Recent reviews by chent

My playthrough of Silksong was an emotional rollercoaster. The world design and the feel of combat are spectacular, and the game evades ever feeling trapped in the shadow of its predecessor with a satisfying return of the "true ending" approach to exploration and progression, crests and tools evolving the charm system and creating much more playstyle variety, and a plethora of great bosses. I do think that Silksong is a genuinely great game and I'm happy with what we received after the long anticipation. That being said, there are also some frustrating choices with regards to pacing, economy, and certain approaches to difficulty - frustrating in my displeasure with the approach and frustrating because I got really mad dying in certain places.

Difficulty is definitely the standout distinction between HK and Silksong with regards to the play experience, with Silksong (without any prior knowledge of tool strategy or routing) feeling quite a bit more difficult than its already quite challenging predecessor. As a misery enjoyer I don't knock this approach but I do think it can occasionally emerge in frustrating ways - one, there are many (MANY) lengthy endurance arena battles, and you will likely get to enjoy dying to the final wave - or the BOSS that emerges following several minutes of combat - quite often, throwing yourself back into the same fodder enemies over and over again. Two, most THINGS (particularly in the latter half of the game) deal double damage in a variety of ways, be they environmental hazards, bosses, or your run of the mill bug - not only when attacking but even on contact. I found that both these problems escalated and amplified one another as I delved further into the game - long arena fights with very little room for error before a swift return to the bench. Three, near the end of the game enemies across the whole map are amplified and made more difficult - a decision that is compelling, but ultimately feels frustrating and unsatisfying - becoming powerful and feeling free to zip across the map is super exciting and rewarding in the original Hollow Knight, and that experience is largely stripped away in the sequel. I don't think any of these problems are unforgivable, and I do hope on second playthrough I find things much breezier, but I feel arenas could have been shortened or made more scarce, enemy damage could have been doubled on a more selective basis (and basically all hazard damage kept at one mask), and the late-game changes reserved for specific locations or made less demanding, without detracting from the challenge or sense of accomplishment.

To be more brief on the other two points - the economy feels a bit inconsistent with "rosaries" replacing geo but NOT being dropped by all enemies. This leads to MUCH slower currency accumulation even IF you don't lose it to deaths, and currency is quite impactful early game as it is necessary for unlocking many benches and the quantity of maps to purchase holds a hefty fee as well. I like the idea here, but I think many prices could have been toned down and more benches could be made available for free than currently are. Lastly, I think the pacing is a bit odd in the early game - specifically, I feel a parallel between reaching the Citadel and reaching the City of Tears in HK as an "opening up" point for exploration - but the Citadel feels quite a bit deeper into the game than the City of Tears is, and I think that leaves Act 1 feeling a bit too linear and restricted for my tastes. Act 2 was the beginning of "getting it" for me, which just feels unnecessarily late - I hope on a second playthrough I see things differently and find new ways to explore the world!

Long story short, Silksong is excellent enough to stand toe to toe with Hollow Knight. From a first playthrough, I'm not sure I can say it exceeds the highs and the staggering consistency of the first game, but it is a must-play for any fan - I just recommend a lot of patience and a willingness to seek advice when you need it.

I think it's quite good. I certainly had some of the performance issues people are discussing (particularly around Rellana , a "mid-DLC" boss) but outside of that I feel it has some of the best content in Elden Ring. I would recommend it quite strongly to any enjoyers of the base game!

My thoughts on ER within From's catalogue are much too dense for a steam review but I have not been especially fond of the bosses in this installment and feel the DLC does a (mostly) better job of capturing the fun and exciting part of their boss design ( Scadutree Avatar, Messmer, and Midra were very exciting and refreshing to tackle in particular). There are a couple bosses I was less favorable towards or possibly just didn't "get" but given I felt that way about much of the base game's catalogue I don't think there were any outright letdowns in my playthrough.

I believe exploration is where ER really becomes incredible and the DLC does not disappoint - not only is the scale and amount of content very impressive (and worth noting when considering the price), but it achieves it with a really satisfying amount of (literal) depth. The Land of Shadows is super layered, with large areas both above and beneath one another with exploration challenges and discoveries to be made in crossing vertical distances as much as horizontal ones. Basically all of these locations are visually stunning and continue to pull your interest as you explore.

While there ARE a couple of catacombs to be explored, which become quite a chore by the end of ER, dungeons are full of new enemies, traps, and treasures, with a majority being flavored unlike anything in the base game and interesting enough that by the end of the DLC I was still excited to stumble upon them.

Our new arsenal of weapons, talismans, flask tears and items are very exciting as well! Almost every weapon I stumbled across made me want to respec my build to play with it, and I caved in twice in my playthrough. The new weapon types are not only very fun but (as of the current build of the game) incredibly powerful as well. Some of the talismans and flask options offer some pretty game-changing effects!

I also want to give a quick mention to the quality of the NPCs in the DLC, because I think they really stand out within From's catalogue. I tend to really like how characters and questlines are handled in these games but this feels like a real exceptional case, to where I began actively summoning for boss fights (which I tend to avoid for my own reasons) as their unique dialogue and narrative presence was super great. Igon's VA had a few lines that he nailed so well that he became an all-time favorite NPC in a From game for me.

If you like Elden Ring, you will get more of it in Shadow of the Erdtree, and much of it with fresh ideas and better execution than the basegame. It's not so much better that it achieves the monumental highs I feel Sekiro's hyperfocus on specific elements achieves, but I do think it further cements Elden Ring as one of the grandest achievements in gaming. Check it out!

Really excellent combat metroidvania with good characters and a fun world to explore. I do feel the game's replay value is hampered by unskippable cutscenes in a game that is quite narrative-dense, which is unfortunate because the raw gameplay experience is really satisfying and I would love to spend more time with it. Adding skippable cutscenes could pair quite nicely with a NG+ option if they decide to add more content in the future and I would likely return to explore it!

we love a good mystery dont we folks

Incredible metroidvania game that I would recommend to basically anyone I possibly can. Challenging and complex combat and movement, vast and interesting world, neat lore and premise (as in the bugs), very large amount of content, great soundtrack and visual design, basically nothing I don't love about this game. I've beaten it half a dozen times at this point (including Pantheon of Hallownest, 100% Steel Soul, and the speedrun achievements) and even though I know it like the back of my hand at this point, I just can't stop coming back to it when I'm bored and have free time. Play it play it play it

I've now 100%ed Elden Ring - one character (strength build), through NG+2 doing the Ranni, Fia, and Frenzied Flame endings (in that order). I think much of the discussion on Elden Ring is around whether it's a masterpiece or a perfect game or whatever. I don't really think it's either, but I do think it's very good, and probably the best game FromSoft has released, possibly with some competition from Sekiro depending on whether "linear and refined" or "open and flexible" is more your cup of tea. Combat is what you might expect from a Souls game but mechanically refined and smoothed out - closest to Dark Souls III but definitely ahead of where that game stood. Diversity of options and playstyles is very strong, and flexibility of exploration enhances that by giving you more freedom to rush your build instead of having to play through X amount of the game before having the chance to use the weapon you might like. The level design probably stands out above everything else as particularly engaging, not just among other open world titles but in gaming in general. Lots of great moments where I felt like I was beating the developers when they'd already anticipated what I was doing, and punches were not pulled with hiding significant pieces of content for people willing to explore. If you like Dark Souls, you'll like this, I guess.

I think I'd have to criticize balancing and some enemy/boss design choices more than anything else. I love that the game has the flexibility to become overpowered for those who want it but sometimes you don't really know where you're supposed to be and will do something harder before finding something easier later on - I had already begun exploring Caelid and was pretty deep into Liurnia when I explored the Weeping Peninsula, and realized early on that I was going to be sweeping through this content because it was just not meant to be left on the backburner this long.
My frustrations with boss design aren't particularly major but fall into a long-running FromSoft problem of camera angles and a newer problem of what feels like hyper-responsiveness and exhausting combos. For the former, the best Souls fights are ones in which the player is fully able to observe and interpret the opponent and its moves - but often times fights against bigger enemies will make this difficult as their movements will be outside the camera's natural view, which never ends up being a satisfying experience. There are sometimes lock-on problems with this as well when enemies are too big to have a single lock-on point, which ends up being pretty janky and inconvenient. For the latter problem, I think a lot of bosses just have a really specific way of being frustrating that can sometimes be a satisfying challenge and other times start to get irritating. Bosses will just keep attacking in relentless combos of moves that offer few openings, and often react to the specific things the player is doing. I think it's really cool to design bosses that work this way, but it can start to wear on you when you realize how consistent it can be. I don't really know what solutions I would use to alleviate these issues.

There's other minor stuff - upgrade material scarcity/cost and duplicate/lame bosses (Godskin Duo...) come to mind as potential grievances for people, and I think there's room for discussion around the positives and negatives of player messages, the larger co-op and competitive systems (which I did not engage with at all in my playthrough), and the classic FromSoft eccentricity of obscure and easy-to-miss NPC questlines. On the whole, though, I loved playing through Elden Ring, will certainly end up replaying it in the future, and would recommend it to mostly anyone interested in a challenging action RPG.

runescape is the ultimate game. a game where NOT ONLY are you playing it even when you are NOT playing it, but a game where you may even be playing it MORE when you are not playing it

Hades pulled me in when I thought I was tired of the roguelite genre. It contains all the tropes you'd expect from a roguelite, but it also takes a different approach that led me to appreciate it differently than I might ordinarily.
At a structural and gameplay-focused level, it's fairly standard, although I think the moment to moment gameplay and balancing are really smooth and satisfying. Some upgrades are arguably much better than others, but a player learning the game is likely to find a number of powerful combos and strategies that are all fun and effective to use - there were several points where I'd believed I found "the best" boons, only to find something even better a couple runs later with some experimentation. Runs are almost never ruined by bad luck, especially later on when you get upgrades that allow you to swing the odds in your favor more often. More often, the random elements of gameplay succeed in giving you unexpected combinations of abilities that synergize well and make your runs more unique.
For diehard roguelite fans, I think a big make-or-break aspect of the game is the playtime. In my opinion, Hades isn't a game that will have you seeing new things for hundreds of hours - you will become intimately familiar with most if not all the upgrades you're able to get, and playing the game to 100% steam completion took me around 100 hours (I had 120 hours at completion but had played with a friend on a second file through around 30 runs as well). It's a game that wants to give players the opportunity to see everything, and that might not be everyone's cup of tea, but as someone who's a little burnt out with the genre, I felt that it made the game a more cohesive experience, where I was doing and seeing something new every time I played. The game absolutely incentivizes playing through again and again with rewarded difficulty settings that can be increased incrementally, but for someone who wants to spend massive amounts of time playing, they might find that the game starts to lack variety after a while of play - there's only around 7 bosses in the game, and only four of those are "main" bosses that will be encountered at the end of each area. That being said, there's plenty of content to justify the price tag, and I think the quality of the amount of content in the game more than compensates for the (comparatively) lower quantity of different things to see over a long playthrough.
Hades stands out most, and excels, in its introduction of a cohesive plot and developed characters that will be expanded as a player proceeds through the game. The game has a ton of unique dialogue, enough to cover almost a hundred runs without ever running into repeat lines. Dialogue responds to your progress in the game, as well as the choices you make moment-to-moment in a specific run - are you low on health? The next god you meet will notice. Did you take a Poseidon boon? Maybe Dionysus will tell you a story about him when you take his boon. As you play you collect Nectar, which is a meta-currency that allows you to further relationship trees with almost every character in the game. A number of characters have short quest-lines to complete that allow you to further parts of the story as well as deepening your relationships and knowledge of the underworld. This story emphasis that's uncommon to modern roguelites (the ones I've played, at least) provides a lot more engagement to spending time with the game, especially early on if you're having trouble getting the hang of gameplay. I do have a half-hearted critique of the story in how main story elements develop and resolve, but it's easy for me to look past it as the story is designed to work in synergy with the gameplay, both providing incentives for one another. At the end of the day, Hades prioritizes the gameplay over the story, but it manages to balance them better than any roguelite experience I've had.
Hades is a great game, for roguelite fans and for newcomers to the genre, with a lot of detail that pushes it above and beyond the standard for the genre. I would also recommend Hades to anyone who, like me, enjoys the genre, but feels burnt out after so many titles in the 2010s - Hades might reignite that spark for you, and even if it doesn't, I think it'll pull you in more than you might expect as a standalone game. It's good!

140hrs in sekiro and this my goty 2019 now

this is a good game. positive review to counter the bomb. easy recommendation