt like I was able to just organically play through Napishtim because it never decided where it wanted me to meet it on a difficulty curve.

Every time you enter a dungeon, you are inevitably weak. Grossly weak. A couple hits from something will kill you. So you have to delicately navigate from one save point to another because there are no checkpoints; if you die, you reload a save. You gain a ton of experience fighting these new enemies, so there's a nice risk versus reward - at first. But once you gain a level or two, you quickly outscale the enemies that were once absolutely decimating you, trivializing the difficulty and making it easy to just hop through screens and pick up all the treasure chests. It felt like Napishtim wanted me to cling to save points and grind a bit every time I entered a new dungeon, and I hated it.

This problem is exacerbated in boss fights. There was only one boss fight in the entire game that felt good to me. On one spectrum, I was too weak. I hadn't grinded enough of those tough enemies, or I didn't spend enough time getting materials for a weapon upgrade, or I hadn't picked up the latest piece of armor from somewhere - and I would get decimated by a boss. I'd do 2-3 damage a hit to something with 3,000 health and every time it hit me I'd take a quarter of my health. Gotta go back and kill more stuff! On the opposite end of the spectrum, I could brute force a boss without thinking about it or dying. I had clearly spent too much time wandering through the dungeon or I had gotten a weapon upgrade just a little bit too early, and suddenly a great fight was trivialized. This was the case with the final boss gauntlet - I blew through them like they were nothing, and it led to an anticlimactic finale.

It's a tragedy, too, because everything else that Napishtim is doing is great. This was a good, 15-hour palette cleanser game that I was genuinely happy I played. It plays really smooth. And the jump is great! I couldn't stop jumping. I was a happy little rabbit jumping everywhere because the controls felt so crisp and responsive.

But if you're looking for a best-in-class action RPG, Napishtim unfortunately isn't it.

The tragedy of Katana ZERO is that it isn't complete - at least in the sense that the story doesn't have a conclusion. Otherwise, this is a stellar game that's easy to binge for its 5 hour run time. The gameplay loop mixes stealth with brutal one-hit kills in a platforming veneer and it holds up for the entire experience. The art is stellar. The music is frenetic. The setting is gushing with detail. The story is evocative. The characters are compelling. Some of the challenges felt overlong or a bit repetitive, but the boss battles really break up any sense of encroaching monotony. One of this game's greatest accomplishments is how seamlessly the gameplay is woven into the narrative. It's also impressive how much quality storytelling is done with pixels and text in such a short amount of time.

Pick this up and play it in an afternoon; you won't regret it.

Inscryption is the epitome of "shut up, stop reading, and just play the game."

If you have the vaguest interest in roguelite deck building games, you should play this.

Even if you aren't into roguelite deckbuilders, you should play Inscryption anyways. It's one of those genre-defining entries that is doing so many creative things from a storytelling and presentation standpoint. Anyone who is a fan of video games as a medium needs to play this one.

Kingmaker is the equivalent of a tabletop roleplaying game where you are playing with the most vindictive, unfair, and inconsistent DM ever. And yet, he's probably a pretty good friend and the adventure is fun, so you keep showing up.

My biggest gripe is that the writing didn't speak to me. The world lacks charisma or character. The dialogue feels like it's "baby's first conversation tree." The voice acting is poorly directed and actively detracts from the already one-dimensional characters. Kingmaker is somehow overwritten while simultaneously feeling like there were pages of dialogue inexplicably cut for content. The foundation is there for a good story, but the implementation feels jilted, inhuman, unsubtle, and ultimately amateurish. The original Baldur's Gate does not have stellar writing; it's often pretty sparse, in fact. But Baldur's Gate tells a simpler story more succinctly and with a better hook than Kingmaker does - and it came out two decades before.

I personally do not like Pathfinder 1e. Kingmaker is so intertwined with that system's flaws that it's hard to overlook them as someone who just isn't a fan of that gameplay model. The barrier to entry is enormous and the pay-off is substandard at best. Kingmaker also isn't doing itself many favors outside of its core mechanics, either. The game is riddled with quality of life problems, still has its fair share of weirdness and bugs, and its implementation of Pathfinder is held together by duct tape. The list of unforced errors that Kingmaker creates for itself is practically endless.

Everything about Kingmaker feels so fussy and inorganic it hurts. All of this would work fine at an actual Pathfinder table with a handful of players and a real DM, but in the context of a single player RPG, these problems with the presentation and gameplay are glaring and unacceptable.

In so many ways, Kingmaker is a strict and unforgiving dungeon crawl. You're here to kill stuff. It's a combat simulator. Get with the program or get out, buddy.

And you know what? If you meet the game on its own terms - as a story-lite, open world, combat-focused game - it plays pretty spectacularly. Most of the time, looting enemies and equipping your characters is pretty intuitive. If you enjoy Pathfinder build optimization, there's genuinely a ton to explore. The combat encounters are archaic, unforgiving, and swingy. But if Pathfinder is your jam, Kingmaker has a whole lot more jelly for you. There's just enough story here to lead you by the hand towards the next encounter - and if all you want to do is fight with your cool build, that's all you really need.

But Kingmaker's gameplay does nothing for me. It's too bogged down by its own ambition and the idiosyncracies of Pathfinder for me to enjoy the experience. And the storytelling is so generic and stilted that I can't justify playing any further. This isn't the story driven roleplaying experience I was hoping for.