Little Nightmares (PS4): Only a little.

I took a swing on this one at the recommendation of my siblings. I'll be 100 percent honest going in I didn't really know anything about it. But since its an indie game, going by its title and I had a general idea. But I never really had the opportunity to play it. It was always kinda on my back burner. Well after a random flash sale had the complete version down to 10 bucks, I figured why the hell not.

LITTLE NIGHTMARES: COMPLETE EDITION(PS4)

As is the case with a number of these types of games, we don't get a whole lot of story to start with and are left to figure it out as we play. When we start the game, we are greeted by a dark and foggy screen. As the fog begins to clear we see the form of a person start to take shape. Clearing further we make out that it appears to be a geisha in a kimono, and slowly she starts to turn to the camera. 

Eventually she sharply faces the 4th wall, and we cut to a small child (named Six apparently) jarring awake from sleep. She is tiny if less than a foot tall, wearing a yellow raincoat with a hood that covers her face. She is currently trapped on a traveling ship called "the Maw" and after awakening, leaves to find an escape.

Honestly, after the waking up the game pretty much immediately begins and I really only have Wikipedia to confirm that the location is called the maw, and I'm basically just guessing that she is trying to escape.  Pretty much from the word go you take control of the game so any story that you can gather comes from the pieces you can put together as you proceed along the game. 

And right from the word go, and rather unsurprisingly, Little Nightmares confirms what I guessed and that the play is that of the spooky indie puzzle platformer variety a la Limbo, Unravel, or Inside.  Its got a pretty functionally simple control scheme for the most part, although I will say some button combo's don't feel very intuitive which I will get into later.

You use your analog to move, you have jump button, a run button, and grab so you can pick up objects and pull levers. If you have played the aforementioned Limbo or Inside the control scheme is going to feel very familiar to you. There is also a button to crouch and sneak/slide but for the most part these indie platformers really like to stick to simple game design and sell their product with impressive visuals and subtle story telling.

I will say though, unlike the previous two titles I've compared to, Little Nightmares operates on a full three dimensional plane, so you aren't just moving left or right like a classic Mario game. When you press up or down, you move in the fore and background. Some of the maps will require you to change your directions, and there are some chase sequences that involve this as well. It only became a point of frustration when trying to tightrope on some pathway, veering too far up or down, and falling off and usually falling to my death.

Little Nightmares is pretty fair with checkpoints though, so if you do happen to bumble with ledge like that, you can count on being respawned relatively close to where you fell in the first place so its not going to set you back too far. Honestly with the exception of one section of the game, this was the way I most frequently died until I adjusted to the control scheme.

It's not a very long game either, and I'm waffling if that is to its benefit or detriment. Full story, with no DLC chapers is about 5 levels long and holds roughly about a 2-3 hour play time. Granted its not a full release, but Inside managed to cram 8 hours into their game. The question is what is the appropriate length for a game like this, because I will be the first to admit that after a while it felt like Inside was getting a little too long. Now, that is just on my assessment of the start to finish of the main game. There are 3 DLC levels I have not got to yet and that might appropriately flesh out length, although for a game this size it probably couldn't have hurt to just include it in the main game.

During the course of gameplay there are handful of different "collectibles" you can gather for trophies. As you play through the game there are lanterns to light, little geisha dolls you can smash, and then if you look in the nooks and crannies, little people called Nooms skitter away and hide. But if you can find where they end up hiding you can pick them up and give them a hug, which I think changes the ending slightly? I have been told there is only one ending, which is a little disappointing. Since this is one of those games without scripts they could have tweaked the ending to chance the subtext. Would have added some replayability to a shorter game. This worked really well in the early Atelier series, and would have done well here too.

It's got a very interesting visual style, as most of these indie platformers do. While streaming it my mom (yes my mom watches my stream, I'm popular), she described it as a darker version of The Borrowers. If I had to describe its visual style, I would say its as if Tim Burton did his take on the Spirited Away. With the exception of the Geisha, the nooms, and Six, all the of the enemies in this game have this bloated or grotesque form to them to the point where it looked like they were wearing skin that isn't theirs. It certainly has a fucked up look that supplements the dark tone of the game well.

Seriously, I think this exact blocking occurs in a Studio Ghibli movie.

There really isn't a lot for me to nitpick here either. The game is dark, but with an title like Little Nightmares I guess I was expecting the game to be scary. It really wasn't. Dark, oppressive, somber, but it really wasn't scary. Again, a nitpick at best, because I don't think being scary was the games intention. It really just wanted a dark undertone, and it basically nails it there.

I've already complained about the length of the game somewhat, but the length can be subjective really. A few hours can be the perfect length for some, but 5 levels for 20 bucks? 8 levels for 30? I dunno, despite me getting it on sale for less I still can't help but feel a little bit of short changed. I paid about 10 for the complete edition of the game and that seemed like more fair price to me.

The biggest issues I had with the game through is that some of the mechanics don't feel like they were properly optimized. The crouch and grab are on the shoulders and run and jump are on the face buttons. Despite them being in the positions where you would typically find these buttons in other games, they never felt natural to me in a way that felt right. I could run and jump with ease, but if I needed to slide or grab something on the fly (like climb a chain) holding down the trigger never felt natural to me. I would lose my grip, or fail to grab something.

But the biggest frustrations I had came in the 4th level in a spot that wasn't even really a puzzle.  There is a segment where you basically have run across a table and avoid gorging heavy patrons or else they will shove you into their mouth. Once you do this, you need to leap off the table to a climbable wall. The problem I was having is I was having real issues with the grab radius. When you see something reach with full extent of their arm, by most video game logic you would think that you have safely found the range to avoid losing in this segment. This is not the case here, and the grabs were always just a bit more than I expected them to be. So in trying to avoid getting grabbed, I would walk right into the range of another.

This was only made even more frustrating from when I reached the end, when I would go to make the jump, the physics would not consider me close enough, and basically glitch push me away from the wall. This happened to me like 3 or 4 times which made me think that there was a different solution to get past this area. So naturally, while exploring some other option I was constantly getting killed in the same spot of what otherwise would be a pretty easy game and it was getting immensely frustrating. Lo and behold I actually just needed to step one more step off the ledge to actually get the distanced needed to clear this jump. Fucking annoying.

But if I am being honest I really can't hold that as a point against it, because it was me playing poorly. The circumstance caused a clipping that made me think it was just a poor design, but when pulling clips it really was just my goof. But all things considered It didn't really mar my experience with the game, just added a pointless 20 minutes of fuckuppery.

At the time of writing I haven't gone back and finished the DLC chapters yet, but I intend to do so. All in all I would say that I enjoyed my time with Little Nightmares but I wouldn't say it blew the doors off for me. That isn't the negative knock it sounds like though. The gaming market place is getting pretty flush with arty, minimalistic story platformers. I basically had an idea of what I was getting into when I started this game and it was exactly what I got. I will say the story wasn't what I expected it to be so that was the pleasant surprise.

I honestly really don't have much more I can expound upon here. Little Nightmares is a pretty solid game, although perhaps a little pricier than I would have liked if not on sale. If you are into this style of platformer the it is going to check all the boxes for you. If you are looking for something with a little more meat on it, I would advise for the complete edition of the game.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (PS4) - A Dark Road

When I first got my Playstation 3, one of the games I was very much excited for was Ninja Theory's action epic Heavenly Sword. The game was pretty short for the most part and drew many well deserved comparisons to God of War but all in all it was a pretty enjoyable experience. Sadly, there was no option to pick up a sequel.

But Ninja Theory did keep working on games like Enslaved and DmC, and a few years ago came a rumbling a new title they were working on. A shorter game trying to get AAA class production with a much smaller team and budget. The trailer originally had me think it was a Heavenly Sword sequel, but they denied that saying this was its own property. The trailers had me curious so for 30 bucks I took a swing at...

HELLBLADE: SENUA'S SACRIFICE(PS4)

The beginning of Hellblade, we follow Senua as she paddles through a darkened river on a hollowed out log. A quiet narration tells us this is her tale, and if we follow along perhaps we can have a part to play in it. Senua appears aware of this conversation, as she looks back directly at the camera. The narrator hushes us and quietly lets us know that she heard us.

Senua is a deeply troubled girl with a very tortured upbringing. As we play through the game we learn about her relationship with her father, mother, the people of her village, and one beacon of strength that shined through to her, a boy named Dillion. Her beloved Dillion has been taken from her, and she is off to try to bring him back.

It is a treacherous journey though as she is plagued by a "darkness" that follows her. She is cursed with a rot that continues to rise up her arm, and is constantly haunted, encouraged, berated by voices that antagonize her with every step, as well as visions that hound her and constantly distort her reality. Her only option is to confront the goddess Hela and plead her case, so she stomachs her resolve and presses forward.

So I'm not going to lie to you, Hellblade is a pretty fucking intense experience. If I had to describe it for a genre classification, I would say that it is very much a walking simulator first, with puzzles intermixed for most of the major set pieces, and occasionally intermixed with tightly focused combat as you play through. It would hesitate to call it an action game even though you can probably see it that way. Although the game is called Hellblade, combat is not the game's primary focus.

I lean to walking simulator because as you travel from set piece to set piece, you get more and more of the narrative from these surreal fade sequences Senua experiences. Constantly shifting from visions of her past and visions of a twisted surreal reality. With each step the voices that follow you are constantly chattering and heckling, whispering that she is going to die, she cant do it, yes she can, who does she think she is, etc, etc, etc. It goes on and on. The nature of how the sound projects, this feels like a game that should be played with a good surround system or a quality set of headphones.

Generally the flow of Hellblade follows a pretty simple path: Walk to your destination while experiencing the near psychotic break that Senua is having, reaching your objective, solving a puzzle or finding the necessary runes to open a door, and fight a wave of baddies. It's generally always these 3 things, although not always in that order.

Typically you will approach a locked door covered in the runes, and you need to wander around your environment while looking for the necessary symbols within the environment. Sometimes these can just be found painted on walls, but sometimes you might see is as shadows or light projected somewhere. Or in the latter stages, you need to stand somewhere else in the location so your surrounding environment actually forms the said shape. Think how you might rotate the map in Echochrome, for example.

The puzzles aren't exactly mind bending. Most of them present the solution right out the gate, you just need the right combo to make it all fit. Again, many of these are visual in nature so they aren't exceptionally difficult. Some just require some fast movement, but since the maps aren't overly complex I would say that overall the puzzles in this game were not very difficult. I think there was only one puzzle I got really hung up on and it's because I wasn't paying close enough attention to the cutscene prior.

And I suppose you couldn't really justify calling your game Hellblade if you didn't have some kind of sword combat in it. This was the aspect of the game that I was most worried about because when I saw the combat in action, it looked very fast paced and arcadey, weightless, as if there was no response to my swings. Happily, this was a grossly incorrect assumption on my part and combat actually ended up being way better than I expected.

It follows a pretty standard system: Light, Heavy, and Melee attacks with a dodge and block. It's pretty basic at its core but they add a bunch of little tricks to change up the combos to make them feel more skillful. For example, if you use your light attacks Senua just swings quickly with slashes. But if you use a light attack after say using a parry she has this jumping twist move to start the combo, I'm not sure if it's a stronger move but it looks cool as hell. In addition, if you dash towards a foe and use the same light attack, Senua does that jumping high stab I can only compare to Brad Pitt's Achilles' in the movie Troy. (A couple of games used this move).

The camera in battle stays high and tight in the 3rd person perspective but somehow doesn't feel disorienting. When enemies swing you can dodge away and dive back in for quick combos, or if you time your block correctly you can parry the strike for a unguarded retort. Sometimes there are multiple enemies, so while there is no lock on reticle, the camera will stay focused on the target you are fighting. but since the camera is so tight, you constantly need to continue to back up to make sure can see all the danger.

Generally the enemies are all variants of marauding northmen, but they evolve to have different weapons and moves. Some might have shields that force you to melee to break the guard before you can attack, some have heavy weapons that your guard will not hold up against. Some enemies fade to ethereal form and makes them invulnerable to attack. When this happens Senua can use her focus to bring them back to reality and slow time briefly to deal a lot of damage in a short time. But you have a limited number of uses so it's wise to save them for panic moments.

The combat excels when it uses the auditory clues from her psychosis to actually give you hints during the fight. Like while I was engaged in a fight with some hammer lugging troglodyte, the whispers started saying "Watch out! Look out! Behind you!" and I panicked and hit my dodge to the side. Sure enough just as Senua made her dashing sidestep, the sword of an enemy I didn't see came swinging down right where I was standing.

In one of the early boss fights, an enemy shifted into shadow and no matter what I did I couldn't seem to deal damage. I was blocking but it wasn't helping. But as he would ready his attack, the voices would start yelling at me to focus, or focus now. I originally thought it was because I was taking damage and were scared, but what it was actually doing was letting me know to use my focus to bring him back to a physical form. It was a very cool eureka moment and made me realize perhaps I can't just ignore the voices.

The visuals in this game are fucking stunning. I almost can't believe that it was done with just 20 people. The environments are all picturesque and gorgeous, with weather actually changing within the environment as you spend time there. The shifts to surreal hallucination are magical yet harrowing. There is a long segment in the late game that very much reminded me of the early stages of Dante's Inferno but with way more movie-like production value. Some of the voices in her head get visualizations done with live action, but they are filtered and blurred to the point where I can't confirm if they were digitally done or not.

But Senua herself? Holy shit.  I have been a big proponent of the use of motion capture in video games, because they give us stellar examples like Grand Theft Auto 5, Infamous: Second Son, and The Last of Us. But Ninja Theory might have set the new standard for how it's done. Using a single lighted head harness and some effects makeup they developed a system that basically captures a 1 to 1 recording of facial reactions that are animated in the game real time. It's fucking impressive.

And it's this that really makes Melina Juergens performance as Senua come to life. Senua's story is gutwrenching, and the ever present hysteria and agony in her voice, the constant fighting she is doing with the voices that berate her for the whole journey, being forced to constantly relive the tragedies of her life. It's fucking brutal, and Juergens' performance was crucial to really setting the tone. I had never heard of this actress before, so I did a little digging to find out she's actually the video editor for Ninja Theory, and this is one of her first actual acting roles. Holy shit, Melina. Bravo.

There is also and option to turn on a photo mod which I dabbled with a bit. It's pretty simple and intuitive to use, although admittedly it's a little tricky to time when you are trying to get it to freeze in an action shot. It let me know that the camera is set a certain way in combat because that's the way it looks best. When I'd try to spin the camera for a cool action shot it would never look as good as the behind the back look. Still, you can pull together some very gorgeous screens with this. All of the screenshots in this review are ones I did myself. This game is just fucking beautiful.

A lot of facial acting went into this game, and it really sells Senua as a character.

An absolutely stellar performance by Juergens.

Hellblade features a score you would expect for a story in this setting. Classic instruments performing that epic fantasy score. I can't say any one song jumped out to me but everything had a place. Much of the game didn't have music as I traveled from place to place, low melodies as Senua experienced some flashback or remembrance of conversation from her past. The other voices are well acted, and the narrator really deserves credit for framing the whole story. Like a grandmother whispering a sad story, she has a haunting presence that is felt from the very first lines of the game.

It's not a terribly long game to play. I think by the time I finished it I it had taken me maybe close to 7 or 8 hours. While that is short, the game is only 30 dollars and I have payed 60 for games that don't last that long. Ninja Theory's Heavenly Sword only ran about that long and that was a full priced game, so this didn't bother me terribly.

A lot of people are complaining that the combat in this game wasn't necessary. I understand that the walking simulator is becoming more and more prevalent and accepted as a genre these days, but I do feel that if you took out the combat, there will be very little left to hold the rest of Hellblade up. At that point it would just make more sense to cut things down and make it a movie. But if you did that I don't know if I would have felt as invested as I was. There are also story mechanics interwoven in the combat that wouldn't work otherwise if it wasn't there.

But with that in mind, I will say that for as good as the combat felt, it does get a little bit samey feeling after a while. Yes the enemies evolve a little bit to require more tricks to actually put them down, but after a while they just start sending more and more waves of them at you. Some of these are for story effect but if this was say a 60 hour epic, it would probably grow tiresome to continue to do.

There were a handful of glitches that are probably already being patched out. Mainly with the subtitles. There are a number of grammatical inconsistency (something I would know nothing about because I am a flawless writer) and timing issues on the subtitles.  There was one glitch where I tried to climb up a ledge, and instead climbed down through the floor that left me falling in limbo forever till I restarted the game. There is also the "head turn" thing that happens when you spin the camera around Senua where she whips her head from side to side to look at what the camera is on instead of posing like I'm trying to get her to do. She always has this kind of open mouth gape of an expression too in resting moments that is not very photogenic either.

And while I praise the absolutely exceptional acting done in this game, a little more volume on the narration would have been appreciated. I know it's going for a specific tone and effect with the soft spoken whisper, but I had that sound effects and music dropped well under 70% and maxed out vocals, and there are still lines of dialogue I can't hear. This is even worse when compounded with the off timed subtitles.

This game could be an easy platinum trophy for you collectors out there. I got all of them but one in a single play through because apparently I missed one of the way-stones that explain the Norse lore throughout the game. It was the only achievement I missed and if I got it, it would have been platinum'd so it's certainly possible to do in one go. (I am pissed I missed it, honestly)

I certainly had more reservations and expectations when I first started seeing live gameplay footage of Hellblade but I was very happy to see that not only did it exceed my expectations, but I was left thoroughly impressed. It's certainly not a perfect video game experience, but Ninja Theory proved that they could can produce a high quality title for a lower price and smaller budget. I find myself wondering how fast they could have pumped this out if they had a slightly larger team to work on it.

I very much enjoyed my time with Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Everything was done to properly fit its length. Any little annoyance I could really come up is effected rounded out by the fact the game isn't long enough for them to become a persistent problem. If they can reduce the development time, I would be ok with more of these shorter games at half cost. Hellblade isn't a game you will probably play over and over and over again, but it's certainly a game that's worth getting through once for the experience.

Problem is, thanks to this game now I question if I'm actually schizophrenic.
Shut up, No we're not.
You shut up.
Tsch, asshole.

Bloodborne (PS4): Accessibility is not a Synonym for Easy

So it should come as no surprise how this one is gonna shake out, but humor me. As we all know by now, if the game contains "Souls" in it, and its by From Software, chances are I am completely frothing over it. So sure enough, I squealed like a fan girl when rumblings and screen shots of something called "Beast Souls" started surfacing.

Trailers and game play videos let me know that indeed a new souls game was on the way, albeit under another name. There were some concerns about the game being more accessible to new players, and a growing fear that it might be made easier. Have they dumbed down what I love so much, to make the game more palatable to the every player? We shall see.... Brace yourself, it's a long one.

BLOODBORNE:(PS4)

Our tale takes place in the Gothic inspired Yharnam, a city once known for its potent medical remedies. A place where its inhabitants value the powers that are contained within the blood. Legend of these remedies pass to travelers (like the player) and they come to Yharnam to see its aid.

But upon arrival, you come to find out that the city is completely wracked with a plague of endemic illness, transforming people into bestial like creatures, or just overtaking them with madness. You arrive on the night of "the hunt" and by some unknown means, you are injured and set to receive a blood transfusion. After receiving it and entering the city, you eventually find your way to the Hunters Dream where you learn that the city received its healing abilities from Eldridge beasts called the Great Ones.

However, the Great Ones that provide such healing also are the cause of the plague, and by spreading it they look to foster the growth of a new great one. So you must return to the waking world to take the fight to the Great Ones in the hopes of finding a cure for your own affliction.

Let me get this out of the way at the start. I fuck'n love the monster design in in this game. Yeah the humanoids are still human, but the bosses and beasts in this game are very fucking scary and cool. They fit right in with the entire games dark Gothic aesthetic, and it feels like I'm fighting giant savage beasts. Don't get me wrong, I love fantasy, but I was getting a little worn on dudes in armor and massive unfair dragons.

So I gave a pretty decent gloss over of the general gist of the story here, but as  you might come to expect with games from From Software, they have a tendency to try to tell their stories by not actually telling them. They much more prefer the style of just leaving you little snippets of exposition, and letting you find bits of information along the way as you play through the game. It worked in Demon's Souls, it worked fantastically in Dark Souls, and to a lesser extent Dark Souls II. 

Because of the nature of this method of story telling, its is incredibly easy to just completely blow past NPCs that will tell you the story. Especially in this game because a lot of times you don't ever get to see their character models. A lot of them are safely hidden behind locked doors or barred windows. You eventually find locations where you can send them to safety, but knowing where to look is tricky until you've passed through the respective areas a number of times.

Arianna may be a prostitute, but if you follow her events
she might be more important than you realize.

But in that very "Soulsian" way of theirs, it works. As grinding is pretty helpful to keep your supplies up in this game, you are going to patrol a lot of familiar areas over and over again. Between that and dying in the game a lot, like the previous titles you will start to memorize every single nook and cranny of each level as you play through the game, which thus gives you a reason to check on the people's homes you find along the way. Some you can take to safety, some are just lost to madness.

Since we are on the map, I'd venture to say that is kinda of meshes the map layouts of Dark Souls 1 and 2 in certain regards. In the original, nearly the entirety of the map was fairly circular. As you would play along in the game you would start finding paths and unlocking doors that would take you to new areas, or areas you've already been from a another path. In the 2nd installment, the map kind of starts you at a central point and branches you in 4 fairly linear directions, but you have the ability to teleport around them at will.

In Bloodborne you kind of have the option to do both. The game at times feels a little bit linear, but at the same time there are a couple of paths that open up shortcuts as well. I guess to make sense of it, the shortcuts just allow you to travel around this specific section of map more easily. The first area in the city of Yharnam has you following the city in one long winding route, but along the way you will find ladders and unlockable gates to take you back to the spawn point, and back again more easily than the first path you took.

There is always an enemy lying in wait.

Alright, so lets just address the werewolf in the room shall we? During the production of the game prior to its release there was a lot of hubbub about the dev team trying to make the game more accessible to new players. This naturally caused the fan base to fly into a tizzy about them making the game an easier, watered down, dumber experience to draw in the troglodytes who have gotten used to a game basically holding your hand the entire way through it.

Guess what? Accessible does not mean Easy. Game starts off, you make your character and BANG, you are in a fist fight with a werewolf. 2nd surprise, he kicks your flippin' ass. So you go to hunters dream and get you first weapon and gun. Go back, smash the wolf, move on? Great.  Kill a dude with a weapon, awesome. Kill 2? Ok, still no problem but sorta miss my shield. Oh wait now there is 4 of them, let me just back up a bit oh wait now I'm getting shot too. Whoakay slow down a se... Oh, I'm dead again.

BloodBorne is indeed more accessible. But you know what it isn't? Easy, and this is by design. The first level, as is most of these types are games is punishing. It wants to break you, wants you to realize that you aren't Johnny Action Hero, and that diving head first into danger leaves you with your ass properly fucked. It wants you to hang back, assess the danger, get a feel for your controls function before approaching a target.

Parrying in this game is a lot more player friendly.

But does that mean it wants you to be pensive? Fuck no. The game has a interesting life bar mechanic where if you take damages a tick moves down, but the life doesn't actually depreciate for several seconds. If you get aggressive and start dealing damage back, you can recover some of the lost health, if not all of it. Even the flavor text on the only shield in the game tells you not to pussyfoot around. Get aggro, but be safe.

So what exactly did they change to make the game more accessible? Quite a few things actually. One of the first things I noticed is there is no more equipment load in the game. No more piling up gaggles of ridiculously heavy armor to just flop like an overturned turtle in battle. Now you are free to mix and match your gear interchangeably and load up with all the weapons you can carry. The counter balance to that is all the clothes you can get, are pretty much just clothes. There are subtle differences to what they can defend, but for the most part from what I have seen the changes are fairly minimal.

There are also a number of less statistics too. There are still a various number of defense statistics: Physical, blunt, thrust, blood, arcane, poison, frenzy, fire, and bolt. But a lot of these are adjusted by a much smaller number of core statistics. Ask me to slow down if this gets too complicated: You have your health, which raises your health. You have your Strength, which raises your damage. You have your skill, which allows you to use speedier weapons. You have endurance, which allows you to attack with more swings. You have your Arcane, which raises your fire and bolt damage.... Am I going to fast?

The only real wild card for a while was something called "Bloodtinge". But even that ends up being simple. It affects your gun, so you could have called it accuracy since I haven't noticed it doing more damage. Gone are the days of needing Vitality to raise you equipment load. No more need for "adaptability" which to this day I don't really have any idea how it affected my character. Magic stats like Faith, Intelligence, and Attunement are now all rolled into one singular stat, and if you are aren't using a fire or bolt mod on your weapon, its a useless stat anyways.

Going back to stuff you can equip? Accessories like rings and amulets are gone too, so those subtle (and in some cases not so subtle) little things you could add to your character just aren't there anymore. No rings to decrease equipment load, give you the cartwheel dodge, raise health, walk fast in water. All that stuff is gone. So while it now makes it a snap to build a character in the game, it kinda feels like its taken away pretty much all of the variety from the game on what kind of characters you can build.

Example, first time through I just built up my character to just kinda be powerhouse. Strong weapon, high Endurance, Health, and Strength. and for the build it pretty much allowed me to bully my way through most of the situations I was in. I made a 2nd character during this, this time trying to focus more on Skill and Arcane rather than Strength. I started it off and played for a couple of hours with a different weapon, and after a while I just felt that I liked my original better, and it didn't see immediate affects of the build. I get the sense that a lot of the effects to where you put your skill points happen more in the late game than the early going. But the problem with that is it makes it feel samey.

I about shit my pants when I saw that thing for the first time. It wasn't always there.

Anyone who has played a Souls title before isn't going to be overly lost here, but there are some changes to get used to. For the most part, locking on, movement, and right handed melee combat feels unchanged and right at home. If anything it feels faster, probably to keep up a more frantic pace of the game. The southpaw, however, has some changes to get used to.

As mentioned before, shields are pretty much gone in this one. So the button you would usually use to raise your shield (typically L1) now becomes your weapons "trick" button. All of the weapons in this game take multiple forms. Some of them, like the axe and cleaver get extended range if you change its form. Others like the cane, turn into a whip and change the dynamic entirely. Then you have the Holy Sword and the Kirkhammer, which gives you a nimble long sword in one form, and a massive greatsword or maul with the other. There is a pretty decent variety of weapons in Bloodborne, but there are significantly less than the previous games, so its easy to just fall into the routine of just one or 2 favorites.

The other button (L2), typically the parry button I guess in some sense is still actually the parry. This is the button that fires the gun that you selected should you have one equipped. You will quickly notice that this game is not designed to be a shooter, and using the gun as a primary weapon more than likely is just not going to happen. It takes too long between shots, and doesn't do enough damage to really be a significant weapon. But then why bother to use it?

Because this is where the aggressive version of the parry comes into play. Depending on the weapon if you can place a well timed shot before an enemy goes to attack, there will be a gong sound and they will drop to a knee (or prone, if quadrupedal) where you can charge ahead with a light attack and gut them for a big Visceral attack. This works for a lot of enemies and many bosses, so learning this is crucial. I found it a lot easier to get then hang of than trying to parry with my shield and with all honesty it makes you feel pretty bad ass to walk around a gut baddies at a whim.

But there are weapons that change the shooting game, I haven't experimented with them all yet so shame on me. The back stab is also still here but it significantly harder to pull off. It lends into a new mechanic with the heavy attacks. In addition to just your normal slower heavier attack, you can charge it for bigger damage. If you can land a fully charged attack behind an enemy, they will drop for a visceral attack. This does massive damage but its significantly harder to do.. and uh, it can make for some awkward situations.....

Uh... Ok.. I know what that's supposed to be and what is happening here.
But that totally looks like what it looks like.... Eww.

Another subtle change to the combat are the healing mechanics and the buttons involved. Our character is very much not undead in this game, so our endlessly refilling estus flasks are gone too. But in its place are now the much more readily available blood vials. You can hold up to 20, and once you are full more you pick up go to storage so that rules. But they are a finite item, so if you are struggling against a particularly frustrating boss (Rom, comes to mind), then you might find yourself in a position where you have to go back to an old level and grind to get more of it. This happens with bullets too.

So as I've said a billion times, no game is perfect and Bloodborne is no exception to the rule. For one, there is a bit of lack of explanation in the game. Sure, it doesn't tell you where to go, that never bothered me. But it also doesn't tell you anything about this curious Insight stat you have. Apparently, having lots of it can make the game harder, and you can use it as currency.

But the most important thing about it is, you need at least 1 to open up the character that allows you to level. That's a pretty important thing to miss. You can get insight from an item, but otherwise it happens when you go to fight a boss. So if you if you are like me, you can go through the whole first level and find that first boss, and if you lose? Bang, back to the start of the freak'n level, all your blood echoes (souls) are gone, and I'm still level 1. I can level now that I have insight, but its very aggravating to have lost all that progress. So do yourself a favor: the very second you find the "madman's knowledge" item, use it, then go back to hunters dream and level.

You need at least 1 Insight to get the doll to awaken. So make sure to do that quickly.

The gear was kind of a let down. As I mentioned a lot of the gear that I have found seemed to have some very marginal differences about them, so really there was little handicap about just mixing whatever Ab Fab outfit I wanted to put together, rather than gearing up for my situations. Just to stand out Lady Velfir ended up wearing a Noble's dress and tiny top hat so she wasn't just another leather jacket asshole with a mask and pointy hat. Same deal with the weapons. The trick features seemed cool, but it didn't reel like there was as much variety this time around. I used my starting weapon the whole game, and I can't think of many games where that happens ever.

And by making it more "accessible" by reducing the statistics, you really kinda took away what made Demon's and Dark Souls special. When I would finish a game, I'd rebuild my character and use different build types and gear, and it would make a brand new experience for me. In Bloodborne it kinda feels like no matter how I adjust my stats, it still felt like I was playing my character the same way, and that is a real shame about it. Because if it starts to feel the same, it starts to feel boring. And when a game feels boring, you don't play it anymore.

I know a lot of Souls players outright didn't like magic, didn't feel it was the "right" way to play the game, but you know it really did at a lot of variety and change to the game's overall play style. I didn't have to charge in and bang if I didn't want to. I could hang back and sling spells from a distance, changed the whole dynamic of boss fights and PVP. I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it.

There is no shame in summoning help for tough fights.

One of the biggest problems was its completely unforgivable load time. For deaths or checkpoint teleports, load times could reach an arduous 35 seconds. This doesn't seem like a lot in type but when you are waiting, it feels like it goes on forever. Thankfully, this as already been address and repaired in a patch, and now the load times are as low as 4 seconds and as long as 11. This is a significant improvement.

I appreciate the efforts to make the Online mode a little more workable. You get a series of bells to offer help, ask for help, or invade a player. It makes the game a little easier since it uses a queue system instead of everyone pouncing on a soul sign, but it doesn't really give an idea who's available to help, and from what I hear, completely changes how invading worked which has made a lot of trolls very unhappy, (poor them, fuck invaders).

Accessible is fine, you always want to expand your audience, but I didn't think things In Dark Souls 1 were overly complex, you could have tightened it up just a little and that would have been more than sufficient. By cutting down so much of it, I think that Bloodborne is going to hurt in the replayablity area just because there appear to be only so many ways you can play the game.

And if I am being truly honest with myself, Bloodborne can be accused of being the same kind of cut and paste job I complain about in something like Madden, Assassin's Creed, or Call of Duty. Sure, the story changes, the location changes, some of the mechanics are different. But right down at its core? Its pretty much the same as Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls II. I think the reason you don't hear people complaining about that is because there is usually a pretty significant gap between releases. Just enough time to pass for you to have moved on or grown tired with the previous game.

Complaints aside, this was a game that the Playstation 4 had sorely needed. Triple A titles like Watch Dogs and The Order: 1886 have been some pretty awful swings and misses, and despite the PS4 doing pretty well, it really didn't have a lot of stand out games. Now it does. From Software knows what they are doing, and even though they keep putting games out in the same engine, it is an incredibly solid one every time.

I hate calling shots for things like "Game of the Year" in the middle of the first quarter, and I certainly feel sheepish that 2 of their games have been my game of the year of 2 of 4 years, but you have to call a spade a spade. Bloodborne, despite its new accessibility, is every bit as good as I had hoped it was.

If From Software wanted to pump out another game like this every 2 or 3 years I would be completely OK with that. It's one of the best engines I have ever played in game and it delivers on pretty much everything want as a gamer. Great control, awesome design, big intimidating monsters, a steep but fair difficulty, and a big meaty chunk of time to sink into it. I don't know what else I can say.

Bloodborne fucking rules.

And fuck you Rom, and fuck your baby spiders too.

The Ragey's 2013: The Rage Quitter Year End wrap up

God what are you people still doing here? This whole gamer blog fad was so last year, nobody reads this crap anymore.  Well, Since you're here, might as well pull up a chair. Because another year of video games have gone by and I've played a lot of them, so I might as welcome you to this year's year end wrap up of my best and worst games of the year.

The 2013 Ragey's:
Seriously So-Co, Who do I have to blow in that corporation to get you to Sponsor me?

10: The Picked last behind the Fat kid with one Leg in kickball award for "Game I wish I got to play" goes to....

Yakuza 5 (PS3)

Over the past year, I developed a burning fury for the people over at Sega. After three entertaining romps in the Yakuza franchise I have been eagerly anticipating the new installment. A year goes by, and Sega only responds to a western release with "no comment". They made a haiku in response to the inquiry about an announcement coming up. An announcement that says "hey we are making a new one, and you aren't getting that either! LOL." FUCK YOU SEGA.

Sega is sitting a on goldmine of slightly obscure but highly desired titles by people in the west, and they refuse to localize them because they don't think Americans "get it" and Yakuza 5 is the chief offender. The Sony Third Party Production division knows its one of the top two requests for western release. So yeah, just skip on the piles of money you could be making by releasing your actual good games. Keep putting out Sonic: Losing a Step so nobody will buy that either.   Fucking morons.....

And If you guys fuck up Atlus or me getting Persona 5? I will personally fly to your Japan HQ to suicide bomb the Sega CEO's office. (Facetious Satire, NSA)

9: The Trent Richardson 2.8 Yards Per Carry garbage award for "Biggest Disappointment" goes to.....

Assassin's Creed  3 (PS3)

I played this during the holiday launch window so I am counting it for the beginning of this year.  At the time of purchase, I was getting very frustrated the story wasn't going anywhere and I was getting sick of paying for new versions of the same game. So to cap off the actual 5th game of the franchise, I was treated to the worst protagonist in the series, most boring story, and the most slapdashed rushed climax to the Desmond narrative I have ever seen. Aside from the ship combat, there is virtually nothing good about this installment of the game. To be completely honest, this was a SERIOUS contender for my worst game of the year. However, as my pending review for Black Flag will tell you, there is still some hope for this series.

8. The Nilbog is Goblin spelled backwards award for "Biggest Surprise" goes to.....

Payday 2 (Xbox Live, PSN, Steam)

Originally, I was gonna go with Battleblock Theater for this one, but I got bored of that and it got surpassed in the last moments of 2013.  Payday 2 could possibly be my favorite FPS ever, and I usually hate FPS. Grand Theft Auto V taught me that pulling heists are pretty awesome.

And Payday 2 is just that: You are given a job with up to 3 other players, you case your location be it bank, jewel store, night club, or whatever. Figure out where the guards are, where the cameras are, where the staff walks. Sometimes you can be in and out of a place, clearing out a safe before the staff even knows you are there.

But MOST of the time, it turns into a game of survival mode as someone inevitably calls the cops. Typically it turns into a firefight as you wait for your drill to crack into a safe. While the maps are usually the same they sometimes spawn things in various areas or ramp up the detection. But what I love about it is that is constantly chaotic and stressful, and you feel like a complete badass when the heist starts to go your way in a hairy moment. Payday 2 fuckin' rules.


7. The Oh my god, I didn't fuckin' care when the dumb British royal twat's got married, and I don't care that they had a stupid kid either award for "Most Overhyped game" this year goes to.....

BioShock: Infinite (XB360)

You just can't throw out a phrase like "as close to perfection as a game can get" and not expect me to be critical of it. Don't get me wrong, I love these characters and the storytelling was peerless. But my problem with BioShock: Infinite is that it was a dumbed down version of a shooter I actually kind of liked.

Gone were the myriad of fun weapons for 2 generic weapon slots, gone were the terrifyingly insane Splicers for generic troopers in 1800's coats. Gone was the creepy and dark settings of Rapture, for the bright and sunny streets of whereeversville, Gone were the Big Daddies and Little Sisters.

There were some good bits to Infinite and it was clearly better than Bioshock 2. But frankly, its even more watered down to the first Bioshock as Bioshock was to SystemShock 2. Great story, but game perfection? Hardly.


6. The Charles Ramsey 15 Minutes of Fame award for "Flash in the Pan" game of the year.

Tomb Raider (PS3)

While Squenix didn't think this title to be a success in the market, I really had some fun with it. Sure, it took the Tomb Raider original formula, made Lara Croft less of raging psychopath at the start (but barely), and put in a ridiculous sprinkling of Uncharted an produced one of my favorite examples of how the 3rd person shooter genre is done correctly.

I wasn't a fan of the Tomb Raider series, and I haven't been since the start. But I really did enjoy this game a lot. One of the few games where I actually looked forward stealthing around a picking off targets with a bow and arrow. Its story got a bit ridiculous at times and clearly wasn't the best written game. But it was fun and solid purchase. It basically met me half way to bring me into a series I didn't care for. Good show Tomb Raider.

I still hate Lara Croft though.

5. The 750 Dollar Photo of an Xbox one Ebay Purchase award for "Worst Value" goes to....

Beyond: Two Souls (PS3)

You know Quantic Dream, maybe you should sell yourself as an animation studio, and less of a game studio. You sort of had me interested in this game medium you were selling in Heavy Rain but you completely dropped the ball here by not learning from your mistakes. The Graphics in this are amazing, Page and Dafoe show that they are consummate actors and deserve proper billing.

But I play games to PLAY FUCKING GAMES. So watching Ellen Page be sad for 10 hours while occasionally knocking over some papers is hardly engaging game play. Every game dev should sit with their product and then ask themselves "Am I having fun?". A great story is one thing, but there is a good reason movies are 2 hours, not 10. If you are gonna stretch it out that long, you have to have engaging middle bits. Not worth 60 bucks. Should have done Last of Us, Ellen.


4. The "Just the Tip" award for "Best Value" goes to....

Dragon's Crown

Proof that simple still works. This game doesn't have CGI out the asshole. This game doesn't bring a load of complex mechanics to the table. Just straight up side scrolling brawly fun with fantastic art direction, fast paced combat, ratcheting difficulty, and loot gathering.

I was really excited for this game and it absolutely delivered on all fronts. The only real complaint is that it somewhat lacks a narrative, but that's really not what you are getting a game like this for. Its shows hands down that all the shiny AAA budgets and graphics doesn't exactly make a game great. But awesome game play always does.

3. The Consistently On Time Chinese Food Delivery guy Honorable mention goes to....

Tales of Xillia (PS3)

There were a lot of options to go for with the honorable mention, because there were a lot of really good games this past year. Saint's Row IV was a front runner here because it was just ridiculous.  Atelier Ayesha just because of the number of hours I dumped into it. Disgaea D2 for bringing back a group of characters I loved. Hitman: Absloution for polishing up the last true stealth game I've had in years.

But I have to give it to Tales of Xillia because the Tales of franchise is just always a beacon of excellence in the active battle JRPG genre. Great characters, good storyline, fun combat, and typically pretty good voice acting. Yeah its probably a pretty generic pick, but if you play any Tales game you can clearly see what I am talking about. Here's to the Symphonia HD Collection next year. 

2. The Ariel Castro Stay at home Dinner Date award for "Worst Game of the Year" goes to.....

Mugen Souls (PS3)

Dead Space 3's Co-op and micropayments made a strong case for worst of the year. Walking Dead: Survival Instinct's generic and bad game play really did too. But I had Mugen Souls locked in as my worst of the year back in May, and I'm happy to say that it hasn't budged.

Creepily oversexualized young characters, terrible soundtrack, choppy and broken animations, excessive text exposition, overly complicated battle system, overly complicated menu system, generic character creation, incredibly weak story, disgustingly cutesy j-pop sequences, constant ongoing fight animations, and the list goes on. It's absolutely remarkable just how badly this game managed to fuck up at almost every given area. I bought the game at discounted price, and I even regret that.

But whats worst of all is it had one decent idea for the character interaction animations that actually could have been put into better NIS America games, and they didn't even do that. Mugen Souls was just flat out terrible and a complete waste of my time and money.

1. The Johnny Malloy's 2 dollar Long Island Award for "Best game of the year" goes to...

The Last of Us (PS3) AND Grand Theft Auto V 

I really tossed back and forth here because both of these games were nothing short of incredible. And for a long time, it seemed like nothing could top The Last of Us. Sure, at times it felt like it was just a cut out of Uncharted but the added stealth elements with the dark atmosphere, the Cordyceps monsters, and a very well acted and likable cast made The Last of Us and absolutely fantastic experience and one of my must plays for the year. Ellen Page was pissing about how the Ellie character looked like her, and maybe she's right to be upset, because Last of Us was way better than her game.

But then Grand Theft Auto V came along. It's sales numbers alone tell the story, nearly smashing any single day record set before it. After taking a massive break in the development from previous game, GTA:V addressed nearly every complaint I had. Better combat, brighter colors, much less depressing story, more arcadey driving. But most of all, I fucking LOVED this cast of characters. I want Trevor Phillips as my life coach. But more so than that, the game was just a blast to play. I managed to rip through it twice in back to back playthroughs, and had a significant amount of fun playing the online mode.

While I can't consider either game perfect, these two come really, REALLY close. Since they were both so great and I felt I copped out last year with Silent Hill 2, they co-win my game of the year.

Maybe I've lost a bit of steam overtime, and the hit count as been dropping. But if I'm still playing games, I'm still gonna have stuff to say about them. See you in 2014.

Beyond: Two Souls (PS3): My Sad Haunted Life Simulator 2013

It's easy to get taken in by some shiny graphics. I mean ultimately, that's really what the game industry has been pushing for the past twenty years or so. And no game truly tried to sell the point that you only need graphics to sell a game as much as Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain did. While the game was severely lacking in actual gameplay elements and just gave us quick time events, the story was still pretty good (although heart wrenchingly depressing). But now Quantic Dream has upped their game by making their graphics even shinier, and brought in actual actors to play their parts in....

BEYOND: TWO SOULS(PS3)

The tale of Beyond: Two Souls follows tale of lonely girl Jodie Holmes (Ellen Page), as we go through her life. Since the moment she was born, Jodie has been linked to some form of supernatural entity who she refers to as Aiden. We jump around in the story from various points of Jodie's life from her troubled upbringing, her troubled childhood, her troubled teen years, and her troubled young adulthood.

The jist, without spoiling too much, is that her adoptive foster family leaves her at a military research facility under the care of Nathan Dawkins (Willem Dafoe) and Cole Freeman (Kadeem Hardison) who make her live in a bit of a sheltered off life as they monitor Jodie and her connection with Aiden, and attempt to teach her how to control him. As she adapts to this lifestyle, she is eventually drafted into the CIA.

After being abandoned by her foster parents, Jodie is actually has a pretty
affectionate upbringing, its just incredibly sheltered.

Its hard to explain the story any further because they way the story is present and you jump around the timeline, different points of the plot are given away at different times. And since this game's whole bread and butter is based around the story, giving you a detailed synopsis would really defeat the entire purpose.

Now I should probably stress right off the bat, that if you are picking this game up you should probably alter your expectations for the game. If you have never played Heavy Rain or even Indigo Prophecy then you are in for a real change of pace. During the course of this review I will probably refer to this as a game, but that's probably not wholly accurate. Quanitc Dream's big focus has always been to produce "interactive storytelling experiences."

Willem Dafoe: For when monster design isn't quite scary enough.

Unfortunately, therein lies the inherent problem because that's an awfully flowery term to use instead of game, which by definition is an interactive storytelling experience. The original Mario has like zero correlating text and no cutscenes, and that still weaves a tale you control the narrative. Now, in Quantic Dream's defense they do paint a hell of a picture. Heavy Rain through all its depressive scenes was still a very gripping story, and their technical demo for KARA had more compelling story in just 7 minutes than some movies do.

The problem is the Playstation 3 is a GAME console and when I use a game console, I use it to PLAY GAMES. And on this front this is pretty much where Beyond: Two Souls falters and falters hard. Heavy Rain was a game that suffered from some of the worst movement controls I've played in a game, and all of the actions that take place happen with quick time events or extended button presses or controller waggles. The bar was set incredible low for their sequel.

The game cleverly fools you into thinking this might have some stealth opps involved. 

But when you set the bar incredibly low, you don't have to jump all that high to get over it. The most recent E3 trailer teased that there would be some war situations and some stealthing involved in the game to bring up the pace and tone somewhat. And while this does in fact happen in the game? The overall control scheme doesn't really change that much. There have been some minor improvements but ultimately they just put quicktime events in a fancy new dress.

Movement controls have been simplified the the normal 3rd person movement we've all come to know. Why this wasn't used in Heavy Rain was fuckin' beyond me. When we get into the action sequences in Beyond:Two Souls we don't have the "Press X to Jason" prompts. Rather, when a combat sequence is taking place, the animation will drop to a super slow motion scene where you have to see which way Jodie is moving, and you need to press the analog stick in the corresponding direction. If you are successful she will land her punch or dodge a blow, if you miss she takes a bit of a beating.

My first playthrough, Jodie took a bit of a beating till I understood the controls.

This is generally how a majority of the action takes place and like previously stated, there are quick time events and controller waggles mixed in. For the most part, it works, but there are always a handful of awkward animations taking place where you have to really stop and guess if its meant to be one way or another. There were a number of times I kept getting it wrong, but it never really impeded my progress.

The other big control aspect in this game is one of the buttons allows you to switch to and control the entity following Jodie, Aiden. When cruising as Aiden you will usually find little indicators that allow you move objects or destroy things. When enemies are afoot you can use Aiden to strangle them or possess them to infiltrate areas. The problem with these sequences is the controls to fly Aiden around are kind of wonky, and your freedom to attack is somewhat limited. Anytime there are enemies around your options are pretty linear and when playing as Aiden, Jodie will often coach you along. 

As Aiden, you usually will just knock shit over. But there are segments where you can
possess and ghost strangle people. You just don't often get to chose which you do.

There is also a "multiplayer" mode that I use as loosely as I use the term "game" in this sense. Basically, it allows a 2nd controller to control Aiden, but since you can only use one character at a time, there really is no reason for it. You can easily switch to Aiden and then hand off the controller for the exact same effect. There is no point to it being there, and really it just takes away the fun half of the game and leaves one player being a very sad Ellen Page for like 10 hours. Nope.

And as far as game play goes, that really is pretty much all there is to it. There are a handful of sequences that will require you to do a bit of stealthing and sneaking while using Aiden to dispatch enemies, but it doesn't happen nearly enough for it to feel enough like an actual narrative based action game.

No, we are here because we want to watch a really, really, really long movie. So the question I suppose is: Did I like it? Well, its hard to say. Graphically, It might be one of the most impressive games I've seen. Like If I considered something like Uncharted or The Last of Us to have some pretty top notch motion capture, then Beyond: Two Souls is definitely a step above that. All of the notable actors in this game are nearly picture perfect digital images of themselves, and because the majority of them are legitimate actors I feel the delivery of the lines were a cut above. Definitely better performed than Heavy Rain was.

I love watching Mo-cap footage side by side with the finished product.

But what I'm not sure I care for is the way the story jumps around the timeline. To use a literary example, Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley delivers the story in what feels like two different story lines, where the big twist/climax appears where the stories timelines begin to intersect at a central point and fill in the gaps of each other's story.

This is kind of like how the Beyond story plays out. You find yourself constantly shifting between child Jodie and young adult Jodie. The constant jumps in timeline will often leave you thinking: "wait, what the fuck happened now?" and sometimes it can be exhausting to keep up with.

But nothing in this game is more exhausting than the relentlessly depressive tone. Literally NOTHING good happens to this chick. Any brief bit of happiness is overclouded by some kind of tragic event, or some haunting of her past, or some current haunting. Now granted, The game delivers a number of options for you on how you want to play things, but unlike Heavy Rain I don't think they appear to deviate how the story shakes out for the most part.

Ellen Page: Mall Goth Teen Angst edition.

There is an fairly early scene where Jodie goes to a birthday party and it turns into this uncomfortably heart wrenching disaster, and you are basically prompted with two solutions: Leave humiliated or commit unbridled vengeance. After (painfully) playing this scene two different ways, the game pretty much proceeded in the same fashion afterwards. Granted, one of the options was a billion times more satisfying to play out.

Through out all the scenes you have multiple ways to play out the conversations, so I guess there is a bit of replay value, and you basically get to choose your ending in the final scenes so I suppose there is reason to play more than once. Then again, you can easily jump to that scene and just pick the other options too.

Full Disclosure: I actually missed this option the first time because I was too busy
oggling digital Ellen Page in her shimmery red dress. DON'T JUDGE ME.

I find myself in the same position I was in for Heavy Rain. Did I enjoy my experience? I think I did. Do I think you should play it? Yeah, I'd say its worth your time. Is it worth 60 dollars? Ehhhhhrrrrnnnggg.... No.. it really isn't.

See Quantic Dream, here's where you have it backwards: You have some of the impressive graphics and some pretty good story writers, but the reviews to your game are mixed. You know who's game isn't getting reviews like that? Naughty Dog, because they take the good story writing and impressive motion capture, and slap that into a GAME. Into a game that is great and possibly game of the year, no less.

You however, after filming several hours of cinematic realized the player actually has to do something for it to count as a game. So the token effort is appreciated, but it really falls short. Beyond: Two Souls weaves a very interesting and engaging tale, and I will say there are marked improvements over the previous games. But it's too long to keep rewatching like a favorite movie, and there's too little interaction to keep the replay value high.

It is absolutely worth a sit through, but I couldn't blame you if passed on buying it.

A digital crying Willem Dafoe might be the most terrifying monster in a video game, ever.