Animal well is worthy of the 9, fantastic game if you love exploration, experimentation. no hand holding, no talking. Genius game design/levels. I'm amazed how non-linear it plays - you can go anywhere, do anything, the effort put by it's dev, Billy Basso is nothing but spectacular!
Small nitpick, I do feel the backtracking is a bit off-putting, becomes a chore and adds to the length.
Stellar blade was fun and as usual the melodrama doesn't focus what was important - the gameplay. One side is all in for the sensual Eve whereas another spins the opposite as labels it as coomer bait and offensive to the average women.
Personally, I feel it doesn't matter a bit. The combat was satisfying and experimental, enemies, bosses and environments were really cool. Music was fine but got boring as it was very repetitive. The story or world building, philosophy, dialogue and VA were not memorable, very mediocre, cliched and irrelevant but that is fine because this is a popcorn thriller.
A laugh out, fun game - it doesn't matter what the main character model is - you could switch Eve for Abby of TLoU2, Kratos, any token character with a randomized skin color or race, an object - you get it, it doesn't matter because it would play the same.
Gameplay (and to some extent pacing/padding/length/bloat) triumphs everything else - I really enjoyed TLoU2, because the fluid combat at higher difficulties is so damn good. It didn't matter whether I played Abby, Ellie or any character as I don't care as long I enjoy the gameplay.
In contrast I dropped/disliked GoW Ragnorok and Horizon Forbidden West as whatever you do, remove DEI or add more DEI, add more dialogues or remove - the games are very boring.
GoW R is super bloated as the story is very lacklustre, it didn't have any clear goal what it was trying to do - there were so many parallel stories in GOW R that dwarfed the good ones - the side story of the wolf who comes back was exceptionally done whereas the main story was Marvel-like. The long walk with Angroboda (her skin color is irrelevant, make Angroboda white or Eve like, whatever you wish) would always be boring, fetch quest like chore. The repeated skeletons army enemies that took ages to kill destroy the fun, pacing.
HFW should have been similar to Zelda or Elden Ring - drop my made character into that extremely well crafted world and let me explore unrestricted, hunt cool mech-dinos, polish the combat, give me abilities to discover myself. Make it non-linear with little to no dialogue. Make it like you're dropped in Pandora and you explore everything. Such a shame that this game doesn't let me play only makes me listen to the absurdly long bore.
Obviously all of this is a personal opinion, I'm sure a lot of you enjoyed these games, play what you like
Edge 
