Jimmy and the Puslating Mass is a stone cold classic. Games and RPGs in particular are frequently about the potential of imagination, the possibilities of human will, and the reckless clinging on to something lost: states, morals, love, life. What the eponymous character is clinging to is unclear for most of the game, but what is clear is the faithful representation of how fucking confusing shit is when anything can be anything and you don't know shit. Jimmy is afraid. His family and the nice people act in ways that don't make sense. Most things outside of him are out to hurt him (like a cute turtle wearing a box), yet we push on without the faintest idea of what is happening or what is at stake. The horror continues but becomes to be mixed with the beautiful and exciting. The game looks very kitschy and precocious from afar, but it demonstrates a really earnest and expert command of how ideas and identities don't come from nowhere. It drills through this naive idea about fixing the family unit and twists into a really earnest family drama, still told through the eyes of our ever imaginitive boy hero. Jimmy becomes an intensely fleshed out individual, first by the world of his dreams and then by his ability to understand the very real things it reflects.

Aside from a few silly choke points made confusing by the encounter skip system, this is a masterful, vivid, and expansive RPG that should be an easy fit for literally any fans of the genre who fuck with/don't mind the horror psychodrama elements. Thanks to Scitydreamer (of Indiehellzone, I Hate You, Please Suffer ) who has been banging the drum about how criminally neglected this game is in the modern canon of western RPG Maker entries for a while. I will poking at the post-game stuff for some time because nothing has hooked me like this since FFX.

(Last played in 2020) This was my first proper RPG and I remember being blown away by it. There are a lot of Earthbound-like games like it with a cutesy exterior wrapped around dark themes, but in most of those games, the cuteness is pretty genuine to an extent. Not in JatPM. In this game, the cutesty stuff never feels like anything more than an uncomfortable veneer, and when that inevitably gets peeled off, it reveals some truly grotesque and disturbing stuff ripped right out of a child's worst nightmares. This isn't to say that the game can't be a delight at times, because it can be, concerning the gameplay especially. Jimmy's Imagination ability is a lot of fun to play around with. Some of the secret dungeons are much too difficult (at least they were for me at the time) but the main game is pretty manageable.