Category: video games

#REVIEW: Pragmata (PS5)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

Ooooofffffff.

I started Pragmata a little under a month ago, and when I did I called it the biggest Dad game since The Last of Us. I beat it tonight, and that opinion remains true; the basic plot of the game is that you end up stranded on the Moon (roll with it) and you end up rapidly adopting, more or less, an android girl who you name Diana. All of the enemies on the moon are robotic in nature (AI GONE WILD is a good-enough description of the wider plot) and Diana helps you throughout your mission by hacking your robot enemies so that you can blow them to pieces with guns. The basic game structure is not quite a Soulslike (die, and you just reappear at the hub) but it’s definitely Soulslike-adjacent; lots of customization of your equipment (no ability scores, though) which gives you a ton of flexibility for how you approach combat throughout the game. Mods can be applied to your suit, all of your guns can be upgraded, Diana’s hacks can be upgraded, and so on. There’s a hub you can return to that acts similar to the bonfires you find in Soulslikes, although it’s more of a hub base than anything else.

This hits right in my sweet spot, honestly; the different zones you can reach are separate and you can’t go in between them without going to the hub in between, but there’s hidden stuff to find everywhere and your inability to travel from zone A directly to zone D doesn’t end up being annoying at all. The exploration is great, and the combat is not like anything I’ve seen before. You’re essentially fighting as two characters as once; Hugh (the guy) controls like any main character in any shooter you’ve ever played, but Diana’s hacks require you to open up a grid and then navigate though it using the face buttons, hitting various nodes that power up the hack as you’re moving through. Successfully completing the hack does damage on its own and also opens the enemy’s armor up, allowing you to do damage with your guns.

I feel like that description’s unclear. Here’s what the hack interface looks like:

It’s important to realize that while time is slowed down, it’s still happening, so you will sometimes have to interrupt your hack to dodge away from an enemy attack, and there are mods that will allow you to start from where you left off if you get interrupted, by losing connection or getting hit. This makes combat really frenetic and super satisfying, especially once you gain the ability to overheat your enemies, which allows you to do critical attacks. And there’s another mod that makes critical attacks also damage nearby enemies, and … man, combat is fun in this game.

The technical aspects are all solid; graphics are pretty stellar and I didn’t encounter any bugs. I’ve talked about this before; so long as I can tell what I’m doing, I don’t really worry about graphics in video games any longer. Diana and Hugh’s animations and facial expressions are great and while the environments are kinda samey (you’re on a moon base, after all) they do manage to work in a forest level via some nanotech-related shenanigans. Certain items have audio cues that help you find them and the game doesn’t actually tell you to listen for the audio cues, which was a nice touch. Voice acting is great– any time a game has a little kid in it (Diana’s not human, but comes off as being eight or so) you could be in some serious trouble with voice acting, but it’s really solid here, even in the more heavy emotional scenes.

And … yeah. About that. The game didn’t make me cry, but it bloody well could have. I’m not spoiling anything; the ending doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere but it still managed to take me by surprise, if only because holy shit, I didn’t think they were really gonna do that.

My tendency toward heavy exploration and trying to find everything led to about a 20-hour play through on this one; you need two of them to platinum the game, which I don’t think I’m going to do, but I might. You could probably get done in 10-12 hours if you weren’t poking your head into every nook and cranny. Definitely check it out.

Still quiet

On By Luther M. SilerIn video games3 Comments

Not a lot going on around here on this second day of my three-day weekend. Spent some time reading, put together part of a Lego set, finally started Pragmata after having it on my PS5 for weeks without touching it. I’m … an hour and a half in, maybe? Having a good time with it, but it’s way too early for any kind of review other than this is obviously going to be the biggest Dad Game I’ve played since The Last of Us.

But, really, that’s it. No strident opinions, nothing in particular to review, no world opinions I feel like talking about. Quiet’s nice once in a while.

#REVIEW: Nioh 3 (PS5, 2026)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

I mean, come on. It’s a Nioh game. I rate it 800/10.

I officially beat Nioh 3 this afternoon and collected the Platinum trophy, with about 80 or so hours of gameplay needed in order to do it. This is the easiest of the trilogy by a long shot; anyone who has been around for a long time and has a really good memory might recall that the hardest boss fight I’ve ever had was in the original Nioh, and there were a bunch in Nioh 2 that were tough as nails. This one? I’m either a much better gamer after all this time or it’s easier. Both are possible; I’m going with “easier” anyway. Nioh 2, along with Elden Ring and Sekiro, is one of my favorite games of all time.

How does this one stand up? Pretty Goddamn well, although it’s not going to get four complete playthroughs before the DLC comes out like 2 did. The biggest change Nioh 3 makes to the series is the addition of an open-world aspect to the game; there are still more linear missions like in the earlier games, but in between there’s a wide-open area with some side missions and a whole ton of exploration to do. As I’m getting older I’m appreciating exploration-style games more and more, so that was something I really liked seeing in a series that was already in my personal pantheon. All of the technical stuff— the combat, the graphics, all the gameplay, basically, is up to expectations against the previous games; I can’t imagine any reason why anyone who enjoyed 1 or 2 might not like 3.

What didn’t work? This is going to be kind of a weird gripe, because it’s kind of a weird system, but this series has always been pretty big on build diversity, right? You can go with super-fast ninjutsu weapons or a magic-heavy build or a more armored, slower samurai-type build or you can mix and match to your heart’s content. This game added a system that I’ve never seen in a game before; you get a “samurai” build and a “ninja” build, which share certain things like ability scores and health, but who have different weapons and armor and Guardian Spirits and skills. Ninja have their complement of ninjutsu skills like shuriken and bombs and a whole mess of other stuff; Samurai have the three combat stances from the earlier games (the ninja weapons drop the combat stances) and a few other things. You can switch between your ninja build and your samurai build at the touch of one of the triggers.

Now, I feel like this should be cool, because you can effectively run two entirely separate builds and switch between them at will, and generally flexibility is a good thing. But the metaphor, for lack of a better word, never made any sense to me. Again, I know this is a weird thing to complain about when you’re playing a game where you’re a fireball-flinging ninja fighting demons in sixteenth-century Japan, but how the hell does this work from a storytelling perspective? The samurai and the ninja are the same person. And you hit R2 and bam, your character does a little spin and your armor and weapons change. I don’t know why this is hitting my suspension of disbelief so hard but I just can’t buy it. I ended up playing most of the game as the ninja anyway— I want to be fast in these games, and tonfa goes brrrrrrrrrrrrr was really all I needed except when I wanted talons go brrrrrrrr, and luckily those are both ninja weapons. You can also respec whenever you want, so if I decide I want to go mostly samurai in NG+ and do axe and odachi or whatever, I can literally just respec my character to do that on the spot, without even any in-game items to spend for it, and go be axe-odachi guy.

This is why the game is 800/10 and not 1000/10, of course. It doesn’t make the game less fun or anything— I mostly ignored the system altogether except when I wanted to fire my rifle, which I kept as my samurai’s distance weapon— but it never really stopped feeling weird. That’s my only complaint, though, and unless I’m stupid enough to download Crimson Desert, this game is pretty likely to keep holding my attention for a while, especially since there are still 3 DLCs coming this year.

I want my brain back

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, video gamesLeave a comment

I have believed myself to be entirely neurotypical for my entire life, other than, y’know, the anxiety disorder and occasional crippling depression, so … yeah, maybe this wasn’t the right sentence to start with? But I’ve definitely never thought I had ADHD before. Until this week. My god. It has been a nightmare week in a lot of ways, some of which I’ve talked about and some of which I haven’t, so maybe I’ve earned it, but … ugh. I read nearly 9,000 pages in January according to Storygraph. I don’t think I’ve managed 200 this week. I can’t focus. It’s driving me batshit.

Now, a good chunk of that is Nioh 3, I’m not gonna lie; I’ve put 24 hours into it already since it came out. I knew it was going to eat my life, and eat my life it has. The other thing, though? Have you heard of Redactle? It’s the worst fucking thing ever. Imagine a Wikipedia article, with all the words except maybe the 15 most common English words blanked out. Selected at random. And then the game is you guess words until you get the title of the article. Which might be, like, “Jesus,” or something you’re familiar with, and might be Niamey, the capital city of Niger, or maybe it’ll be Navier-Stokes Equations, which you will somehow solve in 178 words? “Adivasi,” by comparison, took 401.

It’s not … fun, so much as addictive and horrible? But I haven’t done one yet today and I will before I go to bed. Right after I beat this boss. And then maybe I’ll get some sleep before I pick my wife up at the train station tomorrow morning, and hopefully my life more or less returns to normal.

(Thirteen minutes and 235 words for today’s puzzle, btw.)

Wait, where am I?

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

Pretty sure today was the first day I completely lost to Nioh 3, and I’m only “pretty sure” because I’m only about 50% sure it hasn’t been more than one day since I last slept.

At any rate, regarding the image, I hate that fucking thing, #iykyk.

IMPORTANT NIOH 3 UPDATE

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

IPPON-DATARAS ARE STILL THE ABSOLUTE GODDAMN WORST.

2025 in video games

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

Ghost of Yotei was Game of the Year. It wasn’t close. I played a fair number of really good games this year, but the sequel to the best game of 2020 and one of my favorite games of all time was the best game of 2025, and I feel like that’s probably not something that’s going to surprise anyone.

The big story for me this year was how much more use my Xbox got compared to every previous year; I leaned into Game Pass a lot more than I have in the past, and anything that I could get for free on Xbox ended up being played on that console. I’m still pretty agnostic as far as the virtues of the two consoles go; how well a game runs really seems to be more dependent on the game itself than the system I’m running it on, and I’m well beyond the point where gigaflorps and raytraces and whatever the graphical buzzword of the day might be is particularly impressive. The biggest graphical moments of the year for me were a character moment in Clair Obscur and realizing that the light coming through a stained glass window in a church was actually reflecting off my character in the right colors in whichever Sniper Elite I played this year. 6, maybe? Let’s say 6.

For the second year in a row, I did not touch the Switch, and my son showed no interest at all in picking up a Switch 2, so we haven’t. I am strongly considering a Steam Machine when it comes out in 2026, though.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was probably Yotei’s closest competition, and was definitely the most unique game I played this year, as damn near everything else was either a Soulslike or a Metroidvania or a combination of both– I am nothing if not consistent with my preferred genres. It had the best turn-based gameplay I’ve ever encountered and combined it with a stunningly good story and hauntingly beautiful graphics and if it wasn’t for the bit where it used up all of its goodwill in the amazingly misconceived grindfest that is Act III, I’d probably still be playing it.

Khazan: The First Berserker does not involve any berserking but hooooooooly shit was it a lot of fun and I put more hours into it than anything else I played this year, including Yotei. I played through it completely twice before moving on to the next game. That doesn’t happen very often. What kept this one from GOTY? The lack of depth to the story, mostly. The combat was exceptionally good but the story didn’t hold a candle to the emotional resonance of Yotei or Clair Obscur, leaving the game just a touch below both of them.

I also played the shit out of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and loved 95% of it, and for the other 5% I was staring at a blurry mess of pixels as the game struggled to keep up with itself. There was also a bug in the platinum trophy, which meant that after doing absolutely everything in the game and getting all of the other trophies, I didn’t get the trophy that you get for getting all the trophies. Look, game, they’re right there. They did finally push through an update months later that gave me credit for everything, and I keep hearing there might be a big story DLC that will absolutely pull me back into the game, but a bug stopping me from getting the final trophy in this one stuck in my craw a bit. The game itself was great, though.

This is the entire map for Crypt Custodian, a game where you play a ghost cat that beats up enemies with a broom. I assume that you can tell how much I loved the game just from looking at how huge and complicated this map is. I love exploration-heavy games. This one was amazing.

And finally …

This is a screenshot from Crime Scene Cleaner, a ridiculous little game where you are tossed into the role of a guy whose job it is to clean up after heinous mob crimes. This includes getting rid of all the bodies, picking up anything broken, restoring anything that isn’t, and cleaning up every tiny little spot of blood. Upgrading your abilities includes things like getting better mops and bags that can hold larger volumes of garbage.

It was, and this is a great way to find out if you and I are people or not, one of the most relaxing games I played this year. Walk into utter fucking nightmare chaos and restore order? Sign me up. I want a sequel. They can do a new version of this game every year if they want to, I’ll keep playing it.

And, for the second day in a row, I’ve written “I want more of this” in a post, then gone and looked, and found out there was more! They apparently released a big DLC back in June and it never crossed my radar. Hooray!

What did you play this year?

#REVIEW: Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist (PS5, 2025)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video games1 Comment

I’m finding myself weirdly not in the mood to write about this, but in the absence of anything else not involving profane ranting and raving, I’m just going to tell you that Ender Magnolia is a quality if not life-changing Metroidvania, and that it excels mostly in the exploration side of things. The combat and build styles are really interesting– you bond with AIs called Homunculi throughout the game, and each of them will give you either a travel ability or some sort of new approach to combat, and on top of that each combat homunculus will have three different and sometimes wildly divergent abilities to play with. You’ll have ten or so available by the end of the game, so that’s thirty different abilities, plus items called Relics that can add buffs or tweak your build in other ways, so this is also a game that’s big on build customization.

I liked it, and I platinumed it today, and if you’re into Metroidvanias as a genre at all it should definitely be on your list. Unfortunately I’m tired and kinda crabby at the moment for no particular reason, so I’m going to cut this shorter than I originally had planned. What should I play next? Both of these are on sale right now: