The Forgotten City

 The Forgotten City is a timeloop.. adventure.. game? Starting life out as a Skyrim mod it's a little hard to identify an exact genre for it. While I haven't played the original mod yet, the game is littered with sparsely used mechanics exactly the way a mod might be constructed, used because the original game provided them for nearly free. The premise is that you find yourself thrown back in time to a small underground settlement in Rome, where the inhabitants are under a curse by the gods: if anyone sins, everyone is turned into golden statues. Fortunately you're also stuck in a time loop that lets you repeat the same day as many times as it takes to prevent anyone from breaking it. The ambiguities and loopholes of such a law are the main focus of the story, and I was pretty much hooked by it out the gate. If listening to NPCs talk about the philosophical problems of morality sounds like a good time, then this is the game for you.

That premise might make it sound like a mystery game- figuring out how people are going to sin and stopping them, in practice the game doesn't require much active sleuthing from you. As long as you exhaust everyone's dialog trees, and explore the right corners of the city you will pretty much inevitably solve every mystery. Occasionally dialog choices will have consequences of making characters refuse to speak to you or outright attack, but you can simply repeat the timeloop or load a quicksave to correct. In general it has the most streamlined timeloop mechanics I've ever seen: you keep all items and money between loops- so you only have to find any given key item once, a friendly character at the start of the game can be used to repeat any quests on your behalf beyond that, while characters do have some simple daily routines stalking them isn't really required for anything (even the one time-critical event in the game can be pushed up if you ask, and quest pointers direct you to the few characters that move around), and every NPC in the game even responds positively to you telling them to shut up you already did this conversation. It's basically what it would look like if a high budget studio approached the timeloop concept, and as a result it has a smooth flow to it that lets you appreciate the narrative implications of a timeloop without dealing with the inconveniences of it.

It's also rather open. I'm pretty sure you can reach most of the endings (though probably not the best) by simply murdering everyone in the game, stealing their key items, and then dashing back to the portal for another loop. Even outside of murder I ended up solving a couple character's quests by simply exploring the city, so I have no clue what their stories even are. That sounds cool on paper, but the reality is that exploration and murder are both extremely easy to pull off and are therefore pretty unsatisfying ways to solve quests. While talking your way through things is also pretty easy, it's still the meatiest thing since it has a story to it- I kind of just felt like I missed out by solving things in these alternative ways (though I suppose hatching the perfect speed run or one loop run would end up being an interesting puzzle on its own, something the game acknowledges with having achievements for them). 

In short, while the game has a buffet of mechanics the reality is that the main thing is just listening to conversations and watching the mysteries unfold. So it's a damn good thing that the story is actually a lot of fun if you're into characters pontificating about morality and uncovering mysteries about the setting. I found myself compelled the whole way through, even if you can see a number of the revelations coming a mile away and some of the philosophical conclusions are a little iffy. And while I gripe about how shallow the individual elements are, I think they provide wonderful pacing breaks between the conversational meat of the game- I'm generally very hit or miss with adventure games due to the tendency towards repetition. Would I recommend playing The Forgotten City? So long as you're ok with the price tag for an ~8hr game and the premise appeals to you, absolutely. Strongly recommended.

(Also, like. I love historical settings in games, but practically nothing uses them except bad games like Assassin's Creed. So really heavy bonus points for letting me explore Roman culture in a good game for once, even if parts of it feel a little bit like someone cramming every bit of pop trivia they found on the internet into every nook and cranny and explained it with a text box like a tour guide).

Metroid Fusion

 I never actually played Metroid Fusion when it came out in 2002. The idea of an extremely directed Metroid that told you where to go at all times was really unappealing, especially when Metroid Prime came out at the same time. Over the years I heard a number of people have high praise for certain parts of the game so it slowly made its way to "yeah I guess I'll play that eventually" status, and I finally got around to actually playing it with the announcement of Metroid Dread as a direct sequel. While waiting 19 years gave me time to accept how different Metroid Fusion's structure is, it also made it kind of weird to play in a different way.

Samus is not afraid of a vaccine.

 The short of it is that Metroid Fusion is a game about set pieces- unique or sparsely-used mechanics that diverge from the standard formula of a game for a moment. The most notable one is an invincible clone of the protagonist that hunts you down throughout the game, but it dabbles in a few other gimmicks as well. This is a technique that would become incredibly trendy around this time period, though it certainly had plenty of prior examples. This makes coming to it late kind of really weird, having seen so many games use it so heavily since it came out. The moments it has are done well, and would probably be extremely novel or even innovative in 2002, but they also feel pretty sparse by 2021 standards? A big reason I even played the game was because previews of its sequel, Metroid Dread, heavily showcase similar sequences, and I found them novel enough that I wanted to see their inspiration. In the end, playing Fusion's sparse version of those just kind of makes me more excited for the sequel to really lean into it more than anything? (though realistically I expect turning them into routine mechanics will make them much less appealing to fans of Fusion).

There's nothing scarier than yourself.

 I have a real axe to grind on modern metroidvanias leaning heavily towards convenient world structures rather than organic ones. As much as I expected that to bother me, in practice the game is so direct about its structure that I was actually pretty OK with it. It doesn't dress up its hub world, it just shows you a bunch of elevators right out of the gate. This is a linear series of dungeons with a linear plot, and the game isn't trying to make you think otherwise- even the artificial setting of a space station puts that up front. While Metroid has a genre named after it, Nintendo clearly feels no pressure to always exist within that genre's walls. I respect it. My main complaint about it is just that the game is still littered with hidden upgrades all over, but every time I wanted to go to an older area to find things with my new upgrades, I was always met with plot doors sealing me away- even in the save point before the end of the game. The game is loaded to the brim with difficult boss fights that left me wanting to go back and look for more health, but the game always denied me a chance. It's a little too at odds with itself.

With the streamlined exploration, most of your time is spent on bosses.

 Despite the straightforward structure, I actually found myself stuck surprisingly often (probably 6 times total?). A hidden wall here, an impossible enemy you need to figure out how to defeat there, etc. The game locks you into areas so frequently that it's somewhat less frustrating than other Metroid games to do the "bomb everywhere" dance because it doesn't even give you the option of backtracking to the wrong place looking for answers. I really didn't expect this from a game that directly points you to objectives (and a lot of modern metroidvanias don't go anywhere near this kind of thing), so I was pretty pleasantly surprised by it. Sometimes also very frustrated, but none of my stuck points lasted much longer than 15mins or so (or the next day). 

A lot of things get broken in this game.

 So should you play Metroid Fusion? Probably, if you're interested in it. It crams a ton of neat little bits into one short package (areas transform over time alluding to future encounters, Samus turning into a metroid allows a lot of cute moments that let you think about how it must have felt to be a metroid in the other games (plus people who confuse the game title for the protagonist are now technically correct), the game is chock full of terrifying scifi concepts that it treats completely nonchalantly, the premise is a fun commentary on humanity dicking with ecosystems, and it probably inspired a whole lot of other games). Not quite a must play, but pretty good. Perhaps a little sad to think that it is likely the last Metroid Nintendo will produce in-house, since it's also one of the least derivative.