sometimes I use ps plus as a way to play games as demos to see weather I want to actually buy them, usually i enjoy the starts and buy the games but sometimes i end up trying games and ending up not liking them, not getting far and checking them off of my "to buy list", this happened with 3 such games, teardown, power wash sim and blasphemy (and theres also a genuine recommendation here for a game made by a site affiliate, a cool free browser game i want to recommend and another small game i did enjoy enough to actually finish). ignore the monster blingee, it isn't relevant at all i just really liked it and wanted to use it in something, i did drink a monster while finishing our first (and worst) game though! because god did i need the energy for it.

power wash sim is a game i had very little real interest in, these kinds of sim games never appeal to me at all, despite usually enjoying cozy games and its aesthetics always seemed kind of boring.... and then it got FF7 and tomb raider dlc and this interested me enough to at least give it a try, and it was, one of the most weirdly unsettling experiences I've had in a video game. i mean this wholley derogatorily, this game is not worth your time or money and i honestly regret even playing it, it joins the very small ranks of games i actually dislike. so why is it so bad, well the answer is threefold, for one the gameplay, for two the lack of music, and for 3 is in what it is and what its trying to do. i'll start with the music thing because i think its the most emblematic of what's wrong with the game as a whole. the game has no music, at all, they don't even have a composer listed and even in the crossover levels, you know, the levels with FF7, the game with maybe the most iconic OST in the artform, silent throughout. this leads into one of the other things, what the game is trying to be and do, see the game expects you to play it in one of two ways, either with a youtube video or podcast or inane reaction streamer in the background or "play" it by watching said benal streamer play it, that's what the game is at its core, Netflix style second screen entertainment at best and streamerbait at worst, never the focus or the forefront, not saying or doing anything meaningful, it's a distraction rather than a piece of art , in general its hard to even give games like this credit if you have a good time because if i do have a good time playing this while i have music on, it's not because your game is great, it's because gackt and tommyfebuary6 are great. i mean the game doesn't even have a single piece of music and if you try and genuinely play it as is, the game is hauntingly silent and creepy as hell, it might as well be a horror game, except replace any interest a horror game could provide with bland nothingness, and that's your game, it's games as content instead of art (something i have spoken about before + here . i fundamentally disagree with this, this kind of podcast game, second screen garbage is antithetical to what i like about this medium, it's an anti art sentiment and you all deserve better than this and we can't begin to accept this as commonplace, we did with places like Netflix and now look at those services, full of content, pure content in its most derogatory way, slop made to be watched while doomscrolling on your phone, we need to push back while we can and make it known we do not want our games to be like this because if publishers could stop paying for a composer and a sound Department in favour of telling you to throw on your ad laden spotify playlist or vaguely radicalising podcast, you bet they would.

i mean even beyond this the gameplay also is an issue, it's not great, not even good. while at first its fun to clean big swaths and its really cool how many options you have, you can buy tons more with currency you earn and there's even a really nice aim mode that lets you stand still and still look around without moving the screen, it's just not very fun or even relaxing to play especially with how meticulous you have to be, how hard the dirt can be to see (you will spam the highlight button a lot) and how even a cm of dirt under a surface can prevent you from finishing a surface. it's just a chore to do and not even a fun one, it's the worst kind of bland pixel hunt and it means stages take far too long, letting you away with missing more spots or not having even undersides and insides of nooks being required would have went a long way to helping and don't even get me started on when you need to jump to hit a surface, like the beams and pipes in seventh heaven, getting those cleaned is a miserable experience where you have to jump and pray your water can hit, while you cant even see the dirt thats there to begin with. even in levels where this isn't as much of an issue, like croft manor, it can sometimes just be too big, croft manor is a multi hour project at least with the equipment i had, there's just so much of it and it still penalises you for missing even a few specs of dirt on a litteral mansion, it's not cozy, it's difficult and downright stressful, especially when you even have to double over surfaces because your jet isn't powerful enough, it's just not a good experience.

sure there's some upsides, at times it can be fun and the game can look nice sometimes, though at others it can look like a bad source engine map (the ugliest engine with the ugliest art style, i hate source lol) and it doesn't have its own style, not can it really capture other art styles well when it tries to like how badly it manages in capturing seventh heaven in the FF7 collab which just ended up looking like a generic bar map with a few references thrown in though the crossovers are cool enough and were the sole reason i gave this a try with the FF7 and tomb raider expansions, there's others i didn't touch like spongebob and Warhammer and shrrek, which i'm sure are cool but i just super don't care about those, plus they cost money. the two i do care about were free though and the game itself also was thanks to the ps plus i mooch on. the FF7 one gives you a good few maps that'll last you a few hours, the hardy Daytona and the kei truck from the shinra building escape, two of the games bosses with the scorpion and air buster, seaventh heaven and the big midgar model, they also have some cool narrative tie ins with the texts you get that might be canon and it does make for cute fluff for how workers in midgar function if you really want to take it that way, but the levels just aren't very fun and some like the bosses are so finnicky with how you have to get in and clean stuff you can't even see like the underside of fans and tiny nooks that are unnoticeable without highlighting them. the croft manor is better in this way but it's also worse in others, you get the manor outside, the obstacle course which was the highlight for me, the maze, a boat and a treasure room full of fun references and items from the games, it's good again but it's also still plagued with the games issues and it even worsens some with just how big these levels are and how long they take, each one of these packs is full game length alone and beating them both was longer than some games i played last year, so at least you do get time out of them, though i wouldn't say its worth it even if you do have slavish loyalty to these series like i do. oh and its switch physical is a stub cart, that's gross.

teardown had much of the same issues, though this one did appeal to me more originally. I love games like red faction guerilla and Armageddon, games based around environmental destruction, but this one just wouldn't click with me, it's more of a fun physicsy youtuber bait thing (a style of indie game I just super do not vibe with) with missions thrown in and I just didn't enjoy it, the destruction just wasn't fun to me and it felt very arbitrary on what would and wouldn't be destroyed by certain items and when the buildings do come down its just not very satisfying, even when you do things like driving a car into it, it feels too realistic to be all that fun for me, plus I just don't enjoy the voxel art style at all, this wasn't for me, but I am sure it gets better when you start to unlock more and more, but I wasn't enjoying it enough to find out, but the heist missions later sound cool for whatever it's worth.

i also tried out blasphemy for half an hour, i was interested in this because of the art style, which is absolutely beautiful and if it interests you enough i can imagine it making this worth a play on its own, but i wasn't feeling the platforming or the atmosphere, it's just not my kind of vibe, but i super respect what it was going for and i'd consider this one something i fully recommend for people curious and don't mind a more difficult kind of metroidvania, but it was just not something that compelled me to finish it. 2D games super have to hook me with something like a gimmick or a story or a style i fall for in order to really make me want to play since it's not a style of game i actually enjoy playing and this was for sure a case of a game that proved that to me, it's good and i can tell that but it's just not a game i can really find a desire to push through my dislike of the genre for.

one game i do recommend is the game "pushover", linked + here and made by site affiliate smudgebap.com. it's a cute little Gameboy game about finding a bunny some lunch in the city, it comes with a few choices and endings, it has some rly nice dialogue and i love the sprite buildings and cutscenes, especially for what i think is a first time game i think it's very impressive and it looks great. its a super short 20 min play with some really cute spritework and its free to play so what have you got to lose by giving it a try. ideally give her some cash for it if you can though.

stimulation clicker is another i liked a lot, it's a free browser game also that i was sent by a friend and it's pretty neat. it's a cookie clicker style idle game about showcasing just how bad overstimulation can be on the modern net, as you click the screen gets more and more filled with pointless, inane garbage and you add more to it with a currency you gain via those clicks, you unlock stuff like a banal reaction streamer (played by an actual streamer i have never heard of because i'm way too offline to be the target demo for streamers), subway surfers in the corner, microtransactions and cosmetics, lowfi music, a mukbang (god i was happier not knowing what that was lol), asmr stuff and a ton more, i won't spoil everything but it's really neat and i do hope it opens some peoples minds to maybe disconnecting from this stuff, the game effected me mentally in a super bad way and i think that was the point , i had to go to sleep right after it, so give it a try especially if you're prone to falling into these overstim holes like TikTok and yt shorts, it might be worth your time.

lastly was superliminal which is the last good game here. it's a game i was interested in enough to play but not enough to pick up the full priced limited release physical copy of. so i used ps plus for it and that worked out fine since that's still how i feel after finishing it, it's cool, with lots of perspective puzzles unlike any other game I've ever played and its a real technical showcase with how items can change size with perspective and things like having to align doorways to make them or bringing items into the world via that same perspective trickery and it might even be one of the best looking games I've played on ps5, it even has a cute story with a good message, but it's not the kind of game i think will stick with me. it's good for the short 2 hour runtime though and i don't regret playing it. its worth it if you like these kinds of surrealist puzzles and the areas in it are nice to explore, very backrooms at times, it super lives up to the liminal in its title. if i have to reccomend one game to play here, it's pushover, but the other ones i liked are well worth a try too especially because the clicker is fully free, it's a shame i didn't give with the first three and really disliked power wash sim, but that's just how it goes sometimes, you can't win them all, but 3 wins out of 6 isn't bad at all.