Recent reviews by Keeko

Originally, I had a long section here about Skyrim/Fallout 4, but I ran out of space. So just keep in mind what those games failed and succeeded at while you read this review. Bland writing, bland combat, fantastic exploration. Same applies to Fallout 3 and Oblivion. It's the Bethesda triple combo.

----

Fallout 4, but in space. Skyrim, but in space. Oblivion, but in space. That sounds amazing, doesn't it? A Bethesda game in an all-new setting. We expect problems, but that core's still there and as strong as ever. Except Starfield is like none of those games. In fact, it's the most unique game Bethesda has ever put out. What do I mean by that?

In Starfield, instead of being given a quest and going on a multi hour long journey to your destination and organically discovering tons of other little encounters and quests along the way... you just teleport there. Sorry, you don't just teleport. First, you enter your spaceship (loading screen), enter the cockpit (long unskippable animation), go to orbit (loading screen), pick a destination and warp (loading screen), pick a place to land (loading screen), exit ship (loading screen), and finally enter the dungeon (loading screen). There a way around it, but then you'll end up never really using your ship or being in orbit of a planet. Immediately, Starfield sets itself apart from Skyrim and Fallout 4 by ditching the seamless open world almost entirely. Any time there is a 'seamless open world', it's procedural with handcrafted dungeons strewn about. Let's talk about those next.

Dungeons are what you expect... mostly. You enter one and you're greeted with that Bethesda environmental storytelling goodness. There's tons of junk items strewn about - plates, cups, desk fans, duct tape, test tubes, metal trays, microscopes, notepads, notepaper, books, folders, filled folders, etc. Far more than Fallout 4 ever had, in fact. However, unlike Fallout 4, there is no junk scrapping. 90% of the objects you can pick up in any given space are useless. You can only use it for decorating. The density of junk is so high that it's often a struggle to find what's actually good loot in a room.

About that loot - it's always money, armor, lockpicks, weapons, and consumables. It's typical Bethesda affair. Starfield sets itself apart, however, by having the vast majority of your money come from lootable equipment. There's an enormous disparity between quest rewards and sell values. Generally, a quest will give you a few thousand credits, while a single weapon is worth 400-800 credits. Except you will find dozens of weapons from a single dungeon and be able to make an easy 20,000 from short trips. Though Starfield does little to offset this massive income. You will very quickly find money completely worthless, unless you get really into shipbuilding.

How does combat fare? Guns feel good - great, actually. It's a big step up. They give an appropriate amount of kick, they have crispy firing sounds, and there's a healthy amount of aim assistance to make shooting feel responsive. It's no Halo or CoD, but it's a big improvement. Unfortunately, that does not matter as Starfield has a critical lack of enemy variety. Imagine if Fallout 4/Skyrim had no mutant/fantasy enemies and you only fought raiders/bandits. Except it's even worse than that because enemies will frequently get stuck on the excessive clutter found in dungeons and glitch out, leaving them a still target. Not like enemy AI even matters in this game, given how insanely easy it is to find an overleveled weapon and start one shotting enemies. I was level 5 when I found a gun that was able to one shot all enemies with ease. I was still consistently using this weapon until level 17 when I finally found items that rivaled its power. Yet, enemies had done little to get stronger alongside me and still crumpled like wet tissue paper if I so much as sneezed at them. Higher difficulties only delay this inevitability.

Okay, I lied - Starfield does have enemy variety in the fauna found on planets. It's unfortunate that they're either super rare, completely avoidable, or offer no incentive to fight them. It's even more unfortunate that they exhibit Minecraft Zombie AI (it's worse than that, actually, I sort of doubt they could navigate a maze) and become oversized target practice if you gain a few feet of elevation over them. So, sure, you're not only fighting humanoid enemies with guns, but it effectively doesn't matter because fauna always walk in a straight line towards you in open fields and they're extremely easy to avoid. Terrormorphs are cool though. I'll give them that. Yet again unfortunate that you only fight them in a single questline. We can't win 'em all!

Are the dungeons at least interesting? Sure, if you don't mind doing the same 30 over and over and over. Yes, quests will sometimes have unique dungeons, but most of your dungeon playtime will be in copy-pasted ones. Yes, 30. Genuinely, you will only come across ~30 dungeon variants throughout your entire playtime. No, they are not procedural. It's the same locations with the same layouts and the same characters and the same enemy placements and the same scribbled notes and the same computer terminal entries. The only difference is loot and where they're placed on the procedural planet map.

What about quests? Oh, if you thought Fallout 4 hit the depths of Bethesda's boring, plot-hole ridden writing, you haven't seen anything yet. 90% of characters are lawful good. I'm serious. They're all the same "I just want to help people, I hate crime, I'm morally incorruptible", yada yada. Characters that are 'nuanced', such as the Crimson Fleet, are reduced to 'good for nothing criminals' that just want to kill, steal, and wreck havoc across the galaxy. And, since the 'world' of Starfield is so much more bland than Skyrim/Fallout 4's, most quests feel like radiant quests with a few bells and whistles. The faction questlines are generally better about this (EXCEPT RYUJIN), but they're still worse than even the most mediocre of Bethesda's other questlines.

...Is the lore interesting? Do we have anything like that awesome TES metaphysicality or that Fallout real-world commentary? No, not really. If it exists, it's skin deep. The writers who wrote TES and Fallout's original lore are all gone and now we're left with the writers of Fallout 4's main quest. Starfield's universe has no intrigue to it. If you have consumed any modicum of sci-fi media in the past century, Starfield will offer nothing new. It only borrows popular tropes and does nothing to evolve them. There's a cowboy space town with an inn called the Hitching Post and all the roads are muddy. There's a utopia metropolis with 30 buildings and a seedy underbelly where nothing seedy actually happens. Oh my god, there's even a cyberpunk city named Neon! Named Neon! It's a single street and it has vaguely Yakuza-inspired street gangs who deal in drugs, except the drug is basically recolored alcohol in a club where the strippers are fully clothed because Starfield has no edge. That's the other thing - it's all so deeply juvenile. If you thought Skyrim's portrayal of racism was surface level, guess what, because there is NOTHING like that here. Is that good? Maybe, except there was zero attempt to give Starfield any sort of statement. It's all flat. If Skyrim was written like a straight square, Starfield was written like an edgeless circle.

That's all. I've hit the review size limit. Play the game when it's on sale if you must. And no, there will not be a "Cyberpunk 2.0" for Starfield unless Bethesda makes a whole new game. It's fundamentally broken and cannot be saved. Cyberpunk had good bones - Starfield is a rotting corpse.

I've given up hope on Elder Scrolls 6. If Bethesda took 7 years to make this game, there is no amount of time or money that could make TES6 a good video game. Just go play Skyblivion when that's out. It'll be more fun, I guarantee it.

I'm not exactly the most forgiving when it comes to games and their design decisions. I'm typically a very critical person who is annoyed by inconveniences and frustrated by time constraints. It stresses me out, feels unnecessary... I typically avoid any sort of time sensitive activity in any game. And when a game sends you back to the very beginning for dying? I hate that. Never liked roguelikes, never liked the pressure that those sorts of games had.

Outer Wilds has all of these mechanics as a central point, and it manages to be my favorite game since Bloodborne - hell, I might like it even more.


Without spoiling too much, Outer Wilds makes a point of these annoyances and frustrations to make the most compelling, emotionally moving story experience of my life. I anticipate that nothing will top it for a very long time. The sorts of things this game makes you feel is unparalleled. Endless dread, overbearing hopelessness, nihilism, the fragility of life - all of it.

My experience with Outer Wilds was much different than other people. Most experienced feelings of wanderlust and discovery, hoping to find some great new revelation to tell them more about the universe. For me, as described above, it was primarily negative emotions. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

There are certain moments in this game that I look back to and tear up at the thought. The crushing hopelessness of spending hours on a new lead to try and solve the grand puzzle the game has set up for you, only to find that its a dead end with no answers. The absolute dread as planets crumble around you, striving to find another piece of lore, thinking that it could have the one thing you're missing. Associating certain events with music to the point that whenever I heard said moments, I genuinely wanted to break down, give up, accept my fate in a universe which couldn't care less about me.

Yet, I wanted to keep going, hoping that I could finish the various puzzles the game had laid out for me.

Take this from someone who is not emotional and struggles with expression.

This is in no way negative. The game would be much less without these things. If you hate these sorts of mechanics in games, I still urge you to try this game with as little information as possible. I've already said too much.


The core gameplay loop of Outer Wilds is one of figuring out where you want to go, getting there, finding lore written on walls, and using said lore to figure out environmental puzzles. The only motivation in this game is your desire to explore and to learn. There is no goal at the beginning. You can talk to a couple of NPCs and they tell you about the various planets, but that's it. You may go anywhere you please with little restriction. It does all of this without being terribly obtuse or confusing.

The puzzles range from absolutely genius to meh. The top tier puzzles are mind boggling in how simple they are but how difficult they can be to solve. The meh puzzles typically involve waiting around, but those can be bypassed with the games rest mechanic.


One of the developer's goals with this game was to defy the conventions of game design at a very fundamental level. They wanted to make a game where everything was in motion, where it wasn't on a flat plane, where the game didn't 'cheat' with its mechanics (meaning that objects like planets wouldn't be on rails). They've succeeded in that goal in more ways than one.

All of the planets in this game are constantly in motion, meaning that everything is in motion. They're not on rails, they actually obey the laws of inertia and gravity. Every time you lift off a planet, force is exerted onto that planet and moves it eveeeer so slightly, even if that movement means nothing gameplay wise. You can actually go into orbit around planets, given enough patience.

Ship controls are similarly different. They may seem obtuse at first but as you learn them, they become wonderfully intuitive and you wish every ship in every game controlled like it. You actually have to account for your acceleration and can't just mindlessly land on planets by pressing a single button. It's not Kerbal Space Program by any means, but it is more complex than the average video game spaceship.

Planets themselves are very unique. They defy expectations and, not only are they in motion, their surfaces and objects are constantly changing and morphing as the game progresses. To give an example, Ember and Ash Twin are a binary planet. Ash Twin is covered in sand while Ember Twin is a rocky, canyon filled, cave littered planet. As the game progresses, the sand from Ash Twin transfers to Ember Twin, slowly filling up all the crevices and caverns of the planet, while structures on Ash Twin are revealed, previously buried.

Now, what does this all mean? What is the point of all this?

All of this together makes Outer Wilds simultaneously one of the most solid, mechanically sound games ever made while still being very refreshing and new. It defies expectations at the most basic level and turns it into a wonderful experience. Exploration in this game doesn't have you just thinking about where - it has you thinking about when. It really is a unique gameplay experience that pushes Outer Wilds to the next level.


Overall, Outer Wilds is a 10/10 game. I only have two issues with it, one being an overly obscure puzzle (though I completely understand why said puzzle is so obscure) and the other being a very helpful mechanic that many people can miss. It's one of, if not the best exploration game ever made. Its puzzles are meticulously crafted and designed with intent, deceptively simple while still hard enough to get you to sit down and think. Its characters are similarly simple but you truly do care about them at the end, even if you only meet with them a handful of times. The overarching narrative feels natural and not forced. And, for what I believe is this game's best aspect, is that you'll be experiencing a glorious rollercoaster of emotions the whole way through.

This game is definitely one of the best games I have ever played. The amount of care, detail, and attention put into everything is absurd. Every sidequest, even the most mundane ones, have charm and meaning to them. Every structure you find has a story behind it. All the enemies have unique and interesting designs and mechanics. The world is absolutely beautiful and is a wonderfully realistic and immersive setting. Novigrad is easily my favorite video game city of all time.

But I do not understand the unending praise this game gets.

Don't get me wrong. This game is absolutely fantastic. But this game is not a masterpiece. You hear this term just about everywhere, but it's a flawed gem. No game is perfect. Every game has problems. And the Witcher 3 has some annoying, hard to ignore problems.

The combat, for a game of this scale, is pretty great. It's clunky at first but you get a hang of it after a while. It's complete ass when fighting multiple enemies though. Those Wild Hunt Hounds are absolute hell to fight in packs. Hitboxes can be occasionally janky and enemy telegraphs aren't clear a lot of the time. The biggest problem with the combat, however, is that after a certain point it becomes way too easy. I was playing on the second highest difficulty and I was spam clicking just about every enemy without much trouble. The only things that challenged me were the three big bosses you face towards the end of the game. I really liked the feeling in the opening of the game where you had to prepare before a big fight. Brew a bunch of potions, buy food, temper your weapons, etc... and you do that for like 4 more levels and you don't have to anymore. Really wish that feeling was consistent throughout the game.

I find that the story loses some of its stride after the climax. It becomes a generic save the world plot - more about stopping the big bad than about developing characters or finding new interesting ones. There's really only three characters other than Geralt that see development during the final act. It's a real step down from when you were travelling across the Northern Realms, finding old and new friends, discovering their motivations, and watching them have actual character development. Just kinda stagnated towards the end. Also the ending is meh. Really could've used more explanation and there was some stuff that just... made no sense. The ending wasn't offensive, it was just 'whelming'.

I. Hate. The. Minimap. It's bad. Since nearly every single quest has a location objective where you have to travel somewhere through complex road systems (getting Roach through a forest or swamp is a pain in the ass so taking the roads are just easier), you have to heavily rely on the minimap's little dotted line telling you where to go. This is bad. You end up looking at the minimap 50% of the time. It's more difficult to immerse yourself in this beautiful world when you're not looking at it half the time. I turned off the minimap which greatly improved my experience, but I still had to open the map a lot to know where I'm going. It was pretty satisfying when in Novigrad I memorized the streets so I only had to glance at the map once or twice though.

I won't be going in depth about the pros of the game because I'm sure every review here will do that for you. I do still highly recommend this game. I'd say its a must-play.

One warning though: If you're looking to play a game that's about exploration first, story second, this ain't it. You'll still enjoy it but it won't be what you expect. The world is meant to be more of a realistic and immersive setting to the main story and the multitudes of sidequests there are. It's a different take on the world that I don't really mind. Breath of the Wild is still my favorite open world adventure game to date though.

P.S. kinda salty that this game stole all the rewards from Bloodborne in 2015 ngl

This is easily the best survival game I've ever played, and the only one to successfully execute a (loose) story. If you have any interest in survival and sandbox games this is a must play.

Stardew Valley, the game where you hibernate in winter.
I guess I'm a bear. A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ farmer bear.

Before playing Undertale:
I kill stuff in games.
Playing the Neutral Route:
I kill stuff in games and feel bad.
Playing the Pacifist Route:
I kill no one and feel good.
Playing the Genocide Route:
I kill everyo - get dunked onnnn!!!!!!!!!

10/10 would get dunked on again

How a casual Terraria playthrough plays out:
Git Rekt
Git Gud
Rinse and repeat