inhabits the sense of childness better than most things; the third graders here being utterly unhinged in their expression in a way that rings far more true than either the naive or precocious archetypes that children are often chained to in fiction. in third grade these kids wrestle with mental health, death, and the eternal cudgel of generational trauma; they respond accordingly with coarse jokes and catastrophic outbursts and reflection; they seek companionship, they try to wrangle their feelings, and the outcomes are mercurial and messy and ugly and dumb and real. in third grade these kids are about what I remember of being in third grade — an impressionistic, heightened portrait, if not always a direct doppelganger

it uses its own status as remake as an opportunity to carve up the format with broad, erratic cuts. equally crushingly earnest and sneering at its own earnestness; irreverent humour picking at its own skin. embracing a need for warmth, kindness, and compassionate understanding while burning its own history with a magnifying glass for fun and interjecting frequently with self conscious fourth wall breaks and edgy non sequiturs

plumbs the depths of rpg maker design to pull elaborate gotchas; a puckish sprit overtaking the game's more perplexing asks; saving a life only by being impossibly hypervigilant to the point of psychic phenomena or counter clockwise time travel. scenarios get increasingly unmanageable and more brazen in their expectations, forcing failure and having you reckon with an endless parade of "what if"s while simultaneously showing an undeniable cleverness for these kinds of punji stick designs

the queasy true ending is the elaborate last showcase of the game's dueling philosophies. telling us what we already know, it sets the table up for unconditional love and understanding before the dealer flips their cards to reveal some things are immutable; the participants bowing out with a hideous BANG, canned laughter, and the wistful murmur of those who want to be better — to themselves, and to those around them

rest in peace parun

when i'm an adult i hope to be a kinder one.

sobre trauma geracional e a dificuldade não só/necessariamente de se conectar, mas de procurar empatia, procurar quem entenda e quem ajude. talvez a única maneira de romper com o rito seja dar um fim completo ao último na linhagem da maldição, mas a bondade prevalece sob a angústia e praticá-la, mesmo ao ver o pior reflexo de nós mesmos em outrem, é a chave para tornarmos pessoas melhores.

outro banger do parun. rip.

I've paged over all of the various games vgperson has translated over the years, making a mental repository of which ones had my interest and I wanted to give a try. Yet, all those times, Re:Kinder always fell squarely in the "not interested bucket" because, well, just look at any screenshot of it. Look at it! On the surface, this game is fucking grody, an amateurish mashup of default RPG maker assets that all clash against each other. Every character looks like they're missing one of their eyes when their sprite is facing to the side. Where the fuck is that Backloggd icon from? Everything at face value would suggest that this is a hastily slopped together thing in the sea of the thousands of other RPG Maker projects made over the past several decades not worth caring about.

And yet, what if I told you that underneath this presentation, somehow, some way, this was not only a good game, but one of the best experiences I've had with a RPG Maker game??? It's kinda crazy.

Re:Kinder stands out on two fronts. First, the number and novelty of gameplay situations it sets out during its short runtime is incredibly strong for the genre. The puzzles are generally well thought out and play with the standard RPG Maker elements of inventory and interactables. There is also some combat, but the leveling and inventory systems are stripped out to make each fight more of a puzzle using a limited set of tools. The apartment towards the end of the game is certainly the highlight, with a clever interaction puzzle and one of the most novel combat encounters I've seen in one of these RPG Maker games pasted back-to-back. The combat encounter has you run around a room collecting items and gaining new skills as you fend off a boss constantly trying to engage in combat with you, until you obtain the tools necessary to ignite the boss for an instant kill. It was a bit on the obtuse side (I consulted vgperson's guide for it, which even she admitted some of the elements of the fight were quite inexplicable), but that didn't take away from how novel it felt.

It's other main appeal is the writing and tone it goes for, with a poignant discussion of the impacts of mental illness. The game takes place in a world where mental illnesses are treated as quack science by society, examining how people deal with not having an outlet for or even recognition of their issues. It's a clear reflection of our own world, and it explores the concept with a pretty hefty depth, again, for its short runtime.

Yet, the main villain Yuuichi throws in a hefty mix of off the wall, often dark humor into the game, sometimes right in the middle of some serious moments. Nothing quite prepares you for the main villain coming out after just having murdered a kid to an intense track with Spanish lyrics, nor a stock photo of a dog suddenly flashing on screen (more than once!) in the middle of a conversation. There's a great sense of humor here, making me laugh at several points from the sheer absurdity of what happened. The soundtrack to the game is diverse and shocking in all its own ways, adding a lot to each scene, even if sometimes that a lot is a "wtf is happening right now". By the end of the game, even the seeming mess that is the graphics feels, somewhat, kinda, almost the intent, feeding into the chaotic vibes of the chaotic world.

The craziest part about all of this? Re:Kinder is not some avante garde title, but instead indicates its a remake of the TWO THOUSAND AND THREE game Kinder. Finding out about this after beating the game made its novelty and strong theming feel even more potent. The framework of this game is over 20 years old! It's older than Yume Nikki! From what I understand--there's no English translation of the original release--the dark comedy aspects of the game were added into the remake, where the original kept a thoroughly dark tone throughout. I believe this addition ultimately made the game more interesting. Still, the rest of the game, how it handles mental illness and even touches on some queer themes, and how it plays on the conventions of the RPG genre is radically ahead of its time. Honestly, it pulls a lot of these things off better than many other RPG Maker games I've played that released a decade+ later.

The longer I sit with this, the more profound it feels to be experiencing this creation of an individual 20 years after it was first released, almost in tandem with when I was born. One of the main reasons I play RPG Maker games is the way the pastiche reveals these experiences revolving around, in most of the cases I've seen thus far, a single person's thoughts and identity. In the best case, stepping out of my world to delve into someone else's mind for a couple hours, seeing everything they have to say. These minds enshrined in code that will be available for time in memoriam, from times I didn't get to experience the way I am able to now. And, idk, Re:Kinder is one of the best enshrinements of this.

recently me and my boyfriend have been rewatching Hulu’s normal people which isn’t great but I think the source material and those characters are some of my absolute favorites. it’s a story that’s underneath everything else about the failings of previous generations on younger ppl. ie connell and marianne aren’t bad ppl at all but have the capacity and the learned knowledge to be bad and awful towards their friends, each other and to themselves. the family life of marianne compliments things for her and connell’s financial situation (already being poor and coming of age in the recession) makes things harder for him. the past failings of past generations screwed things up for the next. and bc of the open-ended-ness of both the book and the series the implication if viewing the characters wholly pessimistically is that they too will mess things up for whoever comes next and each other bc they weren’t taught any better.

Rekinder more than any other piece of media I’ve consumed is about future generations reckoning and reaction w their parents generation.

there’s that rlly cringey and also very famous segment in the fight club movie where brad pitt, standing in presumably for all of gen x, says that they’re a generation of men raised by women and that is more or less why they are failed men for lack of a better term. it’s a good theory and a good scene in practice, blaming the past without doing any introspection is a good bit and would actually work if not so deadly serious and even worse sexist and espousing borderline MRA talking points. rekinder is about rightfully aiming blame at others while also holding urself accountable for ur own actions and shortcomings regardless of how u ended up that way.

it’s also a game very of its time and of its place, very edgy and scenemo. the jokes and the references sure but most importantly the visuals. it reminds me a lot of weirdo indie horror animation I would watch in my teens, a lot of it rlly well produced but also not rlly saying anything. rekinder says sm in such little time, it’s also def about how kids and teens as time progresses they become more and more desensitized to their own environments. I was a preteen when the Boston bombing happened and I remember day of making tasteless weird jokes to my friends and asking my family who even cared and why was I supposed to care. it was supposed to be shocking and upsetting definitely but I felt nothing when it happened and when national tragedies happen now I try to have empathy and sympathy but I can’t say I’m any closer to “getting” it. just that I’m more mature and less edgy w how far removed I feel from stuff like that. this past week YouTube randomly recommended me a real liveleak video. there is rlly no reason why the algorithm suggested this to me, I just happened to stumble upon it while searching smth completely unrelated up. I didn’t watch it obv but the thumbnail to the v short vid made it very clear what was about to happen. it was gross and weird to even see the image but it was also hard to realize that that’s a real human life, it feels distant and fake and the memory of it more or less completely left my mind and with time will totally leave my mind. and I had a similar experience w a drawn piece of cartoon gore present in the very end of the game, it felt sudden and it was gross looking but it felt just as distant and fake as that thumbnail. the children in rekinder are so completely desensitized to their real world that their demeanors and attitudes aren’t rlly different once the tone of the game shifts about ten minutes in. and it’s because of their fathers and mothers and those parents fathers and mothers that they’ve ended up in a world where nothing is shocking and nothing is scarier than the world in which they’ve already spent their whole lives growing up in.

cute game and a very hopeful one at that, idk maybe generation alpha will buck certain cycles that every preceding generation hasn’t been able to^_^
traumacore but with hope and love in every moment
I love the deviant art tier drawn portraits of the main characters and how the backgrounds are still present in their little character models and not like edited out.