I'm quite near the end, so consider this a teaser: if you had told me on April 7th that I would have more fun with the Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle than Doom Eternal, I would have thought you were nuts.

Put another way - I haven't nulled any PS5 games yet. Returnal was probably the closest, but I didn't want to break that seal.

Doom Eternal may in fact be the new closest. Stay tuned.

OOM: I mini-binged the end today because I'll be out of town for a bit in a few days and plus I just wanted to be done. I was not expecting my first 2-star PS5 game to be Doom Eternal, I'll tell you that much.

I have seen this game's fun be described as a bell curve:
The beginning levels kinda suck because you just don't have much in the way of tools or abilities yet. The iconic shotgun looks and sounds incredibly weak and you learn quickly that you can only shoot for a little bit before running out of ammo. You constantly have to chainsaw trash enemies (which gives you ammo drops). Later on you also have to start using a different attack to spawn armor drops, and find opportunities for glory kills to get health. If you think you can just turn your brain off and have fun shooting demons, think again.

Also an early level is the absolute worst for platforming/parkour. When you think of Doom, you certainly think of double-jump/double air dash/wall grab combinations, right? It's patently absurd. This is when I started to feel like something was off here.

But the middle sections start to hit a groove. You've got the rhythm going in battle, the parkour calms down, the game's still tough but maybe you're having fun? Not so fast! The last third of the game looms large, with some absolutely awful enemies:

The Marauder. Imagine fighting Knight Artorias and if you shoot his shield he summons Sif. You are literally supposed to *stand still* a certain distance away and counterattack him with a heavy weapon. As a 1v1 boss battle? Weird but manageable. In a huge group skirmish? Near impossible.

The Archvile. Wizard who summons buffed-up versions of enemies. He teleports away if you so much at look at him, has a fire shield that blocks all your shots, and is in fact not squishy and buffed-up himself. Also he's impossible to find in the midst of all the chaos. Terrible.

And the last two boss fights are so bad that the game basically gives you Apology Armor if you keep dying. That's all you need to know. Stay away!

ITTA ended up being an odd one. A boss rush bullet hell game that ends up being fairly easy. There's nothing wrong with the bosses but because I one-shotted most of them, they became rather forgettable. Why was it easy? You have the most generous dodge roll I have ever seen. Invincible for the entire duration and you can roll infinitely with no cooldown. When it comes to boss rush games, Furi still tops the list for me by a large margin.

How has Ys 9 been going so far? That's one I was thinking of starting this year.

EDIT: Did not think of the comparison to the dodge in Other M but it is a rather fair one. Both are moves that make the combat rather easy and there's no skill required to use them. There's a reason why most games don't let you spam it, give it some vulnerability, or both.

I checked and I've been playing it for 24 hours for on average about 45 minutes per day. HowLongToBeat.com lists it as between 23-32 depending on how much you do so I must be nearing the end? It's difficult to gauge where I'm actually at other than a) I'm about to enter the 5th day of the investigation, so I hope something new happens because b) I seem to be pretty much out of places to explore and people to talk to. Not sure how long you were expecting, but I can describe the game as very....thick.

I'm working on getting PS1 games to 50 and then beyond. Only problem is 41-49 are JRPG's so it might take a couple years.

I did peek at the site remake and said "yep, that's a different layout" and had no other thoughts. Feel free to message me on PSN if this place ever goes belly up.~

ISCO: I, uh, sorta played it for like 6 hours today and got to the end. Let me back up though and give you a full review:

This game was obviously not made for consoles. The interface and controls are very clunky, and took me a while to get the hang of. Additionally, I had a jarring first impression - this is really more of an adventure game but one that is mostly controlled by tabletop-RPG skill checks instead of item puzzles. You might think there wouldn't be a fail state, but there are two, and your health pools can be deducted from failing those checks or even just choosing particular conversational branches. I Game Over'd unexpectedly and got returned to a save 20 minutes ago, having to redo some talking again. Old-school quicksaving is a good idea.

I also seemingly got stuck later where I had failed all the available (at the time) checks and there was nowhere else to explore or people to talk to. In Googling for help, I accidentally saw some spoilers, though thankfully not endgame ones. Still. Turns out the problem was I hadn't technically done something in my quest log and that was holding everything up. Once I got that figured out, I was off and running.

Also, so you know, this game is extremely political in nature. Everyone has an opinion about the commies or the liberals or the government etc etc, and you are expected to frequently engage. So if you're trying to escape into a fictional world to get away from our current environment, this is not the game for you.

I would still probably recommend it, but things could have been better, both the game itself and my playthrough of it. It was part of my subscription, so no harm no foul.