#games 2024

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Grand Theft Auto V (2013), PlayStation 5

Dr Friedlander: “The thing is, Michael – here, can we just get a quick photo together? Cheese!” *snaps photo*

Michael, chuckling: “What is this?”

Dr Friedlander: “I really think I can’t treat you anymore. The fact is, I’m in love with you.”

I’m not an online gamer. If it’s a multiplayer game, then it better either have splitscreen, couch co-op, or a story mode, otherwise I’m never touching it. So I slept on GTA V for a decade because I was vaguely aware it had a story, but the only reason people seemed to play it was because the online gameplay was fun.

When I moved in with my housemates in 2022, they told me the GTA V story was really good, and I stored that thought away in my mind along with the 300 other games and movies to eventually get to. Then my friend got me GTA V as an early Christmas gift, so I decided to give it a go.

The story really is good fun. Michael, a retired bank robber in “witness protection”, meets Franklin, a low-level gangster who’s sick of always working for someone else, and they pull off a small heist together to pay off a debt Michael owes to a crimelord. This draws attention from Trevor, a feral hillbilly who used to be Michael’s best friend back in the glory days, and who thought Michael was dead.

It also grabs the attention of Steve, a horrifically corrupt FIB agent who sees an opportunity to make someone else do some dirty work for him. Under pressure from the FIB, Michael, Franklin and Trevor become a formidable trio and carry out heists, assassinations, and all sorts of other violence, all the while bickering and fighting and carrying on as they try to find a way to break free from the agency.

That’s a simplified version of it, and then there’s the side stories which take the characters on such bizarre journeys, like Michael joining a very expensive and obviously-a-scam cult, or Trevor beating up celebrities and stealing their belongings for an elderly couple he met who collects said items, or Franklin collecting spaceship parts for some guy who shows him evidence of alien life. The characters end up feeling really fleshed out not just through these goofy stories, but also through their hilarious banter and interactions with people around them.

By the end of the game you realise you really love these guys because they’re so funny and they’ve been through so much bullshit together that when the credits roll you can’t help but say “fuck yeah, good for you guys!” (That is, of course, depending on the ending you choose.)

It’s such a good time! And if you don’t feel like doing story missions, there’s always something else to do instead. If you get bored of the usual stuff like stealing, blowing stuff up, killing people, and going to the strip club, you can also play tennis, darts, golf, watch TV, go hunting (which I had a lot of fun with), organise hangouts with side characters and get drunk, and all sorts of other shit.

This made it a perfect game to just fuck around with while on the phone with friends, so a huge amount of my playtime was spent hunting or driving off giant mountains while on the phone with @radellama while we yapped about our story ideas and made nsfw speculations about our OCs and whatnot.

The attention to detail in this game is incredible, from the different vehicle behaviours to the sheer amount of stuff you can explore on the “internet” on your phone, to the environmental design. One thing that particularly impressed me was that the underwater area surrounding the map, was very visibly made with a lot of care.

Interesting terrain, interesting animal behaviour… like, this is a game where you’re supposed to drive around in the city and mountains and shit, and the average player is probably only going to go underwater for the two or three story missions that involve it for like 10 minutes at most. So to find that the level of care in environmental design in areas that players aren’t even likely to ever go to,didn’t dip just because players aren’t likely to go underwater when they don’t need to, was really appreciated.

There’s so much you could say about this game because it’s just so expansive and there’s so much going on, but I’m gonna cut it off here because in a lot of ways the game just speaks for itself. I thoroughly recommend playing if you enjoy a good bit of fucking around and funny characters doing funny things.

Favourite radio stations:

1: Radio Mirror Park

2: West Coast Classics

3: Non-Stop-Pop FM

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Cult of the Lamb (2022), Nintendo Switch

“Come closer. Fear not, though you are already dead, I still have need of you.”

I spent like five or six month straight playing just this and GTA V and I had a blast. The premise of this adorable Australian indie game is simple: You are tasked by a demon to build a cult and crusade against the demon’s siblings. The execution is something of a management sim/roguelike combo with a pretty fucking awesome soundtrack.

When you’re attending to your cult, you can do all sorts of stuff. You have to feed your followers and conduct masses at your temple lest they starve or lose faith and dissent, so you build farms with various different crops, and perform all kinds of rituals to keep your followers invested and excited.

Not just that though – when you’re building your cult you can actually choose what doctrines you want to teach them, so you can prioritise sacrifices and violence, or you can prioritise weddings and farming efficiency. You can shower your followers with love or you can bully and imprison them, but above all else you need to keep their faith up.

Eventually you’re going to need to leave the nest to gather materials because you can’t farm and mine everything, and that’s where you get the roguelike gameplay. You can go to one of four locations, the game generates a random map in that biome, gives you a choice of two random weapons, and then you plough through it, collecting materials, new followers, and other goodies as you go. At the end of each “round” you’re presented with a forked path showing you what prizes lie ahead depending on which path you take, and at the end of the run you have a boss fight.

If at any point in the run you die, you lose some of the resources you collected and return to your cult and can try again. If you beat the boss, you can either return to the cult victorious or if you’re far enough into the game, you can just keep going until you beat the next boss or die.

Beware though, while you’re off crusading, your followers are still doing their thing. Getting hungrier, slowly losing faith, and dying of old age. You can provide tools and resources for your followers to maintain themselves to an extent, but eventually you’re gonna have to come back and do things yourself.

A run lasts about an in-game day, which most of the time is long enough for maintenance to be the better option. This means the game strikes a really engaging balance between combat and maintenance that keeps you from getting too much of any one thing.

Ok, that’s a lot of explaining, and not a lot of reviewing. So what do I think of it all?

I LOVE IT.

I really enjoyed the freedom to choose what values I wanted to teach my followers, and the variety in the kind of rituals you can perform. I chose to prioritise farming and stuff, kinda minimalising the amount of sacrifices we’d be doing, which made it a little more like a village community than a cult. This did prove to be a little detrimental though, as the game encourages you to treat your followers more like cattle than friends, and not to feel bad about sacrificing them, and eventually I got the memo.

I liked it when my followers would approach me with requests for items found on crusades, or better yet, specific rituals, or even better still, ideas for pranking other followers. They also have personality traits, which made them feel more like people than just numbers on my follower count.

This, coupled with the followers’ very short lifespans, kept things feeling fresh. I never got bored with my cult because the faces were always changing, and with followers always dying of age or being sacrificed, or even leaving the cult if I was a neglectful leader, I had fun replenishing the numbers by either encouraging them to breed and provide little baby followers (thank you sex update!), or crusading and picking up new folks in the woods.

As for the combat, I do have a few complaints. The crusading is really fun, but god, sometimes you get the shittest weapons! I liked the axes and gauntlets, but man the Blunderbuss just does not do it for me. It’s powerful at times, but I found the hitboxes really unreliable. The closer you are to an enemy, the more damage the Blunderbuss does, but so many times I’ve shot an enemy point-blank and they’ve just taken no damage whatsoever, that I’ll usually just take a different weapon instead.

Then there’s the Curses, which are spells that you can use to do extra damage, and I’ve gotta say I don’t really have any complants. I’m not a huge fan of the ichor-based Curses but I’ll take them here and there, and man, the Hounds of Fate one is good.

And finally, we have the relics. I hardly ever used them, so I genuinely don’t remember what any of them do.

Another thing I’m not a fan of is more to do with me as a gamer and less to do with the game, but too many enemies have bullet hell attacks. To be honest, even one bullet hell attack is enough to be annoying to me. I find it too stressful and not in a fun way.

Some of the basic enemies do it, but worse than that, some of the bosses do too. It’s already kinda hard to beat the bosses, so for me to get to a boss who then just blitzes the zone with bullet hell is so frustrating. Especially because it’s incredibly hard to dodge roll between bullets, as there’s quite often no gaps to slip through.

This is a good time to mention that much like many other combat games, Cult of the Lamb’s combat rewards your patience. You don’t technically have a time limit (other than your followers’ hunger and faith), so study the boss’s moves, find the gaps where it’s safe to attack, and pray to god they don’t sumon minions to do the fighting for them and leave (very annoying) or spam bullets too close to dodge (incredibly annoying).

Anyway other than that, I enjoyed making my followers do the farming and mining for me, and teaching them how to maintain themselves to an extent helped me find the time to do stuff away from the cult other than crusading. There are a bunch of locations in the game you can go to to shop at different vendors and do tasks for weird and quirky NPCs, which I had a lot of fun with. I liked the fishing minigame, about as much as I was able to like a fishing minigame, anyway. It was neat, waaay better than Animal Crossing, so that’s good.

I really enjoyed Knucklebones, a dice game you play with an elderly former cultist named Ratau and his buddies. It’s fun and can be challenging, depending on which character you play against, and while it is luck-based, I never felt like it was unfair when I lost.

I loved the soundtrack. You spend a lot of time in your cult camp so it was a really smart idea for River Boy to make five tracks, mostly 4-6 minutes each, to play on loop. This meant I was never bored or sick of the music when playing, and the fact that they were all bangers definitely helped. I bought the deluxe edition of the game, which came with a soundtrack CD so of course I immediately ripped that baby and listen to it quite often.

That’s about all I wanna say about it. If you’re into Animal Crossing and The Binding of Isaac/Hades, chances are Cult of the Lamb will be right up your alley. I’d recommend getting it on PC or PS5 though. I got the Switch version and it’s got a bit of a lag issue, particularly when customising or loading in your cult. My housemate didn’t seem to have this problem, but even the COTL Twitter page has expressed anguish about its Switch performance issues, so… be careful I guess?

Favourite tracks:

1: Start a Cult

2: Work and Worship

3: Temple

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Chrono Trigger (1995), SNES Emulator

“I hate fairs! Say, do you know the latest gossip?”

→ Yes

No

“Then scram!”

Chrono Trigger is a game @radellama spent years trying to get me to play. I played the first half when visiting him in March 2023, then the second half when visiting him again in March 2024, so my memory of the early story may be a little fuzzy.

And now that I’m writing this review nine months later, my memory of the second half of the story is fuzzy too, but we do what we can.

In the year 1000AD, Chrono attends the Millenial Fair to see the teleportation device his friend Lucca has built. He meets Marle and they become friends, and when they reach the teleporter showcase, she volunteers to try it out. Something goes wrong though, and she ends up being sent through a rift in time, and Chrono steps up to go through the rift as well to go find her.

What follows is a fascinating story about magic, science, time travel and the apocalypse, with a wide range of quirky characters with different personalities and abilities for you to utilise both in and out of battle.

The battle system in Chrono Trigger is really well designed. You can play as seven characters but can only have three in your party at any time, and this means you have to strategise how you approach your battles. Do you want Marle in your party so you can heal and focus on magic attacks during battles? Or do you want Robo and Ayla so you can hit the enemies really hard and use items to heal instead?

The different types of enemies you face have different strengths and weaknesses you have to sniff out, so if your go-to fire attack doesn’t work, maybe try a water attack instead. And if that doesn’t work either, maybe they’re immune to magic attacks entirely, so you’ll have to hit them with physical attacks instead. It’s fun to figure these things out.

Also, every time you attack an enemy, you need to wait a few seconds for your character(s) to recharge so you can use them again. Their recharge speed depends on their stats, which you can upgrade a few different ways. This might not sound like much fun but trust me, it is, and it does also make you consider your timing. Do you do a solo attack with Chrono or do you risk the enemy attacking first while you wait for Lucca to recharge so you can do a joint attack?

I really liked that despite the recharge factor, you can still choose the order by which your characters attack. If you want to attack with Lucca, then Chrono, then Frog, you can do that, as long as they’re charged up. This meant I could use each character’s movesets to my advantage and arrange splash attacks first, then follow with one-on-one attacks on any survivors, or hit them with some magic that lowers their defence and then obliterate them with an attack they’d normally be impervious to.

I will say, the version of this that I played had a mod where you can speed up gameplay, which I did use in almost every single battle. Sorry, they’re just too long! Especially when you’re grinding and don’t need to pay much attention! But at least when I was speeding things along, that didn’t interfere with the game itself. I still had a great time playing. Actually, I’m fairly confident I wouldn’t have enjoyed the game nearly as much if I couldn’t speed the battles up.

The characters are a whole lot of fun. From a robot from the future apocalypse and a cavewoman from 65,000,000 BC, to a cursed frog man and a creative inventor, there’s a lot of variation in the personalities we find ourselves amongst, and it makes for some great story moments.

That’s not all though, the NPCs are a lot of fun too. They’re rude to you sometimes, which is really funny, and they sometimes help you on your sidequests which often results in getting a cool new item or a story beat for a major character. From my understanding, this is pretty normal for most RPGs, but the NPCs in Chrono Trigger specifically have dialogue that gives the game a lot of character and heart that makes it stand out to me. I thoroughly enjoyed getting told to scram by the guy at the Millenial Fair, and the Mayor’s family who hated him because he cared more about money than his own kids.

The use of time travel in the game is really fun too, and is utilised to great effect both in the major story and in the side missions. If you get an item from someone in the future, you can bring it to someone else’s great ancestors in an entirely different time period and that will permanently affect how they are as a person when you return to them in the present.

Also, time travel means we get to see the same map in completely different states and conditions depending on when we are, which makes for a really interesting glimpse at how a land can change over hundreds to thousands to millions of years.

The music was great, not a lot to say beyond that. Just a really great soundtrack from start to finish. Well made and suited the game perfectly.

So yeah, Chrono Trigger was an excellent game and I’d gladly play it again. In fact, it’s a game I think gets better with multiple playthroughs because there are so many routes you can take. There’s an entire character who does or doesn’t get to join your party depending on your choices, so I’d like to get him on my team next time.

Favourite tracks:

1: Corridors of Time

2: Guardia Millenial Fair

3: Robo Gang Johnny

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Animal Well (2024), PlayStation 5

“Heeey, it’s Dunkey. I’ve been trapped inside of the game’s code for 277 years and I just wanted to say thank you for releasing me from this game.”

Developed by a single guy over seven years in an engine he wrote himself, Animal Well is a puzzle-based metroidvania that took the internet by storm upon release. The fact that it was published by Dunkey definitely helped it garner attention, but what kept people playing was the intricate layers of puzzles upon puzzles and secrets hiding other secrets. People went nuts for this game, datamining and hacking it until within a week, they were uncovering secrets the developer though would take years to find. This was a pretty neat phenomenon to witness as it was happening, because every few hours one of my housemates would tell the other one about some new secret that had been discovered and he’d be like “WHAT?? HOW DID THEY FIND THAT?!”

But if I’m being honest, I didn’t much care for Animal Well at first. I found it kinda frustrating and it just didn’t really grab me, and when I got the first ending my initial thought was “well… thank god that’s over with.”

But then… I just kept playing. I’d tell myself “eh, I have more eggs to collect and might try find some rabbits too”, and then I kept finding new items and eggs and areas I didn’t think the map even had room for, and all of a sudden my play time doubled and I was having a lot of fun.

The tools you use to navigate the world are unique and original. You don’t see other metroidvanias having their characters use frisbees and bubble wands to get around. The flute was a godsend, especially when you figure out what codes to play to teleport around.

The remote control was super helpful for finding hidden spaces in rooms, and I loved digging holes with the spinning top. It’s stuff you just don’t expect from a metroidvania and gave the game a lot of charm.

All that is good and well, but it’s also worth mentioning that Animal Well also has the worst map I’ve ever seen in a video game. Apparently Billy Basso was planning on the game having no map at all, and then added it at the last minute, and boy do I believe it. It’s hard to look at! I don’t understand what I’m seeing! Why are the insides of the rooms the same colour as the void areas? It makes it really difficult to tell what’s a room and what’s the background!

The maximum zoom isn’t zoomed in enough, so when I’d zoom in I’d still be squinting trying to figure out what’s going on. Give us another zoom! I want to see the map!

Anyway aside from that, I enjoyed my time with Animal Well. Every now and then I revisit it and see how far I can get into a new run without dying, because there’s an item you can only get if you reach it with no deaths. I don’t really have much more to say about it, and I’m not going to go into the puzzles because I think it’s probably best to let you go in blind. I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys metroidvanias and puzzles, and wants something clever to sink their teeth into.

Favourite tracks:

1: FLAMES

2: HERALDIC

3: MANTENCORE

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Balatro (2024), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5

“Too bad these chips are all virtual…”

Another game developed by a single guy, Balatro is a game that hit the ground running and only got faster. It’s an addictive roguelike deck-building game in which you start with a standard 52-deck, and play poker hands in order to score points, with higher and higher scores to aim for each round. Each poker hand is worth a certain amount of chips x multiplier, and the result of the chips x mult is the score of your hand.

So if you play a flush, the base chips x mult is 35 x 4. But the cards also score chips equal to their number, so if you played a 3, 5, 6, 8, and 9, your hand ticks up to 66 x 4, which equals 264. That’s your score. If you play a flush with higher value cards like Aces and Kings, your hand is worth slightly more chips.

You can use Jokers, tarot cards and other cards from the shop to enhance the cards in your deck to score more chips or mult, gain more money, and multiply your mult which is where you start you get some crazy numbers happening.

You see, there are Jokers and enhancements that simply add mult to your mult count, but there are others that multiply it too, which is much more valuable. If you can get enough Jokers that multiply your mult, you can get scores that not only win the round in just one hand, but you can also easily surpass the score you’ll need later on to beat the game.

The dynamic soundtrack heavily contributes to the replayability of Balatro, with five different versions of the same song that the game seamlessly transitions between as you go from game to shop to card packs to boss blinds. The 7/4 time signature and detuned synth creates a dreamy casino type vibe that never gets old, and every time I launch the game and the bass and smooth drums kick in, my brain locks in and I’m like “ooooh yeah, we’re in for a good time.”

I haven’t adequately conveyed the addictive nature of Balatro. It’s a game that’s remarkably easy to pick up and learn, and its atmsophere, music, sound effects and UI makes it incredibly easy to hop on, expecting to play just a quick cheeky round, and all of a sudden lose five hours playing crazy run after crazy run.

I cannot get enough of Balatro. It’s definitely the most “gamey” of all the games on this list, in the same way that Tetris or Bejewelled are “gamey” games, which makes it really friendly to new players. I recommend this game to everyone with a basic understanding of multiplication. You won’t regret it.

Favourite tracks:

1: Main Theme

2: Shop Theme

3: This awesome live cover of the main theme

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The Last of Us Part II (2020), PlayStation 5

“If I ever were to lose you, I’d surely lose myself...”

The Last of Us is one of my favourite games, so my friends really struggled to understand why I procrastinated so long on getting to Part II. To tell the truth, I just kept waiting for the “ideal conditions” because I knew I wanted to play it alone, without any risk of my housemates walking into the room and interrupting, because I knew this game would be a special experience and wanted to get as much as I could out of it.

I wasn’t complaining or anything, and I wasn’t going to ask my housemates to go away so I could play it, cause that’d be selfish and dumb. So I just bided my time until I eventually realised the conditions I was looking for already existed almost every night because I usually stayed up later than everyone else, so I said fuck it and put down Tears of the Kingdom for once and got started on Part II.

And folks… I fell in love.

Four years after the events of the first game, Joel and Ellie have found refuge in Jackson, a town in the middle of nowhere, but their relationship is strained. We begin with Joel telling his brother Tommy what happened with the fireflies, and then we get to see the daily life of a Jackson resident. Every day trained groups go on patrol, sweeping the area of any infected stragglers and taking in survivors.

Today, things go wrong. A really aggressive blizzard rolls in, stopping Joel and Tommy from reaching their next post, and stopping Ellie and her soon-to-be-girlfriend Dina from reaching their next post. On top of this, a group of young adults, led by a girl named Abby, have reached the outskirts of town, looking to exact revenge on Joel.

They get it, and it’s not pretty.

After the funeral, Ellie and Dina decide to go on a revenge quest to Seattle, Washington, but learn that Tommy has already left for the same reason. His wife Maria begs them to bring him back in one piece, and Ellie and Dina go on their way. They reach Washington with two missions: Find Tommy, and track down the group who killed Joel, specifically Abby.

Throughout our time in Seattle, we learn that the group who killed Joel are part of a militia faction called the Washington Liberation Front, nicknamed Wolves. The Wolves were citizens of the Seattle Quarantine Zone who protested the cruel treatment from FEDRA and eventually grew enough in numbers to overthrow the QZ, and are now a seriously formidable army. We also come to find that they’re at war with another faction – a cult settled on a nearby island called Seraphites, nicknamed Scars.

Ellie and Dina realise they need to play this smart, as Seattle isn’t like Jackson at all. People don’t take in strangers and feed them here – both groups have adopted a kill-on-sight approach to any and all people they don’t recognise, and this danger only serves to exacerbate Ellie’s violent desperation.

The story structure here is really interesting. The first game takes place over a year, with a few chapters per season, and every time we transition to the next season, it feels important. In Part II however, the main game takes place over three days with a few flashbacks sprinkled in, and with each day we see Ellie losing more and more of herself in this quest, growing more savage in her violence and her desperation to reach Abby clouding her vision.

She starts making selfish decisions, prioritising the pursuit of revenge over taking opportunities to look for Tommy, and no matter what happens, she can’t seem to get anywhere in time to catch Abby.

Then some shit goes down and at the most tense moment, we cut to another flashback. But this time we’re not playing as Ellie, but Abby. When the flashback is over, we find ourselves continuing to play as Abby and finding out what she’s been up to in the three days Ellie’s been in town.

I remember it being a huge controversy at the time, to kill off everyone’s favourite character at the start of the game and then for the entire second half of the game you have to play as the woman who did it. I personally thought this was an excellent choice for the story, and I was really looking forward to getting to know Abby better.

During Ellie’s half of the story, I often thought to myself “this is solid stuff but I wish we were meeting some new characters, I miss that from the first game. Where are the Bills and Sams and Henrys?” And I understood that in a revenge story where the protagnist is going down a path that’s isolating her from her loved ones, there’s not really any room for meeting new people, but I still missed it.

So when Abby met Lev and Yara, I’m not gonna lie, that scratched the itch perfectly.

Lev and Yara are two runaway Seraphite children trying to survive on their own, and after their paths cross with Abby she feels a compulsion to help them as Yara is badly hurt. She neglects her duties as a Wolf soldier and goes AWOL without any real consideration for her reputation, in efforts to try and find a way to help Yara.

In the background, big things are happening. We hear the Wolves are gearing up for a full-on invasion of the Seraphite island, plus there are trespassers causing all kinds of problems in the area, but Abby’s not really paying attention to any of it. She’s not thinking about the factions anymore, she’s not thinking about the revenge she got on Joel anymore. All she sees is two kids who need help, and she knows she might be the only person who cares enough to try.

And of course she questions herself about this. She doesn’t fully understand why she’s going to such lengths to help “the enemy”, and I think there’s quite a few answers, one of which is that she’s learning to give humanity a chance again. She sees a child of the enemy in horrible pain and instead of killing her, she decides it’s worth trying to save her life instead, because she knows deep down, this kid doesn’t deserve to die just for being a Seraphite.

What’s interesting here is I’m really not sure she would have actually helped Lev and Yara if she hadn’t already gotten her revenge on Joel. She’s gotten the pain and anguish out of her system and has spent the last three weeks without that goal pushing her forward. And now that she’s not angry and seeking vengeance, the massive scale violence the Wolves are preparing to unleash on the Seraphites just doesn’t matter to her anymore, so it’s really easy for her to focus on something small-scale instead.

Lev and Yara came into Abby’s life at the perfect time to set her on a path toward healing and peace… and then Ellie comes back into the picture.

I won’t talk here about Ellie and Abby’s showdown and the events afterward but I will say that while the ending was super controversial, I think it was emotionally satisfying and left a very powerful impact on me.

I don’t have a lot to say about gameplay…

This is a game that really takes its time and lets you sit and feel the emotions as you go along, so a lot of it involves sneaking around dangerous places, scrounging for resources and killing people violently. In any arena, you can either choose to save bullets and silently pick off enemies one by one with your trusty knife, or you can go guns ablaze and beat the shit out of everything and everyone. To be honest though, the game doesn’t give you enough bullets or crafting resources to feel safe in blitzing every – or even many – enemy encounters, so I chose the stealthy option every single time. I have more fun playing TLOU that way anyway, so it’s the perfect game for me. Nothing like shooting someone in the head with an arrow on the other end of the area and not a single enemy noticing.

The level design is fun, and I have no real complaints about the sets. I think the crown jewel is the skyscraper-through-hospital sequence as Abby. That shit was so much fun for real, and the boss fight was fucking nuts.

I love how shooting feels, especially when I actually hit the enemy. The ridiculous array of blood and guts when you shoot an infected person with a shotgun makes it so satisfying.

I like the stuff you can craft, in particular the arrowheads, both explosive and normal. Molotov cocktails are always welcome of course, and I had fun blowing myself up with trap mines.

That’s all I really have to say about the gameplay itself at the moment, which makes it seem kinda forgettable but I promise it’s a really fun game to play. I really enjoyed the resource management and scavenging, the violence, the strategising how I’d take down a group of people, the whole shebang.

It’s also worth noting that the soundtrack is really effective here. It’s melancholy and quiet and emotional but also thrilling when the action calls for it, and it just blends in with the game so beautifully that it’s never distracting. It really elevates every single moment of the game and makes the emotional scenes hit that much harder.

At the end of the day, The Last of Us Part II is a beautiful story about people dealing with grief the only way they know how, and it deliberately makes you angry in orer to tell its story effectively, but then it shows you a glimmer of light and you find yourself learning with the characters that even in a kill-or-be-killed world, the cycle of violence is not the only option.

Favourite tracks:

1: It Can’t Last (Home)

2: Unbroken

3: Chasing a Rumour

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Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (Nathan Drake Collection, 2015), PlayStation 5

Flynn: “Found the ships though, didn’t I?”

Nate: “You couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”

Sully: “And a map.”

Playing Uncharted 2 is like eating soup where the veggies are good but the broth is bitter.

The Last of Us Part II is only 25 hours long, but it's a real slow burn journey so it felt like I spent a lot more time with it. So after I finished, I started looking through my catalogue for another game I hadn't played yet, one that'll be easy to get into and short enough that I can bust it out in a few sessions. I got to thinking about Uncharted 4, and decided I'd better play 2 and 3 first, just to get to know the characters better.

I played the first Uncharted game in 2021 and I... hated it. The story was fine, I don't really remember, but the gameplay loop was miserable. Just go to an arena, shoot a massive wave of bad guys, if you're lucky do a bit of climbing, and move on to the next arena. I became a lot more invested in the game when it revealed a supernatural element about two thirds into the story, which was cool, but I felt no urgency whatsoever to play the rest of the series, hence why it took so long for me to get here.

I'll briefly go over the story because I really don't have any complaints in that department. Uncharted 2 follows Nathan Drake as he searches all over the globe for the Cintamani Stone in a desperate race against a greedy warlord with an unlimited supply of hired goons. We meet Chloe Frazer, who's a fun ally when she feels like being on Nate's team, and with old friend Sully's help they go looking for Shambhala, a lost city and the last known location of the Cintamani Stone. In Nepal, Nate and Chloe stumble upon Elena Fisher, ally and romantic interest of the first game, as she's doing journalist work covering the story of the destruction Serbian warlord Zoran Lazarević has done to the city around them.

Some crazy shit goes down and Nate and Elena wind up in a Tibetan village in the Himalayas, separated from Chloe. Blah blah blah Lazarević and Nate reach the entrance to Shambhala at the same time and Lazarević forces him to solve the puzzles necessary to open the gate.

Upon entry, the people of Shambhala attack and they are STRONG as FUCK. Nate, Elena and Chloe escape and discover that the Cintamani Stone is actually the sap of a tree of life that makes you mad strong if you drink it, and Nate & Friends realise that if Lazarević drinks the sap, he'll be virtually unstoppable.

Lazarević then drinks the sap and becomes virtually unstoppable, but then Nate stops him, and leaves the people of Shambhala to rip him apart. Nate, Elena and Chloe escape as the city collapses behind them, and when they get back to the Tibetan village Chloe leaves and Nate and Elena fall in love again as the game fades to black.

I glossed over a fair amount of it but the point is the story was good. The problem with it is that between each story beat there's the same fucking gameplay loop from the first game of just shooting arena, move a bit, new shooting arena, move a bit, new shooting arena. It's like those arcade games where you point the guns at the screen and step on the pedals to duck for cover. Those games fucking suck! I don't want that shit in my Uncharted game!

A lot of people will call this a skill issue but the combat in Uncharted 2 is fucking garbage. I don't know if it's because I played the PS4 remaster on my PS5 or what but most of the time when I shot bad guys, their models would tweak out, making aiming at them really fucking hard, and I could never tell if I was actually hitting them or not until they finally collapsed. The fist fighting mechanic wasn't anything to write home about so I won't get into it.

You can only carry one handgun and one heavy gun at any given time which sounds limiting, but you can steal guns from the bad guys you kill and there's always heaps of ammo in them so running out is never really a problem. At first this felt like a humorous contrast to how I always had like one bullet left per gun in The Last of Us 2, but it stopped being fun pretty fast due to the repetitive nature of the gameplay loop.

It didn't take long for me to reach a state of "for fuck's sake, again??" Every time a story beat would be cut off by more tedious arena combat. I want to do more climbing! I want to solve more puzzles! Shooting people in this game is not fun!!! And it takes up most of the gameplay!!

But enough about the frustratingly bad combat, let's talk climbing. I like the climbing in this game a lot. I really like that when Nate climbs the environment around him, it breaks a lot. Pipes come loose from walls, signs fall down, bricks become dislodged. Sometimes Nate will try to climb something but it collapses a bit and he has to climb it a different way than you expected. It's a really immersive way to show the impact Nate is having on his surroundings, instead of making him appear weightless.

Uncharted 2 and 4 seem to be the most popular with fans. And considering the set pieces in 2, I can mostly see why. They were really memorable, such as the iconic trainwreck at the beginning, or the helicopter fight on the train. That was annoying as fuck... but I do remember it.

If you want a non-painful way to experience Uncharted 2, just look up an all-cutscenes movie on YouTube and watch that.

Favourite tracks:

1: Death sound

2: Death sound

3: Death sound

This was the only music I remember from the game because I heard it every 20 seconds.

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Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (Nathan Drake Collection, 2015), PlayStation 5

Nate, pointing a gun at Sully: “How do I know you’re real?”

*Sully slowly approaches, gently lowers Nate’s gun and flicks him on the forehead.*

It's become clear to me that Uncharted as a franchise fucking sucks at combat. The game opens by teaching you how to fist fight, and then if you ever want to actually do it in the rest of the game you will immediately be shot to death. I don’t like the gunfighting either, but I don’t have anything special to say about it.

I don’t know if anyone else had this problem, but it feels like the game is fighting me over the camera controls. When I try to move the camera, it jerks all over the place like it's colliding with a bunch of invisible obstacles, and corrects itself far more frequently than I'd like.

Also, the climbing is somehow worse in this game than in Uncharted 2. If I'm climbing sideways it doesn't matter how perfectly to the left I'm pointing the joystick, Nate's gonna try to climb upwards six or seven times before he actually does what I want. It's not even a skill issue, it’s genuinely a problem with the game, which makes it extra frustrating.

Anyway, despite all that, I was generally having a good enough time thanks to the story... until I got to the boat section.

THE BOAT SECTION

It’s got neat set pieces but from Chapters 12-14 I was really just angry at everything the game threw at me. Frustrating combat arena after frustrating combat arena, and my housemate couldn’t understand my perspective. He told me he really enjoyed the boat section, but I couldn’t feel anything other than sheer hatred for it.

When I got onto the ship that Sully was supposedly kidnapped on, I was finally starting to feel like I’d made some progress, but then I reached another really fucking annoying arena. I started to wonder why the enemies had so much health and dealt so much damage, and decided it must be to pad out the runtime because I really couldn’t think of any fun that can be drawn from that gameplay.

ANYWAY, then I got to the red ball room and discovered that that area is also fucking bullshit designed to pad out the runtime. After half an hour of dying every ten seconds in that room I got to the hold, which is ALSO fucking bullshit. I hate the boat section combat with a passion. It truly feels like it's designed specifically to suck as much fun out of gaming as possible.

Climbing out of the ship when it rolled over was pretty good though.

I’m sick of thinking about the boat section, so I’ll go over the story a bit because that was actually pretty good.

Two years after the second game, Nate and Sully are looking for Ubar, the fabled “Atlantis of the Sands”. After a scuffle with Sully’s former employer Katherine Marlowe, the race is on to get there first, and we’re reunited with Chloe Frazer and we meet Charlie Cutter and the two join the good guy party. There’s some puzzle solving and a lot of funny banter, and then after an ambush, Charlie breaks his leg and he and Chloe are forced to back out of the race as she wants to get Charlie to a doctor and make sure he’s alright.

It’s at this point the game plants a strong seed, but in my opinion, does it weakly. Chloe asks Nate if this treasure is worth it and recommends he let this one go. A few minutes later, Nate and Sully end up in Yemen and reunite with ELENA BABYYY SHE’S BACK!!! But sadly, despite the ring on her finger, things seem tense between her and Nate. It’s clear from their conversation that his obsession with treasure hunting has driven a wedge between them, and they’re separated for the time being.

Honestly it felt to me like the whole “Nathan is taking it too far” idea was severely underbaked, and they didn’t really have room in the story to commit to it. Little did I know, this would be a driving force in the plot of Uncharted 4, but I’ll save that for later.

Elena helps Nate and Sully locate Ubar, and then Nate is shot with a hallucinogenic dart and is separated from Elena and Sully. He wakes up in the captivity of a pirate named Rameses, who tells him he has kidnapped Sully. Nate escapes and we do the fucking boat section, and Nate learns Sully was never kidnapped and kills Rameses. Battered and bruised, Nate washes up on the beach and gets back to his hotel, where he meets Elena and discovers that she thought he was dead and was preparing to go on a rescue mission to save Sully herself. They have a really touching moment when Nate realises how committed Elena is, apologises, and falls asleep head in her lap.

Anyway later on with Elena’s help, Nate sneaks onto a plane and blows it up, and crash lands in the desert. He wanders for two days before being taken in by a tribe that’s fighting Marlowe’s soldiers. Nate joins the fight and eventually he reunites with Sully, they reach Ubar, and Nate drinks some water from a fountain. He has some crazy hallucinations for a while, and then he discovers Marlowe is about to get her hands on an important artefact that I don’t really remember what it is, but it’s important to her. Nate destroys the winch she’s using, which then triggers a domino effect that collapses the entire city into quicksand.

Nate and Sully escape and Sully gives Nate his wedding ring back, which he’s been keeping on hand for “far too long”. Nate shows Elena and they all make their way to Sully’s plane, and they have a bit of banter, fade to black.

I enjoyed the story of this game, and having a consistently rotating roster of characters hanging out with Nate kept things pretty fresh. The first two games have a supernatural-ish twist towards the end, and I found it pretty interesting that this game instead chose to present us with enemies that appear supernatural, but turn out to be hallucinations. It was a neat way to give us the supernatural element without really giving us the supernatural element, which they clearly wanted to move away from because there’s nothing supernatural at all in Uncharted 4.

Also for how iconic the plane sequence is, I kinda expected it to be like… better? It’s the most famous moment in the franchise, and I gotta say, I was kinda underwhelmed with the gameplay of it. The spectacle of it was great, but it kinda felt like it was over before it began. I didn’t really get much of an impression from it until I rewatched the scene on YouTube and could focus on watching the plane ripping itself apart while Nate guns down the bad guys.

I also really enjoyed the banter between the characters – once again, it doesn’t feel like actors playing roles, it feels like real people having real conversations, interrupting each other and having genuine moments of natural wit. Like when Nate complains about Charlie hitting him too hard, and Chloe and Charlie start making fun of him.

Anyway, that’s about it for Uncharted 3. If I ever play it again it will be purely for the writing.

Favourite tracks:

1: Nate’s Theme 3.0

2: Badlands

3: As Above, So Below

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Super Mario Bros. Wonder (2023), Nintendo Switch

“Wowee-zowee!”

I don't really have much to say about Wonder. I played it while I was playing Uncharted 3 and 4, usually on the phone with friends and it was good for something to do. It was challenging in some ways and most of it was fun.

Early in, my housemate saw me playing and said "ooh I know what level you're iiin" and I said "the one with the annoying musical number" and he laughed. Then as I was playing the musical bit one of my other housemates came in and said "OH I love this part!" And my housemate and I laughed harder.

Sorry guys the Piranha Plant musicals were annoying and I muted the TV when I played those bits.

The Wonder seeds are generally pretty good. The level design is fun and I loved that I could play as Daisy. I didn't touch any of the other characters. I love Daisy.

It's neat. Mario Maker 2 was amazing and creative and felt like a genuine apology for U Deluxe, and this game feels like they've dusted off their sleeves and gotten back on track. A step in the right direction for 2D Mario games for sure, they should have done this years ago.

Favourite tracks:

Idk I don't remember any of them lol

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Super Mario RPG (2023), Nintendo Switch

Mallow: "He's the one who stole my coin! Why didn't you stop him?"

Mushroom Kingdom Guard: "Because I forgot my bazooka at home! Sheesh. Give me a break here."

This one was disappointing. For one, I was told by a YouTuber that it was a 9-hour game and it took me 13 hours to beat, which wouldn't be a complaint for me if the game was actually any good. Unfortunately, it wasn't, and so every minute after 9 hours I was praying that the end was near.

The Story

Bowser's kidnapped Peach again and Mario's fighting to get her back, but then some giant swords fall out of the sky and land in Bowser's castle. the shockwave blows Mario all the way back to the Mushroom Kingdom and he recruits a baby cloud and a puppet to save Peach. They do some adventuring and end up recruiting Bowser too, then eventually find Peach and they all decide to ditch the Mushroom Kingdom to go fight the giant swords. The cloud turns out to be a prince and the sword ends up being a portal to some other realm, so they go through it and stop the bad guy, the end.

There's not much to say - it's simple and keeps the characters moving, but doesn't have nearly enough fun interactions to make it memorable or enjoyable.

The Battles

Something I noticed in the Molehill Mines and especially in Booster's Tower was that the combat was... really easy. Like, not even engaging. I don't know if I levelled up too fast or what but almost every enemy went down with one hit, so a battle tended to just go:

Begin -> use regular attack -> hit A at the right moment -> enemy dies -> if there are more enemies, repeat. Most of the enemies didn't even get the chance to attack me.

It didn't help that the fact that almost every enemy could be defeated by one regular attack made it feel like I didn't even need to be doing the battles in the first place. What was I getting experience for, unlocking new special moves? I wasn't even using them, unless I was fighting a boss because why waste FP on the regular enemies? I was pretty bored.

After reaching the castle in the sky this problem subsided and the enemies became a lot more engaging due to having more health and resistance to certain attacks, and there being more enemies per battle... but by that point I was already sick of it and wanted it to be over.

Also, maybe I'm just spoilt by Chrono Trigger, but it's really fucking annoying that I can't arrange my attack order however I want. When a battle starts, and three of my characters enter the battlefield, I want to be able to choose which of them attacks first. I don't like that the attack system in this game goes by ranks of speed - it takes the strategy out of how I use my attacks, so for the first half of the game I'd rarely get to use the slowest character on the field in any battles.

The battles often have 2-5 enemies. So naturally I want my first attack to do splash/group damage to make the battle faster and the game overall feel less grindy. But if I want to use Mallow's lightning to attack all enemies at once? Too bad, I have to attack with Geno and Mario first, so by the time I reach Mallow the battle will already have been long as fuck, defeating the point. It made for a frustrating experience because I could only play it the way the game wanted me to.

The Music

The music is not bad. It's just... not memorable. The majority of the music of this game is so "general music" that it could be copied and pasted into a different game and I straight up wouldn't notice. I know you’re probably reading this and thinking “but what about Geno Forest! That one’s a classic!!” and to that I say… meh, not really.

It's the Taylor Swift of video game soundtracks. It doesn't feel iconic or special like the music of other Mario games. There's like two or three exceptions to this. I liked the... what would you call it... elegant bossa nova? Style of Booster's Tower lobby, and... uh... well.

There's just not really anything to connect with. The story's weak and the characters are weaker. Hell, even the NPCs are boring. It's a bit funny at the start but very quickly forgets to have any character at all, so I only wound up finishing the game because of sunk cost fallacy. Booster's section was amusing but like... is that it?

When my housemate started playing this he said "I now see why people want Geno in Smash Bros." And after having played it myself... I don't. Geno's not interesting! And neither is Mallow! Geno's design is pretty good but that's all there is to say because again, the game has such little character that the fucking characters don't stand out.

It was pretty boring for most of the time, and by the time it got good enough to be interesting, it was too late for me to care. Glad I didn't pay full price.

Favourite tracks:

1: Booster's Tower

2: Volcano

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Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (Legacy of Thieves Collection, 2022), PlayStation 5

“How’s the Malaysia job going, Nate? Seems like you’re a hair off course.”

Oh man, what a breath of fresh air after the boring slog of Mario RPG.

Nathan Drake is back! And he's retired from the adventuring gig. He works an honest job and he and Elena are finally stable and happy in their marriage... but who's this? Drake's long lost brother?? But he's been presumed dead for 15 years!! And he's in trouble with a maniacal druglord who's tasked him with finding a $400 million treasure? Why, of course Nate will help him out! Oh boy, here we go again!

Straight out the gate I want to say this game focuses a lot more on the climbing and exploration and puzzles and shit than shoot shoot bang bang, and it's much appreciated. The climbing is EXCELLENT, especially after Nate finds the piton. They just kept finding new ways to make it fun, and I really appreciated that as Nate climbed through so many decrepit buildings and cliffsides, they fell apart a LOT, forcing you to improvise and take different paths. The previous games did this too, but U4 did it so often that it really drove home the feeling that everything we touched was old old and truly ready to collapse at any moment.

Ok so let’s talk about the story, and more importantly, Nate and Elena. Nate and Elena have a house now and for the last couple years have been working purely within the confines of the law. Nate works as an underwater salvager and that appears to be keeping his adventurous urges at bay. He and Elena are happy together, but the normal life is leaving an itch in Nathan’s soul that he just can’t justify scratching. He can’t put Elena through all that drama again, it’s just too much.

Cue the reappearance of Nate’s long lost brother, Sam! Sam tells Nate the story of his violent escape from a Panamanian prison with the help of druglord Hector Alcazar. Problem is, Hector wants money. Specifically, the treasure of famous pirate Henry Avery, which Sam and Nate happen to be expertly qualified to find.

Nate sees this as an opportunity to help save his brother’s life and scratch that adventurous itch at the same time, and tells Elena that he’s taken up a job offer in Malaysia to explain his time away.

From here, they rope Sully into the scheme as well and Nate goes straight back to old habits, thieving and fighting and killing and all that good stuff. It’s really fun to play, but as the game goes on and Nate goes deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, we find ourselves begging him to pump the breaks, before Elena finds out and finally decides she’s had enough.

In Uncharted 3, the idea of Nate being too obsessed with the treasure hunting is toyed with but not very meaningfully. In this game though, it’s the very core of the drama the story revolves around. Regardless of the danger he’s in, Sam is very obviously taking advantage of Nate’s obsession and really not giving any thought to how this will affect his little brother’s marriage. Sully comes along for the ride because he doesn’t trust Sam to keep Nate alive and safe, but he also heavily encourages Nate to tell Elena the truth because she deserves to know.

Dunkey was absolutely right when he said “in 99% of games the player is meant to feel like a hero, like your actions are saving the world. In Uncharted 4, you are ruining this man’s marriage so that he can pretend to be Indiana Jones.”

This is 100% true. With every decision Nate made, I was tearing my hair out yelling “NOOOOO DON’T DO IT NATE, ELENA’S GOING TO LEAVE YOU AND YOU’RE GOING TO DESERVE IT!!!”

So when things do eventually come to a head and Elena comes to save Nate’s life, we spend a few chapters with them climbing and shooting bad guys and having some really difficult conversations about their marriage and how Nate’s actions, and his hiding it from her, have affected it. I gotta tell you, I was really worried about the state of their marriage by the end of the game, and the fact that this series has made me care so strongly about these characters really is a triumph.

All that isn’t even mentioning that Uncharted 4 has the best set pieces of the whole series. It’s colourful, it’s pretty, it’s structured perfectly, the chapter sequences are paced beutifully, I really have no complaints other than the combat still being annoying, but even then, it was significantly less annoying than in previous games. I think making The Last of Us in between Uncharted 3 and 4 helped steer Naughty Dog in the right direction as far as fighting and shooting is concerned.

This game was great for the first two thirds, and then the last third was excellent. Yes, the combat was still annoying, but much less so, to the point where I actually didn't feel dread whenever I was playing, and I’m actually confident that I’ll enjoy the game even more as I continue replaying it.

There are bits and pieces of the previous games I’d like to play again, but it’ll be a long time before I actually replay any of them from start to finish. But that’s not the case with this game. Not only do I want to play Uncharted 4 in its entirety again, I really want to play it again.

Favourite tracks:

1: Cut to the Chase

2: Those Who Prove Worthy

3: Brother’s Keeper

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Hiatus

It's worth mentioning at this point that I'd been playing game after game after game in a really short time frame and I was fed up with gaming, and I wanted to take a break from it for a while. Echoes of Wisdom came out, but I was in no hurry to play it, and I wound up getting back into reading again and kinda remembered just how much I love it. Then I moved back in with my parents and started The Last of Us 2 NG+ so my gaming journey in 2024 basically ended in September.

Overall ranking, best to worst:

1: The Last of Us Part II

2: Grand Theft Auto V

3: Balatro

4: Uncharted 4

5: Cult of the Lamb

6: Chrono Trigger

7: Animal Well

8: Uncharted 2

9: Uncharted 3

10: Super Mario Wonder

11: Super Mario RPG

I played some really good games in 2024, so when a game like Animal Well is in the lower area of the list, that doesn’t necessarily mean I didn’t like it, it just means I liked the other games more, andit had to go somewhere on the list. I also didn’t dislike Wonder – it just didn’t leave a huge impression on me and U2 and U3 had great stories so they got a boost for that.

All that being said, I did put RPG at the bottom because I disliked it. Bad game.