Games Beaten 2026

[ElkinFencer10]

Out of curiosity, which of the Metal Slug games have you come closest to 1ccing?

The original one. I managed it on three credits when I first got an MVS cabinet about ten or eleven years ago and was playing a lot.

Metal Slug 3 rules so hard. Great review, @elk! If you’re ever down for some more co-op, let me know.

I'm always down for arcade co-op, dude.

[MrPopo]

Only three credits is a really solid run, definitely not a credit feed. Kudos!

[REPO Man]

Just beat the Story Mode of Sonic Origins for Switch.

God, that Sonic 2 final boss is cheap AF!

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)
10. Gravity Circuit (PC)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)
12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)

13. Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island (PS5)

I had the Director’s Cut of Ghost of Tsushima, so that came packed in with this DLC expansion too. This review will largely serve as an addendum to my review of the base game, so I will endeavor to avoid repeating myself as often as I can for the sake of brevity. You have access to this DLC as soon as you enter Act 2 of the base game, and I ended up tackling it around midway through Act 2 because my little sister (who has also been playing through this game) had just finished it and was very earnest that I play through this asap so she could talk to me about it X3. It ultimately took me around 10 or so hours to play through the expansion and complete all the main and side quests in it for the English version of the game (and much like that review, this one will also be far from free from spoilers, so readers please keep that in mind).

At the end of Act 1, Jin Sakai, Ghost of Tsushima, has just finished liberating Castle Kaneda and liberating his uncle, Lord Shimura, from the clutches of the invading Mongols. His uncle has instructed him to begin gathering an army that will allow them to assault Castle Shimura, where the Khan has sequestered himself, and push the invaders back for good, but Jin finds something else as he explores the southern coast of Tsushima’s northern island (as Tsushima is technically two islands, just very close together). A powerful Mongol shaman along with powerful warriors sporting unfamiliar emblems have driven the inhabitants completely mad. They declare themselves members of the Eagle Tribe, and while they have already taken over the nearby Japanese island of Iki, they will soon carry their victory over to Tsushima and the mainland of Japan as well. Jin knows that if he leaves this threat unchecked, then even beating Khotun Khan and saving Tsushima will be all too temporary a victory. Despite the dangers presented by trying to break the Mongol blockade, he and his trusty horse board a boat and set off for the dangerous, unknown territory of Iki.

With all the ways that it attempts to mix up and polish the main game, Iki Island ends up feeling like a lite sequel in many regards, and the story is no exception in that regard. I already spent nearly 2000 words in my main Ghost of Tsushima review detailing all of my criticisms of the main game’s story, and a large part of that (at least other than the racism stuff) is to just how messy and unfocused the larger narrative due to the nature of open world game narratives. Being a smaller island and a tighter experience, Iki Island has a much stronger sense of pacing than the main game, but it also still comes from the same fundamental writing philosophies that inform and cause all of the main game’s stumbling points. As a result, Iki Island ends up sitting in a weird place of both having some of the best writing in the game as well as easily some of the worst.

Other than just being about saving Tsushima and Japan from the threat of the powerful magics of the Eagle Tribe, this expansion’s main personal story thrust for Jin is that Iki is where his father died. Jin was with his father during the late Lord Sakai’s (which is what I will call him from here on to differentiate him from Jin) attempt to purge Iki of the raiders and pirates who call it home. Jin has long blamed his own cowardice and powerlessness for causing his father’s death, and this is a very powerful homecoming moment of sorts for him. I would argue quite strongly that, while the main game doesn’t really touch on Jin’s relationship to his dead parents *that* much, a lot of the personal struggles he’s dealing with in the Iki expansion feel like they come out of absolutely nowhere compared to his (very rough) characterization in the main game. However, trauma is a tricky and unique thing for everyone, so you could totally just hand wave that away as him being able to just repress it all until he’s forced to face it upon returning to Iki. The premise, this time at least, is not most at fault for this expansion’s narrative woes.

The focus on a more personally driven narrative is frankly what gives this expansion all of its best story beats. The people of Iki *hate* samurai for their brutality and ruthlessness in the war over a decade ago, and they especially hate Jin’s clan for leading the thing. Jin being forced to confront just what a brutal monster, a justifiably feared person, his father was while also being shown the humanity in both the people he slaughtered and even his father’s murderer are definitely some of the strongest points in the main story. There are “mythic” quests about tackling legends back on Tsushima, but it’s super cool to have those “legends” now be about *you*, and the samurai invasion of Iki in general. The side stories here also have Jin recalling all sorts of bittersweet memories of both his father and his mother back when they were alive, and one of the segments regarding the latter was just so powerfully acted and told that it genuinely brought me to tears, which is far FAR more than anything in the main game made me feel. If I cut together the best parts of this expansion into some kind of presentation, I could probably convince someone that, despite all the failings of the main game’s story, Iki Island manages to have a really compelling story that does a lot to redeem the game’s character writing.

But that is just not the expansion this ultimately is. This is still Ghost of Tsushima, and it’s still powered by all of the awful writing practices that drag the main game down so hard. We do nothing to really address the larger racism issues, for one. The whole magic Tengri shamans of the Eagle clan are more obviously fantastical and not meant to be portrayals of reality than anything in the main game manages, but it still doesn’t really fix anything from the main game’s problematic (to say the least) portrayals of either the samurai or invading forces, especially with the Eagle Clan’s magical poison that gives you trauma flashbacks until you go insane (the theoretical countdown clock against which is genuinely what Jin is facing against more than anything during his time on Iki).

As a whole, the biggest issue here from the larger plot writing is that the writers seem to have no idea that they’ve created such a good, compelling parallel between Jin and the raiders (as they’re called) living on Iki and the Mongols attacking Tsushima. Now Jin knows what it’s like to be viewed as an invader, to be *correctly* painted as a part of a clan butchering monsters hellbent on sweeping away any and all autonomy of a people and killing all who put up the slightest resistance. Granted, it’d be an extremely bizarre parallel to draw given how (somewhat understandably) little the main game’s story tries to be sympathetic to the ideologies of their invading characters, but it’s still a very compelling light to frame the story in, and they do absolutely nothing with it.

They do amazingly little with Jin’s new framing as an unwelcome invader forced to cooperate with his previous enemies, and what they *do* do basically just gives a “both sides were in the wrong” treatment to the attempted samurai invasion of Iki (despite all of the imagery they use of Lord Sakai’s forces butchering unarmed civilians, women and children, just for the crime of helping armed groups resisting the invasion). In the face of all of this fence sitting about how bad war crimes really are that they’ve insisted upon doing in this story, they don’t make it any easier for themselves when they have the ghost of Lord Sakai say “sometimes things that are terrible are also necessary” just for Jin to say “your crimes are not my own” and leave it at that. With JUST how awful they’ve shown Jin’s father to be, basically no better than Khotun Khan invading Tsushima, it is very hard to not find it anything but farcical that they thought a push back *that* weak was sufficient enough to close the book on Jin’s troubled relationship with his father (and his relationship with being an invader himself in the past).

Iki Island’s narrative threatens very often to get very interesting with the setups it provides for Jin and the new supporting characters, but it cannot escape the writers’ larger inability to take any stance stronger than “all violence is bad, always”. That feckless, centrist inability to actually take a stand against anything *or* for anything is at the root of a lot of Ghost of Tsushima’s greater writing issues, but it’s nowhere more stark than in this expansion. To paraphrase another essayist on similar grounds, from the perspective of Ghost of Tsushima’s writers, there are no actually bad actions, only bad teams. This is why they can frame the Mongols on Tsushima burning villages in retaliation for Jin’s actions as irredeemable monstrousness that demands violent retribution, and breathlessly also frame Lord Sakai’s nigh identical brutality on Iki as nothing but a problematic “there were bad actors on all sides” situation. The Iki Island expansion dares to ask, “why can’t we all just get along?” without even attempting to explore why, in fact, we very reasonably just cannot all get along, and the road to that non-answer is paved with victim blaming defenseless civilians for not merrily accepting their own subjugation and/or slaughter.

So, the story may be worse than we ever could’ve imagined such an awful story could stoop to, but what about the gameplay? The gameplay is, overall, just more Ghost of Tsushima. Anything you liked about the main game is more or less continued here, and anything that bothered you is gonna drive you twice as crazy now. There are a fair few more side activities than the main game has, with the motion controls for playing your flute, archery competitions, and even riddles you can solve, though I didn’t particularly care for them myself. The biggest thing worth pointing out about the expansion’s gameplay is that it is SO much harder than the main game’s that I can frankly barely believe why they chose to open it up right after Act 1 instead of making it just a post-game thing. Even compared to the enemies in Act 3 or the final bosses, Iki Island’s overall balancing is definitely meant for people who already swept the main game’s content, and that should really be kept in mind before starting it.

Two new enemy types make normal combat far harder, for one. The main difficulty in the main game’s enemies was just how much spongier they’d get if you didn’t have the right upgrades to the damage of your katana or passive equipment to help break their armor better. The Eagle Clan introduces not only a new, higher top tier to the enemy health bracket (they wear purple clothes!), but these new enemies also swap weapons constantly. Khotun Khan’s forces on Tsushima all only ever use one weapon out of the sword, shield, and spear sets, but the Eagle Clan’s purple warriors often carry all three of them and will swap between them as you fight them, making them very formidable enemies to tackle even if you’ve been very fastidious in upgrading your katana like I had.

The purple multi-weapon users are already pretty mean roadblocks to deal with, but nothing compares to the new support unit of the shaman. Any group of Eagle Clan enemies will have either one or even two of these guys, and their chanting gives a HUGE buff to all surrounding enemies (not just humans, but the Mongol attack dogs too!) that makes them far stronger, have way more health, and also barely stagger at all. This makes eliminating shamans your new mandatory priority #1, because there is just no way you’re surviving how strong the normal enemies are when they’re *so* much more resistant to staggering and damage. The new enemy types certainly make combat more difficult, and they make instant kills on enemies with either assassinations or standoffs way more valuable as fighting strategies as a result, but they mostly just serve to slow down and make even more tedious combat that has likely already begun to feel that much more perfunctory and tedious to the player. I was so relieved upon getting off of Iki, as you can’t go back to Tsushima until you finish the main story there, if for no other reason than that it meant I’d never have to fight a group of the Eagle Clan’s baddies again.

The unwelcome massive leaps in difficult, unfortunately, do not stop there. The very tough duels that plague the main game’s difficulty balancing are here too, and they’re WAY harder. There’re one main optional duel and one main story duel on Iki, and they’re both *crazy* hard compared to anything in the main game (especially anything you would’ve faced just after entering Act 2). There’s no gold on Iki at all, so you’re totally unable to upgrade your katana any more than you had when you got there. It’s definitely worth keeping an extra perma-save from before you start the expansion, because there’s a very good chance that someone not very familiar with technical 3D action games could get genuinely soft-locked with just how unforgiving the Eagle Clan leader is as a final fight. I’ve already said my piece in the main game’s review on how poor a fit for the larger gameplay loop I find these duels, and Iki Island only makes that existing issue far worse to deal with, and anyone who found the main game’s content too frustrating or difficult should definitely stay far away from Iki.

There’s not particularly much more to talk about in regard to the presentation of the expansion, as it’s fundamentally still pretty darn similar to the main game’s (for quite obvious reasons). Iki is a very beautiful place just like Tsushima is, and the music is still pretty good too (and I especially like how they use Jin’s playing of his flute for various side activities with how it relates to his late mother). The biggest point of comparison to the main game is actually a straightforwardly positive one, and it’s the voice acting. Jin’s voice direction specifically, rather than being so unendingly flat and boring like it is in the main game, is actually very full of emotion very often that clearly communicates how our leading man feels about things he says. It feels like damning with faint praise, at least for the main game’s voice work, but the moments of Iki’s storytelling that manage to be something worth caring about are largely down to finally being willing to let Jin’s voice actor finally show some darned emotion when he speaks.

Verdict: Not Recommended. It’s really weird to talk about “recommending” an expansion like this that is not stand alone, especially when I already can’t recommend the main game in the first place. I don’t know what I’d be saying right now if Iki Island had been some incredibly done personal story about Jin that was far and away something worth playing while the main game’s story is such horrid dreck, but that’s thankfully not a problem I need to solve right now. If you really liked the main game of Ghost of Tsushima, you’ll probably really like the Iki Island DLC expansion too, but if that’s who you are, then you probably already disagree with me so strongly that I can only wonder as to how you made it to this point in the review ^^;. Ultimately, Ghost of Tsushima’s expansion DLC is a land of contrasts that both manages to rise above anything the main game offers while also falling far, far worse than anything it’d done up to that point.

14. Astro's Playroom (PS5)

I’m a big 3D platformer fan, so the Astro games are something I’ve been really looking forward to for a while now. The more recent Astrobot may be far out of my price range for now, but this pack-in game is something I’ve nonetheless been really looking forward to! I really wanted something short but definitely good after finishing Ghost of Tsushima, and this fit the bill perfectly. It took me around 4-ish hours to play through the game and get all the collectibles (only one of which I had to look up the location of in the end).

I’m not sure you could really say that Astro’s Playroom has a “story” as such. It effectively has a conceit, which is just what it says. You play as the little robot Astro as he goes through stages based on the various parts of the PS5 (the cooling, GPU, memory, and CPU). It’s not meant to be literal physical representations of those aspects, of course, but that’s the gist of this celebration of Sony stuff that they used as a pack-in title for the PS5. It’s a got a *ton* of old Sony hardware that serves as its collectibles, and it’s got a ton of little Astro-type robots dressed up as various Sony game characters spread throughout its levels. It’s got some really deep digs for the references too. I like to think that I’m pretty darn well versed on old video game stuff, and there were still even a couple ones where I had no idea what they were going for. Some of the jokes and references are REALLY out there (like one of the collectibles has a “Stop or my Mom Will Shoot” reference on it), but even the references you don’t get will still be cute little gags or bits of set dressing that don’t infringe upon the experience at all.

The experience, as such, is a really solid but short 3D platformer! Of the four worlds, each is composed of four stages. The first and third stages are centered around normal platforming as Astro, while the second and fourth stages of a world are always centered around a particular vehicle specific to that world. Almost like early DS games were in love with making you use the touchscreen for everything, the special vehicle usually involves some way of manipulating the controller in some regard via the force feedback on the analog triggers or the touchscreen on the PS5 controller. The gimmick stuff definitely doesn’t feel as good as the normal platforming, but the stage design and movement overall feel great to go through. Hunting for secrets, be they hidden bits of PlayStation hardware to look at high quality 3D models of or puzzle pieces to reveal the huge mural in the hub world, is always a joy because it means both stuff to collect AND more great platforming to do! The only real complaint I could possibly have about the gameplay is that there’s just not enough of it, and that’s not a bad problem to have! X3

The presentation is really excellent too. The four worlds are really colorful and distinct, and they’re packed with style and personality. The little Astro robot versions of other Sony or Sony-adjacent franchises are downright adorable, and the collectible bits of Sony hardware you can find to display in the hub world are *really* impressive high quality models (for anyone who really cares about that kind of thing X3). The music is also great, and they help set a fun, adventurous mood for each world (and I’m also appreciative that the one song with lots of lyrics also has those full lyrics hidden in the world so you can sing along if you want to! X3).

Verdict: Highly Recommended. I was a bit skeptical that 2024’s Astrobot could really be *that* good, but given how fantastic Astro’s Playroom is, I’m definitely much more willing to believe that now. Astro’s Playroom is a fantastic freebie for buying a PS5, and it’s a really good 3D platformer in general. I wouldn’t go nearly as far as to say that you should buy the whole PS5 *just* to play this, but if you’ve got a PS5, like platformers, and somehow haven’t given this a try yet, then you’re doing yourself a heck of a disservice!

15. Michael Jackson: The Experience (PSP)

My PSP-loving partner got me a PSP some time ago, but only got to sending it to me very recently when they sent me the PS5 I bought from them. I knew she threw in some games (loose doubles she “grabbed out of [her] drawer”, as she stated it), but I didn’t know what they were until the thing finally arrived. This was one of those loose games from the doubles drawer, and while it was indeed a funny gag gift, I also could not imagine what this game even was. I wanted to make sure all the games she sent me worked in the first place, but this was one I actually played a bit of too because I just had to know what the gameplay was even like XD. I actually ended up liking it a lot, if only because I rather like a lot of MJ songs, and it ended up being a great game to just vibe and unwind if I didn’t feel like doing anything else that day. I ended up 100%-ing it with all 85 coins and 51 crowns, and it took me about 4.5 hours to do it with the English (UK) version of the game.

I had totally forgotten these games even came out, but this is just the PSP version of the DS game of the same name. A slew of Michael Jackson dancing games on console and rhythm games on handhelds that were made to (originally) correspond with Jackson’s revival tour that he announced shortly before he died. Ubisoft released these games in 2010 regardless, and this is one of ‘em XD. There are 17 songs to choose from, and while you only start with 3, you unlock more as you play more songs, and it doesn’t take long at all to unlock them all. The track list is pretty solid as such things go, and there really aren’t any obvious omissions from the shortened track list this has compared to the console version (though weirdly not just this but *all* versions of the game lack Man in the Mirror for some unknowable reason).

Each track has 3 difficulty levels, and scoring higher and higher gets you more coins to a maximum of 5 per song (with your increasing number of total coins being the way you unlock more songs in the first place). Each difficulty level of a song does record how many coins you got, but the total amount of coins does not record more than 5 per song no matter what difficulty you earned them on, making this a pretty beginner-friendly experience. What *does* count for each song is the crown (effectively a 6th coin, as it’s just earned by getting enough points after getting the 5th coin), and those just unlock little collectibles you can view in the gallery. It’s a very straightforward rhythm game in that regard, and the actual gameplay has a very similarly friendly approach towards casual rhythm game players (which I appreciate as a rather casual rhythm game player myself).

This isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or anything. You’ve got a bar at the bottom of the screen that buttons flow along, and you’ve gotta press the ones in rhythm with the song as they enter the target field. Strangely enough, this game actually only uses two whole buttons for that: the O button and left on the D-pad. At first, I thought this was a really weirdly overly casual feature, but once I started playing the tougher songs on hard, I grew to appreciate just how tricky even a two-button rhythm game can be, even if I imagine a seasoned rhythm game veteran will likely find the whole thing as child’s play.

Honestly, as much as I don’t mind a “pick up and play” easy rhythm game that anyone can enjoy, the biggest issue I have with the overall gameplay loop is that it’s a bit *too* casual in places. Particularly, this game has no point variances for greater or lesser accuracy when timing your button presses. That is to say, there are not “too late”, “close”, or “perfect” ratings when you hit the right button. As long as you hit the right button, you get the points for it. This makes the game pretty underwhelming as a score attack game, as the only real ways to get more points are alternating the L and R buttons faster during the occasional sections where that’s done instead of the Left & O button presses, or timing the activation of your X2 multiplier star power as optimally as possible. This is hardly a fatal flaw in a game already so casual-focused, but it definitely feels weird to not give the option for that type of score attack play *at all* when that’s hardly an abnormal feature to have in a rhythm game of this type.

The presentation is as fine as it is *weird*. Unlike the console versions, which have silhouettes of real actors dancing and such (much like Ubisoft’s Just Dance games), this game has a 3D model of Michael Jackson dancing as you play the songs. The clothes he’s wearing and the backgrounds he’s standing in front of (even the dances he’s doing) are appropriate to the respective song choices, but he’s also just such a low-detail model that he looks very little like Michael Jackson in the first place XD. I had about as much fun playing this game as I did pulling my friends into voice call to watch the “Michael Jackson homunculus” dance XD. It hardly ruins the experience or anything, as the audio quality is all great and the timing of the buttons to the songs seems more or less totally fine, but it’s still a very odd choice to put this Xbox 360 Avatar-lookin’ 3D model front and center for a game like this when he already looks so little like the actual guy ^^;

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is another really weird game to recommend. Like, as a casual rhythm game fan and an enjoyer of a fair few Michael Jackson songs, I had a fair bit of fun with this game. But I cannot imagine that most potential players (or at least most potential readers of this review X3) fall into such a very specific niche. If you’re a more serious rhythm game player, then this will likely be far too simplistic for you to really get much satisfaction out of. If you’re a more casual rhythm game player like me, then you’re probably disinterested enough in rhythm games that you’d never think to even read a review like this in the first place XD. If, for whatever reason, you find yourself in a position where you can play this game, you’ll probably have a decent time, but it’s far from something worth tracking down simply on its own merits (let alone importing it like I effectively, albeit unintentionally, did, given that it never came out in Japan XD).

[marurun]

The original Metal Slug is definitely the most reasonable game to attempt on minimal credits. It's still hectic and very challenging.

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

Now that's a review of Ghost of Tsushima I loved reading!

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025

1. Dead Space (2023) - PC
2. Dead Space 2 - PC
3. Dead Space 3 - PC
4. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon - PS5
5. Stellar Blade - PS5
6. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined - Switch
7. Silent Hill 2 (2024) - PC
8. Silent Hill f - PC

Silent Hill f is the first new Silent Hill (as opposed to a remake) in over a decade, and asks the question "can a good new Silent Hill game be made?" As it turns out, the answer is yes. 2 and f are a one two punch that really invigorated the fanbase, and now we have a remake of 1 and a new Silent Hill game both on the horizon.

Silent Hill f is the story of Hinako, a girl in 1960s Japan who is constrained by society. Her father is an alcoholic, her mother is a doormat, and her relationships with her friends is strained at times. After one altercation with her father she runs off to spend time with her friends. Shortly after meeting them a strange fog rolls into town, followed by a red kudzu that infests and kills one of her friends. So begins a journey through a nightmare, as Hinako must confront all that troubles her, as well as monsters.

Compared to the Silent Hill 2 remake, Silent Hill f has a more robust combat system and a more obviously linear path through each of the areas. The hospital feels like the RE1 mansion in comparison to what you're given here. That said, the game has a creepy atmosphere that is based around the ever encroaching kudzu, rather than the basic darkness of Silent Hill 2. And the protagonist is just as troubled.

Due to the setting, the game is entirely melee based. Hinako can hold up to three weapons at a time, and these weapons have a durability system. She gets light and heavy attacks, as well as a dodge with i-frames and a special charge attack. Enemies are vicious; they start at the level of the nightmare nurses from 2 and only get worse from there. In many ways they are more reminiscent of Dark Souls enemies in terms of their attack patterns and how you have to approach them. You can skip a lot of them, but there are forced combat arenas, so you can't avoid engaging with the system. Fortunately, the bosses are not too bad; by the time you get to them you should have a good stash of healing items, and their attack patterns tend to telegraph better than random enemies, so they are easier to dodge.

Like other Silent Hill games, there are multiple endings, though in this case you are locked into a single one on your first playthrough, and only on new game plus can you see the others. And the others add a lot of context to the events. Fortunately, you can basically get all you need from watching them, so you don't need to replay the game if you don't have the time for it. It's the one thing that brings down the game; the expectation that you'll play through it multiple times.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)
10. Gravity Circuit (PC)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)
12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)
13. Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island (PS5)
14. Astro's Playroom (PS5)
15. Michael Jackson: The Experience (PSP)

16. Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5)

This is, probably unlike most people, one of the games I was most excited to play on my PS5. I’m a big fan of 3D platformers, and I quite liked LittleBigPlanet when I was younger too. I was pretty lukewarm on the entries after 2, but even still, another game in the style of Mario 3D World was hard not to get excited about (even if it’s by the guys who made the aggressively mid LittleBigPlanet 3). To get my thoughts into the open as soon as I can, I was ultimately far from a super fan of this game. I had and have no plans to 100% it or get to the post-boss extra challenge levels either. Be that as it may, I did still beat the game, and it took me around 9 or so hours to get 203 dream orbs playing the English (UK) version of the game.

We open on Craft World, a utopia where all dreams in the universe coalesce and creators can put together anything they can imagine. This is also the home of the Sack Folk, who are some of the most creative and imaginative builders there are, and that is especially true for the one they call Sackboy, our main character. Paradise is lost in craft world when an evil trickster being called Vex attacks it and steals away all the Sack Folk to build his Topsy Turner, a horrid machine that will give him full control of Craft World to fill with awful, chaos-inducing uproar. Sackboy, however, manages to escape! With a bit of help from the wise woman Scarlet, he sets off on his quest, “a big adventure” you could even call it, to stop Vex and save Craft World!

LittleBigPlanet games often had story, but not with big, sweeping cutscenes like this game has. While I’m usually not a big critic of what people dismiss as “MCU-style dialogue” full of quips and jokes, this game’s writing really did grate on me pretty frequently, and it was pretty difficult to care about most of the time. I’m generally the kind of person who tries to pay as much attention as I can to even the shallowest stories, but this was a case where I just could not wait for the NPCs to stop talking so I could actually get back to the gameplay ^^;. Sackboy himself has absolutely no character at all, and is a silent avatar who is guided through the quest by the various main people in each world you go to.

From the dialogue to the shallow, overly wordy story, the whole thing feels very commercial and cynically designed to appeal to the widest possible demographic. The whole game suffers from that cynical stink (especially the really blatant GLADOS ripoff in world 4). Even Vex, who is by far the most entertaining and full of life of the game’s characters, feels almost custom-made to be a “sassy, evil bad guy” (a “Tumblr sexyman” as the hip folks online seem to describe it). It’s a lot of style, but not much substance under the hood to really make it appealing, and it’s games like this that really make me understand why the Mario games in this style function nigh entirely on pantomime to communicate their stories, as I can’t help but feel that this game would’ve benefited from a similar “less is more” approach too.

Speaking of the Mario games, the people behind this game had *definitely* heard of them. The general gameplay loop is very similar to Super Mario 3D World, with isometric 3D platforming going through fairly linear stages from one end to the other. They’ve even taken the star coins that those games use for collectibles and made their own equivalents via the dream orbs I mentioned earlier. Perhaps it’s my fault for being such a big fan of Mario 3D World in the first place, but this game just could not stop reminding me of better games (such as that) that I could be playing instead with just how painfully derivative the gameplay is.

Movement and jumping is so slow that levels feel like such a slog, especially earlier on before things get challenging. You can roll to both dodge enemy attacks as well as constantly roll to get more speed, but you’ve also got to constantly mash the O button if you want to keep rolling. You can change that in the accessibility options menu to be just holding the O button instead of constantly having to mash it, but in what I’m noticing is a pretty consistent pattern in Sony’s games of this generation, actually using that accessibility option is only penalizing yourself because it sucks. Turning the rolling from mashing into just a hole makes the rolling virtually unusable because it seems to start and stop whenever it wants, and in a game where it’s so easy to just fly off a ledge if you’re not careful (and you’re penalized for dying), it’s hard not to feel irritated by that.

Speaking of the poor accessibility options, there’s also this game’s version of Modern Game Disease (having to hold down R2 and/or L2 for 50%+ of the game), because holding R2 carries objects and grabs onto grabbable surfaces. Turning that from a hold into a toggle works just fine for carrying objects, but it’s awful for the grabbable walls and such. Very commonly, the game makes you hold onto a spinning cylinder to let its momentum fling you elsewhere. I’m sure that works pretty fine if you’ve got that grabbing set to the default hold feature, but if you’ve got it as a toggle, there are tons of parts in the late game where you’ve got to time your grab *exactly* right or get pinged off of the cylinder and into the abyss. While I certainly appreciate the thought of accessibility modes and features in modern games, I’d appreciate them a lot more if they, ya know, actually worked and didn’t feel like I was playing the sucker’s version of a game I already paid so much money for :/

Bad controls aside, the level design is just all around OK at best. It’s not awful, but the slowness of the movement and wide, open spaces make for what seems to be a game centered towards family play. The 4-player simultaneous multiplayer function also seems to lend itself towards that, but the game also gets *so* much harder later on that I’d have a hard time wanting to show this to someone who wasn’t already quite familiar with platformers. It’s not like other 4-player platformers like Rayman Legends or the more recent Mario games don’t also get hard, sure, but those games have the added advantage of having great, fast paced movement and level design, so multiplayer feels like something between an added challenge and just good family fun (depending on what game you’re playing). Unlike those other way better games, this game actually has whole levels you can’t even play if you’re not playing multiplayer, and I can’t help but feel that stink of cynical design once again as these seem perfectly poised to push people towards buying PS+ for the online or more DualSense controllers to play locally (a feature so few other PS5 games have that it feels like a bit of a waste of money these days).

The main thing that makes me think of this as more of a family game is that it actually has an infinite lives toggle in the accessibility menu for if you’re not so good at these sorts of games but still want to see the whole thing, which I do really appreciate even if I didn’t use it. Even still, I’m still not a huge fan of the fact that they’ve actually made the extra life mechanic *more* punishing than the old LBP games were over a decade earlier. Rather than the old system, where getting to a new checkpoint would give you 4 more fresh lives, this game has a maximum of 4 extra lives, and you’ll need to replenish them by finding more in the environment. Combat with enemies is clunky and awkward, and the movement is slow but floaty enough that fighting the more aggressive ones never feels terribly satisfying either. While I did start enjoying things a bit more as the game got more challenging, and I did finish the whole game, the wonky movement and bad combat (not to mention the bad accessibility features) were more than enough to push me away from ever considering getting the 275 dream orbs you need to see the post-game’s challenge levels.

The presentation is very LittleBigPlanet, but it also still reeks just as much of the cynicism that plagues the rest of the experience. Even on my ancient 2010 model TV, the game looks really good for just sheer technical prowess. Textures and models look incredible, and you can really feel the “next gen”-ness of the presentation in that regard (even if this is still weirdly a PS5 game that manages to have loading screens between stages). The visual and sound design, though, were a lot less inspired. NPCs feel very over designed, and their shallow writing makes their pretty good voicework hit a lot flatter too. I’m not sure if it’s just the sound environment they recorded in or what, but a lot of the VA feels very weird to listen to, almost like it’s been ADR’d in after the fact. I know it’s a video game, so it’s not like there’s “on set” audio in the first place, but just how little their environments seemed to affect the sounds of their voices was something that bothered me very consistently whenever cutscenes would play.

The music is also really underwhelming. A lot of it just fits very poorly for a 3D platformer, and I’d chalk a lot of that up to just how much of it is remixes of or literal outright use of licensed music. From Uptown Funk to Material Girl and even Brittney Spears’ Toxic, there are a TON of licensed songs in this game, and it really helps make the thing feel like it doesn’t have a real identity unto itself. The use of the proper tracks is something I basically always didn’t like too. The songs will play in their respective stages and progress the lyrics as you hit certain points of the stage. This sounds all fine and dandy, but all but one of those sorts of stages doesn’t have any kind of meaningful auto-scrolling element to it. Them just being normal levels that you’re encouraged to hunt for collectibles and point bubbles through means you’ll spend *so* much time just hearing those repetitious few bars between the lyric bits that you’ll be going insane, with the only thing keeping you lucid being the knowledge that you’ll never play this stage again once you finally get to the exit.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I ragged on it a lot, but this ultimately isn’t a *bad* game. It may all feel cynical and underwhelming in its design, but at the end of the day, the biggest sin it commits is that it’s constantly going to be reminding you of better games you could be playing. I’d normally add a caveat of “well, if you haven’t played lots of the great platformers of ages past, it won’t bother you so much”, but this being a PS5 game, it also has to directly compare with the digital pack-in game Astro’s Playroom that comes with every PS5. Astro’s Playroom absolutely destroys this game in terms of control and level design, and the only advantage this game is going to have is the amount of content and multiplayer features. Perhaps those will be enough to keep you going if you decide to pick this up, but I have a hard time thinking that most players will find this game satisfying enough to justify the money you’ll be paying for it :/

[PartridgeSenpai]

Now that's a review of Ghost of Tsushima I loved reading!

Thank you! These longer reviews don't always come out the way I want them to, but I was pretty happy with the part 1 and 2 of the Tsushima review, so I'm glad that it does indeed read well like I thought it did! ^w^

[marurun]

Great review of Silent Hill f, Ack MrPopo (that's what I get from trying to read then post while also working on something that requires my attention). I've read two different attitudes about the combat: some people love that the combat is less janky, but others find having smoother combat makes the game less of a survival horror game, because now there's more combat focus and your character suddenly feels competent to deal with these scary threats. But I guess this whole discussion happened around Resident Evil years ago.