I played the base game 7 years ago and the co-op campaign for the first time this month. I honestly don’t remember much of my first playthrough, but I remember enjoying it less than the first game. This time, maybe because I wasn’t alone, I felt like I could enjoy the game more. That’s mostly because the game forces you to use your brain, which isn’t granted in most puzzle games and it does so thanks to its smartly built puzzles. They become progressively harder and harder, but without making you feel overwhelmed. Trying to visualize their solution before actually solving them and seeing that solution working out was my favorite part. The fact that I could do it with another person made everything even more gratifying. You can say the game is aging welI. I had a really fun experience.

The only drawback is GLaDOS' sarcasm; it can become a bit annoying after a while and loosens its charm quite fast.

I must say I was quite unimpressed by the game and I found it an overall forgettable experience.

Neither the story, nor the gameplay-both the shooting and the platforming part-managed to make me feel engaged. Even the boss fights felt a bit too straightforward and failed to provide any kind of real challenge.

Story-wise I didn’t particularly like the dialogues either, except the humor here and there, but most of the time it felt a bit awkward. I had the same feeling with the character design, most of all when we consider the talking weapons and their voice acting.

So yeah, all things considered, it felt a bit like a waste of time.

Oh, there are real movies inside the game that you can watch in their entirety. It doesn’t happen often in a game, I guess, and it’s a fun bit to mention. I must admit I didn’t expect to see a questionably dressed young Paul Walker suddenly appearing on TV inside the game. Had a good chuckle.

I really liked the premise of the story. Imagining a world (not necessarily Earth) where the oceans disappear and grandiose sceneries are left behind is an intriguing idea to explore. In this game, they manage to give a few vivid pictures of what that world would be and I really appreciated that. I liked the graphics in that sense and how they managed to give life to a story and an entire world just with a few diary logs, chats and items that you find while climbing.

I found the gameplay interesting too. It’s not like you have much to do apart from jumping and climbing, but I really liked the originality of the movement system, with the need to alternate your fingers while pushing buttons like a climber would alternate their hands during a climb. Further to this point, I liked the level design too: the whole ascension process, alternating moments where you find yourself fighting the elements on the outside and moments where you’re swallowed in some crevice inside the earth, but instead of going down, you keep going up and up and up.

It seems like I liked the game even more than I thought. Definitely recommended.

Another game that I played a few years back. This experience was the opposite of Portal 2, though, in the sense that I played co-op first, then this month I decided to play it solo (even because we never completed the main campaign at the time).

There’s not much to say. The whole game revolves around combining magic elements and creating spells. Some may synergize well, others may not. It’s amazing how many possibilities there are. It’s also baffling how some fight that seemed impossible at first or in any case extremely hard (basically every single boss fight in the game) became quite trivial once you discovered the right spell to use in order to counter them.

The storytelling was a bit over the top for my taste and so was the humor. I realize just now while writing and thinking back to my recent playing history that a really high number of developers decide to undertake the humoristic storytelling way without considering how humor in general is one of the things that tend to age worse, since it’s primarily subjective and heavily influenced by time/different sensibilities/trends/etc.

Oh, the game must be played with a keyboard. I tried the controller first but the spell input time is really too slow in comparison, making playing unnecessarily harder.

And another thing. I don’t know what happened (it wasn’t like that the first time I played), but the game crashes. A lot. Really really a lot. There’s an unofficial patch for that out there, but it still doesn’t manage to solve the problem completely.

It’s a visual masterpiece. Different palettes of colors are skillfully used in order to match the passing of the seasons. But it’s not a mere representation of nature that you see transposed on the screen. It’s the very feelings we should feel in front of the crescent decadence of a world which is rapidly and literally falling apart. We can see through the colors how the darkness's cancerogenous grasp slowly brings death and destruction to everything that it touches. There are a lot of interpretations we can give to this darkness if we make a parallel to our own world: it’s clearly a metaphor for something and we’re free to choose what it may stand for, but It’s not like the game is shy in dishing out some possible key, from the simple ‘hate calls more hate’ concept, to pollution and disregard about nature in general, to religious fanaticism, and this is just to name some, with one being as good as any. Or it could simply be that we don’t have to choose and it represents all the evils of this world at once.

Parallel to this, in the opposite direction, we have the growth of Neva, from pup to adulthood. She’s a weapon, metaphorically but also literally. She’s hope. She’s the one with real power. We fend off some of that darkness by ourselves, but in the end she’s the one able to fight back and exorcize the masked darkness, she’s the white herald bringing the colors and making living things grow back. If we consider that and go beyond the simple appearance of a wolf pup growing up in the care of her loving companion (btw it’s really sweet how you can interact with her), the fact that she grows over time and becomes stronger and stronger assumes a more figurative meaning and so does the ending.

The ending inevitably rides along those lines and the final message is thanks to hope darkness can be beaten but requires sacrifice and that we should accept said sacrifice. I can’t avoid being a bit sad about it. Maybe I’m not mature enough for that yet.

Gameplay-wise, we have a few puzzles and a few fights, even boss fights. We're on the easy end in both frangents and I think it’s right this way. It’s not like this game wants to be that kind of game where everything must become a challenge. It would disrupt the flow of growth we’re witnessing. I really liked the winter section of the game with its mirror mechanics. The soundtrack is also very nice and enhances the overall experience.

All in all it’s probably one of the best games I played this year.

Oh, btw, the ending actually confused me at first. I didn’t completely get it right away. Only after a few days and a bit of thought (plus going back to the game to confirm a few things) I managed to dissipate any doubt and give my personal meaning to it. I don’t say that mine is necessarily the right one, it may as well be that I’m imagining things, but I’m satisfied with my interpretation. Not happy, but satisfied. I still find everything extremely sad, but that doesn’t depend on the game per se; it depends on the world that the metaphor chose to represent, which is ours, and we can’t do much about it… can we?

The game tries to make replayability one of its cornerstones. You're supposed to play missions by exploring each map, seeing what the set course of each NPC is and what opportunities may present, and then pick one to follow and kill your targets (note: “opportunities”, as they’re called in the game, are guided events that, if followed, give you a good chance to kill a target unnoticed). Once done, you can repeat the mission following different opportunities and objectives or, if you’ve learnt the whole “chess game” by then and know how all pawns move, you can wing it and go straight to the targets without wasting much time. I must say that once I completed a mission, though, I never felt the urge to replay it in a different way, not even when I didn’t manage to stay completely stealthy. There was no appeal for me in that. It’s like asking to play a tedious puzzle game not once but twice, thrice or more. Not even the presence of achievements and scores and a leaderboard helped in that sense. I found the game decent, but just as a one-playthrough experience.

The stealth part can be enjoyable enough, even if there are clear limits to the NPC’s AI that can be easily exploited. Plus some of the opportunities make killing the targets quite too easy, guiding you step by step, leaving no room for mistakes or even personal initiatives for that matter.

The maps are well built and full of details. They offer some really nice sceneries and there’s really a lot going on in most of them.

I didn’t find the main story all that enticing. There’s too little on the fire to even smell a hint of smoke (probably my fault for not having played any other game of the series in recent years; I remember trying out the first one in the early 2000s, but I hardly remember anything about that game and I think I’ve never finished it). I expected a bit more there, I must say.

Anyway, my final judgment is that it's not a bad game, but that it didn’t particularly match my taste.

We had much less fun compared to the first one.

Personally, I didn’t find any of the puzzles particularly clever apart maybe for the cube one from the stairwell section.

The game felt overall shorter, easier and a lot less rewarding. To prove the point further, we didn’t feel like replaying it with inverted roles.

I just hope the next games won’t follow the same trend.

I must admit I don’t have much experience with racing sims, so I can’t really give a proper opinion about the game on that matter (I play with a joypad).

All I can say is that each car I tried so far felt really different, that there’s a decent number of events and activities and lastly─and more importantly─that I’m having fun.

Btw, every time I play this kind of game I get tempted to buy myself a decent racing rig, but then I come back to my senses. I don’t need an expensive dust collector, I have already enough of them, right? RIGHT?!

I’m back at it again. Third time’s the charm, they say. Except, this is the fourth time I picked up this game over the years in order to reach the 500 seconds mark for the achievement (I’m not even close, I still can’t properly handle the 3 gigapedes spawn). But to be honest, it’s becoming a matter of principle, or maybe “hurt ego” if you prefer. I gave up one too many times thinking I suck at this game and that reaching that goal is an impossible feat for me. Well, I’d like to prove myself wrong for once. So yeah, here I go again.

It usually takes me 20ish hours before I give up. I’ll try to stick to it this time.

Oh btw, despite the negative feelings it may have generated, it’s probably one of my favorite games of all time. An epitome of simplicity with impeccable design in all its aspects in my opinion.