With this, I embrace that I am become hipster, destroyer of taste and my own sanity.

This game is a fucking disaster. One level crashed on me three times in a row. It’s an indie game! How many Cells of the mighty PS3 could its polygonal cel shading possibly be smoking? I thought the game developers had cleverly side-stepped needing to do in-depth object collision by having the player characters fly, but nope, escort-mission-esque bullshit of grounded characters is a central game mechanic!

Okabu is fastidious, tedious bullshit, and I love it.

Meant to be a co-op game, we were able to get a Dualshock 4 working for the demo, but not the full game proper. In that glimpse of what Okabu was meant to be, excellent. It is flawed and frictive, but great. Maybe after all the glossy flawless slop Nintendo’s put out over the last couple years (🥲) I’m hungry for something with some spice.

But maybe co-op games are where bad games are allowed to ascend. Where the fun is playing with another human through the bullshit, being in on the unfairness of it all.

Okabu is very well designed for a kind of immersive shared experience. For one, it looks like a joke. Blocky character models, NPC dialog that was obviously one white guy pretending to be a cartoon character, painfully obvious “go here” arrows painted every awful color of a 1960’s mathematics textbook (brown?????). But within that barrenness, that lack of excess and borderline ugly art direction, comes an extreme level of readability. I know what the game wants me to do, I know where the game wants me to go. Yet somehow trying to travel the equivalent distance from a kitchen to a dining room feels fucking impossible.

At the mercy of a fixed but always moving camera, the playable cloud whales get stuck on everything. Stupid robots shoot missiles from off screen, buddies get left behind, chickens need to be herded, and did my goat run off a cliff again??? Where did the fisherman with the plunger go, I need him! It’s all so stupid! What do you mean I failed the target time to get the time medal, I thought I was doing really good this round!

(I absolutely adore the implication that every goat, chicken, bull, and elf yells “FUCK!” (!#?!) when their garbage pathing has them run into an obstacle, like a rock 1 dm too high or a wall that bent too aggressively near their personal bubble.)

Because in a game being cute, and asking so little of my brain, and yet being so hard to execute what I KNOW I want to do, there’s room for real fun, real magic. Not the kind of “tee hee someone at Nintendo snuck in their Luigi Inflation fetish into Wonder,” but incomprehensible lines like “why is there sand on my anthropologist”

I’m being completely serious here. A game being slightly broken makes everything you do in it incredibly dumb. It could crash at any moment. Maybe the sound will cut out. But in this game, if everything worked smoothly - if the controls didn’t wildly vary between stiff and overly sensitive, if there was a shred of quality of life programmed in between some of the most on / off animations, maybe it’d be cute and playable - but maybe also it’d be boring as fuck! Where would be the drama of trying to control a barrel in a whirlpool? That sense of camaraderie from fighting not against your own belief in yourself, but the foe of the world itself?

Maybe that’s it! A level of meta unobtainable in normal games! Fighting against the game’s objectives is one thing, but feeling confident in being able to grasp the meta of the game and having to fight against the reality of the game, but not in a way where the game wants to do that. The game wants to be easy! It’s on your side! But its so bad at being on your side that it wraps around into being a passive enemy! Which creates a beautiful irony against the reality of what you must face!

But then I had to play the rest of the game single player and my god did that magic run out by the end.

So here I am left with a completely unsolvable quandary of what kind of score reflects the reality of Okabu. Like, if I were anyone who wrote for Metacritic, it has way too many glitches and crashes far too often to ever get a 7/10. And a good portion of my time with the game included a lot of bullshit. But after playing the demo multiplayer, I could see the philosophy this game was designed around. I could see that everywhere in how every level worked. Every level always needed two things to be done at once, which, in multiplayer, gives everyone a job and keeps everyone busy. The chaos of the camera trying to compromise between your zooming characters as you both get distracted by collectibles and blindsighted by enemies and trying to pick up whatever you just dropped and forgetting where you set it down - it’s wonderful.

But in single player, that gets turned into trying to get through a series of tasks that has you constantly switching between people in a micro-manage-y way for a game that is chugging. Without that spark, that glimpse into what Okabu was supposed to be, there is no way that I would have had the interest to get as good at this stupid game as I did to start seeing the potential for fun in becoming a speedrunning efficiency machine.

So do I rate Okabu - on it’s demo, that was good? On my imagining of that demo being even better for a full game length of co-op, which is hypothetical? On its technical performance, which is indefensibly baffling? On my enjoyment, which was irrational?

Because I know for a fact I bought this game to be a hipster. I panicked when I heard the PS3 store was closing and the only game I had played on my friend’s system was Metal Gear Solid 2 HD, which turned out to become my favorite game of all time. So what else was on this system I had previously skipped out on??? Was it flooded with gems that no one had ever heard of, that were soon to be lost to time?

So then I dropped way more money into my account than was wise or needed and probably maybe single-handledly got Sony to decide not to close the PS3 PSN store after all.

Okabu was the perfect example of what I imagined I was after. Something overlooked, stuck on the PS3 system, weird, and maybe amazing. I have imagined loving this game for years. But my friend wants his PS3 back this year and we never got around to buying another Sixaxis controller so I had to actually play this idea of a game.

Maybe I’ve crazied myself into thinking its music is spectacular. Who knows anymore! Not me! But look at this, the official bandcamp of the game studio never released the soundtrack - this random guy ripped the game like two years ago and the credited artists don’t even acknowledge ever having worked on or with video games at all! How dare they be ashamed of this project that I have decided to stake my hipster status on???

Because isn’t that the foundation of all love? The realization that something is fleeting, will be lost forever, and wanting to cherish and remember it while it's here? I think a lot of the art in Okabu is kinda trash, but my heart breaks that something so interesting will be lost forever with only incomplete collectible guides on dead forums as proof it ever existed.

I love Okabu. I decided to love Okabu before I played Okabu, and I found my way to loving the Okabu that existed for me to love.

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And then I tried getting all the trophies so it’d be preserved in my PSN profile forever and they want me to collect 20,000 CLOUDBERRIES???? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING M-