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"[The] "challenge" aspect of the game is basically a sequence of traps where the objective is generally "make exactly the right movements or die and start again" which, in the abstract, is about as fun as playing Operation in a Parkinson's ward. There are chasey bits, where the monster catches up and stuffs you into a pita bread if you're not immediately sprinting in the right direction when it starts; there are combat-y bits, where you have to swing a melee weapon at precisely the moment an enemy is pouncing or get your head caved in on a floorboard; and stealthy bits, where you get spotted and eaten if you so much as startle a flatulent aphid, which leads to some moments having to be replayed and replayed, and dread gives way to boredom, gives way to anger, gives way to quitting, gives way to the right at a mini-roundabout. I don't know how one fixes this. It's the classic horror game paradox: the threat of sudden death is necessary for creating the feel of being a little ant postman trying to deliver mail to Mrs. Trapdoor Spider's house, but the moment that sudden death actually happens, all the tension disappears, and each subsequent death as you struggle to get past the challenge is like the game continuing to stab an already-stabbed balloon. I suppose, ideally, you'd want to design it so the player escapes by the skin of their teeth each time, but that's a tough balance, because some players have slower reflexes, or are trying to play while hiding behind the sofa cushions."

"It's the time of year when AAAs are put to bed to dream restless dreams of middling Metacritic ratings and rampaging seven-headed Twitch influencers, and we have to keep the nightlight on with midrange jank and the usual indie survive 'em ups. It's not that I dislike survival crafting as a genre; I just don't feel like it's taught me any practical survival skills. I head out to the wilderness, gather some wood and some stone, pack them together and tuck them under my scrotum for five seconds, and the result is not a makeshift axe, but an awkward conversation with my prostate specialist."

"Hob does do a good job of executing what it sets out to do: The air of wandering adventure, of secret purpose, of boredom, of exploring the ruins of strongholds and cities once mighty if boring, atmospheric, boring, boring, boringly boring... Don't misunderstand me, Hob... "It sounds like you think I'm boring, Yahtz." All right, I guess you haven't misunderstood me, yes!"

"You spend the majority of the game in the big survival sandbox, gradually expanding your capabilities until you acquire a working spaceship, and my assumption was that this was the next stage of expansion; I was going to be able to cruise around the sandbox in my new penis extension, go back to all those mean asteroids that once bullied me, and drive through a nearby puddle to humiliate them in front of their asteroid girlfriends. But no; all you can do with your new ship is fast-travel to another, entirely separate sandbox where there's space combat mechanics all of a sudden, and introducing combat at this stage is like giving us a Snickers where all the peanuts are crammed into the last two bites. Although, you don't even have to fight them, so it's more like all the peanuts are put in a little Ziploc bag and taped to the outside."

"(sotto voce) Okay, Yahtz, you can do this; one more week before the big releases start, and then you can stop pretending anyone gives a shit about indie ga... Oh! Hello there, viewers!"

"I like the Persona series; I guess I'm just owning that now. I like the concept of a magic world formed from the subconscious minds of humanity so you can go into the head of someone you don't like and kick the furniture around until miniature chairs fly out of their ears. Come to think of it, I also liked Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Ni no Kuni II somewhat, and EarthBound and Chrono Trigger back in the day-- Dammit, do I actually like JRPGs, and I just hate reviewing them because I only have a week to play, and they've usually got runtimes inversely proportional to the length of all the female characters' booty shorts? Hang on, let me stare at this anime character for a bit. Hmmm... Nope, still looks like the grotesque offspring of an inflatable sex doll and a three-point electrical socket."

"But the stealth is like a blatantly rigged carny game where the cans are glued together and the goldfish have all died, anyway. It's the shitty kind of stealth where every motherfucker on the map instantly knows your position (and least favorite place to be shot in) because you moved one quarter-inch out of cover to look around and were spotted by someone's hamster. Thus begins The Cock-Up Cascade, and I hate Cock-Up Cascade, because it feels like being unduly and continuously punished for making one tiny mistake. The commanders also instantly know where you are, and will continually re-spawn backup until you storm their office and chop all their arms and legs off -- like the exact opposite of the smooth, un-rattled secret agent you ostensibly are."

"We kick off playing as Iden Versio, a commando and true believer for the evil Empire with a name that sounds like a low-market electronics company from Eastern Europe. She flies around the galaxy doing commando shit with her two squad members: Del Meeko, a slightly nerdy bloke with the word "meek" in his name, and Hask, a sneering Imperial blue-eyed boy with the word "ass" in his name. So here are the things we immediately know for absolute certainty will happen: the Empire's going to get its shit pushed in, Versio's going to switch sides, kill Hask in a boss fight at some point, and some ghoulish recreation of Carrie Fisher's corpse will probably call her a "cool dude" and give her a fist bump."

"[That's] it, really; I'd heard that Natsume was driving the Harvest Moon ice cream van smack into the animal shelter, and I suppose I was just curious to see the wreckage for myself and pick through it for salvageable orange Frooties. In the meantime, if, like me, you enjoy fantasizing about what it would be like to have actual manual skills, there's a new Story of Seasons coming this month that's probably the one worth holding out for. Or try the remake of the GBA one that's out on Steam; keyboard controls are a bit wonky, and it's hard to get a good sexual tension going when all the love interests are proportioned like Dora the Explorer, but that's just the companionable whiff of cow manure that drifts into the farmhouse kitchen, compared to One Worlds hundred-yard swim down the factory farm runoff pipe."

"There's a lot about base-designing that feels inefficient. You're supposed to designate areas as specific rooms, but I'm unclear on why my minions need a barracks, and a dining hall, and a break room, and an entirely separate kind of break room for replenishing mental health or something. That's what happens when you let the fuckers unionize, I suppose. Furniture for one kind of room can't go in any other kind of room, which makes no sense; would it really break the interior designer's heart to shove a fucking vending machine in the break room so my dudes don't have to trudge all the way to the dining hall for a Twix? And while we're on the subject, why can I only put fire extinguishers, guard posts, and staircases in rooms officially designated as "corridors"? I just wanted a fucking split-level food court! Also, why did I have to research the concept of a staircase?! Where was my evil genius educated, St. Bungalow's School for the Wheelchair-Bound?"

"Incidentally, the mayor of City World is Pauline, who may be the same one from Donkey Kong, but I'm not sure they ever directly admit that; probably a hard thing to bring up in casual conversation. "Hey, sorry if this sounds weird, but didn't I rescue you from a monkey?" This is the same City World that's populated with realistically-proportioned humans, by the way, which, for me, raises the question of what the fuck Mario is, if not a human like these lads. Some frighteningly malformed species of hairy pygmy?"

"Outriders blurb file says a couple of interesting things: firstly, that it can be completely enjoyed in single-player, which is always a wonderful excuse to test that claim. Does this mean you have an offline mode, Outriders? "Oho ho ho ho! It's good that we can still have fun, Yahtzee!" Yes, might as well admit now that this will only be a review of the first four or five hours of Outriders, 'cos most of the limited time I had to play it in, the servers stayed on about as reliably as an oversized sweater on a mischievous dog. I know we're all fucking jaded to games being always online these days, but maybe, as a favor to me, you could all go back to not being jaded just for a little bit? Burn down a few shrines to capitalism? How about one shrine to capitalism? And you don't even have to burn it; we can just piss in the letterbox."

"The premise is, a married couple whose relationship is bottoming out so hard it's getting carpet burns inform their friendless, presumably homeschooled and probably on the spectrum daughter that they're getting divorced. Said daughter proceeds to cry on some dolls she made of her parents for Christ knows what reason and the parents' souls get magically transferred into the dolls. Blimey! Lucky she didn't cry into some bog roll or the sandwich she was eating; that would've been a bit Kafkaesque. The parents must then work together to find a way back to normal by navigating abstract puzzle platforming fantasy worlds based on aspects of their family home, which appears to have been about the size of Windsor fucking Castle. Harangued from start to finish by an omnipotent self-help book with a slightly racist accent whom you and the protagonists will swiftly want to murder. In fact, I'd have given the game's story more points if it had ended with the family finally coming together over a cheerful backyard book burning."

"Now, Resident Evil has had its ups and downs, in my view: mainly downs, and specifically two ups - Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 7 - and Vi-li-li-li-lage is best summarized as what you'd get at the exact midpoint between those two games. So, from 7, we have the first-person gameplay that, again, feels like we're piloting a refrigerator box balanced on a Roomba, as well as essentially the same plot beat-for-beat: Ethan gets toyed with by family of psychos, kills them one-by-one, discovers something near the end that ties it to the overarching Resident Evil story, the way one ties the leash of a perfectly satisfactory dog to the front of a combine harvester. The only difference is the acreage. And from Resident Evil 4, we take the gothic B-movie vibe, inventory system, quirky merchant character and associated weapon upgrade mechanics, and basically the whole setting: isolated village in open-quotes "Europe". "Europe", eh? So somewhere between Manchester and Istanbul, then?"

"Triple A games are now merely platforms for blatant attempts to fleece money from colossal dimwits that somehow have financial independence despite not being able to open a tin of beans without losing an eye. And then the publishers will say, "Hey, just because we erected a giant sign saying 'Please jump off this cliff and dash yourselves to death on the jagged rocks below!' doesn't mean you have to do that!" Granted, but I object to the way most of the game takes place in the shadow of the giant sign, and the rest of it is spent perched astride the giant sign. What I mean is, Assassin's Creed Origins is one of those Triple A terminal cases where everything seems to have been built around the giant cliff-jumping sign as an afterthought. Firstly, it's got all the usual variables: Character levels and XP, in-game currency, weapon upgrades, crafting items; 'cause of course, the more things you can quantify, the more imaginary prizes you can put in a loot box, the more you can base the gameplay around making numbers bigger and hypnotize the players into wanting a weapon identical to their current weapon except with a whole two numbers bigger more than they want their next fucking meal! I can't think of what other purpose giving every character a level could possibly have. It's certainly catastrophic for immersion, when anything more than two levels higher than you will just mash you into a fine paste even if you do get a stealth attack on them; one would think a hidden blade to the windpipe would be a pretty decisive argument-ender no matter how many press-ups they did that morning."

"I don't want to dwell on the prevailing loot box controversy because it's been covered to death elsewhere and I'm not a multiplayer guy; I was more pissed off about EA selling Battlefront I at full price with no single-player campaign and then sticking one in their second, equally full-priced game and expecting forgiveness. But then, this is an increasingly-popular strategy, isn't it? If you've done something shitty, follow it up with an even shittier thing and the first shitty thing will be swiftly forgotten and normalized. Take EA's advice: if you get caught cheating with your wife's sister, double down and fuck her guinea pig, as well."

"So you have to snipe crazy long distances calculating wind drift and bullet drop-off, so it's actually rewarding when you score a headshot and it's like watching slow motion footage of a dog overturning their food bowl. But this is a modern stealth game and so as always the spectre of Cockup Cascade hangs overhead like a socially inept zeppelin. If you miss your target and set off an alert then just fucking reload, because if you couldn't cottage cheese their noggin while they were standing around daydreaming about pies then you definitely won't do it while they're sprinting to the car. And when alerted, all the enemy bodyguards instantly know your position 'cos I guess they're all experts in trigonometry, or maybe my mum made me carve my name and address into all my bullets, and they start firing back. And, mystifyingly, can hit you. From a thousand metres! Makes me wonder why I blew all my money on the sniper rifle equivalent of a Porsche 911 if a bunch of rusty AKs that a rogue nation picked up at the CIA's last rummage sale can achieve the same result!"

"The point is, you know it's a slim pickings kind of release week when I seriously give a Mario Golf game a chance, but I figured, "Hey! I just came off slightly enjoying the sniping gameplay in that Sniper: Roast Waterfowl with Carrots 2 game, and what's golf gameplay if not sniping gameplay without the body count?" And so, I set out to escape from worrying about rising income inequality by pretending to be an internationally famous public figure enjoying a sport exclusively played by rich cunts... or not. And that was the first troubling sign: when I started the main single-player campaign, and you don't get to play as Mario. The named characters are only for the multiplayer and challenge modes, I'm afraid; the peasants have to play the campaign as a custom Mii, because of course, when I play something called "Mario Golf", I want to spend the whole time playing as Richard Dean Anderson or Jeffrey Dahmer. Mario, if you can slam your name over the top of this title like an artificially enlarged penis across an unsuspecting forehead, you can damn well stop scoffing mushroom tortellini in the clubhouse and put some bloody work in!"

"Look, I'm not mad at you, Assassin's Creed Origins; I'm just disappointed. And bored. Mostly bored. I might have had a better time if the game had let me speed through the story campaign instead of forcing me to grind up dull, repetitive side-quests to reach the minimum level for the next main mission. I don't like the feeling that the game is fighting with me to stop me getting what I want out of it. Actually, maybe I am mad at you, Assassin's Creed Origins! I'm so sick of all this; I'm sick of playing Triple A games that feel like they exist not because a creator had a vision and an idea that excited them, but because quarterly income projections needed to be met. It's like Blackbeard going into stock market fraud; yeah, it's more lucrative, but there's no freedom or adventure, and they won't let you carve tits on the figurehead!"

"The Monstrums shape the overall plot in that each chapter, Adol gets to know one of them, add them to his adventuring party, and discover their civilian identity, and it never ceases to be hilarious that the game keeps presenting it like we're meant to be surprised, because the Monstrum disguise basically consists of a change of hairdo. Which might make some sense in Anime World, where there are ninety thousand hairdos and three faces for everyone to share, but come the fuck on! Oh, the sassy, matronly party member with big tits is secretly the only other sassy, matronly character with big tits? Next, you'll be telling me that Prince Adam knows more than he's saying about this "He-Man" fella."

"Every now and again, you get to play as Bayek's missus doing ship combat missions, which I find mystifying. Does Ubisoft think we now expect Assassin's Creed to have ship combat, just because Black Flag had it and it was a little beacon of joy and light glimmering all too briefly from inside Ubisoft's churning mass? Because I don't want your ship combat if you're just cynically crowbarring it in like a nice ball of glittery tin foil to look at while we're getting sodomized over the recycle bin."

"Ah, Psychonauts, what a great game that was... I hope your fingers are still smarting from the last time I had to bring that across. Sure, the platforming physics were a bit jank and all the characters looked like their concept art had been scanned in by someone with Parkinson's disease, but it was funny and well written and weird because it was a Tim Schafer game from that wonderful golden age of the PS2 era when games could be weird and culty - I said "CULTY"! - because they weren't expected to make enough money to pay for the CEO's moon expedition. Unfortunately they were still expected to make some amount of money and that's where Psychonauts 1 fell short on initial release, and why I had to start breaking fingers."

"And in the year when loot boxes became a symbolic evil right alongside toothbrush mustaches and Ugg boots, PlayerUnknown's Burbling Grandma's cosmetic loot boxes are taking a pretty sizable amount of piss -- probably up to waist-deep at least. After my first boots adventure, I knuckled down and church-camped my way to my second loot box, dreaming of the next fancy cosmetic that would surely make me the belle of the morgue. And ya know what I got? A pair a beige trousers. Great. This'll be perfect camouflage if the next match takes place in an Ikea showroom. So I knuckled down again until I got my third loot box which contained a pair of white trousers. My fourth, which is about where I resolved to give up playing the loot box market, was -- brace yourselves -- a pair of black trousers. Well, at least I assembled a complete spectrum of trousers. Or to put that another way, I Painstakingly United a Britches Gradient."

"Lord, save me from all these fucking survival games. (There's an ironic joke in there somewhere.) They always start sensible with combining rock with stick to create stick with rock on the end. But sooner or later you end up mashing together two mushrooms and a piece of discarded tinfoil to create a magazine-fed 5.56mm Colt AR-15, which you then rub on a small pile of turds for a second to add the optional holographic sights. Still I understand why they appeal. Where most games revolve entirely around the player waiting giggling just over the horizon for you to step into the designated minotaur area so it can leap out and start flinging minotaurs, it's refreshing to play a game whose world feels like it couldn’t give a shit about you, that its environment and life forms could muddle along perfectly well by themselves and which will kill you stone dead if you go twenty minutes without sucking any hydration from the tear ducts of a passing sparrow. Anyway, we've done crafting survival games in most of the standard Mario level biomes -- grasslands, desert, jungle, ice world -- so until they bring out a crafting survival game set in food world where we have to make spears out of Twiglets, here's a crafting survival game set in a ocean level, Subnautica. You are Rex Handsome, faceless mute space adventurer with the superhuman ability to not go all wrinkly when they stay underwater too long. Sadly he got this power by trading in his ability to prevent spaceships from exploding, and his spaceship explodes over an ocean planet with only three survivors: Him, one escape pod, and the Mars bar in the glove compartment. Now our hero must find a way off the planet, but in the meantime do the usual survival crafting game stuff: Build a base, find food and water, explore, and remember to breathe every now and again, you dozy git. Subnautica is the kind of game that probably could have gotten away with procedurally generating the map and having no further plot beyond, "See how long you could last and maybe find yourself a nice crafting project, like building a castle with a fire breathing effigy of The Allman Brothers on the top." So I was surprised to see that it didn't do that. The world map is fixed and astonishingly there's a plot with an actual ending, where you get to leave the planet tearfully waving goodbye to The Allman Brothers as you go. HO, YES! That space ship disaster wasn't just a contrived setup; the massive wreckage is your principal navigation point for the whole game, and your first challenge is figuring out how you're going to loot it while it's on fire and pissing radiation like an incontinent dog from the Bikini atoll."

"Well, hijack my helicopters, I can't believe there’s been six Far Cry games already! Surely the concept of liberating an open world sandbox from a charismatic fuckface by clearing out base after base with a silenced sniper rifle and occasionally having to shake a mountain lion off your todger is still as fresh and exciting as a dissipating fart in a locked sauna. So what original new setting is the premise being airdropped into now, Ubisoft? Liberating a chain of remote Scottish islands from charismatic football hooligans? Liberating an antarctic research station from a charismatic penguin? "No! This time you're liberating... a tropical island!" Erm. You mean like in Far Cry 3? And Far Cry 1? "No, of course not. You're in the Caribbean for a start. That's slightly more equatorial than the last two tropical islands. Probably. And anyway, this time you're liberating the tropical island from a charismatic totalitarian dictator." Like the one in Far Cry 4? "Look, if you like freshness so much, why don't you piss off to your local Whole Foods and stick your head under the intermittent broccoli misting device?!""

"On the fictional tropical probably slightly more equatorial island of Yara, a charismatic totalitarian dictator – with the emphasis on dick – is oppressing the people, and you are a generic ex-military type with ties to the resistance and a mysterious tendency to go on violent rampages as favours for people you've just met. You're planning to get on a refugee boat and escape to America, where you will happily live out your days getting blamed for all the nation's problems by chronically obese people in motorized wheelchairs, but moot point because you're going to escape about as surely as the annoying fly in my kitchen when I'm holding the back door wide fucking open, so of course your boat gets shot up and all your friends die and you wash up on the beach. Interestingly though, this doesn't change your motive. You only sign up with the rebels so they'll give you another, less shot up boat to escape to Disneyworld in. Which they do, also interestingly, at the end of the first chapter. Wishing you the best of luck with your Burger King application. So I'm looking at this boat thinking "Hang on, this smacks of that 'joke ending' thing the last couple of Far Crys have done where you can make your character flat out not start the game and piss off home instead." And I was buggered if I was gonna play the whole first chapter again, so I just meekly went back to the rebels and magically became a die hard dedicated revolutionary because the premise demanded it. This annoyed me because in previous games – well, mainly just 3 – I enjoyed the way the main character and his motives developed organically over the course of the plot, but this feels like they're asking me to do all the work. What, do I just invent my own reason for why my dude abandons his escape plan and joins the rebels? Fine. I'm also going to invent that he secretly draws Gummi Bears porn and has a model 19th century sailboat instead of a cock. Whee, this is fun."

"I mean PUBG, which stands for PlayerUnknown's Bonanza Goldmine, the breakout hit multiplayer shooter based somewhat on the concept of Battle Royale, except Battle Royale didn't involve quite so many people running around in their undepants (not yet, anyway; don't put the idea in their head, you know what Japanese culture's like). One hundred players are dropped unarmed and helpless into a deserted sandbox map, everyone who owned property in the area apparently thought that a small pile of guns and supplies makes a lovely living room conversation piece, the playing area gradually shrinks over time, and the winner is the last person to get shot, fall to their death, or quit in disgust after listening to the voice chat. Because another thing PUBG could stand for is Players Unabashedly Backing Genocide. Seriously, the first thing I did was mute that shit 'cause I started my first game and immediately heard someone going, "Niggers, niggers, niggers, niggers," and I know that sounds like something I'd make up, but I swear they were. Hell, who needs to interact with the other players, anyway? I do usually avoid multiplayer games. After all, I Personally Understate the Benefits of Gregariousness. But I'm fine as long as I don't have to socialize and we can just mutely exterminate each other, like when I go to trivia night at the pub."

"Oh, you want opinions on Guardians of the Galaxy, do you? Oh boy, do I have opinions on Guardians of the Galaxy. On the one hand it's a snot-squirtingly mediocre game that like so many AAA games of its ilk has the air of something that was stitched together from preexisting templates by about nine different teams who haven’t been talking to each other since a harrowing experience at the company picnic, but it also has a licensed soundtrack that includes "Kickstart My Heart", so on the other hand it's my game of the year, no more questions, please. I can only assume someone at Square must've stolen my high school crush diary, 'cos how else would they know that "Kickstart My Heart" is my one weakness? See, there's absolutely no action a living being can take that doesn't become slightly cooler when it's done to "Kickstart My Heart". Even fingerpainting with Grandma takes on a sort of air of euphoric defiance."

"I'd love to comment on Battlefront IIs ending, but it doesn't seem to have one. You think it's going to have one, and then it just doesn't, but don't worry; a text caption assures us that the story continues in multiplayer. Well, fuck me for trying! There I was, giving the benefit of the doubt, only for the doubt to be farted on and thrown back in my face! I felt sorry for you, story campaign! I thought it was a shame you were forced to hang out with your ugly roommate who charges micropayments before they'll do the washing-up; I thought I could take you out by yourself and maybe we could all have a little fun and take our minds off your ugly roommate! Little did I realize he was setting up a fucking threesome!"

""Well, go on then, Yahtz, tell us World War II shooters are overdone. And while you're at it, be sure to inform us that water is wet and modern political discourse is fucked." Ironically, pointing out World War 2 shooters are overdone is, itself, overdone. We're stuck in the fucking ouroboros of tedium, the snake eating its own tail while complaining that the seasoning is bland. Actually, I wasn't going to rag on Call of Duty for going "Nazi-fartsy" on us again, because I've come to accept that while shooters can't seem to get away from World War II, it definitely hasn't been for want of trying. The Modern Warfare trend was about as valiant an attempt as one could expect, and we all know where that ended so, fuck it, let shooters have their fucking comfort zone. It's the only uncomplicatedly good setting for a quote "realistic" shooter. Get too close to the present and war's mainly decided not by the ground-level machine gun exchanges that FPSes bank on, but by whose tech can make the biggest explosion happen the furthest away. Also it's still the war with the best narrative. Where the writers weren't trying to frame the side with aircraft carriers and predator drones as the plucky underdogs struggling valiantly against an opponent armed mainly with harsh language and angry livestock. Besides, the lesson "don't be like the Nazis, you stupid fucks" is one that certain audiences still haven't properly internalised in this modern age apparently, so fuck it, all is forgiven, World War II shooters."

"The real turning point comes when the depressed girl commits suicide; that's the definite point of bollock descent into icy water. Although, her depression had been portrayed with a slightly uncomfortable authenticity, so it wasn't creepy in an enjoyable psychological horror kind of way; it was just really fucking sad. It happens regardless of what choices you pick, which, in itself, might be an effective premise for a game about depression: constantly reliving the same few days trying to save her and failing every time because her problems are too deep-seated to be fixed just because you accidentally felt her up on day three."

"I'm just going to spoil a lot of The Inpatient, because, trust me, missing out on this one is not going to haunt you to your dying days. The thrust of this and Until Dawns premise is that if you eat human flesh, you turn into a wendigo, right, and the main diversion of the plot is whether you turn into a wendigo or your roommate does. Now, in the former, our roommate is absent — presumably 'cos we scoffed down their entire body with French fries and ranch — but I don't get why the roommate becomes a wendigo in the other scenario, because we're self-evidently not eaten; I don't remember looking down at any point and seeing that one of my legs was chewed off. Just a little plot hole, but there's so little plot, one hole turns it into a fucking engagement ring."

"...Security Breach is a full-on first-person stealth shooter Metroid-vania reminiscent of Alien: Isolation, if Alien: Isolation had fucking sucked prehensile slimy dick! I don't even have to review it. I only started playing it in case my Dying Light 2 code didn't come in, and it did. But when it did, I said to myself, "Y'know what? Techland's new over-produced grind-a-thon can wait its fucking turn, because Security Breach is very bad and I want to hurt it!""

"Eventually I did this enough times that the game went, "Oh! It's coming up on six o'clock! You can go the main entrance and leave!" Feels like there's a lot of the map that hasn't been used yet, but I am so not going to question this; got to the exit, the game goes, "Psych! This is the bad ending! You gotta keep playing to get the rest of the plot." D'oh, the old Symphony of The Night trick. Okay, guess I won't leave. "Great! We are now permanently disabling saving the game." WHAT!? Why the fuck are you doing that? Are you embarrassed about the good ending or something? Are your knickers in shot at one point and now you're going to discourage me from trying? Well, mission fucking accomplished!"

"The Inpatient is a prequel of sorts to Until Dawn, that branching-paths slasher movie game from a while back, and so it takes a few moments to remind us at length that our choices will have consequences; for example, if we choose to get bored and stop playing, that will have the consequence of a slightly more enriching afternoon."

"I tried out Babylon's Fall, Platinum's new live service hack-n-slashathon on PS5, or had a crack at it if you will, not that it made it easy. First it wouldn't even start without a PS Plus subscription, even though I only wanted to play single player because y'know, humanity. It's like a highway bypass: I understand why it needs to exist but I'd rather not have one in my house. Got past that and Babylon's Fall still wouldn't unbutton its top until I also signed into a Square Enix account. What the fuck possible benefit do you imagine I'd extract from signing up for another fucking account, Square Enix, other than one more excuse to never check my email?! Christ, this is like trying to get through airport security with an inflatable novelty suitcase nuke. But eventually I got through it all and when I was on the other side of the metal detector putting my shoes back on and admiring the new tag they'd punched through my ear, I cast a look around and thought to myself: "Oooh. This looks like shit!" As in, it literally resembles faecal matter, decked out mostly in glistening browns except for a streak of vibrant blue from an accidentally swallowed whiteboard marker. It looks like a PS3 game, all brown and flatly lit with characters textured and animated like a papier-mâché diorama about kitchen utensils. It even has a classic case of cheaping out on the cutscenes by just panning over still images with increasingly agonizing slowness. I thought the download size was suspiciously small."

"But I might as well give it away now, I think the game's already peaked by this point; it's already thrown its skirt up and flashed you its knickers with "Subversion of Dating Sim" written on them, and the game has been given away, so all it can do now is try to psych you out by drifting into the faintly lame territory of the video game creepypasta. So of course, graphics start fucking up and characters start bleeding from the eyes and doing that thing where their pupils go really small and they smile a bit too widely, which is, of course, anime shorthand for someone being two gratuitous panty shots short of a Sailor Moon episode. And if anything, this all made me less creeped out. "Phew, I'm glad you started bleeding from the eyes, 'cause things were getting a bit harrowing back there for a while with all that slightly-too-real depression and suicide business." And then there was all that anticipation leading up to it, playing the happy-clappy standard Dating Sim shit, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but now I can relax, because I see we've entered Silly Horror Town. Yeah, you go ahead and stab yourself, missy; couldn't hurt, could it?"

"Hey, kids! Are you trying to write a comedy game but are worried you don't have the chops? Well, worry no more! You don't. But you can fake it 'til you make it with the patented Borderlands method! A simple three-step process that will turn any dry functional dialogue line into gut-busting hilarity. Step one: Say the thing. Step two: Keep talking like you're a socially inept party-goer who's just had his first line of coke. Step three: Transition into some kind of embarrassed tangent to reflect a level of self-awareness otherwise largely absent from the work. Let's see it in action! "Go through that door" becomes "Go through that door, because there's probably treasure on the other side, and by 'treasure' I mean 'more hideous violence against strangers' which is treasure to me. My doctor says I should get out more." Now was that funny or what? No, it wasn't, not in the least. But it does have a sort of comedy vibe about it and maybe that's all you need. You know, it's comedy in the sense that Owen Wilson is an actor. Obviously I'm being facetious here, there's a lot more to Borderlands specific brand of humour than just characters who talk too much. Sometimes they do it in a silly voice as well. And some of them shout a lot."

"Meanwhile, show up at Gameplay Land and ask if it would be possible to play single-player, and the game reacts like you sat down at an expensive restaurant and ordered a bowl of corn flakes. You go to the "Privacy Settings" - once you can find the fucking things, 'cos this game has a worse menu system than a McDonald's drive-thru after a major earthquake - What is it with ultra-AAA games having shitty interfaces these days? Is it the same principle by which Las Vegas casinos are laid out, to get you lost and unable to glimpse the Sun in the hope that you get confused and accidentally drop all your money? - and your options are "Public Match", as God intended, or "Private Match" for big stupid losers. Then, when you set it to "private" and try to start solo, a window pops up saying, "Hehehe, sorry! Someone's CLEARLY made a dreadful mistake! Surely, you don't actually want to play a solo private match? Just click here and we'll set it back to public play so you can rejoin all the NORMAL PEOPLE!" But I didn't click that, and then the tip on the fucking loading screen was something about how playing multiplayer earns more rewards and doesn't make the little baby Jesus cry. What the fuck is this, guys?! Am I on suicide watch?!"

"Of all the video game protagonists I've been unreasonably obliged to identify with, I struggle to think of one I dislike more than Deacon St. John. Even Jeffrey Cuddletrousers from Hatred at least had some fucking ambition in life. At least he knew how to express himself, and didn't just mumble into his shoes all the time. He didn't sulk and whine every time someone asked him to do something, like a teenager when the bins need putting out. And he didn't passive-aggressively criticize them under his breath the moment their backs were turned; he'd mainly just stab them in the face and shit. But the developers apparently thought Deacon St. John's "dynamic" personality needed to be a constant presence, so he has to comment on fucking everything. "Oh, I picked up a bottle. Another Molotov is it? Yawn!" And another thing; stop second guessing my intentions, Deacon St. John! I walk two feet out of a zombie clear-out zone, and you go "Ooh, I guess I'll finish clearing it out later, then..." You'd like that, wouldn't you, you lazy bastard!? What was your job at that biker gang you used to be in? 'Cause I think it must have been taste tasting the crystal meth."

"So the game consists of two phases: the base management part, where You hang out in your cult's campground building stuff and interacting with your followers until you run out of money, bits of wood or piles of faeces to clean up, and the dungeon crawling part, when you venture out to the procedural lands with your big heresy whacking stick and a wheelbarrow. It's the faeces that's one of the sticking points for me, faeces being notoriously sticky. I guess socially well-adjusted people aren't the type to join cults, generally speaking, but I don't remember Jim Jones having to go around the compound every five minutes with a pooper scooper. Something's very wrong here - you can't build a fucking outside loo until you're like three levels deep on the tech tree, but I'd think these people would at least know how to dig a fucking hole in the ground. This is part of the larger issue that the management stuff you have to do is frequently of the micro-variety. You're basically having to constantly make food for these simpering twats, the upgrade that stops them complaining when you make them eat grass is heartily recommended. You have to work on the loyalty of every cult member individually, and that means remembering to give them all a blessing every day. And once your cult goes past a certain head count it's hardly worth bothering to shake the dandruff off your blessing hand. I found it was very easy to get bogged down with the micromanage-y chores in the base because something always pops up if you hang around for too long. It's like being a kindergarten teacher. "Miss! Could you harvest the pumpkins? Miss! Penelope died of old age and the corpse is making us all sick and we still haven't figured out how holes in the ground work. Miss! Lionel blasphemed against our dark saviour, could you sacrifice him for his impudence?" I would, but I can only interact with cultists by standing next to them and pressing the contextual button and Lionel is currently standing in the same spot as three other dudes and one of my base facilities and I don't want to accidentally murder the septic tank."

"I hate to say "I told you so," constantly, with an air of smugness and perverse relish, but I called this when Saints Row 4 came out. It was, to reiterate, a banger. The series went from generic crime sandbox to being the president of space and it was fun and audacious but it was also going to kill the series stone dead because there was absolutely no topping it. You couldn't make a fourth sequel about becoming president of twice as much space. So apparently Volition didn't even bother to try and have instead nestled their face between the cozy cheeks of reboot, and Saints Row going back to relatively grounded crime sandbox after nine years feels like Jim Morrison coming back to life, crashing on my sofa and leaving skidmarks on the guest towels."

"There's a lot of The Last of Us about all this, it's certainly got that Last of Us 2 vibe that the protagonist's best course of action would be to just fucking stop – maybe bury themselves in the woods somewhere – but at least in Last of Us 2 there was the suggestion we weren't supposed to agree with these grimy murdering twats. Requiem seems to think we should be on side with Amicia. Early on she and the fam take Hugo to a doctor who is very blatantly coded as a villain – arrogant, dismissive, looks like Ming the Merciless – and all the time he's on screen I'm nodding along to everything he says. "We must isolate the boy and treat him according to current scientific understanding." Yes! Great idea! Thank Christ Captain Sensible finally arrived! But then he does a medical thing that makes Hugo say "Ow," and Amicia hears and decides she must get Hugo away from this unfeeling monster."

"...Plot is, Sonic and pals fly to some island for some reason; there's a big cockup, and Sonic's pals get trapped in cyberspace or something. And when Sonic wakes up alone in the pouring rain in a washed-out landscape surrounded by the imposing ruins of a once-vibrant civilization, as haunting music plays, I felt, not for the first time, a strong urge to grab the Sonic franchise by the lapels, shake it back and forth, and yell, "FIGURE OUT YOUR FUCKING TONE! YOU ARE A FUCKING CARTOON MOUSE IN SNEAKERS! YOU ARE A CONCEPT FOR BABBIES!" You are not Death Stranding, you are not Attack on Titan, you are not... whatever the fuck Sonic 2006 was trying to be; possibly Final Fantasy X, if it was mashed up with some staggeringly uncomfortable slash-fiction. You are also not Shadow of the Colossus, and isn't it astonishing that I even needed to say that to you, Sonic the Hedgehog? I feel like I'm trying to explain to a sofa cushion with a toilet roll tube stuck to it that it will never be a real boy."

"What we have here is a mission-based tactical combat game from the XCOM developers but instead of your squad being five randomly generated Scottish dudes whose names all start with "Mc", they’re officially licensed Marvel superheroes. And when you get back to base, instead of sending them to training or upgrading their equipment, you take them on romantic dinner dates. And on top of that there’s this heavy theming around black magic and the occult, so the end result is a rather awkward The Punisher meets Harry Potter fan fiction mishmash in which we find ourselves thinking "Man, I should've taken Spider-Man mushroom picking in the haunted forest before we came out to neutralize this group of armed terrorists.""

"If there was ever a game crying out for some kind of spectacle fighter mechanic that rewards the player for varying their approach, it's this one, because by the end your available variety of attacks would shame a battleship crewed by poisonous hedgehogs. Standard punch, uppercut, electric punch, clearing electric punch, sneaky interrupt-kick-in-the-bollocks, parry shield, electric lasso, six shooters, shotgun, rifle, crossbow, flamethrower, glory kills, super-duper attack with ten minute cool-down -- I haven't even gotten to the facetious made-up examples yet -- grenade launcher, minigun, hedge trimmer, angry cat in a bag, and there we go. Plus everything has the all-important satisfying feel, especially when you uppercut a dude into the air, jump up, and pound him into the exploding barrel three of his mates were standing around for their weekly gasoline tasting."

"Dogshits Smegmawee starts well but in the back half turns into the pieces for three boring board games jumbled up in a single uninteresting box, and as such I don’t recommend. Thank Christ for that. Probably the best possible outcome for me, I can advise against giving it money even on its own merits, because it is, by the definition laid out in my Gotham Knights review, a game made by cunts. As well as being, in a slightly more literal sense, a game made by a cunt. Yes, Nick, I’ll add bleeps to the Youtube version. Just don’t blame me if we give everyone tinnitus."

"Things have gotten awfully political lately around this silly computer game review show. First we had to take a stance on systemic transphobia because we wanted to play the twatty wizard game for twatty wizards. And now we're playing a game from Russia. So I guess we have to make clear our stance on the war in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin's saggy man tits. Well, perhaps not. There are plenty of people in Russia who are just as disappointed by the sagginess of Putin's man tits as anyone else. And assuming a game has some political bent just because it comes from Russia would be like criticising Tomb Raider for refusing to address the British government's complicity in Irish sectarian violence. So, let's crack off with this assuredly completely politics-free review. Atomic Heart is set in an alternative mid-twentieth century where Russia is the greatest and most powerful country ever and communism rules and capitalism drools – well, fucking so much for that."

"[...] Metroid Prime enemies are all prissy little pick-mes who insist on popping out with elaborate screeches and animations every fucking time. Relatedly, fuck Chozo ghosts. Amid those in the know you will not find a more universally agreed upon phrase besides perhaps “cake tastes nice.”"

"It'd be a good scam, wouldn't it, claiming that we're playing co-op with uncommunicative humans indistinguishable from NPCs. It'd be like an inverse of the Dumbo's Magic Feather trick. "Maybe I could have beaten that dungeon if the other guy hadn't been such a fuck-up." "Ha-hah! Don't you see? There was no other guy! The fuck-up was in you all along!""