Hey everyone,

I hope you've all been well, and have been staying safe during this worldwide pandemic.

As many of you know, I've been busy with my first year of college and have had little (to no) time to game and review lately. The games that I have been playing have all been on PS4 and PS5.

For years now, I've been in a declining state of mentality toward PC gaming, Steam being the forefront of my qualms with their lack of quality control over what comes into, and stays on, their store. For years, and with great fun I will say, I've battled terrible games with my reviews, and that's what brought a lot of you here; I sort the good from the bad so that you don't have to. In doing so, I've found a lot of hidden gems that lay buried beneath the rotted onslaught of garbage that hauls its way onto this platform every single week, and that is one of the few things that keeps me doing what I'm doing.

And I still want to be able to do that. However, another gripe has grown evermore present in my mind about PC gaming... the state of optimization and the subsequent lack of developer accountability for it. The type of optimization issues where it doesn't matter if you spend $5,000 CAD building your own incredible top-of-the-line beast machine (which I did 5 years ago at this point), the game(s) will still fail to obtain higher than 30-45 FPS.

Case and point: Moons of Madness, a title that I was ridiculously excited about and then my bubble completely shattered when I got about an hour in and the frames dropped from 60 FPS to 24. No amount of lowering the settings worked, and I still (on PC) only game at 1080p. I bought that title at full price at launch. I just spent another $20 buying it on PS4 so I could play it without horrible frame rate issues, which according to the Steam forums are still present even for people with RTX 3080s; effectively a $2000 CAD current card.

It has come full circle where it doesn't matter if it's an AAA release or an indie title, optimization on PC is abhorrent. Even on 'older' resolution settings such as what I am still using. I am deathly sick of fighting it. Now, with the advent of the next generation of console gaming, my PS5 not only plays in native 4K 60 FPS resolution, but it also has some raytracing at that setting, and will even uptick old PS4 titles to smooth 60 FPS. Hell, some PS5 games (Nioh and Nioh 2 remastered) play at 4K 120 FPS.

So why am I saying all of this? Well. It has come to a tough decision for me. I am not leaving this platform, nor am I giving up reviewing entirely. However, going forward I am going to be reviewing PC only games on Steam now. At least for this time.

I cannot afford to purchase a game on Steam and on PlayStation, just so I can plop down a review on Steam. There are some crossover games that I do have (Moons of Madness, Lone Survivor, Distraint 2, for instance) that I will probably crossplay and review at some point, loading them up long enough onto PC to see how well they run, etc. But for the most part, going forward my reviews here will be of games unavailable on PS3/PS4/PS5; at least at the time of purchase. If something launches on PC first and I want to play it and then a year later or so it goes to console, I will most likely be doing a review here on Steam.

I do hope that in the future, Steam can put forth some type of quality control system. I feel like this store has become nothing but a dumping ground for titles that should've been free on places like itch.io, but are now $13+ CAD. It has been like this for years, but it has gotten exponentially worse within the last 2-3 years. To the point that I rarely even interact on this platform now.

If you want to still chat with me and the community, our Discord is linked in the group. Hit me up if you want my PSN ID and we can game there as well.

Again, this is not farewell, but more of a statement of reducing my activity. I enjoy writing reviews too much to give it up completely, and it pains me to even have to make a decision like this, but I just cannot put up with the frustration of how badly so many titles run on PC now. Especially ones that have no business running shoddily since they had all the development power and funds behind them.

Stay safe,
Embalmer