I'll only be posting once I've beaten what I think are some pre major boss pricks.

Could be Christmas.

Dudes up at the top of city of tears.

Oooh, I like it. I've tried juggling, but now I'm just playing them straight up. Have found some good combos of charms to help.

And I got 'em. One of those when I got 'em, it was easy. Smashed the shite out of them.

And now the home stretch. This has done some clever things recently.

I'm in the forest (Greenpath) with that leafy giant caterpillar boss jumping out at me. Will beat the fucker eventually.

Stellar, beautiful game.
Attention to detail is astonishing and the music is superb. Best metroidvania done by a team outside of Japan? Quite possibly.
Contender for Goty of 2017? Most definitely!

I knew it! Leafy fucker!
I'll still get him though...

Lololol

So, Hollow Knight then. 

Prohibitive GOTY fav for me. 

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/09/01/hollow-knight-revitalises-metroidvania-thanks-to-a-little-souls

tempy wrote:

The unspoken truth being, of course, that talking about such design is easy — but very few developers can pull it off. Most games that try to copy Metroid end up as little more than empty, glorified mazes with obvious ability gates. As for the burgeoning 'Soulslike' genre, the less said the better. But Hollow Knight is brilliant, if you'll excuse the pun, at cherrypicking. It uses the example of Dark Souls' oblique lore and history to imbue its own world with a more meaningful sense of place, adapting the game's narrative ideas rather than simply copying them. So too does that little twist with the death mechanic — making your 'corpse' an enemy — result in the mechanic feeling a little more like Hollow Knight's own thing.

Read tempy’s article. It’s right, this game is brilliant. I’ve left 44% of the game unfinished, but am more than satisfied. If you want to be a masochist, you can be. There’s buckets of optional tough bosses. 

The reserved way everything unlocks is lovely. Where Ori throws stuff at you in a traditional RPG-lite way, this takes hours to drip feed new abilities, and the charm system, which is basically a clever rethink of the ring modifiers in Dark Souls, allows for some clever tactical changes and gives you the ability to deal with different sections in different ways.

The combat and bosses are very fair. Although some do go on too long. 

The game is huge, and more importantly, the design and tactics for enemies and areas remains strong all the way to the end.

It’s a similar structure to DS’s final section, but it’s just done better. It doesn’t drag anywhere near as much and feels like a natural conclusion.

There’ll be a few times early on that may frustrate, see article re map, see the same with regards to knock backs when you hit enemies. Give the game time.

So many brilliant touches, so coherent all the way through.

I just can't sit through another hour of his stuff after his weak-ass Uncharted run down

Which is a shame because coverage of it is lacking

I think he can be great too but his Uncharted stuff was really limp, IMO.

I've stuck The Hollow Knight one on the watch list for when I get tried of DS9 anyway.

I kinda fatigued myself on games crit youribe as it's a big old insulated self-congratulatory place like a lot of Games Journalism.

*I should add, that I really enjoyed that piece you wrote for Kotaku about this game.

Wait... this is out on Mac.... any one know how power hungry the game is or point me in right direction please?!

My MBpro is also getting on a bit though.

Dooooo iiiiit, Elf!!!!

More for @Gmoney - I watched that JPH Anderson video. It was good but it really highlights some of the issues I have with him, which are how anodyne his criticism can be, and how massively he needs an editor. 

I wish he'd just dropped the whole disclaimer/product part from the start, and had built his review around the fact he went the such a majorly wrong way when he first played it. That kernel of info is so much more interesting than the 20 minutes either side of it, IMO, and it shows why Editors are still so valuable.

Heck, there are things he rams into the credits section that are more interesting than lots of the granular combat stuff he starts talking about, but I get that's his thing.