• I mentioned getting VAMPYR from Playstation Plus in my last post and it turns out that was one of my favorite games in a long time. The fighting stinks but if you make the right skill upgrades and find the right weapons you'll quickly go from under to overpowered, trivializing the bad part of the game and able to focus on the social aspects. Nothing about this game is perfect - in fact, you can find something new to complain about every five or ten minutes - but somehow it all congeals into this really fun, unique game that stands as a good example of just how far some unique ideas and strong world building can get you. Plus, it remained VERY 2020 throughout, and while most people ran from virus media I clung to it as a reminder.

• HOLLOW KNIGHT is a game I can now understand why people love, at least partially, but it's just not for me. I find the art kind of boring to look at and the combat feels as demanding as something like Dead Cells without the sheer grind you can run on to overpower enemies you can't handle. I set out hoping to binge this game hard but fell off immediately instead.

• NBA 2K20 is a game I re-installed when the 2021 season started. I must've downloaded this game earnestly three or four times (along with 2K19) since the bubble hoping it'd click but honestly these games just feel like ass these days. If their fantasy mode was any good I might still be hooked, but I hate how MyLeague games feel and just can't find sliders that make up for the fact the players are too big on courts that are too small and the animations still feel designed for the post-up roots of the franchise's 2007-2012 glory days.

• DESTINY 2 is still maybe the best pure game-feel of the generation, and I'm always good for a month or two of solid play once or twice a year, but I didn't buy the Beyond Light expansion this time around and the level of content for a solo player seems extremely limited at this point...again, the core gameplay hooked me hard for a few weeks, but if I'm gonna mindlessly grind GENSHIN IMPACT has a stronger sense of moving forward and...

• MLB THE SHOW 20 is still the most perfect mindlessly podcast and achieve something new game ever made. 12 year old me is so happy I'm playing a baseball game this much, 32 year old me still can't believe I care about baseball again at all.

• CYBERPUNK 2077 was a fun experience for me, a base PS4 owner, because I've never got to go to E3 and see a work-in-progress game before. This game looks like a Jackson Pollock impersonation of a Claude Monet painting. The voice acting is so-so, the open world is basically Grand Theft Auto III levels of dis-engaged (I can't believe this game decided it's Wanted system works at all - they should've just not had cops), the action is pretty illegible, the stealth is not my jam, and the game hard crashed my PS4 more in two weeks than the system has in seven full years otherwise. I was fascinated by all of it, but accepted Sony's offer for a refund and uninstalled the game as soon as I played my second hour-long mission that hit a fail state crash three times in a row and started back at the beginning.

• KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO is wildly ambitious in some ways, but in others...I played four chapters and all the interstitials leading up to Chapter V in a single evening and loved the mindstate it put me in, but the more ambitious it got with perspective shifts and the more characters it piled on, I found myself wishing there was some voice acting here, or some kind of lore book I could double back on to connect some dots. I'm excited to finish, but I'm not sure when I'll get back in the mood. There's no whiskey in the house.

• SHADOW OF THE TOMB RAIDER is a game I was scared away from by the zeitgeist despite absolutely loving the first two games in the reboot series...and I'm fascinated by this game in a lot of opposite ways from Cyberpunk. It's just as gorgeous as The Last of Us Part II or Red Dead Redemption 2 and likely the best example of HDR on base consoles I'll see before a PS5 appears on my table. The combat is a huge step back, but surprisingly (and thankfully) this game is mostly tomb raiding and mindlessly completing conversational side missions in large hub towns. It's clear that this wanted to be a definitive game: bits of Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin's Creed, Uncharted and even predictions of The Last of Us Part II are in this thing and it's usually worse at all the things it's borrowing from those franchises. The story is also batshit bad, equivalent in whiplash factor to Wonder Woman 84.

And yet...I've put nearly 30 hours into it and am continuing to gawk at the scenery and scrounge for flavor documents that add zero flavor to the world. There's a baseline appeal to this, most of all that with a little more focus on the things it's clearly best at (which double as the things that make it unique) Shadow could have been an all-time action game. Instead, like Vampyr, it's a death by 1,000 cuts situation that, sadistically, can still leave you satisfied.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
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