Fez

Eurogamer have just done an article on people's Fez notebooks. If you're not using a walkthrough, and you're aiming to get 64 cubes, you will have a notebook. Fez inspires notebooks.

Fez would be charming as just a strightahead 2D platformer. The ability to flip the pespective makes it ingenious. The puzzles, oh god, the puzzles...they're spectacular. They're not just outside the box, they're frequently unaware of the boxes existence.

And there's so much of it. I'm on my second playthrough right now and there's whole worlds I've yet to discover and I'm so excited about the prospect of finding them.

Fez plays like the reviews of Braid read - it's as fun as Super Mario and makes you feel as smart as Portal. Absolutely essential.

10/10.

Journey

I've not long finished Journey, about two hours after I started it. This might not seem long for a game, but it's perfect for Journey - long enough to feel like it's not a chore to replay it to find more of it's secrets. Long enough to play the whole thing with a second player.

On this first play-through, I didn't encounter much of the multiplayer, although I did get a couple of helpful players trying to alert me if I was wandering off in the wrong direction. There's little in the way of real gameplay - just the bare bones - but there's a beauty and emotional depth to the game that meant I wasn't overly bothered.

I do really want to play Journey again; but I can't see it having the same impact as first time round, although the trophy list suggests I could be wrong. Small, but perfectly formed, Journey completes a hat-trick of wonderful games from thatgamecompany and has left me eager for the soon to be announced next project from Jenova Chen.

9.0/10

Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 2 was one of the best received games of this generation. People were eagerly anticipating a follow up, to see how it could be further refined and how this story would end. But what was looking to be one of this years obvious crowdpleasers turned out to be a controversial title, with no shortage of ill will aimed at it.

Mostly this was due to the ending. I had no issues with it, but a theory on Kotaku suggests this could be that I'm not as invested in the lore as other players can be. Whilst I was fine with the ending, there was other things I wasn't keen on with ME3 - it seemed buggy. At first I kept having random textures appear over faces in conversations; other times the faces wouldn't appear at all - it would just cut to a wall where a character was obviously meant to be standing by.

ME2's structure felt formulaic (recruit member, do loyalty mission, repeat till you're ready to take on final mission), but taking that away in ME3 felt like I was following a paper trail, with little build up to the final part of the game.

Some things can be so bad, they make you reassess their predecessors and whilst Mass Effect 3, is by no means a bad game, I've come away from the franchise thinking it's not that strong. ME1 was promising, ME2 is starting to feel like a fluke of brilliance and ME3 feels like an often buggy mop-up sessions to tie up some loose ends and kill off some allies you might have worked hard to save previously. Hmm, what do you know? Maybe I was more emotionally invested in this franchise than I thought.

8.0/10

Bully: Scholarship Edition

Disclaimer! I didn't finish Bully, or come to that, any Rockstar game until Red Dead Redemption. Playing Bully reminded me why; no checkpoints, quests available at certain times, curfews...failure in Bully can mean replaying a big chunk of game just to get the chance to restart the mission. And of course, it's a four year old port of a six year old game. And the voice acting seemed a bit cheesy when I started...

And yet, I enjoyed Bully. When I spent hours trying to describe what I enjoyed about it to a friend, he replied with the far more succinct "Yeah. It's fun". And that fun can go a long way to overlooking it's shortcomings. A bit of a curio rather than an essential purchase, but if the long mooted sequel materialises I'll be very interested.

6.5/10