tldr videogame curation
melbourne, australia

Platform: PlayStation 5

Great art, character design and music. As a game and colouring book, it ranges from OK to kinda-fun. The story is the hero here, with great writing as you’d expect from this team. Cool little game.

Another Minecraft spin-off with, sadly for me, barely any emphasis on creativity. Clearly targeted at children, so it’s hard to come down hard on, but I found it repetitive and unrewarding.

An often misunderstood game and a remarkable achievement from a tiny team led by someone with an uncompromising vision. The world does not care about you and you are not special. Sublime.

It’s Skyrim. For its time, raised the bar for the genre. I have many, many fond memories of the hundreds of hours lost to this game. Hugely influential for better or worse.

A beautiful love letter to oldschool Zelda et al. Starts off slowish and somewhat opaque (by design), but if you stick with it, the pay-off is pretty good. A wonderful little puzzlebox of a game.

Basically Genshin but sci-fi instead of fantasy, and turn-based instead of realtime combat. The intro tutorial is painful, but push through and it becomes pretty fun. Lock up your wallet.

Tone, visuals, atmosphere and music are back to Diablo’s dark roots. Unfortunately the pacing, activities and uneven design quality (not to mention monetisation) become old pretty quickly. Feels more like a checklist than an epic journey, but it’ll probably be a good game in a year or two.

It feels lazy to say so, but it really is - in the best way - more of the same but improved. I wish they leaned more into the soulslike aspects, but they understandably want to retain a broader audience. The set pieces are bombastic, combat fun and exploration a bit more rewarding this time around.

Impossibly good looking, creative worldbuilding & visual design, considering its a studio debut. Combat is cool, exploration is OK, puzzles are varied and good. English VA is intolerable. Pretty cool.

Full of potential and has glimmers of greatness, but ultimately lands somewhere between dull and painful.