JSchlansky
Bio: I perform various production-related tasks
Recent Ratings
Check out JSchlansky's...
| 25 7% | Immortals of Aveum (2023) - Rated 18 Jun 2024
"It's bad enough that the cringey Marvel quip-syndrome has infected so much of broader cinema, keep it out of video games, please! And if you're going to have the story and characters be this awful, at the VERY LEAST, let me skip the cutscenes. I've always been opposed to the whole silent-protagonist schtick, but with player characters like this douchebag, the Atomic Heart douchebag, and the Shadow Warrior douchebag becoming more and more common, I'm rethinking my stance on that."
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| 80 86% | Alan Wake II (2023) - Rated 17 Jun 2024
"I wish I could say that I unequivocally love this game because I do love so much of what it's doing. I love the vast majority of its narrative decisions, its atmosphere and visuals, and all of its stylistic choices, but I find its gameplay and certain design choices far too frustrating to give it full marks. But it's a special piece of work and we need more like it regardless of my hangups with it"
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| 79 83% | Hades (2020) - Rated 13 Jun 2024
"The roguelike genre isn't really my thing. For a roguelike to fully grab me, it has to be one of the best of its field and be doing something special. Hades fits that bill."
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| 100 99% | Disco Elysium (2019) - Rated 10 Jun 2024
"Simply one of the finest written works of art in any medium"
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| 53 33% | Dead Island 2 (2023) - Rated 02 Jun 2024
"There's fun to be had but only when the characters all shut the fuck up. The tone is awful, the dialogue is a conveyor belt of cringe, every character sucks, and the performances sound like every voice actor was directed to be as obnoxious as possible. Oh also, you guys know that Los Angeles isn't an island, right? Two games in and you couldn't think of another island?"
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| 75 78% | Bramble: The Mountain King (2023) - Rated 02 Jun 2024
"Similar to Little Nightmares or Inside, but there's a surprising amount of variety packed in, and it doesn't outstay its welcome. Great use of folklore, beautiful art direction, effectively creepy, and multiple creative boss fights. Only frustration is that your character occasionally refuses to grab onto whatever ledge or surface you're meant to jump to, and dying in this type of game always means tediously re-navigating the same environment with all of its luster removed on the second trip."
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| 47 22% | A Little to the Left (2022) - Rated 02 Jun 2024
"More of a puzzle game than a straightforward cozy game than you might expect. Some of the puzzles are pretty cool to put together, some are frustrating in that there are multiple solutions that make an equal amount of sense but the game only accepts one of them, and some are full-on moon-logic obtuse and don't make any sense even after staring at the solution for way too long"
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| 15 3% | The Quarry (2022) - Rated 02 Jun 2024
"I hated Until Dawn but tried to go into this with an open mind hoping that Supermassive would have improved over the years, but no, this still got on my nerves instantly, especially the awful dialogue and annoying-as-hell characters (all of them). The prospect of playing an interactive horror movie has so much potential but both of these games would be total dogshit horror movies, and the choices jammed in are so awkward in execution (when they aren't being obviously faked)."
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| 30 10% | Marvel's Midnight Suns (2022) - Rated 02 Jun 2024
"The card-based gameplay is excellent, but everything else is total garbage, and there's so much of it that constantly gets in the way of the one thing the game does well. Everything in the abbey sucks ass, and you're forced to spend so much time there engaging in cringy nonsense that you can only skip through one line at a time. Some of the worst writing and voice acting I've tried to endure to get to enjoyable gameplay, but I just can't do it"
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| 78 83% | The Forest (2018) - Rated 02 Jun 2024
"Nails the two biggest things that most survival games fumble: Having a compelling end goal and packing enough variety to keep things interesting. Its systems lead to cool emergent gameplay, but there's also a nice helping of curated events slipped into the mix. I also love the horror components and the sense of exploration, although it began feeling like searching for a needle in a haystack when there was a single item somewhere on the giant map that I needed to progress"
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