Recent reviews by Pancracio (crazy bread)

A super solid souls-adjacent game, it took a bit for the combat to click for me because I expected it to be more roll oriented but it actually really rewards you for using your shell to the fullest and parrying a lot, which is honestly really fun and the correct direction to take it, in my opinion. The lack of weapon variety is sort of made up for with all of the different shells and abilities you can use, and the umami stuff actually feels very useful to get, genuinely making a difference during fights and expanding the combat. The boss fights themselves are usually pretty good, there's a couple of poopy ones but that's to be expected, any of the ones where you're fighting a straightforward melee enemy are pretty engaging, and they've got good variety in their movesets.

I enjoyed that there's a lot more platforming than you'd expect from a game like this, as well as the integration of all of the marine species and all their different personalities/combat styles based on what they do in real life, very nice touch. In general, the game may take a lot from dark souls, as is expected, but there's more than enough originality in its execution for it to stand on its own two feet.

I will say however, there are some balance issues. The game gives you a ton of health upgrades without ever having to invest levels in vitality, so you end up spending most of your points on raw damage, and combining that with the hammer upgrade makes you a complete steamroller. Overall, when you figure out the combat, it does become a bit easy, or at the very least a lot easier than most other games in the genre, which is fine, but it's something to note. (the NG+ mode probably makes it a lot harder but I haven't tried it yet)

Still though, a very enjoyable game, with fun characters/sense of humor and an important message about taking care of our oceans. Highly recommended if you've got an itch for an easygoing souls experience.

Also, to whoever is responsible for making the OST and thus putting a version of Crab Rave as the song for the last area of the game, I'm onto you. I know what you are. I bet you're the same one that thought you could coconut mall me with a QR code and get away with it. Haha, so funny. You fool, you absolute buffoon. You don't know who you're messing with. Scum.

The original Judgment is one of the finest games RGG has ever put out, a truly gripping mystery thriller with tons of charm, and the first game in the DE era that actually felt right at home with the new engine. Lost Judgment on the other hand, expands on the previous entry with tons of novel content, and a new and enthralling case for our (sexy) friend Yagami to solve, spanning from high school bullying all the way to the darkest parts of the state's underbelly. There's a lot that I enjoy about this game, but also a few interesting flaws to point out.

The story, as previously mentioned, is really good, though it does feel a tad detached from Yagami himself, as the first game covers the most important case/lawyer defense in his life, that leads to how he is as a person today, but here he's mostly just in it to help out one of his peers, Saori, with her own defense, and thus he doesn't get much in terms of character development. In a similar vein, Yagami's friend group is pretty well established at this point so they end up mostly playing the role of straightforward supports for him. Still, the newly introduced Kuwana, Sawa, Tesso etc. are very compelling in their own right, and it's got easily one of the coolest antagonists in the whole series of games (I shall not spoil anything in this review).

The side content is also one of the best in the series, it retains a lot from Judgment, retouching some of it, but it also adds a sizeable amount of high school club related stuff that is mostly pretty fun (the bikers minigame is a genuine pain in the ass) and the overarching story is quite nice, and so are the characters involved. I will say, I have a pretty huge gripe though, and that is the lack of a colosseum (the original Judgment also had this issue and I expected it to be solved for the sequel). What the ♥♥♥♥ where they thinking giving us such awesome combat and limiting it to just random street fights and the main missions? They had the perfect setup with the Genbukai from the boxing substory and they didn't use it? Are they stupid? Well, ♥♥♥♥.

Speaking of... let's talk COMBAT. Yea it's pretty phenomenal. It's easily the best in the dragon engine games, and potentially the best overall, taking the previous game as a base, adding a couple new styles, rebalancing the previous ones and making the glorious juggle mechanic much more accessible and compelling. Some of the previous games like Yakuza 0 had a bit of a styles problem, where they felt a bit too generalistic and didn't flow too well into each other a lot of the time. LJ's styles on the other hand have better defined niches that sort of guide the player into using the correct one for the situation at hand, with crane's crowd control/juggling prowess, tiger's power/super armor, snake's defense/disarming capability and boxer's speed... and power... and defense... and easy juggle setup... and heat buildup... alright, honestly boxer's really damn strong lol. The main bosses also feel a lot more fun to fight than other games, courtesy of the amount of different options available for fighting, and also the removal of the annoying "mortal wounds" from Judgment, lord knows they will not be missed.

I do have a couple complaints though, firstly the new mechanics of climbing and stealth felt pretty underutilized and undercooked, especially stealth, it's bad, genuinely one of the most on-rails and unnecessary feeling stealth systems in any game I've played lmao. To be fair however, they did make tailing a lot less frequent and much quicker, and the chases are also a bit better. Secondly, a couple of the stories of the bigger side cases in the previous game were reused, and it felt a bit uninspired ngl, especially because they were made a bunch shorter and less interesing.

All in all however, Lost Judgment is a worthy sequel that manages to be in the same ballpark of quality as the first game, improving on a lot of the gameplay elements and providing a fresh and engaging experience. It's a shame that the Judgment series will probably not get another sequel but oh well, all good things must come to an end. I rate it a solid Kaito/10.

The best roguelike I've played yet. There's tons of cool items and interactions between them and the characters all have fun kits and all are somewhat viable, even if some are stronger than others, you can have a great run with just about anyone. The movement is really fun too, especially with certain characters that can make use of trimping on ramps and whatnot, you always start off slow but building up your speed as the run progresses is a very satisfying feeling. The soundtrack is great too, it's got a very unique artstyle and the devs are continually supporting the game, there was even a sizeable dlc released not too long ago.

As someone who struggled with getting into roguelikes for a long time, this game feels like a breath of fresh air and like it's actually capable of keeping me coming back to it every time. Highly recommended.

This game might genuinely be the dumbest piece of ♥♥♥♥ I've ever played, which is quite the achievement considering I've gone through most Yakuza/LAD games and a few Kojima ones too. The story's messy and unhinged japanese nonsense at its finest, BUT, the combat is very fun, it's very well stylized artistically and has a ton of charisma. The bosses have a lot of variety too, for the better and worse, because some fights fundamentally work better for the combat system than others (mostly the melee ones against a similarly sized opponent). Side content is also pretty solid except for the gigolo stuff which is totally unnecessary, I don't generally mind putting stuff like this in a game if it has some kind of purpose but here it feels totally disconnected and shoehorned in for the sake of Suda being a massive gooner or something along those lines. Anyhow, fun game, pick it up perhaps if you're in the mood for a solid hack n' slash.

Outer Worlds is a beautiful game and a very unique experience, where the main mechanic is a temporal loop that has left your solar system sort of frozen in time and the only progress you make is the knowledge you retain from the previous loops you've experienced. The solar system itself is like a well oiled clockwork machine with timed events that you must slowly figure out how to navigate in order to somehow end the cycle of death and "rebirth" that has kept you and your peers in stasis for around 400 years. Unveiling the mysteries of the ancient civilizations that were here previously and the enigmatic Ȩ̸̞̹̱͠͝Y̷̠̦͔̒̀Ě̵̬̌͗̓̕ ̶̖́̈̈́̐̚ͅE̶̠͓̿̈̈̚Y̴̳͍̯̤̍͜E̷̝̞̜̤̰̓̽̌͌͂ ̸̘̱̘̃͛ͅE̶͚̭̰̗̼͒̑̅͊Y̸͈̜̓̒̃Ĕ̵͖͖̲̣̘ ̴̹̗̋͋́͌̈E̴̢̹̞͇̍̎Ỳ̶̡̥̗̇͊̈́E̵͓̰̭͐́̐͗ is a ton of fun, as well as finding some unknown structures and later realizing what they're for with the help of information gathered along the way. All in all, an awesome puzzle game, and one that benefits from knowing the least amount of things possible before playing it.

Crack cocainè

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♥♥♥♥ off. I'm not crying, you're crying

The year is 2019, you are playing a little game called Hollow Knight, which came out a couple of years earlier, and you're having a blast. It's one of the most polished and fun indie games, or rather, games in general that you've ever played. It's so good in fact, that even though you got it on the Xbox gamepass, you proceed to buy it on steam anyway, and replay it a bunch of times. Not too long after, a trailer for a shiny new sequel comes out. Hollow Knight: Silksong is announced to the world, and everyone rejoices.

Years pass, expectation builds, and yet the news for the game start dwindling into almost complete radio silence. A few announcements are made by third parties, such as Xbox's very own showcase seemingly "confirming" that the game would come out in a year's time during 2022, but nothing happened, Team Cherry remained dead silent and most people were rightfully concerned. What is happening? Is the game stuck in development hell? Is this the end? How will this affect the salmon populations?

Fast forward to 2025, Silksong and its nebulous state of existence have become a massive internet phenomenon. Any game conference with the slimmest chance to feature news about the game was met with people holding on to their clown wigs, united by hope (and cope) that maybe, just maybe, that would be the one to finally do it, and lo and behold, on the second of April, Nintendo's very own Switch 2 direct showed a small segment with Silksong gameplay, claiming that it would come to the console in 2025.

Now, this wasn't our first rodeo, we'd been fooled before, but this was Nintendo we were talking about, they don't usually mess around, so of course, the hype started to build. Later that year, Xbox themselves also showed the game was coming to their new brand new handheld, as a launch title, which meant it was due to be released before christmas rolled around. All the signs were pointing to the fact that this was for real this time. Finally, a special announcement was made by Team Cherry themselves, and on the 21st of August, 2025, Hollow Knight: Silksong was revealed to be releasing to the world on September 4th, so in precisely two weeks time.

The two longest weeks of some people's lives went by, the most wishlisted game on steam launched, people were scrambling to get their hands on it because there were no preorders, so the servers couldn't handle all the incoming requests and it then proceeded to break the 500k concurrent player mark, and a volcano probably erupted somewhere, ravaging the land with tsunamis and wildfires, maybe.

Now the question is, was the hype justified? Is the game even good? Was the 7 year long wait worth it? Well, after 100% the game, I can tell you, without a doubt:

- WARNING: MILD SPOILERS WILL BE SPOILERED AHEAD -
The original Hollow Knight already set the bar pretty high as far as what a borderline flawless metroidvania should be like, and then Silksong came along, took that bar, and backhanded it out of orbit into the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sun. Let's start with the obvious, the OST is fantastic, Christopher Larkin has done his magic again, now with a lot more live instruments, which really elevates the production quality to the next level. The artstyle is gorgeous, taking all the beauty of the first game and amping it up with better parallax, more detail, and overall more polish. Truth be told, this could be said about almost every aspect of the game, but that would be boring, and I need to go on long rants about stuff, so bear with me.

Speaking of, I have to gush over the movement for a while. The movement in this game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ phenomenal, obviously because of the nature of metroidvanias you won't have everything at the start, but you've got, in rough order, a dash+sprint, a float, a wall jump, a hookshot (clawline) and a double jump (which is totally optional to finishing the game initially lol). The dash is already a work of art. It's similar to the first game's dash, but with the ability to sprint right after, and to do a dash attack that also launches you into the air if you hit an enemy, allowing you combo directly into a pogo or whatever you want. It not only serves the combat incredibly well but also enables the devs to make a bigger map because you've got the speed to actually traverse it comfortably. Bravo. The float opens up new paths with air currents and alleviates the platforming a bit, which is especially nice because the 45º pogo does take a bit to get used to (we'll get to that). The clawline is awesome for both traversal and combat, allowing you to stay in the air fighting enemies for extended periods of time. The double jump is a double jump and the wall jump is a wall jump, it's not rocket science. Actually, the wall jump does see some improvement from Hollow Knight, since you can attack from the wall more comfortably and also dash upwards, even transitioning into the ledge grab jump thing, which I forgot to mention but is also really cool and fun to move around quickly with.

The combat, which goes hand in hand with the movement, benefits a lot from these additions. The fights feel agile, graceful and much like the trailer says, acrobatic. The new crest system ensures that people cannot complain about the new pogo for too long, giving you different attack movesets and opening up a multitude of new playstyles, that can lean more into using the new tools, or spells, or playing more aggressively/defensively etc. These things combined with the different configurations of amulets allow for just about as much build variety as the original game, maybe even more. The healing also works differently, since you can heal three masks in one go, but it also takes more hits to build up the silk necessary to do so. Crucially, you can heal in the air, which means it's easier to find healing opportunities. In Hollow Knight, bosses needed to have enough downtime to allow you to heal, but in this game they can be more aggressive, which speeds up the pace of the fights.

As far as enemy designs go, they're a noticeable step up from the original game, featuring more complex attack patterns and movement. Most areas have a combat arena that pits you against the corresponding enemies, which is a great way to showcase them and for you to git gud at fighting them. The bosses get a similar glow up, ranging from good to fantasic, you can clearly tell they've poured a lot of time and effort into making fights with an incredibly satisfying ryhthm of dodging attacks and figuring out how to punish them back. Even during some of the easier boss encounters you walk away with a sense of "damn, that was a good time".

Now, there definitely has been some controversy regarding the game's difficulty, and while I personally believe it's in a pretty good spot (especially after the patch that nerfed some stuff), I can totally understand that my opinion is biased, to say the least. I've fully completed a bunch of difficult games from souls to hard platformers to some bullet hells, and I'm very familiarized with the original Hollow Knight. This is to say, the game is tough, so be ready for a hard time if you wanna play it. I won't be getting into lore or story, that is for you to experience, all I'll say is that it's mostly a different deal from the previous game, but it also ties up some loose ends in a pretty satisfactory way.

I am literally close to running into the character limit so, as a quick summary, Hollow Knight: Silksong is an astounding, beautiful and worthy successor to one of the cornerstones of the metroidvania genre, somehow improving upon it in most regards. And all of this, for the ridiculous price tag of 20 bucks, what the ♥♥♥♥.

What can I say except, thank you Team Cherry for the love letter to gaming that this game is. Keep at it, hopefully you'll win GOTY ♡

The perfect beat 'em up, Sifu will chew you up, spit you back out and then proceed kick you in the nuts until you get good, but once the combat clicks you'll feel like an unstoppable machine of beating ass, perfectly dodging and parrying through enemy after enemy in a trance-like flow, until you get hit once and then have to sadly snap back to the reality that you still suck, but that's ok. The feeling of slowly mastering bosses and other encounters that at first seem impossible is very akin to learning a martial art, it's a slow and frustrating process that can leave you stumped, but eventually overcoming those challenges is what makes it truly special and worth it. If you want a chill time or a bed of roses, this isn't the game for you, but if you wish to get smacked to hell and back into becoming a proper monster in a fight, then enjoy, and good luck, you'll be needing it. (Yang is still an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ngl, focus and grab immune cheap bastard, hate him)

Islets is a short and straight to the point metroidvania that is a blast to play through.

The movement flows incredibly well, allowing you to build up momentum as you hop and roll around the map, the combat makes good use of this movement too since you can chase enemies in the air and sort of "juggle" them to death, and the upgrades that you get let you dispatch groups of enemies quickly. The bosses are great too, with bullet hell attack patterns that are fun to learn to dodge on the spot, and the pace of the game allows you to get super aggressive with them.

The artstyle is very pleasing, the OST is good, the story is nothing special, it's simple and it works, but the characters are quite charming, which is nice. All and all, highly recommended if you're a fan of the genre, you'll beat it in a few sessions and have a real good time with it.