Recent reviews by The Brave Little Longshot

For what it is - a simple, cute, indie simulation game - it hits the mark everywhere you'd want, doing most aspects excellently albeit with some cat-veats:

• Animations look great, and there's clearly a lot of care in getting that aspect right, even if there's a bug or two sometimes when platforming.
  
• Dialogue is cute and clever, with ironically only animals really "speaking" to you. It adds some whimsy to the world without requiring you sit through lengthy cut scenes or get invested in a deep story.
  
• Puzzles are fun to solve and sometimes require creative solutions, othertimes they're a bit too simple - I imagine this helps the game's accessibility, but may lead to some "padding" if you're a veteran gamer
  
• It's cute as hell. I bought and played this while going through some personal ♥♥♥♥, and I was reminded how nice it is that we're still making comforting games like this.
  
• The cellshaded art style works really well in this world, where most of what you're doing feels like a Saturday morning cartoon strip

I got this game for free since it came with my gaming laptop, and I still feel like I overpaid

I don't think I've played an action game that blew me away like this since Last of Us and Uncharted 2. I'll admit I'm a bit biased here - I'm a huge fan of OG4 and have beat it close to 30 times over the course of my life. I'll still always love OG4 as a different game and return to play it once in a while, all things considered. But Remake4 somehow tops it in almost every conceivable way, more than is expected even, and comes out on top as the strongest plot and characters, tightest gameplay, most engaging narrative experience, and possibly most replayable RE game (right next to Remake1 imo).

It's not absolutely perfect: Ada's voice acting is pretty garbage, there are a couple of small areas cut (mostly negligible ones replaced with bigger, more impressive setpieces, but still), and the Merchant talks too much. But any minor gripes I have are immediately overshadowed by genius level design and fan service that manages to be significant/obvious yet somehow never overhelming/obnoxious. I know this reads like a paid review/fanboy gush but I am honestly just that impressed, this game has in my opinion set the new bar for modern remakes and is the best RE game since Remake1. No matter how stacked this year gets with GOTY competition, I would be shocked if this doesn't at least get nominated.

I think it's great that in this remake they took a more artistic approach to the game's narrative. Pay close attention - the game starts by building shaders for 40 minutes in direct reference to the toll humanity took following the outbreak and how long it took to rebuild even the bare minimum of a functioning society. Joel tries to climb past the wall but just can't; it's not a bug or ♥♥♥♥ optimization, rather it's a metaphor for his inability to climb over his past trauma. When the framerate tanks to 30fps at 1080p medium settings while your $500 CPU runs hot enough to cook an egg, it's all a subtle reference to the eggs Joel was cooking the morning of the outbreak.