Fully Ramblomatic - TV Tropes

After 16 years of Zero Punctuation at The Escapist, Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw left the site out of solidarity along with most of the rest of the staff when editor-in-chief Nick Calandra was fired, marking the end of the series. However, Yahtzee soon confirmed that this was not the end of his reviewing career, as he would continue his work on Second Wind, a new gaming channel founded by the former Escapist staff, with a Creator-Driven Successor called Fully Ramblomatic,^note  continuing to bring viewers the insightful, snarky, and curse-filled style they have enjoyed for years. Also like Zero Punctuation, it has a companion series called Semi-Ramblomatic, in which Yahtzee discusses game-associated concepts like he did in Extra Punctuation.

The series premiered on November 15th, 2023, with Alan Wake II being the first game reviewed.

You can find the playlist of every Fully Ramblomatic episode on YouTube at this link, and Semi Ramblomatic's playlist is found here.

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Games covered on the show (in upload order):

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2023 

2024 

2025 

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Fully Ramblomatic provides and discusses examples of the following tropes:

• Abstract Scale:
  • His review of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has him invent the STDJ scale to rank the quality of Metroidvanias, short for "start to double jump". The double jump is singled out because he sees it as the point where the developers gave up on inventing new ideas.
  • In "The Importance of a Good Monster Introduction", Yahtzee brings up the "Start to Crate" metric coined by Old Man Murray to describe how long it takes for a game to introduce crates, which appear to be omnipresent in every game. Yahtzee uses this as a launch point to discuss the similarly omnipresent aspect of how games introduce the first enemy monster and how it sets the tone of the combat, and in turn setting the precedent for the rest of the gameplay.
• Accentuate the Negative: While Yahtzee is famous for being an unabashed Caustic Critic, and usually picks the game he reviews based on how much he's able to riff on them, this show surprisingly downplays this aspect, similar to the later years of Zero Punctuation. He's still an acerbic critic who calls out important flaws in games as he sees them for both critical and comedic value, but he's become more open to addressing things he enjoys without attaching a lateral swipe, with his complaints themselves tending to be less comedically nitpicky in nature. In his review of Cryptmaster — made a week after his coverage of Summer Game Fest 2024, carrying on his annual tradition of negatively reviewing the new announcements — Yahtzee admits to feeling bad about being so pessimistic, opting to take the time to discuss more positive things, including a game he very much enjoyed.
• Advertising by Association: At the start of his South of Midnight review, Yahtzee jokingly prods developer Compulsion Games for conspicuously not doing this, listing nowhere in the game's official blurbs that they happened to be developers of the infamous We Happy Few.
• All Germans Are Nazis: Parodied in the Dungeons of Hinterberg review, where Yahtzee has trouble not thinking about Hitler when discussing... Austria.

  Yahtzee: Let's take a moment to appreciate all the wonderful things that have come out of Austria.
  Voice: Don't say Hitler, Yahtz!
  Yahtzee: Oh, fine! Arnold Schwarzenegger, there's a good one. Uh... I hear the wine's good and mostly not poisoned now. And presumably, a lot of people come from there who aren't Hitler! Some of whom recently put out a nice little indie game called Dungeons of Hitler— I mean, Hinterburg!

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Noted in Yahtzee's review of Helldivers II; While he lampshades the obvious in how the game is in the Starship Troopers lineage of mocking fascist propaganda and criticizing how blind patriotism motivates people to give up their freedom & empathy to the point where they become monsters, Croshaw notes that he also saw the game as a criticism of the idea of a post-scarcity utopia, musing on how the over-abundance of Cool Spaceships given to each member of a Redshirt Army spoke more to him of the idea that Super Earth is a Crapsaccharine World where humanity is slowly going insane after having gotten rid of all scarcity-based issues and has thus initiated a Forever War with the Terminids & Automatons out of desperation for anything interesting happening.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Yahtz notices that Yi, of Nine Sols, is a powerful figure with suppressed emotions, and happens to "keep a beautiful hairless boy in their private rooms". In the game, Shuanshuan (the character he's talking about) is a Morality Pet to Yi, but Yahtzee is reminded of something less-than-wholesome (Yi is keeping a servant boy around).
• Ambiguous Situation: He devotes an extended side-bar in his review of Dragon Age: The Veilguard to complaining about just how poorly integrated into the story Varric is after the opening, and admits he gave up playing the game before getting to the ending. This makes it hard to tell if he genuinely didn't know about the big plot twist regarding Varric in that game and just so happened to be noticing all the Foreshadowing, or if he'd figured it out for himself or just picked it up somewhere and was making a stealth complaint about how obvious the twist is without technically spoiling it. It's fortunately pretty funny either way.
• Ass Pull: In his review of SANABI he mentions that late-story twists predicate themselves on the narrator's memory being false, a plot thread that he resents, since it means that any established rule of the setting could be overridden with the reason of "that memory was false", suggesting that the whole game is the hallucinating mind of a seagull.
• Anaphora: From the Skull and Bones review: "After ten long years to improve on the idea [presented by Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag], Skull and Bones has less gameplay, less story, less sandbox, and "Less" Miserables". So "less" dock our ship at the island of "Less"bos and get into it."
• And Then What?: In his review of Astro Bot (2024), Yahtzee sees Sony's status in the Console Wars represented by the game as being this. Yahtzee is already barely giving Astro Bot the benefit of the doubt that its aspirations of framing Sony and the PlayStation 5 as shining beacons of the medium hold any water: a significant fraction of the many games Astro Bot references to aren't playable on the PS5, and only one strictly needs a PS5 to play, but he also finds that fundamentally, Sony doesn't have anything to really celebrate. With Microsoft pivoting their consoles towards being all-in-one machines comparable to gaming PCs and Nintendo staying comfortable in its bubble of "handheld[s] with a loft conversion", Sony has basically thrown a victory party for a conflict that doesn't even exist anymore.

  Yahtzee: [...]Sony are in the slightly sad position of trying to keep the Console War going in the cutting-edge tech sector when no one else has bothered to show up.

• Anime Hair: Riffed on in the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth review, which depicts Cloud Strife - one of the most infamous cases of this in gaming - as a cockatiel Bird Person.
• Anti-Climax:
  • Discussed in the Semi-Ramblomatic video "The Difficulty Paradox", highlighting a conundrum of certain games (especially those with RPG Elements) having to balance between rewarding players with a sense of progression and presenting ever-increasing challenges in the form of a difficulty curve. Yahtzee posits that while the two do cancel each other out in theory (making a game easier vs. making a game harder), it is possible to reach an equilibrium by way of a game rewarding players with new options and forms of expression vs. new challenges that force them to think their way around new scenarios. Yahtzee finds that many modern AAA games have an issue with both, where challenges neither adequately ramp up and options/"innovations" are really just ways to skip the gameplay loop entirely (citing with Assassin's Creed: Mirage and its game-breaking ability to automatically stab four enemies at once with impunity as an example), leaving games feeling bland and unrewarding by the end. Yahtzee semi-jokingly blames this kind of direction as being the result of higher-ups who think players get enjoyment from simply wanting to reach the end of the game faster instead of actually playing it.
  • Also discussed in the video "The Importance of an Ending", with Yahtzee lamenting how many modern AAA games tend to lack satisfactory endings, whether because the fundamental design of certain games leave it impossible for them to decisively "end" (such as Wide-Open Sandbox and live-service games), or because they're so big and unnecessarily drawn-out that by the time they do end, you've become too exhausted and unengaged to care.
  • Yahtzee came down hard on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League for plenty of reasons, one of which was its incredibly abrupt ending where you're given the end goal of killing Brainiac and his multiple clones to ensure that he's Killed Off for Real... except that when the game launched, such an end state did not exist. Instead, after killing Brainiac the first time, the game stops without resolution and invites you to come back for the next season when new live-service content is added — which, given the terrible and unsatisfying gameplay in general, Yahtzee finds to be just the game practically asking for you to drop it.
  • He found himself disappointed by the ending of Atomfall, where you find "a glowing space rock" responsible for the anomalies in the game, do a prescribed ending based on which faction you aligned with, and then leave to roll credits, with no boss encounter and not even a major story twist. He can only assume that the game is meant to be a "journey over the destination" situation, but Yahtz nevertheless finds it a very sour and unsatisfying note to end on.
• Appeal to Obscurity: The review of Phantom Fury has a weirdly layered example: Yahtzee's opinion of the game is pretty unfavorable, and he describes it as trying to be like Half-Life, but in practice ending up more like a forgettable shooter released around the same era as Half-Life such as Soldier of Fortune or SiN. He's aware that those comparisons might be obscure to viewers, and further mentions that Phantom Fury actually features a cameo appearance by the main character from SiN, which Yahtzee finds will only confuse all but the dozen or so people who remember the game.
• Art Evolution:
  • In contrast to the simple white-hatted avatar from Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee's avatar here ends up getting a more detailed hat, glasses, and a slightly unbuttoned shirt. Characters in general also have circles around their usual dot eyes with a bridge between them, making it look like they're all wearing glasses.
  • Backgrounds from Zero Punctuation tended to be primarily just plain yellow or blue, whereas here, not only do the backgrounds come in red, green, and others, they also feature various background textures with technological motifs like gears, pipes, and circuitry.
• The Artifact:
  • As Yahtzee has discussed on his previous game review show, he doesn't wear a fedora anymore, even though his Author Avatar does. With the rebrand into Fully Ramblomatic, a perfect opportunity to shift his avatar's appearance came and the fedora was removed... to be replaced with a slightly-more-detailed black fedora.
  • Discussed in his review of Persona 3 Reload — a remake of Persona 3 that inserts several design aspects from Persona 5 — where Yahtz finds that there are some anachronisms going both ways: Persona 3 has a generally more darker and morbid tone that ends up at odds with the flashy spectacle informed by Persona 5's aesthetic, while adopting Persona 5's flashier combat style and streamlined gameplay ends up making the game more manageable and far easier come the endgame.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: His review of Assassin's Creed: Shadows is already thoroughly negative, with Yahtzee complaining of it being just as simultaneously overdone and unfocused as not just the last several Assassin's Creed games, but every cut-and-paste Jiminy Cockthroat that Ubisoft churned out in the last few years, prompting this exchange.
• Author Appeal:
  • Yahtzee's personal enjoyment of Grappling Hook Pistols in video games shows up again in his review of SANABI, where his enjoyment of that mechanic excuses the tropey "hairy dad story" in the game.
  • "Post-punk" is a stylistic descriptor he almost exclusively refers to with fondness, describing games (and media in general) that observe deconstructive approaches to genre and medium and build off of them to launch said mediums into new, often hard to categorize, but inventive directions. He frequently celebrates Suda51 as his favorite of Japanese post-punk game developers, with Killer7 being his opus.
  • Yahtzee periodically mentions being skilled at word puzzles and desiring to see more games with them as part of their gameplay. His Semi-Ramblomatic "Why Truly Original Games Are So Rare" has Yahtzee brainstorm a combat system based around typing words (feeling that it would appeal to him, but admitted it would be a total logistical nightmare to program), and he gave Cryptmaster a favorable review for being an imperfect, but cleverly-designed Typing Game that spoke to his specific interests.
  • Massive Multiplayer Crossovers are a trope he's expressed quiet admiration for in several Semi-Ramblomatic episodes. One of the videos, "Could Every Video Game Happen in the Same World?", had him brainstorm one for video games as a personal exercise, and in "The Games I Like, But Don't Actually Play", Yahtzee mentions the creative potential of media crossovers as something that earnestly piques his interest in games like Dead by Daylight and Mortal Kombat despite him otherwise having no interest for their gameplay. Dead by Daylight in particular additionally appeals to him due to being a horror fan who enjoys the franchises it represents.
  • Yahtzee discusses the phenomenon in "Breaking Down My Dislike of Strategy Games", where he gives a close examination over why he broadly dislikes the genre, yet has some key exceptions such as X-COM, in turn highlighting what he more specifically prefers as a player. Yahtzee further speculates that being able to determine where your exact limits are for what genres you like and what you dislike would make for a concise breakdown of your personality profile, and jokes that there may be mileage for a dating service that matched people based on what their favorite games are.

    Yahtzee: Never again would society suffer the consequences of EVE Online family attempting to blend in with a Bubble Bobble household.

• Author's Saving Throw: Discussed in the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster review: Yahtzee makes note of the fact the remake removes some of the more dated elements from the original game, namely the "Erotica" points system encouraging you to take lewd photos of women and changing Larry Chiang from an awkward caricature of a Chinese man to "yet another weirdly physically large white American dude." While Yahtzee does at least praise the remake for acknowledging past dodginess, he takes away points for going about it not acknowledging why it was there to begin with, but by retconning it out of existence and pretending like it never happened.
• Award Category Fraud: In his Semi-Ramblomatic on "How to Predict The Game Awards", among the more prominent elements of The Game Awards that annoys Yahtzee is how it splits award categories, finding awards being based on genre to be arbitrary at best (trying to define the difference between "Best Action" and "Best Action-Adventure" leaving him stumped), downright regressive at worst (as it goes counter to boundary-pushing games that are strong because they subvert or blend genres). He's also quite miffed by how it treats categories for indie games, relegating them to a ghetto to be viewed as inferior to "the big kids" of triple-A gaming, as well as not respecting the spirit of its own "Best Debut Indie Game", passing it to a game directed by Jeppe Carlsen, a creator with over a decade of acclaimed indie prestige, rather than one by an actual nascent group of up-and-comers. Yahtzee claims that if he were given control of how to fix The Game Awards, he would replace "Best Debut Indie Game" with a "Best Newcomer" award specifically for creators, and revamp genre awards to be instead based on what primary emotional experience they sought to induce in the player, e.g. "Best Game that Made Me Feel Powerful", "Best Game That Made Me Feel Clever", "Best Game That Made Me Scared", "Best Game That Made Me Cry", etc.
• Awesome, but Impractical: In his review of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Yahtzee notes that the game's combat system allows for some insane acrobatic combos... which Yahtzee knows because he saw it on a TikTok, not because he wanted to or needed to do it, as simple, well-timed button-mashing is just as effective. Yahtzee finds this emblematic of an issue with the game's overall design philosophy: perfectly decent and enjoyable on a base level, but bloated with excess elements it doesn't need just for the sake of seeming "big".
• Awesomeness Withdrawal: In his retro review of Beyond Good & Evil, Yahtzee determines the hype surrounding the game's long-awaited sequel to be based from this dynamic. While he overall views the game positively, he notes based on its conspicuous gaps in story and gameplay that it was likely subject to a lot of corner-cutting, and that we were only seeing a mere glimpse of potential for what was already an admirable mix of ambitious gameplay, unique setting, great music, and lovable characters. Yahtzee does feel that the expectations for the long-struggling sequel can only get more astronomical and risky the more nostalgia-blind audiences get and we should probably move on, but sympathizes with the excitement that sprouts up with every vague new announcement due to it being obvious why people simply want more.
• Bait-and-Switch: In his Semi-Ramblomatic on "The Rules of a Good Plot Twist", Yahtzee briefly discusses Jump Scares and how they can go wrong by making players overly anxious, which is why he never got into Five Nights at Freddy's. He suspects that it might personally be because of lingering trauma dating back to childhood — not regarding his fear of theme park mascots as previously documented in Zero Punctuation, but an incident regarding "a beloved helium balloon and an unexpected stucco ceiling."
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: In his review of Alone in the Dark, Yahtz (rhetorically, pretending to be the game in question) asks himself if he likes jigsaw puzzles with a maximum of 9 pieces. Yahtz says he does... because they keep his four-year-old occupied while he does tasks that require actual brainpower, like crosswords and rewiring electronics.
• Beef Gate: Discussed as one of the reasons he disliked Assassin's Creed: Shadows and its adherence to the "Jiminy Cockthroat" Wide-Open Sandbox formula of game design: with the return of a levelling system, the missions effectively had to be completed in linear ascending order of difficulty, thus making the pretense of it being a sandbox game entirely moot, as well as making treks through the unnecessarily large maps even more tedious and pointless.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Discussed regarding Stellar Blade, where whenever a protagonist in a modern video game happens to be a highly sexualized Ms. Fanservice, the central conversations are boiled down to mudslinging over whether it's objectifying and wrong vs. people yelling at people calling it objectification that accomplishes nothing and kills the fun. Yahtz admits to not minding the protagonist's sexiness, but he does mind that the actual game is boring and derivative, where the only major creative effort was placed into the ridiculous amounts of customization options.
• Better by a Different Name:
  • In his coverage of "Summer Game Fest 2024", Yahtzee says he preferred Doom: The Dark Ages back when it was called "Hexen", which he preferred when it was called "Quake", which he preferred when it was called "Painkiller", etc., etc.
  • In his review of Assassin's Creed: Shadows, Yahtzee brings up how he had previously described on multiple occasions how Ghost of Tsushima was indistinguishable from "Assassin's Creed set in feudal Japan." Now with Shadows proving an actual example to compare side-by-side, Yahtzee makes an addendum: Ghost of Tsushima is the actual nice-looking one with unique and fun ideas, while Shadows is "the one that's really fucking boring."
• Big "SHUT UP!": In "I Love VR, But It Also Makes Me Sad", while discussing the general limitations of VR gaming, Yahtzee posits that you're restricted entirely to first-person games.

  Viewer: Not exactly, Yahtzee, what about games like Moss and Lucky's Tale and—
  Yahtzee: (grabs the viewer by the collar) SHUT UP! Just— just shut the fuck up!
  (tense pause)
  Yahtzee: (calmly) ...Obviously, you're restricted almost entirely to first-person games...

• Biting-the-Hand Humor:
  • Yahtzee ended his first video saying that he can now do anything he wants, while smoking a severed arm. This was originally supposed to be a bong, but he was told that Youtube would react badly to it and had to change it, and so settled for a Literal Metaphor irony.
  • Second Wind editor-in-chief Nick Calandra — ie., the guy who is in charge of Yahtzee — tends to be a Butt-Monkey whenever he shows up in the videos. While discussing Dragon's Dogma 2 he deletes Nick's singular save file, he mentions shooting Nick in the face whenever he wants in Helldivers 2, and cracks a joke in the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth review that he once tried to get a whole vat of ice cream filed as a business expense under Second Wind.
• Black Comedy: In the Selaco review, Yahtzee's avatar chugs a whole bottle of lexapro and reads the label warning that it may cause suicide ideation. He angrily responds with "bitch I *always* have suicidal thoughts".
• Body Surf: Discussed as the core mechanic in Slitterhead. In addition to finding that the game does a solid job utilizing the concept (your player character being an incorporeal spirit who's able to jump between various civilian bodies to fight and outmaneuver monsters), Yahtzee describes how it stands alongside Messiah and Driver: San Francisco as the only entries of "the criminally underweight genre of possess-em-ups," feeling that there's a lot more potential to be explored from the concept for gameplay.
• Boss Game: Discussed in Black Myth: Wukong as what he wishes the game would be. Yahtzee praises the combat and especially the boss battles as being responsive and full of personality, but feels the game as a whole is let down by separating them with an extremely huge map that looks pretty, but is a pain to navigate and explore, admitting he would like the game more if it sincerely did just strip out everything aside from the bosses, "maybe separated with a little animation of our monkey going up a tower like in Mortal Kombat."
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Inverted in his Slitterhead review: Yahtzee admits that he was very curious about it to scratch his Survival Horror itch, but found to his disappointment that it contains fairly little in the way of "survival" or ultimately, "horror," snarking that it's a decisive entry in the "..." genre.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: In Yahtz' review of Pacific Drive, he lists off the reasons why he likes driving: he gets to control a big machine that obeys his every command, he gets to drive fast, the kids are literally strapped down and unable to complain... and he gets to drive into the ocean. Later in the review, he also lists off three of the game's elements that pertain to the core pillars of a dad game: driving around, engine maintenance, grocery shopping... and nuclear disasters.
• Brick Joke:
  • About halfway through the Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth review, Yahtzee jokes about getting teased more badly than trying to use a glory hole at the retirement home. At the very end of the review, Yahtzee also jokes that the latest game evokes the same feeling as watching an elder family member wander around and get distracted — with the aforementioned glory hole being one of those distractions.
  • At the start of the Helldivers 2 review, Yahtzee acknowledges the then-recent plan to force players to have a Playstation account in order to play this game, promising an addendum addressing it at the end. At the end of the review, he simply tacks on:
• Bring My Brown Pants:
  • When Yahtzee discusses jumpscares in "The Rules of a Good Plot Twist", his avatar gets jumpscared by a monster jumping out of his television. He proceeds to pull out a box of adult diapers while saying "good thing I brought these", strongly implying he shat himself out of fright.
  • He considers Amnesia: The Bunker to be his top 4 best game of 2023 because it "actually scared the piss out of my jaded arse." Complete with an image of Yahtzee pissing out of his ass while playing the game.
• British Stuffiness: Discussed in "An Explanation of "Post-Punk" Games". Yahtzee, being British, recognizes that the British have a tendency to be quite uptight and authoritarian — which has resulted in a significant British counterculture that despises conventions and norms. It's what produced the significant British Punk music scene, the alternative comedy movement in the 80's, and the British bedroom game programmer boom.
• Call-Back:
  • During his summary in "How to Predict The Game Awards" on suggestions for how to fix the Game Awards, Yahtzee lists the potential for award categories not based on genre, but of certain emotional experiences, with a game for each, such as Doom (2016) for "Best Game That Made Me Feel Powerful" and The Mortuary Assistant for "Best Game That Made Me Feel Scared". For "Best Game That Made Me Cry", Yahtzee lists Spiritfarer — a game that he confessed back in Zero Punctuation had genuinely brought him to tears — and briefly digresses to exclaim "Oh God, I just want to know you're in a happier place now, Alice the Hedgehog!"
  • During a sponsor read for Incogni in the Cryptmaster review, Yahtzee espouses how their services would allow him to "metaphorically naked-dance online to my heart's content," with an image of his avatar dancing in his underwear with googly eyes on his ass. That last bit is a reference to his Zero Punctuation review of LittleBigPlanet all the way back in 2008, which featured live-action footage of Yahtzee dancing in googly-eyed boxers to "Soul Bossa Nova" to fill up an otherwise short review.
• Canine Companion: Yahtzee's avatar is joined by an avatar of his dog Toffee, as a replacement for the imps.
• Capitalism Is Bad:
  • Just like in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee makes no bones about how much he dislikes late-stage capitalism and the corporate structure of AAA gaming and its effects on games as a medium, and while he won't necessarily dismiss a game just because it comes from a AAA publisher, he will call out a game's weaknesses that were clearly rooted in it, including predatory microtransactions and live-service structure, bloated filler content done simply to make a "bigger" product, and weak, indecisive direction based around targeting vague focus groups and market-based interests than making actually straightforward, innovative games. He is especially unrelenting towards how corporations unceremoniously devour and spit out developers regardless of whether or not the games are bad or even financially disappointing, which at least partially informs his staunch and vocal support of indie developers who free themselves of such culture.
  • In "The EA Spouse Incident", Yahtzee goes more into detail about how the structure of games development has been "fuuuUUUUcked" from the very moment corporations got involved, describing how its first generation of developers were excited visionaries who were willing to sacrifice well-being for their craft, and that once big corporations took notice, they exploited them by imposing this destructive overworking as the norm. He argues that by 2004 and the titular incident (involving the wife of an overworked developer at Electronic Arts blowing the whistle on its horrible workplace conditions and the company's terrible attempts at saving face), companies had built a sufficient cycle of baiting "starry-eyed STEM grads" eager to work in a medium they genuinely love then wringing the life out of them, and Yahtzee is pretty dismayed that the only improvement since then is that they don't overwork you to death — they simply fire you and shut down your studio before it's had the chance.
  • While breaking down Split Fiction and the flaws in its central premise — a big corporation exploiting the YA novel writer protagonists, which weirdly seems to manifest as referencing classic video games that are framed in-universe as coming from the stories they've written — Yahtzee suggests that the story might have made more sense if the protagonists were instead indie game developers. However, he does note that a story about "naive young indie devs being held down and milked for all their good ideas by a soulless corporate machine" likely would have hit too close for a game published by EA.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • Discussed in "The Rules of a Good Plot Twist" — while one of Yahtzee's rules is that a plot twist shouldn't be too obvious, he also argues that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with a twist being "obvious" if the audience puts the legwork in to decipher the narrative puzzle before the game itself does. He chastises game developers (most prominently David Cage) who attempt to screw the audience out of an honest narrative by giving them an impossible-to-predict twist just for the sake of feeling like they're "outsmarting" them, and encourages writers to allow the audience to guess as speculation is half of the fun, and that they're entitled to their moment of glory when they realize they're right.
  • Brought up something fierce in his review of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, where in describing the deeply predictable government conspiracy plot, Yahtz hypothetically asks the viewer which of the two named CIA higher-up characters is secretly The Mole to the terrorist plot: the grouchy one that all your allies claim might be the traitor who is introduced with an aggressive, but otherwise ineffectual "you're a loose cannon, Black Ops, hand over your badge and gun" speech, or the totally harmless-looking one that is ostensibly on your side and is "all smiles and peach cobbler" yet appears to only stay at HQ and has a tendency to disappear at suspicious times.

    Yahtzee: No, I didn't drop a spoiler warning, because I respect your fucking intelligence!

• Cerebus Syndrome: Discussed as something attempted by Phantom Fury, which features more serious storytelling than its predecessor Ion Fury. Yahtzee highlights that Ion Fury established its protagonist to be a wise-cracking Duke Nukem expy, so trying to add in pathos — namely a tragic backstory of her losing her unit, spouse, and arm before becoming a tool of the military industrial complex — is jarring and atonal, with the fact she continues cracking wise making her come off as less "quirky" and more like "a severely damaged person showing a therapist on the doll where she shot her dad."
• Character Development: In "Can an NPC Feel Like A Friend?", Yahtzee discusses this as being one of the main things that makes it more likely for a player to become invested in an NPC, emphasizing that being around characters who have their own storylines are simply more interesting and easy to care about than blank slates. Yahtzee emphasizes a particularly powerful dynamic: when the player changes their mind about a character, finding "hatred to friendship" much more impactful, emotionally gratifying, and memorable than simply "indifference to friendship."
• Cheese Strategy: During his review of The Crush House, Yahtzee highlights one that unfortunately breaks the concept of it and similar games based around a creative or artistic process (in this case, being the camera operator of a trashy Big Brother-style Reality Show): while you're ostensibly being tasked to shoot the most appealing elements for your randomly-generated audiences, it's ultimately easier and more effective to think strictly about stats to give you good ratings rather than actually attempt to shoot an interesting show, even if the content makes no sense (Yahtzee recalls getting audiences consisting of "art lovers, the motion sick, and people who like calming television," and he managed to set off records by simply pointing the camera at a blank artist's canvas and remaining perfectly still for a minute). Yahtz notes that especially when the game gets harder over time, this form of numbers-crunching Whoring gradually becomes necessary to beat the game, making what might have been a novel high concept into repetitive busywork in the name of efficiency.
• Cliché Storm:
  • Yahtzee comes down hard on Stellar Blade for being extremely generic, sampling "Standard Anime Sci-Fi Template Plot #3" of "After the End war between humanity's remnants vs. monsters of mysterious origin that in some way tie back to it being humanity's own fault, featuring astonishingly advanced technology that, for unclear reasons, is exclusively wielded by questionably of-age people in disquietingly sexy outfits." Combined with the general lack of imagination, Yahtzee claims to have been able to predict every Plot Twist.

    Yahtzee: Oh, and incidentally, yeah, [the protagonist's] name is "Eve"; she's the last survivor of her people stuck on ravaged post-apocalyptic Earth, and she's called "Eve". If you think Stellar Blade isn't going to bring in themes of rebirthing humanity, possibly with the aid of a male character named "Adam", then you're clearly giving Stellar Blade way too much fucking credit.

  • Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed to impress Yahtzee due to feeling very by-the-numbers, both in terms of its place as modern "dark fantasy" and in terms of verbose BioWare RPGs. Yahtzee briefly addresses the controversial shift in tone with audiences accusing it to being way too light and soft, which doesn't bother him as much due to him considering the series as a whole having an identity issue since day one, with him unable to pin down what makes Dragon Age stand out other than "BioWare's generic fantasy thing that isn't Mass Effect." His bigger complaints about The Veilguard came down to its plot and world feeling underdeveloped and rickety, admitting that he stopped before the end due to completely losing interest in what was happening.
  • Discussed more charitably in the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review. Yahtzee notes that the game feels like a classic Indiana Jones film, "probably because it rips off half of them," remarking that the formula of globe-trotting, ancient tombs, magical realism, "spunky redoubtable love interest," and punching Nazis in the face is a formula that appears a lot in gaming as well, listing Wolfenstein: The New Order, Tomb Raider I, Spelunky, and Uncharted as games that have thoroughly covered what The Great Circle seeks to do. However, Yahtzee doesn't mind because it's a formula that works well and effectively informs the gameplay, whose gravitation towards scrappy improvisation allowed him to feel like he recreated a moment from an Indiana Jones film organically.
  • Much of his review of Eternal Strands sees him noting that it's the first game of a nascent developer, and it definitely feels like it: its visual aesthetic feels generic (adhering very closely to the Standard Fantasy Setting formula), its plot is derivative, its characters are either uninteresting or forced archetypes, and its gameplay feels like a standard array of gear-grinding, extraction, crafting mechanics, and occasional fights against kaiju, describing it as "Fisher-Price Monster Hunter". Despite this, Yahtzee finds himself ultimately enjoying the game, finding that it does these ideas competently enough with enough unique ideas to recommend, and that for a debuting studio, it shows a lot of promise.

    Yahtzee: You know how Pablo Picasso started out doing normal boring realistic portraits of people, and then once he demonstrated understanding of the rules, he could proceed to break them and do all his weird career-defining stuff? That's what Eternal Strands is: it's Picasso's boring early stuff, a perfectly well put-together demonstration that the developers understand the principles. Now I want to see them make some motherfucking art — make a game about a lady with both ears on the same side of her head and a 1955 Morris Minor instead of an arse.

  • Yahtzee starts his review of Assassin's Creed: Shadows admitting that there have been so many same-y Ubisoft Jiminy Cockthroats that he's run out of ways to do unique snarky intros, later describing its recurring flaws as being generic in a way that "It's not what I was hoping for, but it's what I was expecting." He really doesn't spare the game his wrath in how milquetoast, patience-trying, and otherwise unmemorable the whole thing is.

    Yahtzee: Ghost of Tsushima is [Assassin's Creed set in feudal Japan] with the nice visual design and fun ideas, like using the wind as a direction indicator — AssCreed is the one where everything's murky and indistinct, and we have to hammer "Eagle Vision" like it's the fucking "Restart" button in Hotline Miami to differentiate the important gameplay elements from the four hundredweight of useless details that some poor sod at Ubisoft had to miss the birth of their child to finish polishing up, and which the game's own interface is now directing me to completely ignore! I can't think of a single moment or gameplay element in Shadows that might enable it to stand out in memory, with the possible exception of making Yasuke jump into a haystack and watching him do his back in, LOL.

• Cluster F-Bomb: This is Yahtzee, after all, once again freed from the constraints of YouTube's demonetisation tyranny that forced Zero Punctuation to begin censoring all the swearing near the end of its run.
• Colon Cancer: Just like in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee dry-heaves whenever reading the title of a game with an unnecessary colon, especially for the first entry of a yet-to-be-established series like Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The color of the background changes from the default red depending on which aspect of the game Yahtzee is currently discussing, with beige for plot/setting, blue for gameplay, etc.
• Color Motif: The subject of "The Language of Color in Games", with Yahtzee observing how gaming culture formed an unspoken, yet understood agreement of what certain colors mean for certain gameplay elements, ranging from red meaning "health", blue meaning "magic" or "shields", brown meaning "realism", to magenta meaning "mainstream interpretation of 'punk' aesthetics".
• Commitment Anxiety: In "The Games I Like, But Don't Actually Play", Yahtzee admits he has this problem when it comes to Fighting Games. While he enjoys the spectacle of high-level gameplay and the artful character designs of many fighting game rosters, he finds that the sheer complexity of the genre — compressing the usual third-person combat principles of "watching for tells and reacting accordingly" within a timescale of nanoseconds — scares the hell out of him, finding that it's far too late for him to ever get into the genre and preferring to admire it from a distance.
• Condemned by History: Discussed as the subject of "I May Have Been Wrong About Some of My Favorite Games", where Yahtzee reevaluates some of his previous "Top 5 Best Games" lists from his past decades of game reviews and bumps down some of his picks. While he doesn't end up completely disowning his picks, usually they've become reflective in retrospect of modern trends that he's become critical of, and can no longer in full confidence say they were his favorites in years with other games that better stood the test of time:
  • Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was his game of 2014, but he thought less of it in hindsight because as revolutionary and exciting many of its mechanics were at the time, like the Nemesis system and open-world sandbox exploration, the industry never successfully built off from it, with Warner Bros patenting the Nemesis system and tainting it with microtransaction culture in the sequel, and Ubisoft having since utterly driven the open-world sandbox action-adventure genre into the ground. Yahtzee instead passes the title of best game of 2014 to Wolfenstein: The New Order.
  • BioShock Infinite was his game of 2013, but became increasingly polarizing over the years for its confused ideological focus and all-over-the-place story, things that Yahtzee can't deny. While he does think it's a good game and likes it for other reasons (the equally polarizing Tone Shift from the horror of previous BioShock games to colorful, swashbuckling action being in his eyes a breath of fresh air for not just the series, but gaming as a whole during its stark "Real Is Brown" cover shooter phase), he can't in confidence keep it as his favorite game of 2013 when below it were Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (the best pirate game of the modern era and the last Assassin's Creed game he can recommend), Saints Row IV (the most fun Grand Finale a series like Saints Row could ask for), and especially Papers, Please (one of the most creative and influential "post-dad" indie games that Yahtzee loves).
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was only his #5 best game of 2011, but Yahtzee admits to feeling confused by because even at the time, he really didn't like it at much. In addition to not being a fan of Bethesda RPGs in general before and after Skyrim, he admits he may have added it to his Top 5 solely out of peer pressure as the industry was lauding it as a classic, and is upset that in doing so, he snubbed Batman: Arkham City from a mention that year's top 5.
• Content Warnings: Discussed in his Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom mini-review, where he gives the game a solid endorsement but warns against playing it if you suffer from epilepsy due to the sheer amount of color and energy it contains.

  Yahtzee: I know standard epilepsy warnings have kinda fallen into the background of our perceptions like "no smoking" signs and ongoing societal collapse, but maybe take this one seriously, yeah? Maybe skip this game if you are sensitive to flashing colours in the way that those sensitive to internal hemorrhaging should skip getting buggered by a horse.

• Continuity Lockout:
  • Discussed in his Final Fantasy VII Rebirth review as one of the reasons he isn't keen on it or its predecessor, Final Fantasy VII Remake. As a non-fan of the original, Yahtzee describes the feeling of playing these remakes like "being a new boyfriend in a well-established friend group," where the games seemed to intrinsically assume he will enjoy being around "familiar" elements rather than finding them alienating and annoying, finding Yuffie (a character who the game had hyped up with many false intros before officially joining the party) to be just another Manic Pixie Dream Girl alongside the other girls in the party.
  • Also brought up in his review of Black Myth: Wukong: Having not read Journey to the West (which the game is a Distant Sequel to), Yahtz admits to being extremely lost on what was happening on a chapter-to-chapter basis or the various Mythology Gags to ancient Chinese myths. However, he didn't mind this very much because the actual spectacle throughout most of the game was sufficient enough that to him, context didn't really matter.
  • He also had trouble following the story of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, which he assumes has to do with him also not fully grasping the events of the previous games in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. However, he still considers this unfair given how the previous entry was 14 years ago, and that "it'd be like only now trying to establish the Hot Tub Time Machine cinematic universe."
• Cool, but Inefficient: In "I Love VR, But It Also Makes Me Sad", Yahtzee describes virtual reality gaming as being this, going over how he enjoys it and believes it's excellent for immersion, but doubting that it will ever become "the next big thing" among the mainstream and be more than a niche peripheral to traditional gaming. In addition to the technology being expensive, complicated, and physically demanding a lot for a mainstream audience to use (granted, Yahtzee admits that technology is slowly improving in that regard), there are still problems in the fact VR can only allow very specific genres (i.e., exclusively first-person-exclusive games like shooters — genres like 2D Platform Games, fast-paced Hack and Slash games, Grand Strategy games, and 1v1 Fighting Games are completely unviable for VR), and even individual forms of application are pretty limited (what VR is best at boils down to: rough melee combat, piloting vehicles, climbing terrain, and shooting one-handed guns, which simply doesn't encompass a full human bodily experience that VR aspires to recreate). Yahtzee finds that the biggest obstacle towards VR's popularity isn't so much the limits of ever-evolving technology, but that it's simply not as efficient or accessible as other means, noting how the masses don't necessarily even want "immersion" unless it's tied to some more direct, real-life social experience (i.e. playing with Wii motion controls and Guitar Hero controllers with the family, or travelling and interacting with friends with Pokémon GO), and that even he as a fan of VR wouldn't want to exclusively play games on such an isolating medium.
• Credits Gag: Like in Zero Punctuation, there are small slideshow gags related to the game at hand as the Patreon credits roll. In the one from the Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom review for example, Toffee tries to pee on the titular taxi. The taxi's roof opens up to reveal a comically sized revolver aimed right at him.
• Damned by Faint Praise:
  • His review of Helldivers II has him point out that a game being touted as "fun with friends" isn't the praise it seems, as that reflects more on the quality of one's friend circle than the quality of the game itself. After all, many terrible things can be enjoyed with friends, from watching a bad B-movie to pissing on a dead cat.
  • Discussed in the Star Wars Outlaws review, where the game is so utterly bland, unfocused, and textbook in Ubisoft's "Jiminy Cockthroat" formula that Yahtzee struggles to figure out what is the game's selling point or who was even the intended audience, describing "One for Star Wars fans!" being the "the faint praise with which most reviewers would now damn Star Wars Outlaws". This is especially hollow praise in Yahtzee's eyes since he isn't even sure what a "Star Wars fan" even realistically is anymore, as Star Wars is so utterly massive that it's impossible to be a fan of everything with Star Wars on it now, comparing it to appealing to fans of pieces of paper.
• Dancing Bear: In "My Big Dumb Nintendo Switch 2 Predictions", Yahtzee discusses Nintendo's history of shoehorning hardware gimmicks in their consoles, a trend that he finds a juvenile means to cover up their fundamental ability to play games, comparing it to 3D movies and smell-o-vision. As a result, he considers the fact that the Nintendo Switch's successor is not doing this — being effectively just "the Switch, just more powerful" — to be a good thing, since the Switch is a perfectly well-designed and versatile gaming console that doesn't need much improvement beyond better specs to help games run better, and trying to stuff it with more gimmicks would only introduce more points of potential failure.
• Dated History: The review of Helldivers II managed to have this twice over in the narrow time period between it was recorded and published. The review opens with Yahtzee acknowledging at the last minute the controversy the game was embroiled in regarding Sony's treatment of the game^note , and that while most of the review was already completed, this controversy would be discussed at the very end as an addendum... which simply consists of Yahtzee clumsily attaching to an otherwise positive review "Shame they fucked it up!" However, an additional, even-more-last-minute addendum plays during the credits, where Yahtzee discusses how Sony had since backed off from their plans, thus rendering the earlier addendum moot — the only reason he decided to keep it in at all is because it's funny.
• Death of the Author: Briefly discussed in "Silent Hill 2 and the Hidden Costs of Remakes", with Yahtzee immediately staking just how much he disagrees with Masashi Tsuboyama — director of the original Silent Hill 2 — over his comments on how the remake and its change to over-the-shoulder camera as being superior to the original, significantly jankier one (which Yahtzee found ultimately more fitting for the detached, alienating tone that made the original so great).
• Delusion Conclusion:
  • Yahtz sarcastically suggests that all of SANABI is a false memory, occurring in the Dying Dream of a seagull.
  • In his review of Senuas Saga Hellblade II, Yahtzee posits that had the game not been a sequel, he would have interpreted Senua's vague, psychosis-filled revenge quest being intercepted by battling various giants was some form of symbolism, but the sequel removes the ambiguity and has NPCs confirm that they are literal. Yahtzee brings up the possibility that those could be imaginary as well, but stops himself since the "it's a hallucination" hypothesis never ends, and that he might as well conclude that Senua is "actually a daydreaming data validation clerk from Tunbridge Wells."
• Designated Victim: Discussed in "Framing, Agency, and AAA Female Protagonists", where Yahtzee discusses how AAA games have a big problem with portraying female protagonists this way (namely Senua, post-Square Enix Lara Croft, and Ellie Williams). Yahtzee notes that player characters who constantly get the crap kicked out of them isn't gender-exclusive, but AAA stories have a perverse fixation with placing female protagonists in especially gratuitous sequences highlighting their suffering, often in ways where they're a passive entity rather than an active agent — even when they technically make active choices, they often have "a bad case of the have-to's" where they don't actually seem to believe they have any agency or self-interest, and are thus put in borderline Torture Porn scenarios entirely from contrivances. Yahtzee doesn't call this out for being sexist as much as it's boring, arguing that it's uninteresting to watch any character suffer horribly and gratuitously for contrived reasons that make said character look stupid, and is annoyed that it's often treated as the narrative goal that the rest of the game was built on justifying. Yahtzee notes that more than beyond misogyny in a male-dominated medium, the reason why AAA devs still have trouble writing female protagonists is because of general ignorance in actually exploring them as well-rounded characters with their own interests and depth in favor of what they think easily appeals to a male-dominated audience.

  Yahtzee: Ron Rosenberg's stated intention behind reboot Lara Croft inadvertently lays a lot of shit bare, because it's still rooted in the attitude that birthed the original, scantily-clad Lara: whether you're supposed to want to protect them or fuck them, the emphasis is what you want, not what she might want. She's still a wank doll, just one for wanking off different emotions.

• Doing It for the Art: Discussed and Deconstructed in "The EA Spouse Incident": Yahtzee notes how the earliest landmark game developers like John Carmack and John Romero were so incredibly excited by this new medium full of potential that they would willingly sacrifice their well-being in order to work on it, to the point that it was even seen as admirable and "cool" to brag about overworking yourself on twelve-hour shifts and only sleeping four hours. He argues that, as influential as their works ended up becoming, this set a dangerous precedent as it quickly attracted "the sharks of corporatism" who saw two of their favorite things: "exploitable people and absolute distended rectum-loads of cash to be made," and thus exploited this mindset to a point where actively harmful crunch in the name of success became an industrialized norm.
• Double Entendre:
  • Inverted in the Dragon's Dogma review. Yahtzee mentions at one point that the "climb on monsters" mechanic led to him smothering his face into a minotaur's pubic hair; from that point onwards, the mildly sexual phrase "pubic hair" becomes shorthand for the more innocent "fighting monsters".
  • The Another Crab's Treasure has Yahtzee nickname the game as "crabs". He then cracks a number of puns on crabs and "crabs" (slang for pubic lice), like "crabs has really gotten me by the hairs".
• Dressed to Plunder: Discussed in the Skull and Bones review: the moment Yahtzee realizes everyone was wearing a stock pirate outfit (tricorne hat, eyepatch, overcoat), he runs off to buy and wear the components of the second-most-stock pirate outfit (floppy hat, horizontally-red-striped shirt, baggy shorts).
• Dual-World Gameplay: Discussed in his review of Dungeons Of Hinterberg — Yahtzee notes where many indie games try and fail to bridge the gap between "cozy slice-of-life minimalism" and "traditional action gameplay" (usually by ending up in an awkward middle-ground that makes both of them feel out of place), Dungeons of Hinterberg succeeds by way of regimenting the two parts in ways where they're separate, but performing well in one aspect directly benefits the other, comparing it to another franchise that does this well, Persona. However, Yahtzee admits to finding the combat less interesting than the slice of life elements — itself not a big sin since it's otherwise functional and is just something you do in between the other elements — but this does lead him to question what the game intends to be a priority, lamenting how the game ends by beating the dungeons with there being a substantial amount of NPCs and activities he never got a chance to interact with, yet also feeling that attempting to make friends with everyone would be missing the point of the game.
• Dump Months: Yahtzee addresses mid-December as being this for video games, "too late to receive any game awards or to go on anyone's Christmas lists," noting that if a big game studio releases a title during that window of time (examples including The Callisto Protocol and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora), chances are that they have little to no faith in it.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Discussed in his review of Persona 3 Reload — having gotten hooked onto the series from Persona 5, Yahtzee notices a lot of odd issues with tone and underdeveloped identity from (the remake of) its predecessor, though he ultimately enjoys the Persona gameplay enough to excuse most of its flaws. In fact, Yahtzee admits that part of him likes that it's a bit all-over-the-place, and feels that Persona 3 being remade in the way it was is in some ways a disservice as it buries those idiosyncrasies to history.
• Elephant in the Room: Yahtzee is about to bring up the adage during his review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, but stops himself for a specific reason:
• Enforced Method Acting: In the Another Crab's Treasure review, Yahtzee remarks that he wasn't sure how to make a voice actor sound more angry than the lobster does in the game, if not via invoking this trope (stealing coins from the voice actor's pocket and then flicking them at his balls mid-recording).
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game:
  • Discussed back and forth in the STILL WAKES THE DEEP review — Yahtzee acknowledges that "walking simulator" games can be a perfectly valid form of interactive storytelling, and the story of Still Wakes the Deep is quite good, with most of Yahtzee's criticisms coming down to the game's need to stop itself with perfunctory combat and stealth sequences. He then acknowledges the long-term hypocrisy of how critics like him in the past have dogged on "walking sims" for not being "real games", finding himself in an awkward position of wishing The Chinese Room stayed in their lane and committed to linear stories (which Yahtzee also finds perfectly valid) but also noting that Still Wakes the Deep is a horror game that needs some level of threat to maximize effectiveness, and thus such token gameplay may be necessary.

    Yahtzee: So I'm not even sure what I'm asking for now. I guess a greater commitment to what gameplay mechanics they do have and another excuse to use the word "numpty."

  • Also discussed in "The Games I Like, But Don't Actually Play", where Yahtzee discusses games that he doesn't play largely due to being based in gameplay genres he doesn't enjoy (online multiplayer games, Real-Time Strategy games, 1v1 Fighting Games, etc.) but maintain his interest and admiration due to their rich characters, spectacle, and/or writing. Yahtzee briefly acknowledges that while him not being very interested in certain genres on principle is neither his fault nor that of the developers, it is a shame that he can't enjoy every game that personally appeals to him, but at the same time, we live in an age of wikis, podcasts, and YouTube clips that still enable some level of superficial enjoyment of video games without necessarily having to play them.
  • His review of Split Fiction is a rather recursive play on this. Yahtzee gets out of the way early on that the gameplay is overall quite good and enjoyable, but he spends the rest of the video blasting through what he really wants to talk about: its plot, which he had a ton of problems with and takes the time to skewer (its clumsy central premise, its hackneyed writing, its annoying main characters, etc.). However, during his conclusion, he admits that he probably wouldn't change it, and that part of the fun that he and his mandatory co-op player had during the game was taking the piss out of every dialogue scene, and that for better and for worse, it became a lot more memorable because of it.

    Yahtzee: [If] that was the intended experience, then Josef Fares is a fucking evil genius, but I doubt it. In brief, you're a great game designer, Josef; now for fuck's sake, get someone else to write the story for your next one!

  • He recommends South of Midnight largely by virtue of its solid aesthetic and writing, in spite of its gameplay being bland but at least serviceable. When comparing it to Compulsion Games' previous title, We Happy Few (which made his 4th worst game of 2018 in Zero Punctuation), Yahtz finds South of Midnight to be a marked improvement, even when considering that We Happy Few itself had a pretty good aesthetic and story bogged down by its sub-par gameplay.
  • He criticizes Old Skies for having a flat visual aesthetic and contrived, railroad-y puzzle gameplay, but gives much more praise to the story and writing, being an unconventional twist on Time Travel stories (its plot surrounding Time Travel for Fun and Profit playing out in ways he didn't expect), finding it to be a compelling character story about feeling trapped in one place while everything else changes around you and learning to break free.
• Escape Sequence: One critique Yahtz had of Pizza Tower was the presence of this trope. Each level has a Timed Mission in which the player has to race to the start of the level while also having to locate hidden items, which Yahtzee found too stressful. As such, while he enjoyed the game, the experience ended up being too much to play more than a few levels at a time.
• Everybody Hates Mathematics: Joked about in the Semi-Ramblomatic of "Why Truly Original Games Are So Rare": while brainstorming a hypothetically "original" concept to illustrate the pitfalls that can come from the process, he proposes a melee combat system where rather than basing it on fast reflexes and strategic planning, it's based around typing coherent various themed words... which would be a nightmare to prototype as it involves programming every word in the English language and flagging them for context. Yahtzee attempts a compromise by instead focusing on less cumbersome math equations... which would in turn be less flexible in ability to allow players to express their creativity, in addition to the fact that "Nobody thinks maths is fun. Nobody you'd want to be trapped in conversation with at a party, anyway."
• Everyone Has Standards: During his review of Silent Hill 2 (Remake), Yahtzee he trusts Bloober Team to have quality original ideas "as much as I'd trust Michael J. Fox to transport a wedding cake!" The accompanying visual is simply white text on a black background reading "SLIGHTLY MEAN SPIRITED GAG I ELECTED NOT TO ILLUSTRATE."
• Exact Words: As Yahtzee admits midway through his "Best, Worst, and Blandest of 2023" video, he's talking about all the games he reviewed in 2023, "regardless of what label they were reviewed under".
• Excuse Plot: Discussed and almost namedropped in the review of Pacific Drive. Yahtzee finds the story of the game to be somewhat underbaked, with the game's most substantial plot element being the personalities and interplay of the Mission Control who are giving you assignments, with Yahtzee still describing them "as about as interesting and well-characterized as a bodiless voice with the physical presence of a fart can be." However, Yahtzee is ultimately okay with it as they're decent enough at doing their job of informing the gameplay, which is the real meat of the game's appeal.

  Yahtzee: ...but you know what? I'll take it. It'll do, because all I want from the story is an excuse. It could just tell me that driving my car keeps the baby owls nesting in the carburetor warm, and that'd do, because driving the car is fun!

• Extreme Doormat:
  • In a throwaway joke from "The Moral Dilemmas that Weren't", Yahtzee admits that — when presented with moral dilemmas — he'll just do whatever would please the person in his immediate vicinity because he doesn't want confrontation. This is accompanied with a graphic of Yahtz considering a baby sacrifice because the person in front of him wants it.
  • Part of the reason why he ended up playing the card-game minigame from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth so long, despite hating it, is because he didn't want to get puppy-dog-eyes-ed at by the announcer NPC running the thing.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: At the end of the Citizen Sleeper 2 review, the game's story is enough for Yahtzee to take a moment to reevaluate his life, look at his surroundings, at everything he takes for granted every day. He holds his child in his arms as he thinks about it, taking a long, contemplative moment of silence... and then has to put her down because his back starts to hurt.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out: The review of Silent Hill 2 (Remake) starts with Yahtzee silently thinking by his computer for a Beat, before saying "Could've been worse." Smash-cut to end credits for a few seconds before Yahtzee returns to continue the review for real, sternly asking "Let's be serious, viewer: why are you here?"
• Fan Disservice: The ad spot for NordVPN on the Nine Sols review shows Yahtzee's avatar dressed in nothing but a hat, sandals, and a skimpy speedo/thong. Toffee really doesn't like looking at him in that state of dress.
• Fanon Discontinuity: In his review of South Park: Snow Day!, Yahtzee would like to insist that South Park only received its first video game with The Stick of Truth in 2014, and that if anyone tries to argue that there are earlier games, they're lying and must be chased back into their homes with guns and attack dogs.

  Yahtzee: So even sight unseen, I had my misgivings about a full 3D real-time combat-based South Park game; remember the terrible N64 ga— I mean, don't remember it, 'cos it didn't exist.

• Feeling Their Age: Discussed — initially as a joke, not as much as the video goes on — during his review of Citizen Sleeper 2, describing the game and its chore-based gameplay loop as accurately depicting "the very human condition of not always giving that much of a shit about what you're doing," describing how he's at the age where sometimes he'll "roll a whole day of 1's and 2's" and develop random back pain "because I walked across the room wrong." However, this comes to a head when he describes the ending — where the player character, now that their adventure is almost over, begins literally breaking down and becoming incapable of accomplishing their tasks, with the only solution being to volunteer for a "rebooting" that has a decent chance of erasing their personality — which Yahtzee admits to have genuinely stunned him into considering his mortality.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: "The EA Spouse Incident" opens with an ad spot for The Merch of a "let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee" shirt, with Yahtz quipping that it might be relevant soon. a couple seconds later, the video for the first "Occasional guide to notorious moments in gaming history" starts, with Yahtz saying the exact line described on the shirt.
• Follow the Leader:
  • Discussed throughout the Astro Bot review. Yahtzee lays it out that it's extremely obvious that it's another attempt by Sony to replicate what Nintendo had long established as being successful, and that following their failed attempt at directly copying Super Smash Bros., they opted for a Massive Multiplayer Crossover vis-à-vis Super Mario Galaxy clone. Yahtzee additionally makes it clear that this isn't necessarily a bad thing — Astro Bot is a genuinely good, well-made and fun game that actually benefitted from its massive corporate backing — but he does make note that successful as it may have been, imitating a past work inherently made Astro Bot feel "old school," and the fact it was used as a vessel by Sony to self-congratulate itself and the PlayStation 5 for their contributions to gaming rubbed Yahtzee the wrong way as being circular and hollow.
  • In " Live-Service Games Ruined Crafting", Yahtzee discusses how despite much of the gaming world has taken after Minecraft for popularizing Item Crafting, virtually no games have attempted to copy or improve upon its grid-arrangement system for assembling item ingredients in specific shapes, which Yahtzee finds to be its most intuitive, even genius design decision. He can only surmise that the only reason it never caught on is because it's so idiosyncratic that copying it directly would lead to you being called a Minecraft knockoff, but then he notes how Fortnite knocked off PUBG for its battle royale mode and became even bigger, summarizing how "No one complains as long as you make something better with it. The creative industries are practically built on that principle."
• Formula-Breaking Episode: "Yahtzee Showcased Starstruck Vagabond at GDC 2024" follows Yahtzee not only covering a live event and in front of the camera, but also as a presenter, with the video detailing the experience of showcasing his own upcoming video game, Starstruck Vagabond.
• Fun with Acronyms: While reviewing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Yahtzee insists that the title must be an acronym due to the dots in between the letters of the word "STALKER", though his best initial guess is "Survivalist Twitchy Assholes Looting Killed Enemies Regularly". Later attempts in the review include "Stupid Tony Abbott Lingeringly Kissing Enya's Rectum" and "Shania Twain And Linford Christie Eating Risotto".
• Game Within a Game: Discussed in "Card Game? I've Got a World to Save!", where Yahtzee discusses the influx of games that feel the need to insert some secondary recurring minigame that exists in-universe, usually some form of Card Battle Game or some simulated Fictional Board Game. Yahtzee is really sick of these since they often kill the pacing of the rest of the game and steadily feel more like an obligation due to the game shilling it (such as Queen's Blood in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth) or it forming a substantial fraction of the game's content that ignoring it seems like you're willfully missing out (such as Whatever in Cryptmaster). Yahtzee notes how the popularity of this trend in recent times may have to do with trying to imitate the success of Gwent in The Witcher 3, except Gwent actually contributed to characterization and worldbuilding, whereas new imitators just feel like shallow flexes that eat up space and ironically damage immersion, especially when the rules get far too complex and stop being believable as casual pub games.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Comes up during the Helldivers II review as part of why it's one of the rare multiplayer-focused experiences that Yahtzee enjoys: while he hates most multiplayer games because they're designed around eternal conflict which prevents any story from having a satisfying ending, Helldivers II got in his good graces because eternal conflict is a part of the gameplay as well as the story.
• Genre Throwback: Discussed as the central theme of his dual-review of Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom and Phantom Fury: Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is a Nintendo 64-style Collect-a-Thon Platformer which does what Yahtzee argues is the correct thing to do while designing a retro-style game: assess the foundation, then pump it up with all the madcap energy that modern technology can provide. Phantom Fury, meanwhile, is what Yahtzee found to be a passable, but shallow attempt to recreate the spirit of late 90's/early 2000's 3D shooters like Half-Life, finding in practice that it more resembles the low-quality knockoffs of Half-Life in the era such as Soldier of Fortune and SiN (1998). Yahtzee notes that if you want something that evokes the spirit of a beloved game, just play the actual game — in contrast to praising Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom for having a solid identity that warrants attention even without its nostalgic appeal, he finds that all that Phantom Fury really excels at is reminding the audience that every era looked on with fondness was littered with mediocrity.
• Growing with the Audience: Discussed in "The Rise of the Dad Game" in a few different ways:
  • Yahtzee introduces the concept of "dad games" — games that feel like work, but in a meditative, relaxing way similar to traditional "dad" hobbies like model railway construction — as being a culmination of the medium growing up and responding to ever-evolving audiences. Yahtz describes how in addition to advances in graphics technology making basic Simulation Games more immersive, audiences simply aging from youngsters playing cool action titles to adults with jobs and families made such "dad games" more in demand, along with what Yahtzee further coins as the "post-dad game", which serve as a happy medium between crazy narrative fantasy and prosaic task-based mundanity.
  • Tonally, Yahtzee finds that there are also specific subgenres of "dad games" that are tied to very specific generations: when video games first became popular and had audiences mostly populated of young boys, stories were appropriately juvenile and basic (ex. the basic Save the Princess narrative of Super Mario Bros.), and when audiences matured from such simplicity, this led to the rise of more macho power fantasies (ex. DOOM or Duke Nukem) or complex world-saving narratives (ex. Half-Life and Metal Gear Solid), usually with conscious disregard for any relationship-based drama. Then came the 2000's as video games — a medium that itself became at least two decades old, enough to be considered an adult in its own right — experienced mainstream popularity whose trends gravitated towards mature concepts and grappling with the uncertainty of responsibility, leading to what Yahtzee dubs "sad dad games", featuring mature adult protagonists (usually literal fathers) who have been in some way wronged that leads them into seeking catharsis, often through violent means (ex. God of War, Gears of War, Red Dead Redemption, and even Silent Hill 2). This culminated in what Yahtzee considers "hairy dad games" started from the 2010's onwards of heroes finally accepting the responsibility of parenthood and being defined by their desire to raise and protect a child figure (ex. The Last of Us, BioShock Infinite, The Walking Dead (Telltale), and God of War (PS4)), and he even speculates that there may be a nascent genre of "post-hairy dad games" based around the generational passing of the torch in which games follow said child who benefitted from their "hairy dad" (ex. The Last of Us Part II, Horizon, and modern Tomb Raider games).
• Hanlon's Razor: Yahtzee's review of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is nothing short of a thorough knifing over all of its awful game design decisions, and his most charitable explanation for why the game turned out the way it did was that Rocksteady was using "weaponized incompetence" — willfully making a terrible live-service game to prove to Warner Bros. that such games are a waste of time so they can return to making the world-class, groundbreaking single-player games they were famous for. Unfortunately, Yahtzee still notes the key pitfall that Suicide Squad was actively defiling such work, with its plot being based around overriding the Batman: Arkham Series in a disrespectful and unsatisfactory way, meaning it's instead killed all interest in the franchise.
• Happy Ending Override:
  • He criticizes Alan Wake II for treating Alan Wake's American Nightmare as non-canon^note , partly because he felt American Nightmare had a satisfying ending that tied up all the loose ends that seemingly prevented any obvious sequel-baiting (something that Alan Wake II itself would do).
  • He also came down hard on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League for being a poorly-handled followup to the Batman: Arkham Series, culminating with Batman receiving an ignoble and anticlimactic end following an unsatisfying boss fight. Yahtzee doesn't take so much offense at the idea of the game disrespecting the legacies of Batman or the Justice League in general ("You want me to give Superman an atomic wedgie, just show me the coat hook and the industrial welding gloves!") — rather, he's frustrated by the game disrespecting him as a player for "the many, many hours I spent keeping the bastard alive in the Arkham games," sweeping all that effort under the rug in service for an unlikeable looter-shooter.
• Healthcare Motivation: Snarked about alongside Littlest Cancer Patient in his review of Crime Scene Cleaner, which features its Punch-Clock Villain protagonist motivated to do dirty work for baddies for his ill daughter... who we never actually see and is basically a living excuse to justify a rather clumsily-executed plot, which unfortunately still fails to make said protagonist likeable.

  Yahtzee: [...]I'm assuming [she] has blonde hair and pigtails and sparkly blue innocent eyes and chubby cheeks, and a tattoo across her forehead reading, "Insert cancer for free unquestionable character motivation". As I mentioned when I covered the demo for this game in Yahtzee Tries, the whole "sick daughter" thing is pretty eye-roll inducing — it's the kind of thing that gets put in a screenplay as "insert better motive later", and that you end up having to go with because you can't reach the writer on the first day of shooting 'cos they're passed out in someone's cocaine ball pit.

• Here There Be Dragons: Joked about in the Monster Hunter Wilds review: Yahtzee summarizes how the game takes place in the Forbidden Lands, which are supposedly inhospitable but oddly seem to provide for a large population — his guess as to why is that someone wrote the map along with "here be dragons," and nobody realized it meant that literally.
• Hidden Depths: During his mini-review of Jusant in "The Games of 2023 I Didn't Review", Yahtzee revealed a personal fun-fact previously unmentioned in his long career: before having kids, he was an avid indoor rock climber, which he brings up to highlight his insight towards the unique physicality of the sport that Jusant does an admirable job of replicating.
• Hidden Object Game: Discussed as the subject of "The Hot New Indie Horror Genre", with the specific variant Yahtzee christens the "anomaly hunt" genre. Formulated by P.T. and codified by The Exit 8, "anomaly hunt" games by Yahtzee's definition are horror experiences built around spotting differences in environments ranging from outright scary to subtle, invoking Unnaturally Looping Locations, liminal space horror, and the general paranoia of being forced to focus way too hard on little, uncanny details. Yahtzee confidently calls this "a thing" as not only does it have a clear modern trendsetter (The Exit 8), it's quickly led to expansions to the formula that take advantage of gaming as a medium (Ten Bells and The Cabin Factory), as well as failures that do it poorly (The Stairway 7).
• Hype Backlash:
  • Played for Laughs during "The Best, Worst and Blandest of 2023", where he didn't include Baldur's Gate III in the "Best" section — despite having enjoyed it and finding it a welcome bastion of artfully-designed single-player design amidst a year of increasingly-repugnant live-service games — solely on the grounds that it already won Game of the Year at The Game Awards and doesn't want it to get too smug.
  • Played again in 2024's "Best, Worst, and Blandest" list, this time attributed to Astro Bot (2024), which swept that year's Game Awards and other year-end lists. Yahtzee does end up placing it as the #5 Best title, but mostly to get it out of the way for everyone's sake as to not dwell on "Sony's autofellatio habits."
• Indecisive Parody: In his mini-review of MiSide, Yahtzee categorizes it in the bin of "weeby dating sims with deniability," where fans can tout it as secretly a subversive horror game that just so happens to contain anime-style fanservice as a trojan horse for complex plot and game mechanics, but Yahtzee finds it indulges in too much unironic "weeby" fanservice and fetishistic presentation for it to be a truly honest description. He noted how beating the game unlocks a "Non-Subversive Actual Dating Sim Mode"^note , which he saw as confirming the game's intent to benefit from perverted weebs.
• Infodump: Discussed in his review of The Talos Principle 2 as one of its few prominent flaws, in that while it's a beautiful, well-designed, and genuinely fascinating game, it (as well as its predecessor) goes about its philosophical topics in a very dry, robotic way that can come off as unnecessarily excessive. Yahtzee believes that the reason the game went under most peoples' radar was that "it's not the least bit sexy," comparing it to how Disco Elysium was also very smart and funny and "full of sexy drama," and that there's very much enough room for good science fiction to tackle big questions and "have a few exciting laser gun fights as well."
• Innocent Innuendo: During his V Rising review, Yahtzee is initially grossed out upon discovering that the main goal of the vampire survival game is collecting "V-Blood", which he suspected was something obtainable only through cunnilingus or used sanitary products (in reality, it's just blood belonging to that of powerful enemies that consist of the game's bosses).
• Intended Audience Reaction: Discussed extensively when it pertains to boredom in "Should A Game Never Be Boring?" Yahtzee is of the school of thought that games are able to be more than simply "fun" and can cover every corner of the human experience should it be engaging and interesting... which posed an interesting situation when he played and reviewed The Crush House: despite finding the gameplay of filming a Reality Show featuring and targeting "frivolous pricks" boring and repetitive, he ended up giving it a soft recommendation with the understanding that the boredom was part of the game's satire on the banality of Reality TV, with the game having an interesting metanarrative running beneath the surface that he was encouraged to look out for, leading Yahtzee to conclude that the game benefitted artistically and provided a surprisingly worthwhile experience from being purposefully dull. After trying to parse how this seeming breaking of his own critical logic made any sense, Yahtz further concludes that purposefully boring gameplay may actually be useful as a measure to highlight actually interesting parts, and that ultimately, he's willing to stomach games that have an indefinite amount of boredom to them as long as there's a sincere promise of something fun happening as a reward (though he does digress to be wary about games like live-service looter shooters that merely masquerade being mind-numbing and exploitative as "fun," which he finds to be a substantially worse version to more wholesome and therapeutic time-wasters like PowerWash Simulator.)
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople): During his review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Yahtzee explains his surprise that in the 14 years since the last S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, he somehow didn't notice that the spelling had been changed from "Chernobyl" to "Chornobyl"^note , chiding the viewers to give him a break as "I'm still getting my head around the Istanbul/Constantinople thing."
• Item Crafting: Discussed as the subject of "Live-Service Games Ruined Crafting", with Yahtzee breaking down the appeal of the mechanic but also where it went wrong in mainstream gaming, especially live-service grind-a-thons who staple it their gameplay loops to encourage grinding and microtransactions as negative reinforcement instead of an actual rewarding form of progression. Yahtzee comments that despite its ubiquity in mainstream gaming, he feels that there still remains untapped potential that future game designers can improve upon — as one example, he notes how even after Minecraft popularized crafting, very few have tried to expand upon its table-grid system where you have to place ingredients a certain arrangement loosely corresponding to the completed item, and that if anything, most modern games have taken a step backwards by not even requiring this array as most of them simply require you to have the ingredients in general.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Yahtzee complains of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom being this, finding that its central gimmick of Zelda being able to summon clones of things for herself makes it way too easy to cheese puzzles and combat, with Yahtzee able to create bridges to break platforming puzzles and chuck an infinite supply of mooks to deal with big monsters, along with the game's economy being flimsy and seemingly not taking into account how easy it is to gain free resources and money with nothing to spend them on. Yahtzee found that even without free, infinite-use beds making smoothies completely useless as a healing option, they were already weirdly overpowered (very early-game ingredients can get you smoothies that refill far more hearts than what you start with), and he didn't realize you could ride horses in the game until after he beat it, which he didn't need thanks to easy bed-bridges and fast travel being easier options to navigate the world.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Discussed with a lot of scrutiny in "A Case of Soulslike Fatigue". Yahtzee describes his history with Dark Souls and how he initially found its difficulty curve uninviting, but steadily grew to love it after figuring out how to approach it (i.e., communally through players helping each other out on their their experiences), which led him to enjoying other Soulslike games... until he didn't, admitting that starting from Dark Souls III, he found himself getting bored, admitting that he never even finished Elden Ring despite liking it enough to place it as his 2nd best game of 2022. Yahtzee observes the quiet pattern throughout new Soulslikes steadily getting harder over time, trying to up the ante of each subsequent title with bosses featuring unexpected second phases and crazy, hard-to-interpret attacks while diluting creative strategies or tests of players' skills, something he became more privy to upon playing the Demon's Souls remake and feeling how easy and straightforward, yet enjoyable it was. Yahtzee admits to disliking pinning the blame of him getting sick of Soulslikes for them being too hard since difficulty is the point and part of the appeal, and suggests it may more be the result of overexposure, where too many games trying to follow the formula just end up being a slog to get through. That being said, he still found enjoyment from later Soulslikes like Nine Sols and Another Crab’s Treasure, partly for being nowhere near as unfair, but also for their creative spins on the formula in terms of tone and the types of challenge they provide, which to him represents difficulty as being a mere part of a complete package next to storytelling and innovation.

  Yahtzee: You've established to my satisfaction that you can make a game hard. Maybe we could focus on the other stuff for a while. Or to summarize, you can't bring me off just me spanking me anymore. You have to at least do it while wearing those special underpants I like.

• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • His complaints about Persona 5: Tacticia is that it's essentially just more of the same stuff he expected of a Persona game, and that reusing the same characters and general plot made it feel worse when Tacticia lacked stuff he liked in original Persona 5, such as the Dual-World Gameplay.
  • "Sucks" may be a strong word, but in "Best, Worst, and Blandest of 2023", he can only list The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 as honorable mentions, commenting that they're good games, but "Not having to design a new world map is cheating."
  • He describes Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth less favorably to its immediate predecessor (which made his top 5 favorite games of 2020 on Zero Punctuation), finding that after the Denser and Wackier approach of Like a Dragon 7 proved a satisfying breath of fresh air, Infinite Wealth didn't have as much novelty going for it, allowing the flaws from the previous game to settle in. Yahtzee ultimately summarizes it as "Like all Yakuza games, it will blow your mind if it's the first one you've ever played, but it's a bit too same-y for veterans.
  • His review of Silent Hill 2 (Remake) sees him coming down somewhat harder on the game even compared to other Video Game Remakes, where even though he admits it's an overall serviceable horror game, it doesn't do much with the original Silent Hill 2 to justify its existence, and that he's not sure how many points Bloober Team deserve "for copying someone else's homework." Yahtzee freely admits that a lot of his cynicism comes down to greatly-biased affection towards the original, finding that he does like some of the changes in a vacuum (i.e., the town being much more actively hostile in the remake — while he prefers the original portrayal of it being darkly uncaring and apathetic in the original, he found that this did make for a more enjoyable combat experience), but being very annoyed by others (i.e., changes in puzzle design by doing unnecessary "fixes" that are lateral improvements at best, as well as there being far more of them).
• Joke and Receive: Yahtzee did this to himself at one point: in "The Games of 2023 I Didn't Review", he mocks The Game Awards for basing its award categories on genre, which he feels is a flawed practice for a variety of reasons, remarking that they should instead categorize awards based on what feelings they bring out in you, such as "Best Game That Made Us Excited", "Best Game That Made Us Scared", and "Best Game That Made Us Haunted By Our Own Capacity for Violence in a Zero-Consequence Environment". During his later Semi-Ramblomatic on "How to Predict The Game Awards", Yahtzee admitted that he was just joking at the time, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense, and that if he did have the ability to fix The Game Awards, he would implement this change. He ended up doing this for real alongside his usual Top 5s in 2025 to see how it would feel.
• Karma Meter: Discussed in the Semi-Ramblomatic "The Moral Dilemmas that weren't", where he notes that most implementations of a Karma Meter fail, either because the evil option is downright nonsensical, just for the sake of being evil, very obviously go against the moral the game preaches (as in Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, where the entire game insists on the importance of exorcising ghosts, even if they are your loved ones, but still gives the player the choice of bringing Antea back to life in a ritual that screams "this is the wrong choice"), or the so-touted "downsides" for making the harder choice really aren't that impactful (such as making combat in Vampyr (2018) harder, but in a way that keeps it fun and engaging rather than making it tedious or annoying, further encouraging players to stick to the good path).
• Kudzu Plot: Discussed as a strike against Slitterhead, which he felt started off with a simple, effective premise — Slitterheads are brain-eating monsters, you must kill them — but quickly got way too complicated for its own good, introducing elements like time loops, heroic Slitterheads (that turn out to be Evil All Along), parallel universes where you must fight yourself, and then again from the other side, before the game goes "Bored now! Plane crash, everyone dies."

  Yahtzee: What the fuck are you on about, Slitterhead?!

• Lame Pun Reaction: In the Graven episode, Yahtzee says that the game's title is what a car crash victim would say to describe the vehicle that hit him.^note  His avatar is then shown wincing at his laptop's screen, as he apologizes for how bad the pun is.
• Lampshaded the Obscure Reference:
  • Yahtz represents the protagonist of a reviewed game as having the head of some other fictional character. For the Graven review, Treguard from Knightmare fills the role alongside the phrase "Christ no one's gonna get *this* reference".
  • In the Skull & Bones review, Yahtzee makes note of characters commenting on "the look on [your player character's] eyes", then comments "Who are we, The Demon Headmaster?! Yes, I do get off on making references most people won't get."
  • Yahtz compares Phantom Fury to other late-retro shooters such as Soldier of Fortune and SiN, then follows up with "And just in case that reference slips you by" as an admission that Sin is an obscure topic.
  • In the Blue Prince review, Yahtz summarizes the game and its central premise — exploring a manor that constantly changes its layout every day — as "Sarah Winchester meets Wallace & Gromit". In the credits, one of the extra text gags is "If you don't know who Sarah Winchester is be assured the comparison was very apt and you would have enjoyed the joke enormously."
• Last-Second Word Swap: In the Another Crab's Treasure review, Yahtzee almost remarks that "the shell mechanic is a hollow shell of itself", only to swap in "epidermis" at the last second.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Yahtz compares Another Crab's Treasure to SpongebobSquarepants near the end of the review, complete with a cameo from SpongeBob; even though SpongeBob is pixellated and partially-blocked-out with the text "obscured after legal advice", you can still recognize his yellow square shape and brown pants.
• Limited Animation:
  • Discussed during the South Park: Snow Day! review, mentioning how the game attempts to recreate the style of South Park, which heavily features this (albeit less so than The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole, where Snow Day! inexplicably opted to shift to 3D). Yahtzee notes that such stylism ends up becoming a liability in a real-time combat system as it simply becomes harder to read, using his own animation style to illustrate the problem.

    Yahtzee: My visual style works well enough to deliver gags, and is easy to knock out during my brief windows of consciousness, but I wouldn't use it for a combat engine, 'cos there's no visual difference between a character winding up a punch and saluting a Nazi.

  • One of his criticisms of Old Skies is the fact that every character appears to be based on the same template with only a few minor changes, possessing the same default pose (shoulders backed, hips cocked, feet apart) and the same rigged animations for things like walking. Yahtzee contrasts it to Chrono Trigger, a game that was constrained by its 16-bit graphical limits but managed to convey a ton of personality and life in its characters from the unique ways everyone moves, whereas everyone in Old Skies move smoothly, but appear sterile and flat.
• Loophole Abuse: Discussed in Semi-Ramblomatic on "How to Predict The Game Awards", in regards to the 2023 Game Adwards' Best Indie Debut award. Yahtzee notes that the award went to Cocoon (2023), a game by the studio Geometric Interactive. Though the title indeed was a debut project, Yahtzee points out that the game's director, Jeppe Carlsen, is a firmly established veteran and darling of the indie developer scene, who had already won several awards and accolades for his work as a lead designer on Limbo and Inside.
• Love to Hate: Discussed in "Screw Nuance, Give Me A Memorable Villain", with Yahtzee's opening thesis being "Is it possible for storytelling to get too nuanced?" Specifically with regards to characterization, Yahtzee remarks how straightforwardly evil, love-to-hate villains are a shockingly endangered species in modern gaming, and how nowadays, villains have to be some degree of sympathetic and "complex", if they even exist at all as a character. While he isn't against writing nuance and moral complexity as a principle, Yahtzee finds that "realistic characterization" doesn't inherently make a villain memorable and interesting, and misses villains along the likes of GLaDOS, Pious Augustus, Senator Armstrong, or even Bowser that are memorable because of how uncomplicated and fun they are. Furthermore, he speculates that the "need" to be realistic and morally grey at all times may be reflective of more cynical trains of thought about the current state of the world — in lieu of an actual mustache-twirling Big Bad responsible for all the systemic failings in modern life, abandoning straightforward villainy reads like accepting that nothing will change, so might as well share the blame and stop pointing fingers... despite there being plenty of very real entities out there actively causing real-world problems, such as corporate suits shutting down perfectly healthy studios for the sake of a bottom line.

  Yahtzee: Sorry, I didn't mean to end up sounding like a paranoid weirdo one bad weekend away from beating my CEO to death in a car park, let me get back on topic: I want more games to have characters I actually hate so I can enjoy beating them to death! Oh, wait, shit...

• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: The opening to the Dragon's Dogma 2 episode: "sometimes I lick the underbellies of sugar gliders for an illicit sexual thrill." Yahtzee then immediately admits that he was only saying that for shock value.
• Malicious Misnaming:
  • As part of his vendetta against sequels that don't involve a number in their title, Yahtzee refers to Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth with random subtitles like Final Fantasy VII Porridge or Final Fantasy VII Part Knickerbocker.
  • His introduction to Selaco involves describing the game's name as a brand of dollar-store motor oil. He then checks off "mock the game's title" from his to-do list.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: A trope brought up frequently in his review of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, noting that part of the reason he isn't exactly impressed by its story (or of the original Final Fantasy VII) is that all three female party members seem to be this single archetype, and are either interchangeable or cringe-inducing in their attempts to be endearing.

  Yahtzee: Blimey, how much can one man be Manic Pixie Dream Girl'd without going into diabetic shock?

• Manly Facial Hair: Invoked in Yahtzee's neologism of the "hairy dad game," games surrounding father figure protagonists raising and protecting child figures, which Yahtzee names after the fact that said father figures always have beards, seemingly to make them seem older and more mature.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover:
  • Discussed and toyed with in "Could Every Video Game Happen in the Same World?", where Yahtzee lays out a hypothetical for-fun experiment of how to make one of these for every video game ever made à la The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The paradigm he chooses to explore are settings and how one could merge famous video game locations in two shared maps (one for contemporary settings and other for more fantasy settings that could be placed in a historical era), pinning individual cities and locales on a real-world map (the Black Mesa facility in New Mexico, Silent Hill in Maine, etc.) and amalgamating similar locations into one (replacing New York City with Liberty City and retroactively placing games like The Division, [PROTOTYPE], and Crysis 2 in it, or replacing ancient Scandanavia with Skyrim, and thus Kratos spent two games killing gods of the Elder Scrolls pantheon, as well as placing all games that took place in "Hell" like Doom and Dante's Inferno in Oblivion.)
  • Discussed again in the Astro Bot (2024) review, where Yahtzee makes note of this being Sony's second attempt to replicate the crossover appeal of Nintendo's Super Smash Bros.. While considering their first attempt, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, a failure due to being an inferior Smash Bros. clone with irreconcilable demographic and tone problems, Yahtzee finds that Astro Bot worked much better due to just being a solid mascot platformer that just so happens to incorporate tributes to Sony's catalogue (Yahtzee semi-jokingly identifying Sony's trajectory as "So what you're saying is, we need to rip off a different Nintendo game?"). However, Yahtzee makes note of the irony that much of the franchises Astro Bot references aren't even playable on the PlayStation 5, and all but one are exclusive to it, making it more a celebration of Sony's past rather than its present — Yahtzee closing that as fun as Astro Bot is, it does very little to change his perception of the console as "a dust-gathering machine, grudgingly brought out for an exclusive every six months or so."
• Meta Fiction: Discussed throughout the Split Fiction as something Yahtzee finds the game fails at. He notes that any story dealing with the nature of storytelling and espousing the power of creativity tends to be "inherently up itself," but Split Fiction annoyed him for its clumsily-handled allegory against AI art and modern Tech Bro exploitation, as well as how hamfisted its writing is in championing just how creative and cool its characters and their ideas are.
• Mid-Battle Tea Break: In the Graven episode, Yahtzee describes how the game suffers from a weird Inventory Management Puzzle where weapons take multiple slots on the hotbar, but you still can carry extra weapons in your inventory, so if you need to switch it can be incredibly awkward. This is visually represented by the protagonist telling a zombie and a Scrag that it's "time out lads" mid-fight, after his crossbow runs dry. The zombie and Scrag oblige, sipping at drinks as they wait for the protagonist to finish fumbling around with his weapons.
• Misaimed Fandom: A joke in the Helldivers 2 review references this trope regarding Starship Troopers, where the hyper-nationalistic patriotism in that work was understood poorly by crazy people as genuine when it was intended as satire.
• Misaimed "Realism":
  • Discussed in his review of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, with its attempted adherence being one of its greatest flaws. Yahtzee notes how immersive open world games with robust systems catered to realism, while usually appreciable in a broad context, fall apart in the finer details since all it takes is for one system to break down for everything else going for it to stop making sense, usually shoddy AI. He further describes how even when things are working correctly, "realism" only goes so far in justifying the unfairly designed, borderline random nature of the challenges he has to face that seemingly require Save Scumming just to be approachable.

    Yahtzee: At one point, I fail a speech check, and the dude decides he's gonna punch my lights out. [...] I managed to punch this dude enough that he runs away, but then he comes back with a fucking hammer, so I have to draw my sword and kill him, and we're in the middle of a village, so guards run over, I can't pay the fine and failed the speech check to blab my way out, so I've got three choices: murder the entire village, watch a prolonged cutscene of myself being hanged before reloading my save, or reload my save now. I opted for the last one, spoke to the dude again, passed the speech check this time, and parted as friends. Jesus Christ! The road to Cockup Cascade is paved with realistic gameplay systems.

  • The points made regarding Kingdom Come II returned during his later review of Avowed, a different western RPG whose systems are far less complex and much more predictable, which to Yahtzee was all the better for it. He describes the game as not very ambitious, and it certainly doesn't reach the lofty highs of modern open-world RPGs like Baldur's Gate III or Skyrim, but it knows exactly what it wants to do (have fun and responsive combat) and hits the mark without needing to be distracted by overly complex systems made to make a world feel "realistic".

    Yahtzee: I don't fucking care if a questgiver moves from their designated standing spot to go brush their teeth twice a day, realistic or immersive though that might be; I care that I can fucking find them when I'm ready to hand in the seventeen pairs of soiled kobold sanitary pads they asked for.

• Money for Nothing: Discussed as Yahtzee's biggest criticism of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: all the hidden chests and sidequests rewarded him with rupees that he struggled to find any use for other than accessory slots, finding that he ended up getting as much of them as items he found. In general, the game seemingly never accounted for the possibility of him using the central duplication mechanic to snap the economy in half, where things like beds that you can sleep in for free to heal yourself make things like rare smoothie ingredients obsolete.
• Ms. Fanservice: Discussed in Stellar Blade, as the protagonist's scantily-clad design was the big source of hullaballoo surrounding the game before its release, with Yahtzee finding that such shouting-contests over whether such a design should be acceptable enough tiring in general, and a feature of the game he ultimately doesn't mind. However, he argues out that in addition to the gameplay and plot being very bland and generic, so is Eve's personality. Yahtzee makes a direct comparison to Bayonetta, who is a proudly expressive and flamboyant Ms. Fanservice, whereas Eve just behaves like "a fucking RealDoll programmed with the personality of another, more down-market RealDoll," and isn't nearly as fun or interesting as a result.
• Mundane Fantastic: Discussed in his Dungeons of Hinterberg review, where Yahtzee highlights the game's usage of this being its greatest strength. While a quirky setup — a quaint European town gets invaded by portals to dungeons with fantasy monsters, and rather than freaking out about it, the locals decided to gamify them and turn them into a tourist attraction — he praises how well-realized the setting is, making for a solid mix of action and "cozy" gameplay while also being a clever dual satire of video game tropes and the tourist trap industry, with a subtle environmentalist message for good measure.

  Yahtzee: [...]while treating a monster-stricken peasant village as a relaxing getaway for city folk is the main gag, the really funny part is that it kind of is. Relaxing, I mean. You wake up in the morning, have breakfast on the veranda, choose a nice, scenic environment to explore, and then work out all those little workaday frustrations by punching a load of goblins in the face so hard that they'll have to brush their teeth tomorrow by bum-shuffling across a shagpile carpet.

• Mythology Gag:
  • Fully Ramblomatic is the title of Yahtzee's blog and was the title of the pre-Escapist reviews that later became Zero Punctuation.
  • At the end of the Alone in the Dark (2024) review, Yahtzee proclaims he can't relate to the protagonist, "and not just because I've never worn a trilby [...]". Toffee then brings over the white hat Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation avatar was wearing, to which Yahtzee replies that it's a fedora.
  • Closing out his review of Crime Scene Cleaner, Yahtzee proposes a hypothetical combination of a Hitman-style assassination game combined with a therapeutic cleaning simulator — one where you have to kill your targets before disposing of all the evidence under the guise of an unassuming janitor. In the credits, he slips in a caption reading "If only someone would prototype out that killer cleaner idea say as part of some experimental game design series," referencing The Cleaner, a game Yahtzee produced during his Yahtzee's Dev Diary series.
• No Problem with Licensed Games:
  • Discussed in his review of RoboCop: Rogue City: Yahtzee notes that its developer, Teyon, have started to find their niche of adapting classic 80's action properties for modern generations, something that Yahtzee is surprisingly okay with as the games themselves are perfectly competent and fun and have an obvious nostalgic appeal to them. He does highlight, however, that they do receive a somewhat disproportionate amount of praise simply for not being what people normally expect of "licensed games" and reiterates that RoboCop does still have problems — it's faithful in a way that allows nostalgia do the heavy lifting, while the gameplay itself is "exactly as good as it needs to be and no better".
  • Also discussed for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a game that Yahtzee admits set off a few red flags before he got to it (released in mid-December and based on an IP whose "good" content is outweighed by its "bad"), but to his pleasant surprise turned out to be "resoundingly okay". Yahtzee critiques the game for more or less directly copy-pasting story elements from previous films, but he gives it a pass as it's a formula that works, and he praises the game for recreating the spirit of the films in a way that fits the stealth-action gameplay.
• Non-Indicative Name: Joked about in his RoboCop: Rogue City review, highlighting that gaming culture has a pretty bad track record with naming certain genres of video games, specifically highlighting how "Adventure Game" has been used to describe "games where you rub random inventory items on everything like a blind raccoon in a recycling facility."
• Nonconformist Dyed Hair: Discussed during "The Language of Color in Games", where Yahtzee makes note of how magenta is the go-to primary color for highly corporate-driven and sanitized mainstream fare when it's trying to appear free-spirited, punky, and bohemian, almost always featuring at least one character with magenta hair as a cheap ploy to appear "rebellious". Yahtzee also makes note of how a weird number of indie games also feature player characters with cyan hair, which might be a response to the overuse of magenta.
• Nostalgia Filter: He discusses this in his Phantom Fury review: he cites Half Life as "a game that embodies the purity and greatness of late 90s early 2000s shooters", and Phantom Fury as "a harsh wake up call" and that it will "effectively remind you that every era also has piles of mediocre dross". As he puts it, there's a lot of nostalgia for this era of shooter games, but in a way the era is Written by the Winners and the less-stellar stuff fell to the wayside in everyone's cultural memory.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • In the RoboCop: Rogue City review, Yahtzee describes a "suffocatingly pointless side-quest where RoboCop goes around, getting everyone to sign a 'Get Well Soon' card, and that's not the facetious exaggerated example it sounds like."
  • In his Jusant mini-review, he finds that the game tapers off when it stops being about slowly exploring through the remnants of a lost civilization and just goes "Oh fuck it, I'm bored, space whales out of nowhere!" Yahtzee pauses to reiterate that the game indeed features literal space whales.
  • His review of Wuthering Waves documents how the gameplay feels like tedious busywork, he describes how the opening sequence involves arriving at "Main Cityville", being instructed to go to city hall and meet the governer, being told that she's in an appointment and instead being tasked of doing a Fetch Quest for a chief scientist, who then responds with "We will now analyze these three objects for you. Feel free to stand around admiring the room for a few minutes." Smash to a very-annoyed Yahtzee shouting "This literally happens!"
  • In his review of Mario & Luigi: Brothership, he brings up how a lot of Nintendo games seem to get their theming from something the developer saw while glancing around the room. Case in point:

    Yahtzee: Well, apparently, for Brothership, their gaze finally went off the crafting desk and fell upon the nearby wall, because the Mario Brothers find themselves tasked to save a race of sentient electrical outlet people. I know it sounds like I'm taking the piss, but that's what they are! Ever since Origami King unironically had a hole punch as a boss fight, the line between "reality" and "piss-take" has only gotten blurrier, probably because of all the piss on it.

  • While introducing Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Yahtzee mentions how Majima starts the game searching for the requisite "random helpless innocent" to form his central motivation, and upon finding a random boy and declaring his intent to help their dreams of friendship and "being a kickass pirate captain," they have a big musical number together.

    Yahtzee: No, they actually do, and you know what? If you're not having fun at that point, then there's no reaching your miserable flinty heart.

• Notice This:
  • Discussed throughout the review of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, with Yahtzee criticizing the game for botching this. On one hand, Yahtzee is already annoyed by the game's unfocused "Jiminy Cockthroat" approach to Wide-Open Sandbox design in plastering notifiers over everything, undermining the exploration aspect since the game just tells you were to go. On the other hand, he found that with the game's option to turn those notifiers off (replacing the objective markers with vague location clues that require more problem-solving), the game became unfairly difficult as the objectives become easily obscured by the cluttered environment. Yahtzee finds this especially damning since the whole appeal of the game lies in exploring beautiful and lush alien landscapes, but because this aspect was so mishandled, it's either ignorable or actively impedes the player.
  • "Oh, That Darn Yellow Paint" discusses a gaming trend (which he previously made brief note of in his Final Fantasy VII Rebirth review) of climbable ledges marked with glaringly obvious patterns, with the most common token of criticism being "walls marked with yellow paint". Yahtzee narrows down his primary criticism with this trend by describing it as "Corridor Climbing", where the problem is less about how ham-fisted and obvious it is, but rather the fact that such climbing is completely linear, provides no challenge or exploration, and is ultimately just a bit of boring padding.
  • One of the elements he gives full praise in Atomfall is the fact it doesn't do this, being pleasantly surprised when he's given a broad overarching goal ("go collect all the plot coupons around the world in whatever order") and wasn't given any objective markers. He ended up having to think critically based on engaging with the story and its setting to deduce where they could be, and more often than not, he was rewarded for it, comparing it to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in terms of encouraging exploration through showing, not telling.

    Yahtzee: [Having] been conditioned for years by games that stick two fingers up your nose and lead you around like a mischievous horse, it's kind of sad that a game can be refreshing and interesting just by asking you to pay attention and think about stuff.

• Obscure Popularity: Discussed in the review of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, with Yahtzee questioning how Avatar is apparently a massively successful global juggernaut despite nobody ever expressing much interest in it. He jokingly speculates that there's either "an unknown subsection of humanity living among us, presumably dwelling underground and subsisting on rats and stray dogs, who emerge from the sewer drains at night to watch Avatar movies and send votes into America's Next Top Model", or that James Cameron is buying up empty theatre seats "when he's not buggering off to the bottom of the ocean to scrape bits of dead billionaire off the Titanic."
• Observation on Originality: Discussed in "Why Truly Original Games Are So Rare", where Yahtzee admits that even as a critic who can be snobby about games not being able to come up with new gameplay ideas, actually doing that is really freaking hard, and ironically by trying to pursue an original idea, the closer you end up replicating something that already exists. Yahtzee posits that the most original ideas only really come from a spontaneous spark of taking a game mechanic and reframing it through a unique perspective rather than strictly iterating or building upon it, citing Balatro (a Roguelike Deckbuilding Game based on poker) as one of these high concepts that's so effective and obvious in retrospect that it leaves everyone wondering how no one came up with it earlier. Yahtzee further makes a point that this sort of innovation almost never happens in big-budget triple-A development because the risks are so high that very few suits are willing to bank on pursuing such novel ideas without overthinking it, and it instead comes from indie game development, full of "mad people having mad ideas" who can go about uninhibited.
• Obvious Beta: Discussed regarding S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, with Yahtzee characterizing the Elephant in the Room being that it's extraordinarily "janky", especially by the standards of the modern day, 14 years after its similarly janky previous entries. However, Yahtzee specifies that while it was riddled with bugs and bizarrely inconsistent quality, he would never describe it as "broken," and most of the glitches were of the funny kind that made for endearing stories to share — at most breaking immersion, but never making the game unplayable.
• Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo:
  • Yahtzee really hates this trope, alongside adjacent tropes like reusing the exact same title between sequels and pointless colons and subtitles on games purporting to be the first installment of a yet-to-be-developed series. He was very quick to praise The Talos Principle 2 right off the bat for having a simple numeric sequel title, which he found refreshingly "old-school".
  • His review of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 begins with him relaying how he was confused by the title at first as he doesn't even remember there being a Black Ops 5, only that there was a Black Ops 4 "that expected us to play full price for a game with no story campaign, and then I remember a sort of red mist coming down, and then I woke up in a portaloo wearing a human intestine as a sock."
• Oh, Crap!: During his review of Dragon's Dogma II, Yahtzee establishes early on that the game one has one save slot, and tells his audience that this will be relevant later. A bit into the review, he then describes the moment he finally gave up on the game: after a particularly harsh difficulty spike against a boss and realizing that every time he loaded a save to retry it, a chunk of his maximum health was being sliced off, he decided to accept the "last inn" save and tank the walk back. However, to his unpleasant surprise, he didn't actually spawn at his last inn, but somewhere four or five hours ago, and since the game only supported one save slot...
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Per the title of the the show (and the previous one) Yahtzee is a fast-talking guy, so anytime where he actually pauses and considers his words is usually noteworthy:
  • His review of Star Wars: Outlaws is brought to a screeching halt when a hypothetical viewer asks "how does the game plays?", Yahtzee taking several seconds to compose himself before seething that no one should ask that question anymore, since it plays like every single Ubisoft game of the past decade and a half.
  • The end of the Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector review is very introspective, as Yatzee gradually slows down speaking, stressing how much the themes of the game resonated deeply with him and made him actually reflect back on his own life and what his children's would be like. On an visual level, this also features the first time his on-screen avatar is actually animated, being shown blinking.
• Oscar Bait: Discussed in the Semi-Ramblomatic on "How to Predict The Game Awards", with Yahtzee identifying the hallmarks for what easily wins at TGA (effectively becoming what the Oscars are for video games in terms of prestige and publicity), having used them to correctly predict about 90% of all the awards for its 2023 show:
  • In terms of "Game of the Year" in specific, actual quality of the games themselves is irrelevant — it's more about pushing a narrative for the gaming industry as a whole, with Baldur's Gate III being an obvious shoo-in not just because it's a good game, but because most of the competition in the category were either remakes or sequels, which can be seen as regressive rather than forward-pushing. This left Alan Wake II the only viable competitor, but Yahtzee didn't see it winning either because, by his observations, the triple-A games industry gets cold feet at the idea of video games actually being an artistically provocative medium rather than a place for reliable committee design, with a game as experimental, postmodern, and auteurist as Alan Wake II only being enough to claim a Consolation Award in the form of "Best Game Direction".
  • Regarding "Best Indie Game", what the TGA eyes more than quality is aspiration, specifically when it comes to its reverence for "the establishment". This is primarily due to the preference to see indie games as plucky underdogs or "sidekicks" to triple-A gaming rather than a respectable source of creative ingenuity and innovation in the medium, which usually means the award will usually be given to something blatantly derivative on virtue of it trying to "be like the big kids." On that same token, TGA resists any form of subversive and rebellious elements, resulting in the highly quirky, but critical indie darling Pizza Tower getting snubbed from "Best Debut Indie Game" in favor of the traditionally "artsy" indie fare of Cocoon (2023) (despite the latter being directed by an established indie veteran).
  • He sees audio and music awards as a Consolation Awards for games that are popular enough to mention and pay respect to, but not good enough to qualify for other, bigger awards, citing the likes of Final Fantasy XVI as an easy winner for "Best Score and Music" by sole virtue of being a legacy entry from a big franchise in spite of otherwise being too lackluster for anything else (Yahtzee did note that Hi-Fi RUSH was an exception due to being so centrally and effectively built around its audio design that it backed TGA into a corner, realistically leaving it the only possible victor of "Best Audio Design").
  • While Yahtzee doesn't have guaranteed guidelines for niche genre awards (primarily due to finding such separations of genres for awarding arbitrary at the best of times), he does find that first party Nintendo titles are most likely to win by virtue of the company being so well-regarded and integral to the "establishment" of gaming that TGA seeks to pander to.
• Our Product Sucks: Lightly discussed during the review of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, where Yahtzee makes a point that the game defines itself with the narrative motif of "we suck": the titular squad of baddies suck, the person they work for sucks, the city of Metropolis sucks after it was turned into a warzone by the Justice League, who now suck because they're being brainwashed by Brainiac, "the suckiest dude of them all", etc. Yahtzee understands the gag the game is trying to pull off, and he doesn't bag on it for "not giving a shit" about itself in an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek way — rather, he's annoyed that the game actually doesn't give a shit, with gameplay so perfunctory and repetitive that there's no sense of escalation or satisfaction, making its self-debasement ultimately feel disrespectful and tone-deaf.

  Game: When you feel confident, you go to the next story mission to fight the next Justice League member, not that you should feel confident, 'cos you suck so much, you bunch of huge sucky suck suckaroo—
  Yahtzee: Yes, yes, sorry to interrupt, but I genuinely can't tell: are you continuing the broadly insincere "we suck" motif of the story, or are you telling me I'm still too underleveled for the next story mission?

• Padding: A recurring element that Yahtzee often brings up and criticizes, finding that it's something that nearly all triple-A games suffer from, feeling bloated with content just for the sake of feeling bloated.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: From the Dragon's Dogma 2 review, Yahtzee portrays the impostor of the Arisen king as a giant potato with his hat and a smiley face scribbled onto it. It was apparently enough to fool at least one royal court assistant.
• Pet-Peeve Trope: Shares a page with Zero Punctuation.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Yahtzee expresses surprise during his Monster Hunter Wilds review that the game has a robust, if "standard" RPG plot (compared to the rest of the series where narrative is mostly tertiary), but once the credits roll, the game hits you with truckloads of more content, as if to say "Right! Now we've got that out of the way, here's the actual Monster Hunter game; open fucking wide." Yahtz finds the approach of having the "main campaign" and "optional faff-about shit" occuring one after the other instead of alongside each other to be an interesting choice, describing it as "having a lovely ice lolly and then having a lovely stick to chew on." He speculates that the point of the hand-holding campaign is that it's effectively a warm-up to ease players into the more intense traditional monster hunting grind the franchise is known for, which he feels does an imperfect, but serviceable job of doing.
• Please Subscribe to Our Channel:
  • The end of the Alan Wake II review debuting the series sees Yahtzee — in an uncharacteristically sincere outro — asking viewers to subscribe to the Second Wind Patreon page.
  • Requested again at the end of "The Best, Worst and Blandest of 2023", the first video of 2024 and the official marking of Second Wind's first year.

    Yahtzee: Yeah, I know donation drives are a bore, but all the good wishes in the world won't get us past the budget section of your mum's blowjob catalogue.

• Plot Armor: Discussed with Assassin's Creed: Shadows, where in breaking down how contrived and flimsy the plot is, Yahtzee highlights how Yasuke and Naoe starting off as enemies before becoming co-protagonists only makes sense with the logic that everyone knows that they're supposed to be protagonists. With Yasuke beginning trying to foil her plans to kill his master, only for that to dust aside when Naoe reveals she has a Hidden Blade (aka the franchise's "here is the protagonist" flag) and Yasuke's decoy villain master suddenly killing himself, Yasuke's motivation for partnering with Naoe is borderline nonexistent.
• Plot Twist: Discussed in the Semi-Ramblomatic of "The Rules of a Good Plot Twist", with the three cardinal rules Yahtzee lays out being: it can't be seen coming (otherwise there's no suspense or surprise), it can't come out of nowhere (because it feels cheap and denies a sense of satisfactory resolution), and it can't be based on the work outright lying to the audience (otherwise it makes the story less interesting on repeat observations rather than enhances it). Yahtzee describes a the concept of "the really good plot twist" existing on the same trifecta as "the really good joke" and "the really good Jump Scare", all being powerful shocks of emotion for the audience if handled well, but can really die if handled poorly.
• Poe's Law: Discussed in his Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II review, where he admits to liking it (and what little of its setting he knows about) partly because of how over-the-top everything is and seems like a parody... but there are also parts that are played so straight that he isn't sure if it's actually a satirical setting or not (and he thinks not even the people making the video game know either).
• Post-Somethingism:
  • One Semi-Ramblomatic episode discusses how he uses the term "Post-Punk" in relation to games. To Yahtz, something that is "punk" would be something produced to defy major artforms or trends, while something that is "post-punk" is an evolved form of punk that explores the subversion of the trend rather than merely existing to be an opposite. He considers punk music to be a rejection of classical music theory, while post-punk music continues to be that while being more than "making a bunch of noise in your dad's garage". For a video-game example, he cites the joke Game Mod Crack-Life as a punk artform,^note  while something like Undertale is post-punk.^note 
  • He also applies this concept to what he calls "dad games" (games where you play as a father or engage in jobs/hobbies associated with older men) and "post-dad games" (where the same concepts are put in weirder and more fantastic contexts).
• The Power of Friendship: Discussed in "A Case of Soulslike Fatigue", where Yahtzee analyzes in hindsight that part of the reason why he fell in love with Dark Souls, and why Souls-likes are so popular and successful, is because of their communal aspect. Despite being largely intended for single players and featuring fiendish difficulty, players are encouraged to give each other tips on how to beat difficult challenges, community-made guides and wikis help explain useful game mechanics, and content creators make extensive YouTube videos explaining and deciphering all the complicated lore. Yahtzee is upfront with how he normally doesn't care about multiplayer modes, but the asynchronous multiplayer structure found within the games-turned-genre appeals to him as it enables him to interact with others providing helpful advice without burdening him with another actual player as co-pilot, and if it gets too hand-hold-y, he can simply opt out and enjoy the challenge for himself.

  Yahtzee: The intended message from the very first time a giant fist made of beef jerky pounds you into a grease stain is that yes, you are a tiny pathetic helpless ant in the face of the universe, but even an ant can steal a picnic with the help of all its ant friends.

• Precision F-Strike: Discussed regarding American Arcadia, a game which he was unsure if he enjoyed it or not up until the end, which he found to be "the most satisfying ending of any game I've played in a while", which he attributes to the fact it has an extremely well-executed example.

  Yahtzee: Obviously, I won't spoil, but you know how films with PG ratings, you're only allowed to say "fuck" precisely once? If that's also the case with video games, and if there were some kind of annual prize for "Best Strategic Use of Your One Permitted 'Fuck'", then American Auntie Nora would be my hot pick.

• The Problem with Licensed Games: The nature of this is discussed in the intro to his review of Star Wars Outlaws, establishing context for how the game makes the case of reaching "the bland, overproduced wank singularity."

  Yahtzee: In the days when I was young and the internet was a new and bewildering concept we were still fearfully hitting with mammoth bones to provoke a reaction, it was common practice for popular movies to commission licensed video games as a form of cross-promotion. This practice has all but ceased today, at least in the AAA sector, for two main reasons: developing games now takes too long, and they can't be counted on to be ready to coincide with the movie launch, and secondly, all but a very small number of such games were a load of old double-dipped dingo diapers. If you want to adapt movies to games these days, you either take the Warriors route and aim for the nostalgia crowd who don't care that both they and the property in question are about forty years out of relevance, or you exclusively adapt IPs that we are apparently never ever going to see the fucking end of.

• Prolonged Prologue:
  • Discussed regarding Final Fantasy VII Rebirth as something that frustrated Yahtzee alongside its predecessor, where both are meant to be remakes of Final Fantasy VII, yet they take their sweet time actually getting the plot going. Yahtzee admits that this is more applicable to Remake (which to him only progress through "a hearty .5% of the original game's plot"), but Rebirth suffers a different problem where it's covering the second third of the game, where not much actually happens and largely consists of meandering about.

    Yahtzee: There's a scene early on where "Manic Pixie Dream Girl B" [...] gleefully does a little skip and goes, "That's the first step on our new journey!", and I very clearly remember yelling at the screen, "Journey to where?! To do what?!"

  • Yahtzee goes hard on Assassin's Creed: Shadows for having four consecutive and distinct combat tutorials over the course of several hours: one while playing as Yasuke, one as Naoe, another one as Naoe during a Flashback, and then another one as Naoe back in the present day after she's forced to relearn all her skills. The criticisms of the game's pacing don't stop there, with Yahtzee being additionally angered by how it undermines the game's later gimmick of having two protagonists to choose between, when one of them was clearly given more focus, and the other (a lumbering combatant vs. a stealthy assassin from the shadows) is thematically out-of-place for a game about assassins and shadows.
• Pun: From the Still Wakes the Deep review:

  "Before [the protagonist is sent to jail], a thing happens. And by that I mean, THE thing happens. John Carpenter's The Thing. The oil drillers hit something weird and alien under the sea[...]"

• The Quiet One: In reference to its Heroic Mime protagonist, the Anthropomorphic Personification of Half-Life is depicted as never saying anything during the Phantom Fury review.
• Raging Stiffie: Yahtz says The Talos Principle gives him a "brain boner". Cue image of Yahtzee's avatar with a boner... coming out from his head, tenting the shape of his hat.
• Random Events Plot: In his review of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Yahtzee finds himself bewildered by how — general formula of "soldier discovers and must stop a PMC-led terrorist conspiracy" aside — every mission feels like it's from an entirely different game: the campaign starts with standard Call of Duty-requisite "committing war crimes in the Middle East", then suddenly jumping to two different stealth-based missions including a weirdly Hitman-inspired blend-in-and-assassinate-a-target affair, followed by a massive open world sandbox with mini-missions, a sci-fi survival horror level where you're being chased by supernatural monsters, an Ocean's Eleven-style casino heist, and a final boss based around the main villain undergoing a Silent Hill-style Battle in the Center of the Mind/nightmare sequence. Yahtzee gets the impression that the game was made by developers (sourced across eight different studios) who would rather be making literally anything other than an actual Call of Duty game, not that it stops the experience from being boring and shallow.
• Recycled Title: Just like in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee really hates these, finding it unnecessarily confusing, even for remakes. While he doesn't dwell on it for his review of Alone in the Dark (2024), he briefly makes it clear how annoyed he is for it being the third entry in the series to use the exact same title.
• The Reveal: Although many viewers were able to figure it out on their own beforehand, The Best, Worst and Blandest of 2023 allows Yahtzee to finally admit that the one game he couldn't previously mention by name due to the embargo date being moved was Hellboy Web of Wyrd.
• Reviews Are the Gospel: Discussed rather intensely in Yahtzee's highly-anticipated review of the Silent Hill 2 (Remake), which opens with Yahtzee directly asking the viewer "Why are you here?" After over a decade and a half of his Caustic Critic persona and his unabashed love for the original Silent Hill 2 having become public knowledge, Yahtzee has no idea why people care so much about what he thinks about the remake, flat-out saying that he's too personally biased towards the original and that "My opinion on this remake will be fucking useless to you," recommending that if viewers want an unbiased review of the game, there are plenty of critics who never played the original to get better opinions from. He does acknowledge that viewers may be here for his "permission" to like the Silent Hill 2 remake, and despite how unnecessary he feels it to be, he humors them anyway to give it to them on the grounds that it's still a perfectly good (if redundant) horror game.
• Rotating Protagonist: He criticizes Assassin's Creed: Shadows for mishandling this despite marketing it as a major gimmick: not only are one of the two central protagonists clearly given more favoritism (Naoe gets a whopping three separate combat tutorials), the other one, Yasuke, is mechanically at odds with the supposed fantasy of the game, with Yahtzee asking why would anyone buy a game bared around assassination and shadows to play a lumbering Mighty Glacier and not an actual Ninja. Yahtzee's only guesses are that the game is trying to cover a wide demographic of people into combat-based experiences alongside stealth-based ones (which doesn't work because both are tedious and radically unfocused), or that narratively, it's allowing players to follow which protagonist they find more compelling (which also doesn't work because "that's like comparing Damp Tissue Paper to Moist Toilet Roll").
• Ruder and Cruder: A somewhat roundabout case: Yahtzee has always been a very blue-humored writer, but in the final years of Zero Punctuation, concerns over demonetization and excessive swearing forced him to tone down his profanity. With Fully Ramblomatic and the shift towards other forms of income as per Second Wind's creator-owned model (primarily operating through audience support and outside sponsorships), demonetization by YouTube has become much less of a concern, with Yahtzee happily announcing at the series' debut that he's able to return to using the swear words he wants. Somewhat humorously, this means the censoring was in effect for only about five videos of Zero Punctuation before Yahtzee came back with a vengeance.
• Rule of Funny: The only reason Yahtz covers "The EA Spouse Incident" at all is because of a part of the story where EA sent apology bouquets of flowers to the romantic partners of their employees instead of giving fair pay for the back-breaking hours they were forced to work at, which Yahtz found comically evil enough to lighten up an otherwise depressing story.
• Rummage Sale Reject:
  • While discussing the character customization in Stellar Blade, Yahtz shows a graphic of the protagonist at a fashion show dressed in star-shaped glasses, a blender hat, stapler shoes, and a loincloth.
  • In his review of Monster Hunter Wilds, Yahtzee can't help but laugh at how the game's treatment of extensive Character Customization using monster parts collides with the fact that unlike previous games in the series, it actually has a bigger emphasis on character-focused narrative, making it much more glaring during cutscenes where your supporting cast dresses in ordinary clothes like hoodies and button-down shirts, and then your Player Character is wearing "a fucking six-eyed octopus head mask and a rippling muscle suit apparently carved out of wood, with a bunch of glowing antlers coming out of the shoulders" that provokes zero reaction.
• Running Gag:
  • He compares the "long chillout periods broken up by sudden apocalyptic violence" in Pacific Drive to the intensity of having sex with every animal in a zoo. From that point onwards, having sex with zoo animals becomes a reoccurring joke within the review.
  • Early in the Dragon's Dogma 2 video, Yahtzee mentions that the game has a "climb all over giant monsters" mechanic, which he communicates with the visual of him smothering himself into the pubic hair of a minotaur. An association with pubic hair and/or spitting out loose hairs of such is used as a shorthand for fighting monsters for the rest of the review.
  • Whenever Yahtzee does an ad read at the end of the review, he repeats the sponsor's URL twice, and then jokes that he said it the second time because the viewer is dumb or easily distracted.
• Sadistic Choice: Discussed as one of the unique, but failed core elements of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden: the protagonists are an established couple by the start of the game, but one of them ends up killed and becoming a ghost, with the main narrative through-line being the decision of whether she must be exorcised and sent to heaven as per their responsibility as Banishers, or if we should try to bring her back to life with a forbidden ritual that entails sacrificial murder. Yahtzee finds that this falls flat due to it being incredibly obvious which is the narratively "correct" option (aside from one path necessitating murdering several innocents, the prologue hammers home that ghosts are unnatural and must be dealt with), and that presumably the stakes were meant to be covered by the audience being investing in the characters — thus wanting to see them survive — but in this case, they're not very interesting nor likeable. In the follow-up Semi-Ramblomatic, "The Moral Dilemmas that Weren't", Yahtzee comments that the decision might have been harder if the still-living protagonist was not just emotionally, but physically dependent on Antea — that instead of Red, a hardened Brave Scot who could almost certainly get by on his own against the murder ghosts and move on from her death, you replace him with a vulnerable six-year-old girl who will almost certainly die without her (posthumous) guardian, making the prospect that she'll eventually have to pull the trigger far less desirable.
• Sanity Meter: The subject of "The Games That Drove Me Insane". Yahtzee thinks that the concept rarely lives to the full potential as loosing sanity is often portrayed as loosing health or defence. He thinks that while Eternal Darkness famous Interface Screw is unsettling the first time, it looses impact any time after, to the point that he deliberately played on low sanity to see the various effects. He thinks that interesting applications of sanity loss in games comes from forcing the player to act counterintuitively or inflicting loss of control upon them, bringing up how his own video game, The Consuming Shadow has hallucinatory enemies appear, causing the player to potentially waste limited ammo, and how the prompt, "kill yourself"' will flash on the GUI's buttons, forcing the player to play a minigame to prevent their character from committing suicide if they accidentally press on it.
• "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: Discussed in the review of Alone in the Dark (2024). Yahtzee expresses mild confusion over how Alone in the Dark keeps popping up with misguided remakes/reboots every few generations despite none of the games being better than "halfway decent", noting that the first game, while a pioneer to 3D Survival Horror, has aged pretty embarrassingly. Yahtzee does give the 2024 title some credit where after several failed attempts to reinvent the franchise — 2001's The New Nightmare being a shameless ripoff of Resident Evil, 2008's remake being "creatively-spirited but unwittingly camp", and 2015's Illumination just being flat-out terrible — it wisely decides to revisit the roots by evoking the 1920's Lovecraftian horror setting of the first, most well-regarded title, before going in its own new directions (even if it is still extremely derivative of Resident Evil 4).
• Self-Deprecation: At the end of the Alan Wake II review, Yahtzee acknowledges that the end-credits rock song is "overly loud", just like it was on Zero Punctuation.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Discussed in "I Was Bored, So I Did a Black Mesa Ironman Run", where Yahtzee discussed why he felt the desire to spice up his habit of playing nostalgic games in his free time before documenting his experience with Black Mesa, which he played on a no-deaths "Ironman" run. He described the experience as giving him the exhilaration of challenge and requiring his focus that he was looking for while it lasted, but he did describe getting the wind knocked out of him when he ultimately failed his run (after getting pretty far into the game, he ended up falling off a cliff due to an errant misstep), as while he ultimately chose to uphold the honor of the "no deaths" concept, he ultimately lost the desire to play the game again from the beginning.
• Separated by a Common Language: In the ad spot for NordVPN in the Nine Sols review, Yahtz tries to look for thongs (open-toed sandals in Australia) he instead gets results for thongs (women's swimwear/underwear in America), and Google promptly shames him for this.
• Sequel Escalation: Discussed in "My Big Dumb Nintendo Switch 2 Predictions", where his predictions relate to Super Mario Bros. doing this in two different ways: the first being that its next major title will be an open-world sandbox game, the second being that there will come a sequel to Super Mario Maker devoted to 3D Mario levels:
  • Yahtzee's speculation that Mario will go open-world is rooted in how what he considers the "tentpole" series consistently expanding in scope and ambition with each new installment^note , with the last entry, Super Mario Odyssey, already making a substantial jump towards sandbox-style level design. Combined with Nintendo's interest with sandbox Zelda titles and already dipping their toes using Mario through Bowser's Fury, Yahtz considers it only a matter of time for them to pull the trigger.
  • In terms of a 3D-based Mario Maker, Yahtzee considers it to be the result of one of Nintendo's few true success stories in the Wii U era, with Super Mario Maker 2 just being them porting it to the much more lucrative Switch. Feeling that Nintendo can't do the same trick twice for the Switch 2, Yahtzee speculates that they'll focus on 3D level creation to really capture attention, especially since the era of early 3D Mario platformers like Super Mario 64 is old enough to benefit from nostalgia that sustained the previous Mario Makers with their focus to 2D titles.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Discussed during "Silent Hill 2 and the Hidden Costs of Remakes". Yahtzee discusses how part of what made the original Silent Hill 2 so uniquely enjoyable is due to creative decisions that were forced due to its limitations — highlighting not only its famous use of fog to cover draw distance limits, but also its casting of a random non-actor for the lost, mentally troubled protagonist — quirks that are effectively lost in the remake due to having better technology and a preexisting basis to copy. Yahtzee finds himself particularly disagreeing with comments made by Masashi Tsuboyama — director of the original Silent Hill 2, who disparaged its wonky camera limited by the PS2's capabilities, praising the remake's over-the-shoulder camera as being more immersive — finding that while the Resident Evil 4-style camera is good for up-close action and combat, he much prefers the somewhat unreliable, detached feeling of the original camera as being a better fit for the Psychological Horror story of Silent Hill 2.
• Sex Sells: Discussed in his review of Wuthering Waves. Yahtzee, exasperated as he is by how much the game panders to them, doesn't hold it against its intended fanbase for liking anime women with big tits; Yahtzee admits to sympathizing as his own teenage years were occupied "expelling white wee-wee over big titty anime girls." However, the key difference is that in his case, that was porn, and he admits to having trouble understanding how "wall-to-wall anime babes" is that much of a draw in a non-pornographic context, especially when the game itself is extremely tedious and derivative.
• Shaped Like Itself: Yahtzee describes the bosses in Stellar Blade fighting like they're "spazz[ing] out like an arachnophobic drummer practicing in a poorly maintained garden shed". Then he invokes this trope by saying he could parry those attacks consistently by mashing the block button, "like an arachnophobic. Me. Noticing a spider. On the block button."
• Shout-Out:
  • Eric André stands in to represent Ichiban in the Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth review, owing to their similar haircuts and skintones.
  • In "An Explanation of "Post-Punk" Games", Yahtzee references Heavy is Dead and Emesis Blue as examples of punk and post-punk artforms, admitting that the latter's Psychological Horror elements ended up enthralling him out of work for a morning.
  • In the review for South Park: Snow Day!, Yahtzee talks about the New Kid from the game series, "Or perhaps I should say "new kids", plural; that's how you can tell it's co-op focused"; while he's speaking, a landline phone appears on top of the TV screen saying, "Sure you don't wanna phone a friend?"
  • A thumbnail for the Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn shows Toffee the Dog saying, "It's BLLLLLLLand!", a parody of Tony the Tiger's "They're Gr-r-r-reat!" line from the Frosted Flakes commercials.
  • The ending tag for Yahtzee's Top 5 list of 2024 proclaims "We shall not see his like again" in a reference to Hamlet.
• Show, Don't Tell:
  • Discussed in "Split Fiction's Writing Is Bad, So Let's Fix It". One of the flaws Yahtzee calls out about Split Fiction's script is that "there's too much of it," and what should be poigant emotional scenes of Character Development are padded by the characters elaborating all their emotions, often breaking the intended tone in the process. When discussing how he would correct this, Yahtzee relays creative advice from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away," which he applies to Split Fiction as to strip down the dialogue and actions to their most concise points based on straightforward goals — with the example scene, that is to establish that Mio is happy (have Mio smile after being asked if she's okay), grateful to Zoe, and now considers her a friend (when asked "Do you need anything?", Mio wordlessly hugs Zoe lingeringly).
  • He also expresses frustration that modern screenwriters are apparently having this trope's inversion enforced on them from the top, with a leaked Netflix memo in particular instructing its writers to assume out of hand that their audience is constantly poking their phone, doing chores, or otherwise distracting themselves with something else after throwing the movie on in the background, and thus needs to be constantly told instead of shown what's happening on the screen.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer:
  • During his review of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Yahtzee discusses that the main meat of Like A Dragon's fun factor lies less in its dramatic stories and more in its quirky sidequests and minigames, and that he would bee-line straight to them at the earliest available opportunity. However, he ended up finding Infinite Wealth throwing him for a loop as the "optional optional sidequests" were largely same-y and boring "help random person in way that involves beating people up" stories, whereas the actually fun sidequests were the "non-optional optional ones", including its weirdly compelling Pokémon and Animal Crossing parodies.
  • Also brought up in his review of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which is stuffed to the brim with mini-games (naturally; it is a partial remake of the Trope Namer, after all). Yahtzee notes that he isn't particularly interested in the mini-games, which made him realize more to his annoyance that the game seemed to be constantly pressuring him to play them rather than letting himself get "sidetracked".

    Yahtzee: [...]inevitably, they'll explain the rules, and inevitably, I'll listen with my mouth hanging open and the Inspector Gadget theme tune running through my head, and then after the tutorial, never play it or think about it again. But then there's a whole chapter devoted to a tournament of this fucking game that I had to opt out of, and when I heard the incredulous voice of the tournament manager asking if I was really quitting, my stubborn pride forced me to back down and learn this stupid card game I didn't find fun just so an NPC wouldn't make a disappointed face.

• Slumming It: Yahtzee directly describes Ubisoft's development philosophies in making Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown as "a AAA publisher slumming it in AA land." While Yahtzee is happy that Ubisoft is more open to splitting their resources between several smaller-scale, but more focused projects instead of "one billion-dollar Assassin's Creed game every six years that nobody fucking wants," he finds that Ubisoft still can't help it with some of their AAA desires to bloat their games with far more content than necessary, dragging down a relatively lower-scope Metroidvania — which is functionally solid on its own — with elements that just make everything more tiring and excessive. Yahtzee also remarks regarding one of its better twists to the formula — the ability to snapshot locations and post them to your world map for future reference — that it was such a good idea that his first reaction was to guess which obscure indie Metroidvania Ubisoft stole it from.
• Small Reference Pools: Discussed in his Black Myth: Wukong review — Yahtzee is relieved at first that he can play a historical fantasy game that isn't retreading Greek or Norse mythology (or in the case of God of War, Greek then Norse mythology)... only to be let down upon realizing that the Chinese developer Game Science have opted to base it on Journey to the West.

  Yahtzee: Oh, not Journey to the Fucking West again! What, was 16th-century China so busy inventing fireworks, it only had time to write one fucking book? Andy Serkis beat you to doing Journey to the West, and he lives in a fucking cave!

• Some of My Best Friends Are X: Joked in the review of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom — after introducing the game as the first title where Zelda is actually the player character, followed by his summary that he unfortunately didn't like it, Yahtzee finds himself in an awkward position of having to counter accusations of being a Nintendo hater and a misogynist.

  Yahtzee: Err, my daughter likes Nintendo! And the other day, she said "I love you daddy, thank you for not being a misogynist!"

• Stay in the Kitchen: Yahtzee feels a whiff of this coming off of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, where in being the first official Zelda title where Zelda is the actual player character, the way it ends up shaping her gameplay comes off as unflattering. Zelda is severely limited in combat ability compared to Link, instead having Summon Magic and the ability to clone things from beds to monsters — ostensibly to emphasize her status as the avatar of wisdom who solves problems in clever ways — but this ends up being little more than "send mooks to smash into other mooks," escalating in the final boss where Link effectively fights it for you (taking back his sword and all the respective upgrades Yahtzee grinded for in the process), Yahtzee questioning if there's any way to interpret it other than "Okay, you've had your fun pretending to be the hero; now go sit over there and try to avoid breaking a nail while the men take care of things!" Yahtzee does emphasize later on that more than "arguable misogyny," he's more just upset at the game for "core game design that just doesn't bloody work," as it doesn't speak to the supposed strengths of Zelda's character and seems purposefully like a low-depth cakewalk.
• Strictly Formula: Yahtzee discussed this with regards to Call of Duty while reviewing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 — Yahtzee pledged back in Zero Punctuation that he was going to stop reviewing the franchise following its 2019 reboot due to them, without fail, being "the washed-out masturbation fantasies of neocon armchair generals," plots being of jingoistic American soldiers who get to extrajudicially torture foreigners with distinctly less advanced tech, discovering in the process a hidden Government Conspiracy backed by a secretive PMC with James Bond villain-esque plans to drop weapons on civilians. The reason he ended up making an exception for the Black Ops sub-series is that their campaigns have been more inclined to "let the freak flag fly in interesting ways," finding that beyond Black Ops 6 having the same bones, The '90s aesthetics and bizarrely haphazard writing and gameplay were at least different enough to make it interesting (though still not necessarily good).
• Stupid Evil: "Resident Evil 4 is Stupid If You Think About It" features Yahtzee acting out a hypothetical scene in Resident Evil 4 where Saddler explains his evil plan to Leon, only for Leon to explain all the holes in it that make it completely nonsensical, ranging from the flimsiness of "infect the president's daughter with a parasite then take over America" to highlighting how if the plan involves the already-infected Ashley (and possibly Leon) returning to America, why are they trying to stop Leon from doing exactly that?
• Sudden Downer Ending: The review of Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is largely a typical Black Comedy dissection of the game as we've come to expect, but near the end, Yahtzee feels the need to explain why the game's ending turned it into "one of the most deeply, emotionally-affecting interactive narratives I've played in who knows how long," where the player character begins to completely break down from age, a slow decline with no hope in sight beyond a reboot that will likely erase their memory — as Yahtzee describes it, it shifts the whole game from being about "finding a way to live" into one about "getting ready to die." Yahtzee found himself so haunted by it that he ends the review on an uncharacteristically slow, wistful muse about his age, his mortality, his anxiety over an increasingly pessimistic future, and the awareness over his children steadily growing older, being forced to reckon with a world that he will at one point no longer be a part of.

  Yahtzee: I pick up my youngest, knowing that a day will come when I do this without realizing it's the last time I ever do it. (beat) ...and I hold her in my arms. (ten-second silence) Okay, I'm gonna put you down; my back hurts.

• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In his Wuthering Waves review, Yahtzee mentions how he first got a glimpse of the game at a GDC booth, where one of the very first words out of the rep's mouth were "It's not the same as Genshin Impact!", which Yahtzee exasperatedly took as a massive red flag that it was exactly like Genshin Impact.
• Take That!:
  • A lot of digs towards The Escapist:
    • Throughout the Alan Wake II review (the debut for this show), Yahtzee makes several digs The Escapist and the events that resulted in the retool of Zero Punctuation into FR: as Yahtzee quips about the game world having a sense of reality "as reliable and permanent as a career in corporate tech journalism", along with a hand appearing from the sky to proclaim "we expect you to meet certain targets" (referencing how Nick Calandra, the then-editor-in-chief of The Escapist, was fired for, in his own words, "'not achieving goals' that were never properly set out for us").
    • During the Semi-Ramblomatic video "The Importance of an Ending" (released about a month into Fully Ramblomatic): while going into detail of why he enjoyed the ending to American Arcadia, Yahtzee notes that "there's something about a bespectacled dude breaking free of an emotionless corporate machine that particularly resonates with me personally... in the last month or so."
    • In "Should A Game Never Be Boring?", Yahtzee acknowledges his previous Extra Punctuation "Do Games Have to be Fun?" as coming from "Ages ago, back before we all escaped from a certain online magazine that won't be identified but which in retrospect had a pretty appropriate name..."
  • Yahtzee introduces his "Best, Worst, and Blandest of 2023" as comparable to The Game Awards, except for two details: actually prioritizing awarding things instead of "sucking off corporate industry so hard that its legs recede into its stomach cavity," and having award categories that make sense.

    Yahtzee: I mean, come on, "Best Action-Adventure"? Might as well have an award for "Best Game With A Title Screen".

  • The opening to the episode on Graven is Yahtz jabbing at white people who complain about minorities having holidays that recognize them, sarcastically remarking that, as a northern European white guy, he doesn't get his own holiday that celebrates the moment when he was liberated from people like him.

    "[...] but I can always take solace in the fact that the entire world literally exists for my benefit. And if I'm bored I can go sail to some exotic land and take all their spice, and proceed to not use it because it smells weird."

  • The opening to Another Crab's Treasure has Yahtzee take potshots at Xbox Game Studios and Sony Interactive Entertainment, the former being shown unceremoniously firing Hi-Fi RUSH from the studio, and the latter's treatment of Helldivers II is depicted as them shitting their bed and then sleeping in the shit.
  • His review of Metaphor: ReFantazio came out in mid-October 2024, and the fact the game's premise is heavily built around campaign-trailing in a life-or-death election against an extremely blatant villain feels annoyingly timely^note .
    • In his dual review of The Roottrees are Dead & ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist, Yahtzee — admitting that he's become "bored of playing coy" with his political stances — much more explicitly says "If you voted for that orange knobend, I hope he mashes your family up into paste and uses you as part of his skincare regimen."
  • In his review of Atomfall he reluctantly concedes that what he sees as a bog-standard faction system of "fascists vs. nutters" makes perfect sense for the Northwest British countryside, where those're the only two kinds of people one's likely to meet anyway.
• Tempting Fate: In the Dragon's Dogma 2 review, Yahtz mentions that the game had only one save slot. After fumbling around with his game data folder on his system, he found a way to bypass the restriction in a way that he found sufficient, narrating that he was sure that this would no longer be an issue... before turning to the camera and calling this "Foreshadowing". Whilst a save file bucket hangs over his head, hung up with string alongside a sword of Damocles. The single save slot in fact becomes an issue later during the review, when Yahtzee learns that the game managed to undo an afternoon's worth of game progress by autosaving over his singular save slot, prompting him to Rage Quit the game.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
  • In the RoboCop: Rogue City review, he briefly talks about the movement shooter genre that Doom (2016) reawakened. Doom (2016) was a title he enjoyed when it was a standalone classic-style shooter in a slower-paced triple-A sphere, but now that there's a whole Genre Relaunch of classic-style shooters in the wake of Doom, Yahtzee's opinion has changed to be "absolutely bloody sick of the fucking things". Case in point, Robocop: Rogue City was deemed to have passable gameplay, despite Yahtz also comparing it to Gears of War, a game he once considered infamous for slowing the pace down too much, back during Zero Punctuation when all the other triple-A games were doing likewise.
  • A recurring criticism Yahtzee has for Video Game Remakes — especially covered in "Silent Hill 2 and the Hidden Costs of Remakes" — is that their inherent goal of "copy someone else's work to make it palatable to modern standards" both buries any serendipitous developments or interesting idiosyncrasies established from the original, as well as make things much more homogenous. Yahtzee brings up the case of how the original Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 4, and Silent Hill 2 are all extremely distinct games with unique identities and flavor, but their respective remakes are far more similar with each other, integrating shared design choices that — while not necessarily "better" or "worse" than the original — are all fundamentally pursuing the same trends as opposed to embracing what made them special to begin with.
• Toilet Humour: The review of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth ends with a joke that one of the characters' crouched-down animations looks a lot like her tooting out a fart.
• Tranquil Fury: When a hypothetical viewer asks Yahtzee how Star Wars Outlaws plays, he remains quiet for a moment, then puts down the controler with a sigh, turns to said viewer, and says, in a quiet voice: "You. FUCKING. Know. How it plays. It plays... like a Ubisoft open-world game."
• Uncertain Audience:
  • Discussed regarding Star Wars Outlaws, which frustrated Yahtzee for just how utterly milquetoast and bland the experience was, leading him to wonder who the game is even for, being unable to find any unique selling point amidst a sea of generic open-world sandbox games by Ubisoft and other Star Wars media that the game pays insubstantial lipservice to, reminding people what they could be watching instead of playing Outlaws. Yahtzee's most charitable guess is that it's just "one for the Star Wars fans", but he considers this damning with faint praise since Star Wars is so gigantic of a franchise that there's no way anyone could possibly enjoy every work in the franchise, and in turn no way people would enjoy Outlaws on principle.
  • One of his criticisms of Batman: Arkham Shadow is that it's simultaneously trying to be sociopolitical meta-commentary like The Batman (2022) — examining themes of social inequality and Batman's effectiveness as a crimefighter — but it also wants to be a larger-than-life superhero story as already codified in the Batman: Arkham Series. Yahtzee finds that the end result feels like it's trying to have its cake and eat it too, where the disaffected poor people you're both meant to fight and empathize with are inexplicably "huge musclebound martial artists in rat costumes, reciting revolutionary slogans in exaggerated New York gangster accents."
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • One of his criticisms of American Arcadia is that it doesn't mesh together the Dual-World Gameplay of Trevor and Angela's gameplay very well. He cites an early game challenge in which Angela has to answer questions to a security officer while simultaneously keeping tabs on Trevor (who you need to sneak past guards, and can only see when Angela's looking at the right computer monitor), and wishes the game had more of those types of moments.
  • In his review of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Yahtzee noted that one of its better innovations to the Metroidvania formula was the ability to take screenshots and paste them to the map so you can remember what you need to come back to later. He does, however, find it odd that you're only allowed a limited amount of snapshots at a time and have to find collectibles to gain more when it should just be a general quality-of-life feature, comparing it to forcing the player into level grinding just to unlock a volume slider.
  • In "The Moral Dilemmas that Weren't", Yahtzee remarks that Vampyr (2018) came at the cusp of being brilliant with its central moral conflict: you play as a doctor who has an obligation to care for his patients, but is also a vampire who side-gigs as a monster hunter and must sustain himself with the blood of the living, with the game pressuring you into choosing to sacrifice one or more of your named, well-rounded, often likeable patients. Yahtzee argues that this would have been a great test of the player's moral character... had the game fully committed to the concept. Instead, the game makes it so you don't actually have to kill anyone, and thus the whole basis for a moral dilemma is completely moot, and while going on a Pacifist Run makes the game more challenging, this isn't an ideal tradeoff as being challenging can often be more fun (and given that this is the way to reach the Golden Ending, this reads as the game actively rewarding players for not engaging with the moral choices to begin with).
  • Yahtzee declared this to be the big issue with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and why despite overall enjoying it more than its immediate predecessor and even the original Final Fantasy VII, he didn't really like it all that much. The cardinal flaw Yahtzee finds is just how many concepts it jumps between with little room to breathe, feeling that even the main combat (which he generally enjoyed more than in Remake) is ultimately just a fall-back option for when it can't think of another minigame, of which there are dozens, describing the game as "a mile wide and an inch thick."
  • The biggest problem Yahtzee had of The Plucky Squire is that everything surrounding the central premise of the game — the protagonist emerging from a children's book and messing with it to affect the story — is great, but it isn't given the focus it deserves. Yahtzee critiques the game for simply having too much different gameplay elements in it that have nothing to do with the premise and come across as irrelevant padding which leaves the game with little room to breathe. Yahtzee summarizes The Plucky Squire as suffering from a bad case of "first game syndrome," being so impatient to share all of its ideas that, while ultimately fun and competently-assembled, it spreads out its potential far too thin.
  • He summarizes Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii by saying that he enjoyed it when it was being a pirate game, but liked it a lot less when it went back to being a Yakuza game. He admits to have completed all of the pirate-related sidequests because of how fun they were, but resented whenever the game had to go back to the typical Yakuza formula that had become very standardized by that point, admitting that while the game does have enough likeable stuff in it, he felt it was tainted by the knowledge that the game could have had so much more were the time and focus devoted to it rather than its more perfunctory elements.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Brought up in his review of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II; Yahtzee dislikes how the game, touting its open-ended design and immersive sim elements, encourages players to solve problems using either stealth, combat, or diplomacy, but ends up railroading him into doing all three at various times, defeating the point of specializing. Whereas the first game annoyed him with mandatory combat, II annoyed him with mandatory stealth, which featured Trial-and-Error Gameplay that felt more finicky and arbitrary than rewarding.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • In his review of Hellblade 2: Senua's Saga, Yahtzee simply can't get behind the game's framing Senua's psychotic revenge quest as tragic, since not only is the banter of the voices in her head annoying, Senua keeps doing nonsensical, blatantly incorrect things against the judgement of everyone else around her, which makes her less "tortured" and more "a self-destructive idiot." He also doesn't buy the shilling of Senua as possibly being an anti-heroic savior for the innocent people she fights for on account of the game never properly showing any of them aside from lipservice.

    Yahtzee: I know she's supposed to be mentally ill, but maybe the reason I had to take a break every couple of hours is 'cos I find it exhausting to watch a mentally disabled woman blundering again and again into situations that a blind puffin could predict would lead to her getting her face smashed against rocks some more. Sorry if that's condescending of me; obviously, the neurodivergent should be free as anyone else to smash their face into rocks.
    Senua: (standing before "Faceosmasho Fault" and holding a rock to her face) My body, my choice! (WHUNCH)

  • Yahtzee was intrigued by Crime Scene Cleaner and its ambitions of giving it a story compared to other cleaning simulator games, but was let down by the lack of effort, commenting that its protagonist — a janitor who ends up working for The Mafia to pay for his daughter's medical treatments — is "kind of a prick." In addition to being unimpressed by the cheap "working to pay for his unseen/undeveloped sick daughter" motive, Yahtzee finds that Kowalsky's constant snarking just makes him come across like a passive-aggressive jerkass, especially since for all his talk of how awful his boss is, he never actually considers not working for him.
  • His review of Split Fiction dedicates a portion to just how annoying he found its protagonists to be, which he found to be shallow caricatures of young creators who squabble about their respective genres of work, making them seem obnoxious in the most blunt, overwritten way possible. He ended up doing a follow-up episode of Semi-Ramblomatic dedicated to elaborating what went wrong with the script, breaking down an individual scene to illustrate why it failed to make its protagonists likable or sympathetic, and glancing over what he would have done to fix it.

    Yahtzee: Ooh, they're chalk and cheese, they are; one's a city girl, one's a country girl, one's dad is a mechanic, the other's dad is a sheep. The game will tell you the country girl is optimistic and extroverted, but she comes across more as a smug, flaky busybody, and city girl is pessimistic and introverted, but she comes across more as an unlikable spiky asshole. The central wedge between them is that one only writes hackeneyed sci-fi and the other only writes hackneyed fantasy, and they spend the whole fucking game being juddy of each other for it. I wish there'd been a third lead who was, like, a literary fiction writer, who could point out that every fucking bookshop in the world groups those two genres together for a reason, and they're both equally frivolous twats.

• Universal-Adaptor Cast: Yahtzee brings this up regarding the playable cast of Team Fortress 2 in two separate Semi-Ramblomatic videos — "An Explanation of "Post-Punk" Games" and "The Games I Like, But Don't Actually Play" — as being one of the elements that gives the game its longevity. In addition to finding the nine characters extremely well-realized and memorable, Yahtzee finds that tools like Garry's Mod and Source Filmmaker have made it very easy to transplant and play with them beyond the means of the game, with their deliberately exaggerated, archetypal designs making them perfect to be placed through whatever tones and genres indie animators wish to put them through, from the crass, anarchic silliness of Heavy is Dead to the genuinely intense Psychological Horror of Emesis Blue.
• Unreliable Expositor: Yahtzee described SANABI as having mildly frustrated him, as while it had some nice story twists, he found himself annoyed by how said twists were predicated on the main character's memory being false, with the game outright lying to the audience about what they showed earlier rather than "a James Sunderland Unreliable Narrator" way where the differences are in the character's own personally-driven misinterpretations. In his Semi-Ramblomatic video "The Rules of a Good Plot Twist", he refers to SANABI as a case for one of his main rules on how to make a Plot Twist interesting rather than frustrating: it shouldn't lie to the audience.
• [Verb] This!: In the Semi-Ramblomatic episode, "Breaking Down My Dislike of Strategy Games", Yahtzee wonders "why we can't clear out the pawns and give the queen a submachine gun."

  Queen: Checkmate this.

  • And in "Video Game Adaptations Need to Mind Their Manners":

    Yahtzee: ...saying the first bucket is better because the dog in the hat has the better pedigree still doesn't scan as an argument because it's completely disregarding the cat and the fox.
    Fox: [points a knife at the dog] Pedigree this, bitch.

• Video Game 3D Leap: Discussed in the Semi-Ramblomatic episode "Oh, That Darn Yellow Paint", where he argues that it ended the Platform Game's dominance over console gaming and elevated the shooter in its place. In most 3D games, the camera's focus was no longer on where the Player Characters were located (as it was in 2D games) but rather on where they were looking, which was almost never at their feet but instead directly in front of them, making it a lot harder for players to precisely judge distances and jump between platforms or onto enemies' heads but a lot easier for them to aim guns at enemies. 3D games eventually figured out how to make platforming work by embracing Le Parkour and focusing less on precise landings than on lining up where players wanted their characters to go, essentially making the player characters themselves into the "bullets".
• Video Game Movies Suck: Discussed in "Video Game Adaptations Need to Mind Their Manners", where Yahtzee argues that the biggest reason why most films based on video games fail is because filmmakers as a whole disrespect the medium of video games as a whole. He brings forth how for a while, it would make sense to treat video games as properties limited by their technology requiring a lot of transformation to make sense for cinema (hence the borderline In Name Only Super Mario Bros. (1993) or the rollercoaster of Resident Evil films), but this has made far less sense now that gaming has evolved that it can effectively do what film can do (cinematography and lifelike graphics to enable expressive acting) and arguably even more (interactive narrative elements, skill-based challenge, and catharsis directly attributed to player investment). He argues that this ego problem makes the mingling between video games and films to be a one-sided transaction where the former is just an IP that the latter can exploit and toss around carelessly — he's especially incensed by people being hired to adapt video games who flagrantly dismiss the source material on account of being video games, which he compares to someone who doesn't speak Japanese being asked to adapt a Japanese text.
• Video Game Remake:
  • A concept briefly discussed during his review of Persona 3 Reload, admitting that intellectually-speaking, he's against the idea of remaking games just for the sake of making them up-to-date with recent instalments, feeling that it erases history and its earlier quirks formed by burgeoning development for the sake of homogeneity.
  • Also discussed surrounding Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. Yahtzee questions the necessity of trying to remake the first Dead Rising in the first place, as not only is the original still available and still holds up to him as endearingly janky yet captivating, he considers that the game's frantic hack'n'slash zombie-survival gameplay formula was refined and perfected in Dead Rising 2.
  • Discussed yet again with Silent Hill 2 (Remake). Yahtzee feels that this anxiously-awaited remake of one of his most beloved games of all time "could've been worse," being basically decent, if still inferior to him in his admittedly heavily-biased perspective, once again questioning why it even needs to exist when the original is still perfectly fine. He would later place it as an honorable mention in "The Best, Worst, and Blandest of 2024" list, saying that it's good for a remake, but emphasizes the "for a remake" part. Yahtz humors Konami by addressing how if they cynically wanted to remake Silent Hill for the sake of making money rather than creative fulfillment, they should have tackled the very first game, which could be improved upon due to being substantially more dated and cheesy.
• Video Game Tutorial:
  • Discussed on the Semi-Ramblomatic video "The Lost Art of the Tutorial Level", discussing the evolution of how video games teach players their mechanics. While Yahtzee does concede that the modern trends of integrated tutorials taking place during gameplay is a much more efficient and useful method, he can't help but express nostalgia for the dedicated tutorial levels of late 90's shooters like Half-Life, Deus Ex, and Thief: The Dark Project, feeling like their ability to provide a pressure-free environment to learn the gameplay while also setting up early worldbuilding before the "good stuff" of the main game was rather undervalued.
  • Part of "The Importance of a Good Monster Introduction" discusses how video games introduce the first enemy to the player, and thus their combat system, and how it can be done well or poorly in terms of immersing players and instructing them what to do. He prefers that games do both simultaneously, and looks down upon the fact most games feel the need to stop everything for a cutscene to zoom in on and introduce the first monster before the player gets to try and fight them. He especially mocks Doom Eternal for this, as it not only stops the game with an informational popup before an enemy encounter, but provides literal instructions just telling you what their weaknesses are and how to fight them.
• Virtual Paper Doll: Discussed in the Stellar Blade review, where Yahtzee admits to being somewhat amused by the fact that amidst generic plot and gameplay, there was clearly a ton of creative effort placed into the various fanservice-y and futuristic outfits for its protagonist to wear. In general, Yahtzee also points out how in light of the controversy regarding Eve's Ms. Fanservice design, in actually feels somewhat justifiable given the game's plot — if you're in a post-humanist sci-fi setting where everyone's in custom robot bodies, you might as well be a hot chick.

  Yahtzee: More bridges should be built between the people who want to dress up Barbies and the people who want to jerk off to big bums. Maybe Stellar Blade could bring all those people together.... hopefully in a room with adequate air conditioning.

• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: For an Invoked example, the sponsor promotion after the review of Skull and Bones has Yahtz find out about a movie called The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Believing it will be a good watch for the kids because they misbehave at bedtime, he finds out mid-watch that the film's actually about The Holocaust. Yahtzee's kids are visibly crying thick streams of tears at the movie's scenes.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
• Writing Around Trademarks: Yahtzee put a lot of the video's design aesthetic and writing style into making it clear this is a continuation of his old show without actually mentioning his old show due to The Escapist keeping the rights to it.
  • Whereas he uses a variety of colors for the background, he notably avoids using yellow.
  • He uses round-bodied, pointy-limbed black creatures to represent nonhuman enemies, but they're based on his dog Toffee rather than being the imps.
  • Humans are represented with simple floaty-limb'd figures with boots, but they're all wearing round-toe boots instead of pointed ones as well as universally wearing glasses that make their eyes look bigger. Yahtzee himself is wearing mostly black, including his hat, and has a pair of squared off glasses.
  • The recurring "Occasional Guide to Special^note  Moments in Gaming History" episodes were replaced with the "Occasional Guide to Notorious Moments in Gaming History" (complete with clumsy censorship gag), and while the "Let's all laugh at an industry..." jingle was preserved, it's been re-recorded with slightly altered instrumentation. Given that Second Wind also began selling shirts containing lyrics to the jingle, it appears that The Escapist likely doesn't have complete ownership over it, but it was changed enough just to be safe.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: In "The 2024 Games I Didn't Review", Yahtzee laments that he never got a chance to play or review Concord before it crashed and burned, so he decides to devote his time for a mini-review towards effectively the only part of the game that still exists: its god-awful hero designs, with such descriptions as "Parallel universe Doctor Robotnik after they got mauled by a rabid set square," "The Quake 1 protagonist's embarrassing mum standing too close to a heat lamp," and "Someone who cobbled together their World of Warcraft costume in five minutes in the alleyway behind a convention center."
• You Can't Get Ye Flask: Happens in the review for Cryptmaster:

  You are in a room with a prominent control panel, on which you see a single red button. There are exits to the North and Left.
  >PUSH BUTTON_
  I have no earthly idea what you're driveling on about.

• You Don't Look Like You: Played With: in some reviews when he depicts a character from the game he's reviewing, sometimes he'll use a similar-looking character or person with some noticable differences, rather than using the actual character from the game. So Alyx Vance stands in for Beyond Good & Evil's similarly-headbanded, tan-skinned Action Girl Jade, Eric André replaces the curly-haired Ichiban Kasuga of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Keanu Reeves portrays the likewise long-haired-and-bearded Alan Wake in his eponymous sequel.

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