Recent reviews by Nøstalgia

This is what happens when a Pixar movie meets Dark Souls.

The graphics, especially animations, are absolutely godlike. It really does feel like playing a Pixar movie. The combat is surprisingly difficult, albeit not quite as difficult as Dark Souls/Elden Ring. The story is quite good.

Definitely worth playing if you thought that it looks cool.

A weird mix between Diablo and a building game. Combat is Diablo-esque, but the end goal is to build your base.

Really fun with friends, has local coop, and online servers. If playing locally, server config is highly customizable, which allows to remove several grindy limitations.

Performance is good, but the game is heavily CPU-intensive.

Metroidvania with good story that manages to capture the feeling of Gotham really well

EDIT: Changed my review score back to negative. After ~100 hours of gameplay, in Caelid, my audio in the game started crackling. Issue is not present in any other game or while listening to music. This is one of the worst ports I've played in a decade. Don't give these developers your money.

COMBAT I personally never liked Dark Souls combat, but in this game, I am loving it. There are a ton of ways to cheese the enemies and out-level them, so it's really not that difficult. I've heard reports that enemies get spongy towards the end of the game, but it's still possible to cheese them. There's many playstyles, you can min/max builds and switch them on the fly.

STORY & QUESTS There's absolutely no story except "become Elden Lord". Protagonist never talks, isn't voiced, has no character, motivation or personality. It is very easy to miss quests, if you are a completionist who only cares about the story I heavily recommend finding a guide online that tells you where to go and in what order - but it is an enjoyable enough experience. Lore is there, if you're willing to dump like ten hours into reading item descriptions and then spend another ten on YouTube watching "Elden Ring Lore explained!" videos.

Very big topic of discussion online is the fact that the game lacks quest markers or a questbook, but this is present in other games like Assassin's Creed: Origins/Odyssey/Vallhalla if you use the UI settings to toggle everything off and never use the questbook - and those games manage to have well-written characters with voice acting and sidequests. And you can place questmarkers - so the summary is, the game is just being a ***ch for no reason when it comes to quests. It forces you to research stuff online if you don't want to miss out anything instead of giving you an option to control the level of information to your liking.

PERFORMANCE Performance is absolute crap on PC. There are mods that help with that, but you will be playing offline or risk an Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) ban. But the game looks absolutely gorgeous; the art style and level design (on a macro level) is something I've never seen in a game before.

TL;DR overhyped, but not too much, it is fun. I'd buy it at 30 EUR/USD or cheaper, but if you primarily game for stories, you won't be missing out anything if you skip this alltogether.

Hilarious, fun 30 minute experience in Aperture Science/Portal universe. Play it. It's great.

Originally designed for the Steam Deck, but I played it on PC. With a PS5 controller, you can finish it completely. It has gyro aiming, and all the controls work. Buttons which are not present on the DualShock 5 (R4, R5, L4, L5) are emulated via mappings to other buttons.

Hand-painted puzzle/escape the room game that is on a level of a graphic novel - since it's author actually is a graphic novelist.

The puzzles are tough and do take space awareness and out of the box thinking to solve. The graphics, as I said, is a hand-made graphic novel. Music is great.

A hidden gem.

Criminally underrated puzzle game. Self-aware writing that is breaking the fourth wall in funny ways. Charming characters, great jazz soundtrack. Gameplay is challenging, levels are brain twisters. Game feels like a product of love, attention to detail just screams "I had this cool idea in my head and want to do it", well the idea was great and is executed perfectly.

Not sure why this isn't known more.

Amazing performance by great actors using voice acting and full-body mocap. Soundtrack that includes songs from one of my favorite bands. An interesting world and story.

And yet a tedious, long game with a gameplay loop that gets boring after a short period of time that is way too pretentious.

Dialogues and some parts of the ending during the ending were just too cringe. It's not worth spending a 100 hours on. Watch the best parts of this game on YouTube and save yourself a lot of time doing the same thing (delivering packages, there's really nothing else to do) for a literal hundred hours.

The game starts slow, but picks up towards the end. The ending is a rollercoaster of emotions that is absolutely worth it.

Great fun with friends. External communication tools like Discord recommended.