I know it’s been harshly criticized and I have no idea in what state it was before, but my experience in the 3 days I played it has been thoroughly enjoyable. I managed to properly close my first cycle in about 6 hours (on the 4th try).

At first impression, it was brutal, but once I got the hang of it, and learned that I had to extract often, and that some of the boss attacks were supposed to be parried and not dodged, everything went smoothly.

The addictive cycle loop is there.

Graphically, it feels a bit rough over the edges, but it’s still pleasing to the eye. Fights are fun, even though mere normal monsters can make a run go south real fast if you’re not careful enough.

At the moment, the major issue I have is with the healing management. The healing opportunities are quite limited during a run. So the game results to be a bit too close to the “git gud scrub” part of the spectrum. There’s hard and fun, and then there’s hard and frustrating. For now, we’re closest to the second one.

All in all, however, imho it has a solid foundation, and it seems the developers are properly building on it. There's even a laid out roadmap for future developments.

My hopes are high and I’m curious to see how it will evolve over time. I’m going to replay it once it gets out of Early Access.

This is another game that’s in Early Access, but I must say this one feels like a complete game already. I know it got two major updates during the past few months, so it must not be that far from release, but at the moment it’s in a state where it could put to shame some other games that fledged themselves as fully released.

At first, it feels like more of the same of the first Hades, but after a few runs it’s evident that they expanded the combat system in various ways. You get more basic moves, more weapons, more varied trinkets, more powers and more ways to buff yourself. Basically a lot more possibilities in general that can change your whole playstyle.

Apart from the gameplay, we get an expanded collection of characters, new and old, that widen the already rich lore of this fictional world with a plethora of lines of dialogue I find hard to fathom. Some of these characters are lovable, others much less, exactly how they are supposed to be. The multitude of interactions with the NPCs was one of the strengths of the first game, and this one doesn’t disappoint in that sense either.

What’s surprising is that the game has basically double the content of the previous one. At first, if we’re looking at the level design, it seems like a replica of the first game (four linear worlds with a big, bad final boss at the very end), but once you beat that final boss a few times, you unlock a different route. A mirrored version of the first one, with new bosses, monsters, mechanics, NPCs and powers, and much less linear design.

I was skeptical at first, since I couldn't properly understand what was the point of the double route feature, but I ended up liking it. It allows for more variety without aggravating the progression. I mean, if they decided to put them one after the other it would have made the gameplay loop too long. This way, instead, one is free to choose which route to take, and looping is faster, less repetitive, and overall more addicting and enjoyable.

If I had to find a flaw, it’s the feeling you get when you reach the end of a run. In the first Hades you had a sense of progression every time you managed to beat the final boss, like you were a step closer to the final goal. In this title, at least for the moment, when a true ending is still something not properly tangible, it feels like you’re just replaying the game for the sake of it. The gameplay is fun and all, but, despite the double route possible, it lacks purpose after a while. I don’t doubt this will be fixed when it’ll be fully released.

However, it’s a solid game, and already an all-time favourite for me. I’m looking forward to play it properly once it gets out of Early Access.

Let’s put the premise that I've never played a Silent Hill game before. This remake is my first experience with this series, so I can't make any comparison with the original videogame. Furthermore, I knew very little of the series before playing it, apart from the movie (yeah…), which, in any case, I barely remember btw. So, as a result, my opinion is purely limited to this one game.

Long story short: I really enjoyed it, especially the first half.

I immediately got immersed in the game world: the feeling of uneasiness while exploring this seemingly godforsaken city was real, and the very first encounters with the monsters were really intense, contributing to deliver the proper feeling of fright you’d expect from a game like this. Let’s say the game does a great job at setting the right mood right from the start.

For that same reason, I really liked exploring the world, despite it being quite linear in design and despite the “quests” involving a bit of back and forth, I often felt the urge of progressing with the story to discover new things and better understand what was happening.

The fights were engaging, too. Moreso the ones against the normal monsters rather than the boss fights, which didn’t really bring anything interesting to the table. The huge dodging windows made those fights quite trivial. Even with the normal monster, once learned their pattern, they hardly implicated a real threat, but killing them, especially with a melee weapon, was really satisfying from the beginning until the very end of the game.

Another thing that I really liked was the range of expressions of the protagonist. The motion capture is one of the best I’ve seen. The way they managed to convey his anguish, even with minimal change to his facial expressions, was very impressive.

The only thing that perplexed me a bit at first was how some of the characters (almost all of them, really) felt detached from their own stories. I mean, it’s quite weird how little they react to what they say to each other. For instance, how James (the main character) remains calm in most situations, ignoring what other people say, not asking questions, and accepting everything that happens around him without any interest or doubt. It’s hard to explain, but it felt wrong at times. Though, by the end of the game I reached the conclusion that this whole sensation was intended as part of his character development. So, let’s say that I accepted it. I’m glad I played this game.

I didn’t pay particular attention to the story of this game, to its graphics or anything that wasn’t, let’s say, strictly essential. What mattered to me was the gameplay, and it was fun. Mind that it's nothing memorable, but I still enjoyed those few hours it took to complete it.

A bit easy when it comes to boss fights, and nothing much to them other than being huge hp sponges, but, nevertheless, it’s been a good three hours of brainlessly shooting. Just what I needed.

It’s clear how heavily it’s been inspired by Hollow Knight. From part of the map design, to some of the basic monsters, at least one boss and a handful of NPCs, everything screams “Hollow Knight 1:1 copy”.

Luckily, there were a few key differences when it came to skills and gameplay that made me forget how similar the two games are to each other. In the end, the game has been perfect for someone like me, a metroidvania fan who considers HK the best one he played, looking for a similar, but not identical, experience.

I liked the map design, the setting, the simple story, and, with one exception, the overall progression.

Only the fights were a bit lacking, and that’s where this game isn’t able to stand its ground if compared to HK. In particular, I consider the boss fights its major flaw. They all feel the same. Almost all bosses act like some sort of standing target and lack any special mechanic that you would need to learn. They are on the easy end, too, and as a result you end up killing them before even actually getting into the fight. Mind that I played the game without using heals right from the start and I've been just fine. I don't even remember dying during any boss fight.

A second flaw I have to complain about is that they decided to lock weapon damage upgrades behind certain boss fights. It may be because I skipped an early map without even noticing, but the problem with that is that, by the time I faced those boss fights, I had already completed 80%+ of the map and slayed almost all the other bosses in the game.

All in all, I think that the game would gain a lot from a bit of boss rebalance and a better timing of the aforementioned upgrades, so as to force you to get at least the first one at some precise moment of the game, and not all at the very end.

Despite these flaws, I consider Haiku a very decent metroidvania that I can recommend to any HK nostalgic (I can use the word ‘nostalgia’ with HK? Are 8 years from release and 6 of waiting for its sequel enough?)

This game feels like abstract art to me. In the sense that I’m unable to judge it, since there’s no evident objective parameter I can use.

Gameplay-wise it’s a simple walking simulator. There’s some platforming, some very basic puzzle-solving, but eventually all you have to do is walk around and talk to the different NPCs, witnessing all these absurd dialogues that may or may not make any sense to you. Just to give an example of how confused I was: at first I didn’t even get that they were showing my character in the cutscenes, since I had been in 1st person until that point and therefore thought they were just showing some other crazy NPC. Only after roughly 30 minutes into the game, when I saw said character responding to a phone call “I” received, it finally got to me that we were the same person.

I guess I just can’t appreciate this sort of ‘art’ properly, not even in a game, to the point I can’t understand if it was an enjoyable experience or not.

Oh! One of the side characters is voiced by ThePruld (a popular Italian youtuber I used to follow a few years ago). I immediately recognized his voice and it was quite a surprise! (In a good way hehe)