Lovely Planet with a porn addiction. An FPS with cards that you can discard paints Neon White as a post-doom-(2016)-er shooter without the animation budget but it truly fails to describe the most genius part of the equation; all of the discards are movement abilities.

Going fast is fun. Death, Taxes and Preservation of Momentum. Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing gets a shotgun, speedy thing turns into a fireball and speedy thing flies into an enemy/door/off-the-side-of-the-map. Give a man seemingly unlimited movement options and he will try to beat his high score for a lifetime.

And you think Neon White would Godspeed the shark at some point but no, the game folds in on itself and emerges as a new piece of origami, with a decidedly familiar looking blue rocket launcher card tucked into the telefragging folds.

The seemingly poor reception to the narrative has worked in the games favour for a player like me who has felt contractually obligated to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion at some point in their life. The tropes are sincere, the internet humour is still fresh and the characters are only slightly less horny than they first appear.

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker

How many expansions do I have to play before I come to terms with the fact that Final Fantasy XIV is simply not engaging. The last few expansions I bought as a bundle, on sale, and I used my sub time as efficiently as I could as well as some time during a play-for-free campaign. But this month I finished university, and I decided that now was the time to put down £45 and finally play 'the greatest final fantasy story ever created' (citation needed).

As I write this, my character is middle-mousing themselves across a lush expanse, requiring gentle taps from me to correct their course like a Roomba, so that I can click on the NPC that awaits me at the end of my ride. This npc is similar to the hundreds of npcs I have already spoken to in my time playing FFXIV and its expansions, and I know what to expect: I get to read some text, and then off I go, middle-mousing myself to the next npc.

FFXIV has the best writing of an MMO (which isn't to say too much) but even then Yoshi-P and his team are not immune to padding their experiences with pointless quests and overwritten text boxes. Here is my main problem with the game, and one that will not be fixed until Final Fantasy ((14-11)+14): Every single text box crushes my soul. The ones that are quick to read are often pointless and use unnecessarily flowery language. And then there are the unvoiced cutscenes, where I get to wait 5 seconds between text boxes so that I can watch npcs move their mouths or sigh.

Voiced cutscenes often feel worse, leaving plenty of dead air between voice lines that is filled with awkward cuts to show my character soulessly and silently emoting. A particularly bad cutscene may consist of a cut to show my character, Alphinaud, Alisae, This Guy I've Just Met, his pet dog, Freddie Mercury: "So this is The Scions... And you, must be the Warrior of Light".

When playing Shadowbringers I conceded that this game is a visual novel with a mahjong simulator plugged into the side of it. The problem is that the dialogue does not have the pacing and the presentation isn't as slick as your typical visual novel... and I still have to walk 5 minutes to get to the next text box.

The Quarry

The Quarry is inspiring and depressing.

Inspiring in the same that many schlocky B-horrors (or indeed Hollywood thrillers) are - You don't have to make a masterpiece for people to enjoy themselves and become devoted fans. On the other hand, it must be somewhat depressing to be one of the hundreds of people who worked on this game and watch as its narrative slowly unwinds itself from the spool in the later chapters.

Here is the main reason that I fell so far on the wrong side of this story. There is almost zero tension. The game wanted me to disobey the hunters the entire game, even when in the earliest chapters we had already established that they are the characters who know the most and clearly have the best intentions for the counsellors. An early encounter with Jacob proved this as they slapped werewolf blood on his face and set him on his way. And still the game insists that we shouldn't trust them and constantly wants to make decisions that endangered both the hunters and the counsellors just because they 'be kinda sussy tho'.

And what is my reward for not listening and not trusting the games invisible hands? I don't get to save Silas. I either have to give in and shoot the boy in the back or watch as my favourite characters are slain. There was no twist ending (unless the hunters wanting to kill werewolves and not humans was supposed to be a shocker) and there is no payoff. Just kill the defenceless wolf in a random ditch.

Furthermore, Chapter 7 was an exercise in how NOT to do a flashback sequence, with it being overly long and full of exposition I would have rather just figured out on my own. Thankfully, I had figured out Chris's secret before the world's most blasé plot reveal.

The Quarry does not trust the player's intelligence and repeats obvious facts several times, turning the lodge into an armoury of chekov's guns until the biggest and most obvious one is fired straight into the chest of the nearest werewolf/counsellor.