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I was on the edge over whether to give a thumbs up or down, but since the general score is Very Positive, a thumbs down doesn't feel wrong.

In short, Bayonetta is one of those games that encapsulates the mid-to-late-2000s. We're thinking flashy, explosive, edgy, bombastic action with an overreliance on cutscenes, QTEs, button mashes, and where you fight the camera more often than you fight the enemies. Some parts of it are great, but the overall experience of playing it all in 2026 is a bit rough.

Some things are undeniable. Bayonetta IS edgy, stylish, and over the top. If that's what you're looking for, a litte bit of provocateur energy, it fits the bill and is great at it. But part of the problem comes from it -- to show you how edgy it is, the game needs to take control away from you, and probably half the time the game is on I'm not controlling the character, but instead, watching it being edgy on a cutscene. That hurts the pacing, to the point you're frequently watching the game, not playing the game. But it get ridiculous when the game throws a quick time event (QTE) at you in the middle of a cutscene, only to kill you if you fail to react. Or when it requires a button mash in the middle of a cutscene, making you scramble and breaking your controller in the process. I know we're talking about a 2009 game, but I would expect at least the decency of an option to turn those things off in 2026. Not only that, sometimes the cutscene ends with less than one second to react before an enemy hits you. In one instance in Chapter 8 or 9, the enemy hit me for HALF my life bar before I even realized the cutscene had ended, and in a game where you don't get health items recharged, this is simply ridiculous.

When you're not watching Bayonetta being badass, you can sometimes be it yourself. The combat system is mostly fine, with many combos you can either memorize or buy with in-game currency, but I didn't feel any reason to use most combos besides the basic PPP or PPPKK or PPPPK, all of which generally did good damage but still allowed me to frame-cancel in case I needed to dodge. There's no parrying which is fine, and the dodge unlocks Witch Time which is a slo-mo retribution window, which is sweet, but coming from Elden Ring, I found enemy animations and attacks very jerky and hard to read, but that would be fine if the camera was a bit more helpful. I can't really pinpoint what's wrong with it, but the amount of times I got hit by enemies off-screen and the amount of finaggling it took me to try to fix my positioning in battle arenas was just very frustrating. I do like a fast-paced combat system, but the arenas, monsters design and camera have to help me have fun, whereas in Bayonetta they just felt half-assed and prevented me really enjoying the combat. Good combat encounters are really good (I loved 1x1 against humanoid humans, like Joys or Selene), but very frequently you'll be fighting the environment, not the monsters.

The game economy is also a wreck -- your currency is used both to buy healing items, important upgrades like health, combo moves, cosmetics, and amulets. Amulets are so absurdly overpriced that I imagine they are a feature for NG+, which robs players of the enjoyment and strategy they could offer. The problem with the same currency being used for everything is that it forces you to choose very few areas to focus on. For instance, I barely bought moves or amulets in my run, because I spent most of my money on healing and extra energy (given how I was suffering through combat encounters). But you earn currency by getting good rankings, and using items reduce your rankings, and dying has little effect besides rankings, so put it all together and your best bet is ignoring healing (and rankings, maybe) to ensure you have enough money for lasting upgrades and maybe, learn your way through the encounters so you can survive them on subsequent playthroughs (if you still want to play it after beating it). Poor players get punished by receiving no money to use on upgrades, whereas good players are showered with more currency than they know what to do with and for items they don't need, all so they can spend it on overpriced amulets or useless cosmetics. It's a whole system that feels built upside-down, and which clearly shows its age.

So yeah, while Bayonetta is "cool" and "edgy" and "sexy" and ♥♥♥♥, it's also not super fun to play if you're a casual gamer that is not gonna try to S-Rank everything on multiple runs. You'll be fighting camera, hard-to-read enemy animations, the lack of a functioning economy, and the cutscenes, before you even reach your first enemy. I like the character, I tolerate the plot, but I can't say I really enjoy the game per se

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Shortly after beating Disco Elysium and being properly enthralled by it, a friend suggested I try Roadwarden. Looking at the trailer, I was very skeptical -- how could a game that looks so simple match the grandiosity and genius of Disco? But is in this simplicity of systems and focus on a small-yet-very-dense world filled with interconnected events and great writing, Roadwarden took me and never really let me go.

Many people have already mentioned the typos that happen maybe a bit too frequently throughout the game, and I'll admit it bothered me, but not enough to write the game down. If it might seem the game lack polish, I am still willing to let it pass since this is mostly an one-man job. Graphically, Roadwarden gives you enough to suggest what the world looks like, but never enough to rob you of imagining your version of it. Musically, it's simple yet evocative, again, letting your mind wander and fill the gaps. But is in the game's writing and plot that it transcends most other RPGs.

I mean, the name implies it, but most RPGs are quite limited in the amount they let you effectively roleplay, but in Roadwarden, this is the whole game. The open-endedness of the tasks you're given and the tools to achieve them is shocking. I struggled to remember another game in recent memory that felt so … pen-and-paper like this one. My game ended mostly as I wanted, being an honorable fighter that spared more beasts than I killed, that respected most opinions even though they were different from mine, but that didn't shy away from tough confrontations with bandits or tyrant village lords. I was not able to achieve all my objectives, effectively antagonizing one tribe I was seeking the favors of and failing my personal goal, but it never felt like a proper failure, just as a life well lived where you do your best and sometimes fail to come through. The journey was harsh at first, easy later on, and entirely satisfying.

If you're looking for pure roleplay, there are very few games that match Roadwarden charm, ambition, scope and freedom. It might not be the prettiest boy in town, but it's certainly one of the smartest and most entertaining. It's harsh at first like life on the road, but it gets easier once you have friends in the wilderness and knowledge of the beaten path. A must for any pen-and-paper RPG fan.

Great arcade racer. I beat the first campaign and extra trial, but will surely try to beat all four of them. It's kind of weird to accelerate with the face buttons again after many years playing modern racers where acceleration is on the shoulder buttons, but it kind of works here. The story mode is short and sweet but I love the mini-plot and the characters you interact with. Car graphics are nothing to write home about but the levels are really beautiful, and the OST is an absolute banger.

I don't know man, sometimes it's good to just boot a game from the time before online play, DLCs, Season Pass, lootboxes and all that stuff were commonplace.

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Bookwalker is one of those games that break my heart to give a thumbs down. It is not a trash game and it's not broken, but it's also so uninteresting and bland that I cannot in good conscience give it a good rating.

Long story short, Bookwalker is a point-and-click game disguised of what else you want, with a veneer of choices matter but that actually doesn't, and with a minimal but intrusive addition of J-RPG style combat. Between chapters you'll have to navigate some boring and uninteresting walking sim segment to advance the meta story. The main gameplay loop is: waste some time doing the same repetitive task six times, then jump onto a book where you'll be pixel hunting and exhausting all the dialogue trees and chasing resources to create tools required for progression, rinse and repeat. Two or three times per chapter the game will throw you some J-RPG battles where you slowly improve your skills between chapters and which require little to no thinking. No single system in the game is awful, but also none of them gels together into something great.

The standout element of the game is the graphics, which are really good. High-quality textures in the first person segments, and really nice overall design in the isometric mode. The problem is that whenever you have particle effects on the screen, your FPS drops from 140-150 to 15-20, and some areas rely heavily on those, compromising framerate. Also there's an overuse of screen blur on the first-person segments, which is just annoying. While I generally love the artstyle, a lot of characters lack portraits and there are little to no animation on the first-person segments, which just looks jarring and reeks of lack of polish.

There's no voice acting, just mumbles, which is acceptable but not incredible. There's forgettable music - the best track is the combat track, but it's a bit repetitive. The sound effects on the first-person segments such as microwave sounds, steps running away, phone ringing and background noise are high-quality but feel a bit tacked on.

And then, the story. It has good stuff there, but it's lost in its own ambition. The idea that writers can commit book crimes, lose their licenses to write, inhabit books, interact with characters - that is mostly good stuff. The rules are never clear but I'm in for the ride. The main issues I see are with the individual books and the choices system. Each individual book is interesting, but too shallow and short to truly shine and flesh out, and you're over before you get attached to them, just to be thrown into the next one. All the while, there isn't much happening in the first-person segments, so it feels the best parts of the game are over before they matter, and you're stuck with the least fun bits of it progressing at a glacial pace. Then, there are the choices, and here the game is infuriating -- it gives you the illusion of choice, but doesn't respect or persist your choices, always either forcing you to pick what it wants, or just commenting on your (usually binary) choices on a very heavy-handed manner, that diminished the impact of them. For a game about books and writing, its writing is quite poor. Ain't that ironic?

In short, I came here after playing Disco Elysium hearing I might like this one, but this game is so confused, rushed, unpolished and poorly-written that it can't be recommended. Is it broken or trash? No. But it still hardly deserves your time.

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Arkham City is …. complicated. For a while I almost dropped the game, but eventually stuck to it. And I think most of problems stems for its ambition, lack of focus, and comparison with the original.

Now, I loved Arkham Asylum and 100%-ed it. What I loved the most about it was its sense of progression, with very clear milestones guiding your journey. But if you look at it, the level design was also fantastic, with each level separated by semi-open areas that were dense with things to do and to see. By the time you beat the game, you probably could navigate the entire island without a map and never miss a beat. And finally, the pacing was great. The story slowly involved you, characters were introduced timely and you always wanted to play a little bit more, just to figure out where the plot was going. Collectables were plentiful and they enhanced the level design and the progression. Everything just gelled together. I had some issues with the combat, but generally there was very little to fault with the original game.

Then 6 months later, I decide to play Arkham City. First issue is one of familiarity - here Batman starts with almost the full kit you had at the end of Arkham Asylum, but remembering how to use it effectively took me a fair bit of time. It's not an issue if you're coming straight from the previous game, but can be tricky if you took a break between them like I did. Then I started to get confused, shortly after getting the goal to head to the Courthouse and meet Two Faces. The confusion arose from the fact I could go …. anywhere else. At that moment. And there were already side-quests available and a world of collectables to get and … it felt both a bit too much and too soon, before I even got invested in the game. I still don't understand really well what Arkham City really is as an universe.

Arkham Asylum was cohesive, dense, and full of lore. Arkham City is a collection of boxes for you to zip around with a few levels scattered throughout. I barely ever walked in the open-world sections of the map, which is a shame because I assume there's a lot to see and do in the map, but zooming around was always faster, while at the same time disconnecting you from the world you're inhabiting. Kind of the same can be said about the story - the game funnels you into one level at a time until you've seen them all, and then the game is over. It feels heavy-handed. Sure, Asylum was also convenient in having you move between buildings, but here it feels more game-y and less natural. And there are so many collectibles and side-quests supposedly available from the get-go, but some requires power-ups that you're not sure when will be available, which makes it really confusing on when you should be taking detours to engage with that part of that game. For all its ambition, Arkham City lacks the focus, polish and rhythm that made the original game so good, and it's worse for that.

That all said, it's far from a bad game. It still deserves a thumbs-up. Even though you start the game with almost the full kit from Arkham Asylum, there's still much to be found here in the form of new toys and gadgets, which are generally fun to use. Combat is also a bit better here, with better input detection (particularly on counters), more enemy types (requiring more mix-up in encounters), and more unlockable combos. The fact you can play with other characters such as Catwoman which control similarly but play very differently is a great addition, and the cinematic aspect with great voice acting is also still there.

But it's hard to deny Arkham City feels like a game that tries to be way more than the prequel, but loses its focus in the process of embracing gaming industry trends, and becomes a worse product for it. I'm not sure I'm that keen to play Knight or Origins after playing City, fearing that the sharpness and polish of Asylum was a blip rather than a trend

Interesting although a bit unpolished little game. It's a point-and-click puzzle game, where you have to go into 5 rooms and perform a series of tasks to wrap that room and move to the next (keeping it spoiler-free). The constrained nature of the puzzles help the game, as you know that what you need to solve the room is in the room. The first room is always the hardest because you're not sure of the rules of the game, and at least I didn't expect the level of pixel hunting or the amount of moon logic required. Once I adjusted, the other four rooms went by much easier and the game got a bit better, but the first room was very frustrating.

The art and the puzzles are charming, and if you're okay with a game that lasts 1.5 hours (more if you want to do all the right things in the right order to unlock what I imagine to be a secret ending), this is not a bad pick, but it's also hard to go our of your way to recommend it

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One of the worst, if not the worse twin stick shooter I ever played. It is incredibly opaque in communicating information to the player, to the point that you beat a boss and has no clue what each power-up is supposed to do; has this awful design choice of tying shots to the four face buttons, meaning enemies can approach you from each angle but you can only shoot in four directions; movement is sluggish and you'll frequently be mobbed against walls and into unavoidable explosion damage; and the success of your run is mostly determined by RNG - where enemies will spawn once you enter a room (if near the door, your run is over. and if far, you can kite them one at a time to beat the game without taking damage). Your pistol is piss-weak and if you're doing poorly, the game rewards you with not giving any powerups, whereas if you're doing well you'll have a lot of redundant powerups all at once. Awful design, poor gameplay loop, an experience best avoided

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One of the best puzzle games I've played in recent memory. What shines for me is the simplicity of it - every level consists of a 5x5 chess-like grid, and you receive anywhere from 1-5 pieces that need to be placed in order to power up or fuel up all your buildings on the map. And on this extremely basic premise, you have loads and loads of mechanical modifiers that ensure not only that each level is unique, but that each stretch of the game is unique as well.

Some stretches will have you dealing with spikes that come up and down on alternate turns, some will have you dealing with red crystals that prevent piece placement, and some will have you dealing with glitched patches that grow like a cancer, to name a few. The optional puzzles keep adding new mechanics, and the game is graceful enough to end before it becomes dull.

One of the things I loved about it is that, while some puzzles can be hard, there are just enough options that you can bruteforce the ones that stump you. Sure, it takes a bit of time and patience to do so, but it's better than getting stuck forever on a few levels like happened to me on Snakebird or Baba Is You.

All of that is wrapped in a game with a simplistic but confident art style that is charming and unique at the same time, some sound design that is arguably limited, but fits the atmosphere incredibly well, and some wordless environmental storytelling that works much better than it should.

How this game hasn't become a puzzling benchmark is beyond my understanding, but I hope my review at least help some people who are curious to finally give it a go!