Lies of P

Available on: PC, Mac, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Played it on: PC
Played it for: 35 hours

RATING: 6/10

This game is an enigma. A flawed, frustrating, beautiful, deep, janky piece of art. Where to even begin...

Let's start with the positives. Lies of P is absolutely stellar when it comes to the realization of its main setting, the fictional city of Krat. Based on a visual motif of industrial revolution Paris and London, Krat is a dirty, fog-choked, messy city. Many Souls-likes fall flat in creating a hub that you could imagine as a populated, bustling town. It's common to traverse empty, body-laden streets in these sorts of titles, but few actually achieve something that is believably livable. Elden Ring's capital city of Leyndell comes to mind, which is striking and awe-inspiring at first glance, but traversing its streets still feels like a video game level that only exists as a playground for the combat. Krat goes far beyond that. Some districts offer dense apartments, others detailed shop windows still filled with glitzy goods that are now meaningless in the post-apocalypse, while still others boast theater venues that could support actual stage plays. This is Bloodborne's Victorian Yharnam, but given a homely splash of Yakuza's Kamurocho, and it is excellent. I have never played in another Souls-like setting that has felt this complete.

The characters, too, are nothing short of perfect. The entire cast is dynamic, emotional, flawed, and so very human. Some of our misfits live exclusively at your base of Hotel Krat for the entire game. Others are collected from the streets, given a home and safe respite from the dangers of the city. One of the critical mistakes that FromSoftware continues to make in its titles is to give you an interesting and often awesome supporting cast, and then kill off 97% of them over the course of their questlines. For me, this makes it very hard to care about the outcome of anything. Not so in Lies of P. The biggest thing that kept me going in this game was the cast. I actively wanted to keep them safe, see them be happy, and end the plight of the city so they'd be ok. Even characters I didn't like all that much, like the eccentric inventor Venigni, ended up quite thoroughly endearing themselves to me by the end of the game.

This also lends itself nicely to the main themes of the game. The familiar tale of Pinocchio is about how lying is harmful, and you have to be brave and tell the truth. But Lies of P takes that familiar framework and flips it, making the compelling case that lying is actually what makes us human. The game is laden with messages about it. When P dies, instead of the classic Souls-like, "You Died," screen, you get the message, "Lie or Die." When fast traveling to a new area, the loading bar is labeled, "Now Lying," with a graphic of P's nose growing as the bar fills up to 100%. Characters constantly remind you that the thing that separates puppets from humans is their prime directive, the Grand Covenant. The Fourth Law is that puppets cannot tell a lie. But P is special. He can.

The first lie you tell in the game is a necessary one, it gets you past Hotel Krat's security system so that you can progress the game. After that, the lies are up to you. You can be entirely truthful to all the people you encounter around the city, but... maybe you shouldn't be. White lies can help people feel better, in their final moments as they're plagued by debilitating illness. You might lie to be polite, because you're always expected to tell a lady she looks beautiful. You might lie to protect a friend's feelings when you know the truth isn't really worth telling them. Later in the game, you might hear something that nobody else can, and it reveals a truth so dark that it's simply not worth spreading. And the more you lie, the more human P becomes. He begins to look more human, his hair begins to grow, he starts playing music and experiencing true life. It's powerful, and it's complicated, and the game adds tremendous weight to your conscience as it progresses. But the ability to wrestle with the truth at all, that's human.

The soundtrack, too, is amazing. It is tense when it needs to be, it is quiet when it needs to be, and it excels in crafting a multi-faceted atmosphere. The records you collect from NPC questlines are somber, pining, hopeful, and full of soul. I loved listening to them every time I came back to Hotel Krat to resupply, level up, and upgrade gear. It is difficult to describe how much they add to the game, and, like lying, listening to these records will also make P more human, blending them into the game as something you are rewarded for listening to.

So, from the artistic side, this game is a marvel. It has weighty themes, fantastic art, marvelous attention to detail, and presents a cast of characters that is easily the best of any Souls-like I've ever played, even including FromSoftware's titles. So why on earth am I giving it a 6?

Unfortunately, the game only has so many positives, and this is where the experience will sharply differ between players. The meat and potatoes of any video game is not its set dressing. It is the moment-to-moment gameplay. The level design, the combat, the challenges. And these elements are where Lies of P sharply falls short.

To address the level design first, it is linear. Incredibly linear. This isn't the end of the world, I'm a bigger fan of linear games than open world games, but this game is a straight hallway from beginning to end. There are a few areas that are a bit more dungeon-esque with extra hallways and shortcuts back to the checkpoints, but for the most part you are never going to explore a hidden pathway for more than one extra room here and there. And in a setting with as much detail as Krat, this was a bit of a letdown. But it pales in comparison to my experience with the combat.

The combat is a bizarre mix of elements from other Souls titles like Sekiro, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and even the first Dark Souls that have difficulty melding together. It has Sekiro's parry mechanic, where perfectly timed blocks will damage the enemy's poise meter until their health bar starts blinking white. Then you can hit them with a charged heavy attack to actually stagger them, like you would have to do for Bloodborne's visceral attacks, in order to get a, "fatal attack." But despite the name, these attacks are far from fatal. They deal a decent amount of damage, but it's not nearly as rewarding as Sekiro where it could wipe out a full health bar. The timing window for these perfect blocks is also extremely tight, far tighter than Sekiro, and the vast majority of enemies employ frustrating attack delays in their movesets that will be followed by a blindingly fast attack that both launches and hits in 3-5 frames. I felt as though I had no choice but to trudge through fully memorizing each boss's individual attack patterns and delays in order to parry them, since the delays are deeply unintuitive and the actual attack launch is too fast to allow a reactive button press.

Speaking of delayed attacks, this was, in my opinion, one of Elden Ring's greatest weaknesses, and it was violently frustrating to see it replicated here to an even greater degree. Some bosses would lift up their arm to attack and hold it for a full second or two before swinging. Some enemies would raise their weapon, take three, four, or five staggering steps forward, and then swing. Some enemies would jump in the air, hang there for what feels like an eternity, and then slam down with the force and speed of a meteor. For that last one, they also have full tracking while in the air, I've watched enemies jump up and then rotate 90-180 degrees to perfectly track me before suddenly rocketing down. It not only looks wrong, it also feels wrong. The telegraphing in this game is in very dire need of a full rework, and it's compounded by enemy health values.

This doesn't become so apparent until later in the game, but elite enemies are absolute damage sponges. They also hit brutally hard, often able to kill you in 2-3 attacks, which happened to me quite often. I struggled to avoid moves where they would hold an attack while walking forward and perfectly tracking every movement I made, giving me no ability to avoid their sudden supersonic blow. But rather than being glass cannons, they also exhaustively dominate encounters with huge health pools and unbelievable defenses. In some rare elite encounters, I would be beating on them relentlessly, proc'ing status effects, finally staggering them for a fatal attack, and then still they would still have a quarter of their health bar left. Combat made most areas feel like a slog as I doggedly pushed through encounter after encounter of these mechanics.

And speaking of slog, this game has a veneer of speed thanks to how fast attacks come at you when they do finally launch, but the rate at which attacks come out is even slower than Dark Souls 1, which itself is the slowest of FromSoft's lineup. One boss that comes to mind is a big swamp creature that you fight a little over halfway through the game. One of its signature patterns is three huge slamming attacks. There is a full five seconds between each of these swings. It's long enough to get in a hit or two with a speedy weapon, but not really enough to safely commit with a big weapon, and adds to the bizarre pacing of combat overall. These sorts of unintuitive patterns were very common, and lead me to the conclusion that speedy weapons were the objectively correct choice for engaging with the game. Every time I tried using bigger weapons, I felt like the game punished me very harshly because I couldn't snag good hits in the time between enemy attacks, and even when I did they weren't doing nearly enough damage or poise damage.

This leads into my final issue with the game. Most Souls-likes have some kind of special mechanic that separates them from the pack. Mortal Shell has the titular shells, bodies you inhabit that take the place of your usual gear and stat upgrades. Lords of the Fallen (2024) has the umbral world mechanic, a scary place you enter upon death that gives you an extra shot at survival, but sometimes must be entered on purpose for progression or challenge areas. Blasphemous has its Metroid-vania exploration mechanics woven into its questlines and combat powers. So what does Lies of P bring? Weapon building.

Almost every weapon in the game can be disassembled into a blade and handle, and you can swap these around to create a weapon unique to you. The handle governs the moveset, the blade governs the damage, status effects, and how fast it can swing. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, this means that no blade can deal a ton more damage than others because you could just unscrew the greatsword blade and put it on a dagger handle and break the game. So as I experimented with weapons, I found that big things were swinging slower... and that was it. It was still taking 3 hits to kill rank and file enemies, but speedy weapons could do it three times faster, and the damage values simply weren't different enough on bosses to make big weapons worthwhile. By the halfway point, I found no value in anything bigger than a one-handed sword because I could deal damage (and apply status effects) so much faster simply by hitting more often and being able to capitalize on openings.

Bigger weapons also didn't deal nearly enough poise damage to be worthwhile either. I found that I was still getting fatal attacks just as fast, or sometimes even faster by using small weapons because they could hit so often. The weapon crafting is a neat idea, but it seems to have added an unnecessary burden on the development team that they ultimately couldn't solve. If they have the time in a DLC or sequel, a great fix to this would be to limit what blades can be attached to what handles, allowing big weapons much more breathing room to shine and allowing Neowiz to appropriately crank up the damage and poise damage to compensate for their slow movesets.

Ultimately what this all created is a game that feels like it was overdesigned. It can't have full Sekiro parry-and-kill mechanics because we want it to feel like Bloodborne, which is largely where we're borrowing our visual aesthetics. It can't have Bloodborne's parry-and-visceral-attack mechanics because we want players to work for their staggers with the Sekiro parry. No blade can be that much stronger than any other blade because we want this weapon combo system and we can't let players get too wild with what they make. It can't feel too easy because it's a Souls-like, so we have to include extremely delayed attacks so that the game feels much harder than it actually is. It is a game that was pulled in too many directions, and fails to commit to any of them.

These are the novice steps of a development team who are just breaking into the Souls-like genre, so I don't want to be too harsh. Especially when other teams have made games like Thymesia and Mortal Shell, which are maybe a tenth the size of what Neowiz has created here. A good portion of their achievement is tremendous, and I think they should feel proud of the majority of this game. The aesthetics, the story, the music, the themes, all of these are beacons that other games would do well to aspire to. But the combat is the biggest issue here. As I was reading through negative reviews, players who struggled with the game almost universally cited the unrewarding and tedious combat as their biggest sticking point, which was certainly my experience too. I did leave this game being happy that I played it, but it was a test of will to stick through to the end, and I did so only because everything else was done so exquisitely well. My biggest hope is that Neowiz can use this as a jumping off point for what could be a hugely successful career, provided they can take some appropriate lessons, iterate their designs, and double down on what makes this game shine. And I absolutely think that they can do that.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition

Available on: PC, Xbox 360
Played it on: PC
Played it for: 40 hours

RATING: 7/10

Metro 2033 succeeds where The Witcher 2 fails. But that doesn't make this game bad.

I'm no stranger to Eastern European video games. I've been a fan of the Metro games since they first released. I love their vision of an underground ecosystem barely hanging on, trying to forget the weight of the nuclear winter raging above and trying to survive the mutant menace crawling up from below, all while dealing with the ever-present tribalistic nightmare that is inter-station politics. Games made in this region of the world tend to hit different. From Metro 2033 to This War of Mine to S.T.A.L.K.E.R., these games tell the story of a region of the world whose psyche has been irreparably affected by grim folk tales, harsh mythologies, revolving wars, and of course most recently by the devastating presence of the Soviet Union. And it shows in the art produced in this region. If you've played more than one of these titles, the similarities in tone and feel are incredibly apparent. So too does The Witcher fall into this category.

Eastern European games also tend to feature their fair share of mechanical jank, which is sometimes referred to as "Eurojank" because it's so common. The older the game is, the more evident this becomes, with the original Witcher game being one of the most prime examples. Thankfully The Witcher 2 escapes the nightmarish confusion of the first game, but this legacy is still obvious. The PC controls aren't unintuitive, and never get in the way of combat, but they can still be imperfect. Left click is how you interact with the world, but it's also how you attack, so it's better to put your sword away if you're looking for items on the ground lest you attack instead of searching a pouch. If you begin to draw your sword, you cannot move until the animation is finished, which sometimes gives enemies a free hit at the start of combat. If you want to use your medallion to highlight items, you have to wait for Geralt's walking animation to come to a full and complete stop before the game will read that input. While these don't break the experience, they also don't help.

The biggest problem the game has, however, is in the communication department, and this is why I said in my opening statement that Metro succeeds where this game falls flat. And it's for a very simple reason - Metro 2033 understands its constraints, and absolutely flourishes within them while The Witcher 2 tries extremely hard to break those chains and wastes effort doing so, diminishing the game. Let me provide an explanation.

In Metro 2033 the theme of the entire game is that Artyom is constantly walking a razor's edge against death, and that comes through in the design. There's really only 2 things you're supposed to care about as you progress, and that's maintaining stealth and being frugal with your good ammunition. These two elements are constantly complimenting one another. If you can maintain stealth, you can use throwing knives to kill enemies or just sneak past them entirely. By doing this, you save regular ammo and don't have a chance to get shot. In turn, you then don't have to spend your good ammo to trade for health kits, or more simply to kill enemies faster. The design of the levels, too, employs general simplicity so that effort can be spent elsewhere. When Artyom is above ground, Moscow feels quite immense despite the playable area being small, by using distant assets correctly and providing enough small side paths to allow the imagination to do the rest. The game is still imperfect, but by revolving entirely around simple goals, the developers were able to spend their effort in exactly the right ways.

In contrast, The Witcher 2 feels completely confused in its goals and generally fails to communicate the right things to the player. The game pretty desperately wants you to think that the areas are bigger than they are. But instead of employing simple tools like rendering large structures in the background of towns or guarded doors where you're told "only merchants allowed beyond here" or some such, it instead opts to just make towns absolutely labyrinthine with a map that doesn't reflect an accurate layout so it's even more difficult to navigate. The forest near the first town is completely littered with bodies, I guess to make you feel like the elven Scoia'tael freedom fighters are a much larger threat than they are shown to be in-game, but the number of dead bodies is about a fourth the number of the NPC's you see walking around town, which is just excessive. This would be fine if the town seemed bigger, but you can explore the whole thing in about 2 minutes, it's barely as big as the street I grew up on, it's just laid out poorly to make you think it's bigger.

The saddest part is that CDPR already pulled off the feel of making a town feel larger than it actually is in the previous game. Both the starting town and Vizima do it. So CDPR actually regressed their design for this game.

The economy is the worst aspect of this, as the game to communicates that you'll need to maintain a balance of money and crafting materials as you progress. You can spend your money to buy diagrams and formulas from vendors for a large up front cost, and then kill monsters for their parts. Then crafting items yourself is dirt cheap, and you can still buy missing monster materials from vendors that will add up to less than the cost of buying the finished item, so it sends the message that you should invest in formulas and diagrams to make later chapters easier, even if you need to buy parts somtimes. Simple, right?

Except you can still find those same diagrams and formulas out in the world. Not just unique ones, the basic generic ones you can find at vendors. So you might end up blowing 500 orens on something only to immediately find it in a random box, and you can't even buy most monster parts in the final act of the game. So if you didn't blow your time farming out dozens of monsters in Chapters 1 and 2 then congratulations, you have to buy those items whole anyway!

On top of this, I found zero use for most monster parts in the game despite leveling up almost entirely in the Alchemy tree and relying heavily on potions and oils, the kind of playstyle you'd think would make the most use of these ingredients. I had a massive surplus of hundreds of Endrega fangs and Harpy feathers and Nekker claws, while I completely ran out of Nekker hearts at the beginning of Chapter 3 because crafting one Ysgith sword rune takes 8 of them and finding better swords is relatively common, so I made them often. And then I suddenly found out that not a single vendor sells them in Chapter 3 and there are no Nekkers to kill, so for three quarters of the game I was informed that I could kill Nekkers for their hearts, or buy the hearts if I was in a hurry, and suddenly I can do neither and I have to spend 512 orens per Ysgith rune because I didn't stock up on 40 hearts before I progressed the story. So I didn't even upgrade any swords I found in Chapter 3 until I was sure I had the final ones, so I could just spend 1,024 orens on 2 Ysgith runes and call it good. This is a horrible way to treat your players, and it honestly doesn't even make sense from a design perspective. You should not communicate something for the vast majority of the game and then punish players for doing that thing.

Sigh.

It might sound at this point like I hated playing this game. And yes, there were parts I found highly aggravating. Quests only sometimes have markers. Hub towns are poorly laid out and nightmarish to navigate. Only two of the magic signs are any help, and the code for the Yrden trap only fires about half the time. The loot system is average. The graphics are dated, even for a 360-era game. Only some of the voice actors are good. There are at least two quests in the game where you are guaranteed to lose money - "The Harpy Contract" and "A Sackful of Fluff", the latter of which has its own stupid design where you can try to pass a persuasion check to get 1.5x more money or an even harder persuasion check to get 2x the money, but if you don't do any check the NPC will automatically give you 2.2x the reward money... which will still make you lose money compared to just selling the Harpy feathers he asks for at a vendor. Suffice to say, the game is extremely imperfect.

Yet, I didn't give this game a 5, so there has to be a reason I think it's above average. And there is. It's the writing.

The writing, both in the characterization of NPC's and in the dialogue between characters, is extremely high quality. In fact, it carried my entire experience and was the only reason I finished the game rather than abandoning it halfway in. The game maintains a careful balance when it addresses the larger world conflicts that don't motivate Geralt. It was actually nice to play an RPG where I'm not playing the destined hero, but rather a neutral party who gets involved with in a continental war by accident, just doing as much as he has to in order to get closer to his own personal goal of saving his friends and making coin.

The side characters, too, all have personal motivation for doing the things they do, and it's clear that their actions are the fuel for the events of the game rather than some predestined path laid out before them. Even the villains are not the world ending variety, rather they are characterized as people with their own distinct pasts, biases, and personalities, and it is their conflicts of ideals with the protagonists that lead to something much larger by the end of the story. The war between Nilfgaard and the Northern Kingdoms in The Witcher 3 has its seeds masterfully laid in this game, making it clear that the conflict originates with... people. Flawed kings. An ambitious emperor. A cabal of conniving sorceresses. And two Witchers who are both victims of circumstance - Geralt of Rivia and the Kingslayer, Letho of Gullet.

So ultimately, what do we have here?

I think that's a tough question. The game is old, obviously. It comes from a different era of RPG's, and has older style conventions. The combat is janky, and doesn't always work correctly. The controls are a bit stiff, though not unserviceable. The game crashed on me twice, so it's not perfectly stable even in its current state. The graphics are dated to say the least, hair tends to look quite terrible most of the time and facial animations are stiffer than concrete. Quest design leaves something to be desired. And I was frustrated by many of the core design decisions in the game.

And yet, it is unquestionably carried by its magnificent writing. Though it got to be too expository at times, and it left a few gaps knowledge gaps here and there, it is overall a very airtight experience. Believable characters are motivated by realistic goals that clash and end up igniting flames that have very far reaching effects. Ultimately, that is what you should probably play this game for. If you can tolerate average mechanics and slightly frustrating quest design long enough to get invested in this world, then I don't think you'll have an issue reaching the credits. That certainly happened with me.

Would I play it again? I don't know. Not right now, I can say that. But I'm glad I played it once. And if you're a fan of narrative RPG's, I think it's worthwhile for you to give it a try as well.

Mortal Shell

Available on: PC (EGS Timed Exclusive), PS4, Xbox One

Played it on: PC

Played it for: 25 hours

RATING: 8/10

This was really refreshing.

As readers likely know by now, I'm a pretty big connoisseur of the Souls-like genre. I've played Demon's Souls, every Dark Souls, I've played Bloodborne, and I've played Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. For most of those, I've earned 100% of the achievements. But it's always nice to see other developers taking on the FromSoftware mantle, especially when they have unique ideas of their own to add to the table, and boy did Mortal Shell deliver.

Coming into this game, it's clear where the inspiration lies. It's got the health bar, it's got the stamina management, it's got the obtuse exploration and the obscured lore, it's even got the same oppressive atmosphere of the Souls series. Even the tutorial is a bit bizarre, throwing you into a boss battle within the first five minutes that it expects you to lose, and then boom, you're out in the game world... after you get eaten by a giant fish. Yeah, I don't uh... I don't even know the right questions to ask at this point.

Getting out into the proper game world, Mortal Shell wastes no time teaching you its two primary mechanics. You find your first Shell, a dead mercenary, right outside the tutorial area, and there are 3 more to find as you explore the central hub swamp. Unlike the Souls-borne games, there is no leveling up to get more health or damage stats. Once you get a Shell, that's pretty much the stats it will always have, so whether you want something balanced or something with very high HP or endurance, get used to sticking with a shell for quite a while as you learn to master it. The other important mechanic is called hardening. During just about any point in combat unless you're knocked down or in the middle of being grabbed, you can harden your shell into stone and pause your animation. Until you release the button or are hit by an enemy, you stay that way, and you don't take damage when you get hit. This completely changes the flow of combat from the usual Souls-like rhythm. Getting stuck in a combo? Harden. Getting low on stamina? Harden, and regain it while the enemy is recovering from being stunned. About to get slammed by a massive attack because you positioned poorly? Harden! It's an amazing get-out-of-jail-free card, and its cooldown of about 6 seconds is short enough to always be useful while remaining long enough that you can't abuse its power.

Even the first enemies in the swamp area have a very real chance to kill you. The first time your HP reaches zero, you'll be knocked out of your shell and have an opportunity to get back in it (though a single hit in this form will put you down). The second time you get knocked out, it's game over, restart at the checkpoint. This gives the player the same incredible tool that Sekiro does, allowing death to not just be an instant game over. But because it's so easy to get knocked out of your shell, the main thing this teaches the player is that hardening is extremely important. There is no block button in this game, so learning when to harden is essential to mastering the combat. From there it's just about exploration and finding a playstyle that fits well, as well as mastering the parry once you acquire it.

Between hardening and the extra chance to get back in your Shell, the game is much more forgiving than most Souls-likes. The default parry also lets you regain HP, giving you yet another option to stay in the fight, and the item that lets you parry will flash and make a noise when you're about to get hit by an un-parry-able attack, which you can escape by either dodging or hardening. The game is very clear about what it wants from you in battles. On top of that, the healing items can be farmed in the world, and will either be dropped by enemies or picked up at set locations that will respawn after a timer of about 3 minutes. If you just spend some time wandering the swamps, you can easily go into a temple with 20+ healing items. There are still combat sections that are tough, but I beat at least half of the game's bosses on the first try, including the final boss, simply because I picked up what the game wanted me to do. It felt amazing to play a game in this genre that was almost relaxing at points.

The locations are probably the best part of this game. Aside from the central hub of Fallgrim, there are three temples to explore. Each one contains a new weapon to try out along with a slew of unique enemy types, each of which requires time to master. And the level design, both from an artistic and gameplay perspective, is just awesome. The most difficult temple features a huge sprawling structure of obsidian, not unlike something you'd see in The Lord of the Rings. But this gives way to an assembly of jagged blocks that barely make a coherent path in the sky. This, combined with the obscured lore and cryptic inscriptions, makes for a world that feels very alien and just out of reach, and that makes it all the more enjoyable to explore.

The four weapons of the game all play quite differently as well, so while it may seem strange to go from Dark Souls where the combinations are nearly limitless to a game with a mere 16 possible combinations of Shells and weapons, each option is so different that I found it quite refreshing to ultimately find the combo I liked best. And sure, it only took me about 15 hours on my first playthrough, but this is absolutely a game I plan to revisit. I'm already about halfway through my new game + run, which is significantly more difficult than the base game, and it's clear that this is the sort of game for which I could get a random craving, play for a week, and walk away highly satisfied. It's exactly the kind of direction I'd like to see this genre move as more developers work out their ideas. Keep things unique, keep things fresh, and above all keep things fun. And that's everything that Mortal Shell accomplishes. 

From Software, Sekiro, and the Intent of Entertainment

Bloodborne did not need an easy mode.

Dark Souls 3 did not need an easy mode.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice does not need an easy mode.

It's a topic that comes up every time a new From Software game releases. The games are too hard, therefore they need an easy mode. It has never been true. It never will be true. And to cut to the chase, if you believe it is, it's because you are missing the intent of entertainment that is the core of every From game.

There's something we've come to take for granted in the Western video game market. It has become the core of Western games that the entire medium of video games exists purely for non-committal entertainment value. And I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that, I really don't. Life is hard, and games should be fun, whatever that means to you. Horizon: Zero Dawn has the same inherent fun no matter what difficulty setting you play it on, so long as that setting is engaging for the things you seek as a player. I played it on the hardest possible setting because it was more engaging for me to struggle against the huge robots that far outmatched my initial skill level, but a friend played it through on Normal and still enjoyed it. Aloy's journey is the same, the robot AI behaves the same, it's all fine and dandy. The indelible story of Master Chief in the original Halo trilogy is just as compelling if you want to play on Easy or Legendary, because of the pure entertainment value that the game series is trying to convey. It's pretty universally well known at this point, that the intended difficulty of the Halo games is Heroic. But I played them on Normal and love them just the same. My buddy played them on Legendary LASO. Both of those experiences are awesome. And perhaps most surprising, I play Gears of War... on Casual. Not because I can't play them on Insane, I've done that run, but because I just think the games are more fun as a chainsaw-wielding, explosion-filled bloodbath. I don't want to think too hard when I play Gears, I just want to play Gears. I like it better that way.

However, despite my propensity for picking wildly different difficulty settings for many of the games I play, I am devoutly resilient in my defense of From Software's lack of difficulty settings. And it's because From games do not aim to entertain in the same way the majority of Western games do. To suggest otherwise is a fundamental misread of what the games are trying to achieve.

To explain what I mean, for most video games, the intent of entertainment is to provide a wide-ranging possibility of experience, that allows the majority of players to find something within the game to enjoy regardless of what they're searching for. A fun romp through the story? We've got you. A brutally punishing test of endurance and wit? Also here, if you crank it up. This is a fine concept, and one that I don't begrudge if the game is built from the ground up to facilitate it. But that's not what From's games are here to do.

The intent of entertainment in From's Souls-borne games, a legacy from which Sekiro proudly inherits, is that they are hard... until they aren't anymore. This is something that every series veteran can tell you. After you beat one of these games, learn their internal combat rhythms and timings, explore every area, and discover the secrets, the games become less difficult because you, the player, have cranked up your own difficulty threshold. My first run of Sekiro took me forty-five hours, as I slowly internalized the game's unique dance of death and learned through failure. I even threw my controller once. But I beat it. New game+ took me ten hours. New game++ took me five. I stopped counting how many times I died on my first run. On new game++, my total death count was three, all of which were 100% my fault because I got too cocky.

This is the intent of the game series. Not to entertain in the sense we typically understand of video games, but to entertain by providing a visceral, brutally engaging experience that has been built, from the ground up, to facilitate a sense of accomplishment by providing one difficulty setting. Not two. You learn by failing, but you are never barred from trying again. Or failing again. But that's the point. You learn the move sets. You get better at the game's systems. You become more at-home with the controls and the rhythm of combat. Until, at some point, it clicks, you kill the boss, and you move on to bigger and better.

This experience is not meant for every player. But it was never designed to be. The truth of the matter is that From's fame with Dark Souls simply happened because they were poised in the right place at the right time, not because they made a game for everyone to enjoy. The Souls-borne games are, always have been, and always will be, deeply niche. You know what game is incredibly difficult, and within the same niche genre? Nioh. And I can say with absolute certainty that I have died more times in Nioh than I did in Sekiro, and by a pretty wide margin. But articles calling for Nioh to have an easy mode are extremely sparse, despite the experience actually being a significant step up from the majority of From's games in terms of difficulty. Why? Because Nioh isn't made by From Software, and therefore doesn't get the mainstream press attention that every From game gets despite its niche intent of entertainment.

The other argument I've begun to see is about adding an easy mode for the sake of accessibility. Not to diminish the value of the game's intended difficulty, but to instead allow people with various cognitive or physical disabilities to get in on the action. This is certainly the most compelling argument, and I do see where it comes from. Lots of people talk about Dark Souls, but not everybody can experience it, so it would be nice to allow more gamers to play. However, if you need assistance in that regard, the Xbox Adaptive Controller has been out for a while now. This controller has an insane amount of options to allow as many people as possible to play games in a setup that works uniquely for them. It accommodates for a lack of fine motor dexterity, missing limbs, you name it. If, even with this option, you are still unable or unwilling to fully engage one of these games, then it's time to accept that... the series isn't for you, and move on. And that's not a bad thing. Games need to cater to a specific audience, and difficulty is so innately married to the intent of entertainment in this series that a great deal of value would be lost in making the games easier. Not for those who play on normal difficulty, but certainly for those who do not.

There are other famously hard games, like Ninja Gaiden, that do in fact have multiple difficulty settings to chose from, but the intent of From's games is not to be brutally sadistic like Gaiden was, not at all. It is intended to teach gameplay through a cycle of failure that will eventually lead to victory, that's exclusively what these games do. I've seen people bring up closed captioning so the deaf can watch television, or braille so blind folks can still read books, and that this same concept should apply to an easy mode in Souls. But this misses the entire point. It would instead be akin to not understanding the film Eraserhead, not because you need closed captions, but because you simply struggle to engage with the film's intent, and then demanding to see a simplified, easily explained version of Eraserhead rather than engage directly with the weird, niche film like its fans have. The difficulty of understanding Eraserhead is tied to the experience of the film in the exact same way that gameplay difficulty in From's action games is tied to the experience of the games. And, like Eraserhead, the Souls-borne games are not meant for all audiences, and that's ok.

To demonstrate what I mean, I'd like to share a story of my time playing Sekiro during my first run.

I struggled against the final boss. Deeply. Perhaps more than in any previous From game. The final boss is hard, requiring players to completely master the rhythm of combat, parries, and counters, timed to his unique attack patterns that mercilessly ruin your health bar if you make a mistake. This final challenge is also the only one in the game with 4 health bars instead of 2 or 3. Eventually I grew so frustrated with this boss that I wanted to quit. If Sekiro had an easy mode, I know for a fact I would have given in to the frustration and used that mode. But that wasn't an option. Either you beat a From action game or you don't. No turning it down, no easy way out. You do it or you don't, that simple. So I put the game down. I watched some videos of others fighting him. I watched strategy guides. I learned his moveset without the interface directly in front of me, like learning a bit more about properly playing an instrument by watching a better musician. The next day, I came back refreshed. Five tries later, I was watching the credits roll, my hands shaking as I was coming down from my adrenaline high. That is the Souls experience. And it is something that would be lost with the addition of an easy mode because the game is meant to be frustrating, enough that some bosses would absolutely drive some players to that mode instead of engaging with the actual intent of the game. Which is why, intentionally, that isn't an option. You can't move the goal posts closer. But you can figure out how to finish the race.

And the result has been clear. The Souls-borne games are massively popular for the niche audience they are trying to garner. They're not Grand Theft Auto V popular, but popular to the tune of three million unit sales of Dark Souls 3 - five hundred thousand more units than Nioh. But despite these numbers, it doesn't change the niche appeal that makes these games so good. These games are loved because they fill a specific niche, not in spite of it. And yet the demands for the games to become mainstream continue to pour in, sequel after sequel, which would directly hinder the core intent of their design. And that is why, no matter how many times you ask, no. No From game needs an easy mode. And they never will.

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin

Available on: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC
Played it on: PC and PS4
Played it for: 400+ hours (that's not a joke, please send help)

RATING: 10/10

DARK SOULS II: SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN FIXES EVERYTHING.

Not really, the game still does have a few minor issues that are simply inherent to the engine. However, this was the product that Yui Tanimura wanted to deliver after his co-director was kicked off the Dark Souls II project. Some of the AI has been improved, many of the enemies were re-positioned, all DLC content has been included, the netcode has been updated, basically everything that could have been fixed, was fixed.

So, where to begin? Scholar is so much more than a standard Game of the Year edition of a game. So much has been changed for the better. In many ways, it almost feels like a new game entirely, even if one has already played the original Dark Souls II. The vast majority of enemy placements in the game have been changed, with some enemies not even appearing in same areas at all. It does a fantastic job at keeping players on their toes, especially when they've already played the first iteration and have certain expectations of where enemies are.

The graphics are much more polished than the original game as well. Scholar runs at a buttery-smooth 60 fps, and the texturing has been highly polished in a lot of areas that give the game a new dimension of beauty. The simplicity of the overall models lends itself well to this improvement too, there are rarely, if any, framerate dips across the entire experience. It just looks good. It feels good.

The whole Crowns DLC trilogy has also been included and similarly revamped. They have been more properly integrated into the larger game, as the in-game keys used to access these areas have been hidden in the world rather than given directly to players at the start. As a whole, the experience has a much better flow. The world does a fantastic job of feeling organic. Areas are layered on top of each other in a way that is not necessarily logical, but is conducive to player progress. While this was also true of the original game, the enemies reflect this even better this time around. No longer will you find an enemy that makes no sense for the area, the game has been redesigned to reflect both a logical world coherence and a difficulty curve that better suits a gradual increase in player skill. The trademark hardship is still present, but the difficulty spikes are a bit more rounded in this version.

And speaking of the Crowns trilogy, the background lore added by this content is fantastic and deep. They connect the world of Scholar to that of the first Dark Souls in a way that is not too overt, but is extremely meaningful. The Crown of the Ivory King does this especially well, directly addressing the fate of the Chaos of Izalith in between the games. The Majestic Greatsword found at the bottom of a side tower in the Crown of the Iron King is, for veterans, the blade of Knight Artorias, referencing him indirectly in its description. And even on a base level, the content added in each DLC is some of the best that any Souls-borne game has to offer. Each area has three bosses, a huge amount of land to explore that is populated by unique, tough, interesting enemies, and of course teeming with unique loot that enhances the total experience.

This iteration of Dark Souls II also improved the netcode enough to make PvP a viable passtime. This doesn't account for simple poor internet connections between players, but when the internet is good, I hardly had any of the frontstabbing or other bizarre lag problems that were ever-present in the PvP of the original game. On the whole, every component of the game has been tuned as well as it could have been. To break the facade of impartiality, as a Souls-borne player, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin is, in my thousand-odd hours of total series play, the best that the games have to offer. Hands down.

Now with that being said, the game still isn't flawless. There are still annoying aspects of area and enemy design that stayed over between iterations. Hitboxes are not always entirely accurate, for one, and that includes the PvP environment. Certain PvE enemy triggers are very strange and will put players into awkward situations that will absolutely cost estus uses or even a life if the player doesn't know what to expect. And, you know, Brightstone Cove Tseldora and The Gutter still exist, so... take that for what you will.

And as much as I love the Crowns trilogy as a whole, I can't get over certain deeply flawed parts of those areas. The optional boss fight of the Crown of the Sunken King's Sunken City of Shulva is a truly horrific exercise in frustration, as is the entire optional Frozen Outskirts area of the Crown of the Ivory King. The former features a grueling endurance contest against three tuned up NPC's, one with a full Havel build from the first Dark Souls game, one with a blacksteel katana build, and one with a greatbow who harasses players from the back of the arena. Certainly a boss that requires skill, but even the arena itself hardly works in the player's favor, and the boss still almost always takes me five or more tries despite the hundreds of hours I've put into the game, depending on how the enemy AI configures. And the latter is just... poor. Low visibility, bad enemies, it's a mess. And on top of it all, there's the entirety of the Crown of the Iron King's Brume Tower, which is designed with an extreme amount of verticality. Definitely rare in the Souls games... but for a reason. The games are not platformers, and forcing those mechanics has historically always resulted in garbage areas. Blighttown is the easiest example, but the Crystal Cave, The Great Hollow, and The Gutter are all examples of where verticality has been done before, and all those areas are universally disliked. Brume Tower is now another place on that list.

But despite all those criticisms, for me the game is still a 10. I adore Scholar, and it was the first Souls-borne game I played where I finally internalized the mechanics and learned how to play the games well. And I partially attribute that experience to how varied and well-crafted this game is. It's the most balanced that the series ever got, with the most diverse areas, enemy designs, and viable builds to enjoy in one place. I still play it to this day, and will likely continue doing so for the entire foreseeable future. So please, give Scholar a shot. Because it needs more love.

I'm Concerned About Anthem

So the Anthem open demo happened. That was... a thing.

Yeah, the VIP and subsequent open demo for Anthem didn't go quite like BioWare hoped, I would guess. I know I wouldn't be happy if I were a BioWare developer right now, and the vitriol surrounding everything that is EA isn't helping either. There's a vocal group of people who are screeching at the top of their lungs that Anthem is the Antichrist, and it's very hard to go anywhere on the internet to get away from this group. I don't agree with them, after giving the open demo a good 15 hours of play I can definitely state that there are great things waiting inside the game. But will I buy it at launch? ...Uh... well, about that.

You see, we were told by BioWare that the Anthem demo is a six-week-old build. That means 6 fewer weeks of bug fixing, a changed economy at launch, and a few other things that the company listed as changes from the full game. Depending on how you read this announcement, it means that the demo is six weeks old from the time of the VIP demo launch, so a total of 9 weeks to fix everything wrong with the demo build. Or, it's a difference of 6 weeks between when they built the demo and when the game will be playable on Origin Access Premier on February 15th. In either case, I have disappointingly little confidence in their ability to fix the game by then.

As a BioWare fan, this is really starting to hurt. I was willing to write off Mass Effect: Andromeda as a one-time failure, a result of an extremely troubled development cycle that forced a complete re-imagining of the game's core concept not once, but twice over 5 years that meant the game we got was built in an unbelievably short 18 months. But now Anthem's demo has been fraught with insane bugs over its two weekends, from crashes to infinite load screens to server issues to who-knows-what-else. This isn't the BioWare I've grown to love all these years.

My personal experience with Anthem was on PS4 for the open beta this past weekend, and I personally had a lot of bad experiences. The game completely crashed on me three separate times. I got stuck gaining 0 experience after leaving freeplay more than once. I experienced severe sever connection lag despite being connected through ethernet, which means the server tick rate is horrendous. And on one notable occasion, I entered one of the world's dungeons to complete a world event, and the dungeon didn't load for 8 minutes. I was stuck in the skybox with no terrain around me, barely able to move around while stuck in the falling animation, as I tried desperately to hit enemies that teleported around the map while my friend completed the dungeon by herself. Oh, and the strike? I wouldn't know how fun it is, in three attempts we never completed it because a key item never spawned the first time, forcing us to quit and retry, and then the server crashed the other two times we played it.

The worst part about all of that is... I like the game. Fundamentally, I think there's a great game hiding under the technical problems. Flying around in Javelins is fun, I like the gunplay, the abilities feel great to use, every Javelin chassis plays completely different, it's all there under the gunk. The roleplay is lighter than previous BioWare games, but I don't really mind that much because I know Dragon Age 4 is in development and that's the real meat I've been waiting for. And on top of that, the super fun mech combat more than makes up for the lack of genuine depth in Fort Tarsis. But when I can't go more than thirty minutes without encountering something that massively tarnishes my experience, my fun is kneecapped.

So I find myself stuck. I want to support Anthem for two reasons: 1. Because I actually like the core gameplay, and 2. Because... well, EA has a history of canning companies that underperform. Visceral met that grizzly end a year and a half ago, and even though Dragon Age 4 has been announced... I have very little confidence that if Anthem fails, EA will still let them make it. But the technical issues present in the demo build, those don't excite me. The fact that they only have a few weeks to fix this stuff doesn't excite me. The fact that we have yet to see the real economy of the game, that doesn't excite me. Instead, I'm left befuddled, sad, and ultimately anxious for the future of my favorite game creators and confused as to why this game isn't getting another 4 months of development to ensure a smooth launch. And in its current state, I don't think it's justifiable to spend premium price on this unstable mess. I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't.

Will we get Dragon Age 4? Here's to hoping. But with the way things are going, I've already got some whisky set aside to pour out over BioWare's grave.

Changing Your Opinion - Fallout: New Vegas, and the Importance of Nuanced Perspective

I have spent years hating Fallout: New Vegas.

I think that's important to say, because it's not the first game to allow me to see things in a new light. As a game reviewer, it's quite easy to make early and often imperfect judgments of a game based on certain immediately apparent factors. It's important to have that ability, in many respects. As someone who enjoys being critical about games, it's validating to know that your repeated analyses are paying off, that you're able to easily recognize key features of games that you do or don't like. It's also useful as a gamer, because you're stuck with a game you dislike for far less time. You can dump it and move on to something good that much faster. But what happens when the initial impression is wrong? What happens when somebody says something, and it actually changes your mind permanently?

I recently had this experience watching YouTuber H. Bomberguy's video, "Fallout 3 is Garbage and Here's Why." Now, I'm a huge fan of Fallout 3. I played it for an easy hundred fifty hours in 2008-9, and I adored getting lost in the world and experiencing this post-apocalyptic RPG. The story was, to me, compelling and interesting. My character was a cool guy who helped out the Capital Wasteland, he wandered the wastes providing altruistic aid to all he found. He had adventures in virtual reality, in bombed-out Pittsburg, and even in space! Plus, how cool was it to explore a world that was a post-apocalyptic vision of a more technologically advanced 1950's America? I loved it all! So, when I saw Mr. Bomberguy's video pop up on my recommendations, I ignored it. For weeks, I pushed it aside. It seemed like clickbait, an easy target for controversy, something that would only make me mad for no reason. But it stayed in my mind. The video was an hour and a half long, surely he would have to make valid points and reasoned arguments with something so lengthy. And, more importantly, what kind of critic would I be if I never addressed an argument like that? This hobby all but requires debate and an allowance of shifting perspectives. I knew I would have to watch it.

And so I did. All one hour, twenty-nine minutes, and thirty-seven seconds. I was ready to defend my position, to somehow validate that my dozens of hours had been well-spent on a game that was, to my memory, a masterpiece. And the unthinkable happened. After a while, I began to agree.

WHAT?! Fallout 3 isn't bad, how could it be? I don't have bad tastes, right?! I wouldn't have spent so long playing it if it were a bad game, right?!

Right?

Well, that's a much more difficult question to answer. Games like Brink, RAGE, Prototype, the bad features of these trash piles are easily identifiable. The problems with Destiny are felt from an immediate, visceral level. There are aspects that are lacking, or straight up nonexistent, in these titles and make them objectively bad. But, what if a game is only... kind of bad? This is where Fallout 3 falls.

Fallout 3 proclaims itself as an RPG filled with freedom of choice and player direction. It is a game that was designed from the ground up to have that same grandiose feel as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but in a world that fringes on wacky science fantasy and is built on a contradictory notion of highly advanced 1950's technology. It accomplishes this quite well. It has "dungeons" in the form of exploring sewers or other ruined structures filled with zombified ghouls and big angry mutants, the world is grand, open, and exciting, and you help people like a good old fashioned fantasy hero (or spread chaos like a villain). And that's what I liked about Fallout 3 when I was fourteen. It was grand and open, and yet limited enough to not make me think too deeply. I could just be a hero and feel cool. But now that my tastes have matured, I'm forced to ask myself what actually constitutes a good RPG. It's a broad category, and there is no one cut and dry answer. Part of why we have so many games in general is that different tastes exist and there's no such thing as a perfect game.

But it's critical to think about Fallout 3 in comparison to its genre fellows. And in doing this, Fallout 3 lacks considerably. There is a blanket, uncaring Karma system that judges actions based on a deity-level, all-seeing moral scale. There are railroaded segments that force you to play only one of two ways, or sometimes just one period. Thousands of man hours were spent on creating this massive world that is limited and not entirely cohesive. A real RPG is nuanced. Fallout 3 is not.

More importantly and ironically, when Fallout: New Vegas came out, I hated it for this exact reason. New Vegas is by far an imperfect game, in my defense. There are too many massive text walls when encountering new pieces of the interface that are immersion breaking and horribly boring, the voice acting is less professional, the world is not as immediately gratifying and interesting. But underneath this shell lies an intricate web of mechanics, built in the same engine, that are far better overall at crafting a real, believable, and interesting world. After hearing Mr. Bomberguy's critiques, I decided to play New Vegas anew, with a fresh and much more critical perspective. That was when I had to face the music of being truly wrong.

Fallout: New Vegas is the best Bethesda-era Fallout game to date.

Now, I don't like the story as much as Fallout 3's. I like the drive of having to find my dad out in the wastes, and I love the setup of seeing a sped-up eighteen years of growing up in Vault 101 only to be forced to leave that world behind and face something terrifying and alien. The Courier's tale doesn't hold up like that for me. But all the other hundreds of hours spent in New Vegas? Now those are fascinating. Every town has a different opinion of your character based on their personal interactions with you because news travels very slow. Every faction thinks differently of you because of your actions. Every area of the map holds a unique kind of danger and is designed around player progression and earning one's stripes. For example, there is an early quest to take on a large group of deathclaws, and they will kill you if you try to take them on like an idiot with your low level gear and trash stats. But the longer you leave them, the longer a group of lovable, honest miners goes without work. That's a kind of pressure that is rarely present in Fallout 3.

On a more base level, you can take traits during character creation that permanently change the way the game works for that character. You can have a faster fire rate for less accuracy, you can get a higher critical chance for a slower fire rate, you can gain agility in exchange for less durable limbs. I took one on my new character that lowered her perception by 1 permanently, but gave her a +2 boost to the stat for wearing glasses. How cool is that? A rollplay element, needing to wear glasses, that has a mechanical effect in the game! It's an amazing way to get a cooler character right from the get-go, it immediately made me care more about the game. She needed to get glasses as a first order of business after leaving the doctor's house so she could see properly.

Now, to get back to the core idea of this post, all of this new way of seeing 3 and New Vegas is thanks to an ability to see them from a new angle. I opened myself up to other opinions, and was able to see these games in a better way. I still like Fallout 3, and I definitely disagree with Bomberguy that it's garbage, but I can see where he's coming from and acknowledge that these parts of the game do, in fact, lack considerably. New Vegas can still grate on my nerves, but now that I can see the elements that make the game interesting, I can actually enjoy my time spent in the Mojave and come out with an overall positive experience counter to my original knee-jerk dislike.

Is it ethical, then, to go back and edit an old review to reflect this change? Not only do I think it's ethical, I think it is necessary. I don't post reviews for games as they release, I post reviews for games as I play them. Generally speaking, this means I have a lot of time with each game before I craft my opinion into writing. That also means I have time to go back to old games to revisit and finish them, and my experience during this revisit may change my overall opinion of the game as a whole. Or I might have a conversation with somebody or watch a video that makes me question my initial findings enough to try a game again with a clean slate. When that happens, I've found myself conflicted about what I should do with a review I've already written. Ultimately, I've come to the decision that if my opinion has changed or deepened, then the original review is inherently flawed and incomplete, which is unjust to both readers and to the game. Sure, it may be obvious that it's an old review, but all the same I don't think that fact speaks for itself.

That's what Fallout: New Vegas taught me. That I'm not always right, and in not being right I have an obligation to amend previous statements to reflect a more honest and up-to-date attitude. As things go forward, you'll start seeing some old reviews pop up again, with more polish, a revised score, and of course a disclaimer of [REVISED] at the top of the review. This allows me both the freedom to return to old games when I want to, and the contentment of knowing that my opinions are allowed to change as I change and grow.

I hope I've properly explained myself, and I thank you for your understanding. As always, I am committed to delivering properly explained reviews, and I will always continue to providing quality content. See you soon!