Since I wasn’t here last week (because I had to sleep Thursday night and feel bad if I don’t make my comment early on for reasons too dumb to articulate), I have decided to put Hollow Knight on hiatus. The game is great, I don’t want to disavow my gushing about the game at all, but it does very much suffer the common…

Firstly, I appreciate you looking at a level that isn’t the already well discussed introduction that teaches you the wall jump. It’s got great design, but so does a lot of Mega Man X.

Just popping in here to also say goodbye and that while I’m excited for whatever you decide to do next, I will also miss your “For Our Consideration” pieces and the other critical writing you’ve done for the AV Club. I think all the focus readers put on your Newswire snark - and this is not to say those pieces weren’t…

Oh, Hollow Knight, Hollow Knight, Hollow Knight, how I love thee. I’ve pretty much done most of everything - saved all the grubs, close to getting that 1800 Essence, combed the wonderful world that is Hollownest, and feeling ready to at least try the final, final boss (and maybe the last tier of the Coliseum?). It’s…

You know what, Splatoon 2? You’re great, but I don’t wanna talk about you, or Fire Emblem Heroes. This week, all I want to talk about is Hollow Knight. And boy, it’s something. I could talk forever about how great it is as a Metroidvania, with so many accessible paths it never feels linear in the way some (even ones I…

Gorogoa is down! This was no less difficult and obtuse when I started it, but damned if it wasn’t an unbelievably brilliant puzzle game. I’m normally okay with taking some hints in games to move the story along, but I refused here - I mean, the story is the puzzles. One of the later sections had me damn near lose my…

That the RE4 menu works as a pause is really important, too, and in a way that accentuates the horror as much as a menu that doesn’t pause the game. Because RE4 is also a game about tension and plans, the latter of which almost always go awry. In a game where the menu has to be interacted with during fights, it’s hard…

And yet one more time, I have finished Paper Mario: the Thousand-Year Door. It remains as it always was: brilliant in virtually every regard, a masterwork on levels mechanical, structural, audiovisual, narrative, and literary. Truthfully, while I plan to write about the game at some point (specifically, the way your…

For last weekend and this week, I only played Paper Mario: the Thousand-Year Door, and not for much time since Tuesday morning. Truthfully, I’ve said so much about it last week that I’m worried of being redundant. Plus, I’m kind of exhausted and will be done with it next week, so it’ll probably be best to discuss it…

It’s a real “water cooler” game, one of those experiences where you and your friends kind of grill each other and talk about all these incredible moments and shocking secrets as you play it together. Breath of the Wild was a lot like that, too.

I’m both so happy and totally unsurprised at how you came out of RE4. It really is this bizarre, brilliant beast. It’s frenetic, and honestly kind of demented a lot of the time; you mentioned Gymkata and Commando, but there’s also a huge John Carpenter vibe as this thing that’s both deeply campy and viscerally intense…

Paper Mario remains an excellent, brilliant game. Elsewhere on the internet yesterday, I was talking about Doom (2016), and how I lost so much investment after returning from Hell and struggling with that fight on the giant tram. We talk sometimes about games that get less engaging over time, but this is a rather rare…

My assumption is that the ghost is meant to be Mimikyu, who I think a lot of fans have been ignoring in favor of Decidueye (though I guess it could count by also being a Ghost type?). Which is itself really interesting to me, too, seeing the way fans coalesce around a few “obvious” choices regardless of any real…

With things being a little calmer for me for a while, I’m committed to playing more. And while I do want to play more games with which I’m less familiar or which I’ve not played, I just have a desire to play something I know. So I’m easing myself in with Paper Mario, one of the most important games in my gaming…

It definitely does, but I do also think there is a little more going on there than people necessarily think. Like, it’s not exactly deep, but there’s definitely some post 9/11 themes about a threatened and insecure America (the baddie even leans on it when Leon calls him a terrorist). And the credits sequence with the…

I’m going to mimic Misanthrope’s position here; RE4 is an absolute treasure. It’s absolutely incredible how many ideas and concepts the game just throws at you with lightning speed. You mention mac n’ cheese, but that game’s like some kind of blind buffet; each scoop is something totally new.

Jesus, the Lordvessel in ten hours. I love seeing speedruns of these games, so I know it’s totally doable, but it felt like I took over ten of those just for Ornstein and Smough.

So I’ve not really played much of anything beyond Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, but there’s still a lot of resarch to do. With all the writing I’ve been juggling, I feel a bit uncertain about playing too many things right about now (which is funny, given I’ve been feeling the exact opposite problem all year). I got to…

I think Symphony of the Night is at least one of the best games of the Nineties, but there’s a lot of it that doesn’t quite work, or shouldn’t have been kept from previous games, or was poorly conceived. And I don’t think that’s bad - its shaggy design is part of why it’s great - but what’s great about most of its…

Ooh, a David Lynch-inspired horror game that goes against the grain to have its retro graphics be based around fifth generation consoles? And I’m not dependent on having a Windows computer? I can’t in good faith purchase Paratopic for a while, but that’s something to remember. I’ve been wanting bolder games to explore…