I wound up getting into Alan Wake after buying Alan Wake 2 on sale for super cheap. The first game, which was also super cheap through Steam, was a fun time. I didn’t care much for the gameplay, but I was intrigued with where the story went. I held off on starting 2 after I finished it though because I was going to try to get the entire lore (which involved playing a different Alan Wake game and Control) However, I decided to abandon that as I was not enjoying the other Alan Wake game (American Nightmare) and wanting to close the book on Alan Wake for a while (I’ll play Control sometime for its own merits)

Alan Wake 2 was a let-down.

I didn’t mind the idea of Alan Wake 2 getting darker than its predecessor (to start leaning into the horror idea) but the game relies a bit too heavily on jump scares. During particularly tense moments of the game, it can give you these flashes of people screaming. Sometimes you can predict them, but the times when you’re really invested, they can just pop you up and take you right out of it (Nothing usually happens after you see those scenes) They just feel crammed in to try and make the game feel like it’s scarier than it actually is.

Gameplay is not especially smooth. Clunky is what I’d describe it as. Even playing on the easiest difficulty, I felt like it was tripping me up more than enhancing the experience.

The story, where it goes, leaves a lot of stuff open. What worse is that you need to apparently finish it on New Game+ to get an ending that explains things a bit more. While I generally liked a lot of the ideas, the atmosphere, and the characters, it just felt anti-climatic in the end. More questions about this world they’re in and what’s really true. I could accept that maybe it’s not the end of Alan Wake’s saga but it really doesn’t even feel like an ending for the second game until you beat it again (Which I feel is kind of bad) There’s a reason why they do it that way, but there are better ways to do it than making people play through the same game again for only a few bread crumbs.

My overall grade for this would probably be a C. I was thinking I might play Control right after while playing, but now that I finished, I’m sort of Remedy’d out for a bit, I think.

I decided I didn’t like my initial write-up of Expedition 33 and have decided to rewrite it.

The game is excellent.

My first time through, I rated it well, but honestly, I didn’t truly get it. I dodged most of the time, and character battle mechanics only half meshed with my brain. It was enough to reach an ending, and while I enjoyed it, I felt like I had to keep playing.

When I started my second game, I decided to parry only, and from there the experience actually went from a “good game” to an excellent one. It’s hard to explain why, but trust me when I say that if you’re not doing parry only, you’re not really experiencing the best the gameplay has to offer.

Up there with the best JRPGs, unironically

Blue Prince was sold to me as Myst meets a rouge-lite. Who exactly sold it to me that way, I can’t recall. I just started seeing a bunch of media talking about it, and shortly after that started watching some Youtubers play it before I decided I needed to experience it for myself.

That all said, I’m not really huge into Myst. I’ve never beaten it. In fact I’ve never even got very far into it. Partly due to it coming out when I was too young to understand how to figure out the puzzles, but also because I was scared away from playing it (Long story short, don’t play atmospheric games with your friend at a sleepover at 2 am)

On paper though I’ve always liked the idea of Myst and having an interest in plenty of rogue-lite games, it definitely sounded like something I needed to check out.

I will admit that I didn’t solve many (if any at all) puzzles. A big part of that was watching Northernlion play a good chunk of the game, although once he stopped his playthrough (to move onto other games) I wound up using internet help. Most of my enjoyment came from the rogue-lite parts.

I know there’s probably some people who would frown at that, but I still enjoyed the game. I think it’s a masterpiece. Well at least up until you reached room 46. The stuff you can do after that starts to plummet in enjoyability to a more “normal game” level. Not bad, but it gets to the point where I started to feel like what I was doing was not working towards a resolution of the main mystery that becomes clear to you over the course of playing.

It didn’t stop me from doing all there was to do, and it wont probably stop me from picking it up again if new content was introduced. Though for most others I would recommend just focusing on the getting to room 46 and calling it there