there's something unimaginably beautiful about games that feel just like when i'm really tired with a drawing and i just decide to do whatever and put it out into the world, then i see so many wrong things with it that could have been fixed with time but then again i'm very tired so in no way i'm touching it again. makes me think how human work will forever be valuable, we're able to develop apathy for imperfections due to fatigue and that's honestly beautiful.

excluding the obvious deadline constraints the team had to put up with, this kind of ambitious, large scale, unpredictable, weird, aggravating, difficult, time consuming, tiring, agressive, livable world barely has any space in the sanitized UX focused world but yet here we are, yet after all the misinformation efforts by 20 year-certified dumbass Stephanie Sterling here we are experiencing what is probably one of the most feverish mainstream gaming efforts done by a big studio in the last decade. this is probably the most important game Capcom has released in a lot of years and i'm all here for it, because if you play the game you end up realizing the boxart is extremely funny and there are simply no other games that do this kind of thing anymore. like, my bf missed seeing a major scene with a character around the last part of the game because he never got any of the optional quests involving him how is this not pure art.

also gotta love the genre of games that you could easily swap a "thank you for playing" at the end with "fuck you for playing!!" and it would still make perfect sense. they're dear in my heart and i will protect them always

Harold Halibut is a very technically impressive (when its not bugging out or dropping frames) feat, which unfortunately puts its gorgeous claymation style and cinematography in service of an overwritten, overindulgent miserable slog which might have been refreshing were it a fifth of its length instead of the overbearing wank we got instead.

Wank is the operative word here, the game is spiritually similar to jerking off. It takes inspiration from various sources, wes anderson films chief among them, but from what few films I have seen of those, they were much more entertaining and well written. The sheer nothingness of the gameplay even for narrative focused adventure games and amount of dialogue that was 3 lines too long for what it needed to be really fits together when you learn about the game's 10 year development time. This is someone's baby, presumably a labour of love, but thats the thing, sometimes you need to detach yourself emotionally from your work and cut things when they don't actually add anything. The most damning thing of all, after all that, 8 goddamned hours (it felt twice that) I feel nothing. The game is nothing. I am nothing. We're all nothing. And I have 8 fewer hours now before I return to the nothingness of oblivion with little to show for it.

There's a story beat in Ys IX: Monstrum Nox where the large Pendleton company, the major employer within the city, has systematically disenfranchised the people of shantytown situated alongside the literal sewers. There's a chivalrous Robin Hood-esque figure who steals from the Pendleton company and gives to the poor residents, and the game's message is to admonish this figure for doing so by showing multiple scenes of the poor people being lazy and indolent and wasting the assistance on booze. The ending to this particular subplot is so blatant as to be insulting - the solution is to start your own business and show the rest of peasantry that you can climb out of the sewers with hard work (and perhaps some generous private subsidies). This is the product of Japanese sociocultural attitudes toward capitalism, much like its partners in the West. Poverty is treated as an individualist issue, one inextricably tied to moral fundamentalism. You're poor because you have bad habits. I'm rich because I work hard. It's worse than garbage writing, its some of the most irresponsible neoliberal wankery I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. Game sucks.

100% achievements.

November 6th, 2023, marks the day I would begin my journey of playing Hellsinker. 5 months and a day to be exact. With interest spawning from a stray suggestion by a friend of mine, this would quickly result in an obsessive play-through which then graduated to an obsessive achievement hunt which would THEN go on infiltrate my personal life via absolutely wreaking havoc on my sleep schedule, even hijacking my dreams.

And I couldn't be more thankful.

Quite honestly, I'm not sure where to take this review, I'll let my fingers glide along the keyboard and post whatever crops up.

At 89.1 hours, Hellsinker sits comfortably at my #5 most played game on Steam. Despite this, I've only gone on to engage with the game in its entirety through the lens of 1 character. The game features 4 characters, 1 of which has 4 "Ordinance Packages" which change up their loadout. Essentially, this 1 character is 4 though their endings remain the same between loadouts. This leaves me with a staggering 1/7 true completion. In addition to this, each character does have a unique ending depending on their TLB progression, not viewable within the game's text sequence viewer. Though I've already gone ahead and watched a video showing their contents (SPOILERS (DUH!)), I'd still love to play the game to experience them firsthand.

Alright, what more is there left for me do? Surely after that I would have completed EVERYTHING there is to this game... right?

WRONG! THERE'S SO MUCH! THERE'S QUITE FRANKLY TOO MUCH! AND I THINK THE FUNNIEST PART HAS TO BE HOW ABSOLUTELY UNINTENDED MOST OF THE EXTRA STUFF IS!

I'll start by introducing this game's older sibling, Radio Zonde. Yes, I have played the game before, but I haven't really completed in a manner I find acceptable, so there's still this entire game for me to play. Much of the ideas regarding design both graphics and gameplay are very much seen within Hellsinker. 1CC for Radio Zonde TBD.

Following this game would then come Hellsinker but in the form of a demo, kinda? Colloquially the build is known as Hellsinker 0.95. This build is quite.... special. There's a bajillion changes from this version of the game to the Doujin and Steam releases and although I'd like to talk about them all day I'll spare this "review" the word count and cut to the main thing. This game, although presenting itself as a demo, actually holds within itself the entire game but more importantly the final stage(SPOILERS(AGAIN(DUH!))) accessible through dropping in some files graciously provided by the original poster. In a non-patched version, only stages 1-4 are playable. The cut special stages also feature 2 versions from what I understand looking at the channel. One version would then go on to become the Shrine seen in the Doujin and Steam release. The other version cut from the final releases feature something adjacent to a dungeon crawler style level (not spoilers).

Okay so. That's it right? Nothing more? There couldn't possibly be more?

But there is! All of these are from the game's Doujin release era (so like 2007-2011?) I'll tally up everything here:
>Doujin release (PURCHASED)
>Completion of said Doujin release (unsure if I'll do all characters TLB but I'll cross that bridge when I get there)
>Buying the fanzines (warning the page probably has some Not Safe For Work Ads so please use an adblocker <3 ) and then reading said fanzines (currently studying Japanese primarily for that)
>A 3D Hellsinker Railshooter fangame (Completed)
>A Puyo Puyo styled Hellsinker puzzle game (Completed)
>Another Hellsinker fangame though I don't really know what to compare this one to, check the IGDB page for more info (Completed)

...and that's it. At that point, I'll have fully exhausted myself on every possible official and unofficial expression of love for this game. Have I made it obvious enough how much I love this game?

I'm currently in ownership of pretty much every version of the game out there with their fan-patches in addition to the fan-games so if you'd like any of that please contact my either on Twitter or Discord @strawhatcanti. Thank you for reading. Until the next "review" goes up,

Keep your dignity.

Insanely creative “Choose your own Adventure” kind of mobile game, where I was scared that the phone limitations would result in Sorcery’s gameplay crying to be put onto something else, but instead it all really shined. It came off like reading and playing with a book you could actually interact with - it was perfect! The combat especially, which had a really creative and thought-provoking battle structure. The entire game really makes you sit and think each decision you make, while at the same time being kind enough to allow you to rewind if you really fucked yourself.

The only thing that pissed me off about Sorcery was how I finally got to the final destination and was told I had to go buy the second game to finish it! I was so invested too! Like come on, we were RIGHT THERE, MAN!!!

But besides that, Sorcery was an absolute treat to play with lots of replayability in deciding different ways to reach (or fail to reach) your goal. I really would rate this higher if not for the ending essentially being behind a paywall.

4/5

After hours. I am a single line across which all other lines unfold, slick, slipping. Going so fast the strands slide through the cracks of the emulator.

2:00 am. My automobile body funnelled into video-tunnels that stretch without end to the rhythm of nu-jazz beats. A drama that plays on repeat for my Pearl Blue Soul.

Someway, somehow, R4 reminds me of a Hong Sang-soo film.

It's a senseless comparison, played-out across mediums and genres but every time I come back to these tracks it persists, blends-in along the city lights and tire marks in my rear-view mirror.

There's a tension in this philosophy of drift, the joyous longing of century's sunset, that makes me pause for thought at the end of every race. The stories are so simple, the game presented with such expert straightforwardness, as to blur the feeling itself in Camarro-yellows.

Still, where I think this iteration of Ridge Racer joins the cinema of the author is in that insistence to make flows coexist - rub emotion and expression against one another in ways most often hidden - and leave the outbursts at the edges of the screen.

The speed of Ridge Racer is the pace of life itself but for all its glamour breathlessness the moments that truly stir are those near-misses, the curves in a length of road where the vehicle goes slightly out of control and you brush past a rival. The little encounters. The seconds where the heart stops. I wish I could've held-on to your hand a horizon longer.

Type 4s and margaritas, that’s all I want for the summer.

The Dread X Collection is… a hybrid anthology/game jam which asked one thing of ten different indie horror devs: distill the horror game of their dreams into a short playable teaser. To that end, the prompt was executed in a variety of ways: some of the games in the pack beg the question of how they could even be extended further, given how complete they feel as standalone experiences, while others… definitely feel more like a proof of concept than something that stands on its own. It’s a smorgasbord of different ideas and executions, the quality varying wildly between each game in the pack, which… as someone who loves horror, and new ideas, and analyzing what works and what doesn’t, this is my shit.

So here are my thoughts on each game, organized by the order in which I played them. There’s a little ranking at the end in case you’re interested, but without any further ado:

THE PAY IS NICE:
I like some of the stuff going on here — I’m into the theming around what we’ll excuse or stomach if it’s part of our job, and I love the diegetic representation of the fixed camera angles as security cameras automating your every move — but the writing is… not quite there, and sadly there’s a glitch where there’s no animation for walking backwards so I ended up just zooming everywhere through the facility which kind of undercut a lot of what the game was trying to build up. I could definitely see this working a bit more if it was longer (diegetically represent the daily grind by making you do the same thing over and over again, maybe), but as is… it’s a bit hamfisted and abrupt to really work, IMO.

DON’T GO OUT:
This honestly has a ton of potential as a (theoretically) full game. I love the idea of a horror/slasher-themed deckbuilder/roguelike/RPG thing, and I’m into a lot of the mechanics here — how you need slowly-fading torchlight to see through the fog of war, how the arena becomes smaller with each turn, the focus on using the cards you get to just try and survive rather than clear an objective or win… I’d be super down for this to be expanded on. Right now though… there isn’t particularly much here — it’s precisely one level, where the only difference between easy victory and near unavoidable defeat is… whether the player is able to find a specific door while in complete darkness, which… doesn’t provide a particularly engaging experience. I absolutely see the potential in this and really hope this gets made into something full, but the playable teaser in itself does… not have a lot to it.

HAND OF DOOM:
This was pretty cool. This is a throwback to some of the old early dungeon crawler games (honestly reminiscent of Virtual Hydlide, at least in terms of how it looks), complete with a menu that takes up two-thirds of the screen and a… rather fun magic system where you have to press buttons to physically chant out each spell. Getting new spells — and using them to progress forward — is one of the coolest things about this game, and even if it is a bit simplistic and more of a demo/proof-of-concept than a game of its own I still had a ton of fun with it. Super happy that this one in particular got expanded into a full experience. The 20-30 minutes of it I played really delivered in selling me on the concept.

SUMMER NIGHT:
Frankly, I’m… not particularly sure how this could even be seen as the start of something larger, given how complete of an experience it feels on its own. The game does build up fairly well, starting off as a really accurate game-and-watch throwback which is fairly fun in its own right, and as the game progresses, so too do things stop being quite what they seem, in a way that interfaces rather well with how the game adds new mechanics to up the ante. I’d knock it down a bit mostly due to how there are… so many periods where you’re just waiting for the game to continue — I guess it’s meant to make the player more unsettled, but it felt more like dead air than anything — but aside from that this was a super solid standalone experience. Easily the highlight of the pack.

OUTSIDERS:
This one… I might have been a bit too fatigued to really appreciate it while I was playing it. It’s… almost like a survival horror roguelike, in a way. You have to scour an empty, unfamiliar house to find items (primarily keys) that let you solve puzzles, which all coalesce to perhaps let you out… except, secretly, there’s a time limit, and when your stumbling around the house not quite knowing what to do leads you to run out of time, you’re forced to start over again… but with all the items in different spots. I won’t reveal anything after this point, but… as a whole it’s a really interesting take to make a time-attack survival horror, and I like the way the mechanics are justified thematically. I doooo however think that maybe the puzzling itself is a little weak: it’s mostly just “find item unlock way with item” puzzles, where most of the ultimate challenge ending up being having to find the keys you need in the hundreds of drawers within the house, something not helped by how the time limit slowly makes it impossible to actually see anything as all the lights around you get snuffed out. Still, I’m definitely intrigued by the main idea here, and definitely would be interested in seeing it expanded on, even if I maybe wasn’t the biggest fan of this particular demo. Also I SAW THOSE HQ_RESIDENTIAL_HOUSE ASSETS, YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME.

MR. BUCKET TOLD ME TO:
This one is a survival sim — one of the ones where you have to scavenge to keep your food and water and piss and shit meters up to keep yourself alive — and while it’s a bit simplistic by virtue of being a game jam game the core mechanic where each day you have to choose which of your tools to give up forever adds an interesting edge to it. I say ‘interesting’ because in practise it’s kind of like Don’t Go Out where you kind of have to know the specific answer or else you’re doomed to fail, but as a preview for a potential something larger I’m into what it’s going for: taking the way resource management works in these sorts of survival sims, and then through forcing you to get rid of your tools and scour the island for far less useful ways of feeding/hydrating/cleaning yourself slowly make it clear that this is more survival horror. Definitely think that if this goes in a little deeper on its mechanics and also gives the player a bit more of a setup/indication of how things work (I played this game twice in total and had no idea some things were in there until near the end of my second) I could definitely vibe with this as a full experience.

ROTGUT:
oh boy I do love walking down an empty tunnel for 15 minutes while absolutely nothing happens- wait what do you mean I have to walk the exact same distance back to the start- wait what do you mean the game glitched out and didn’t give me any ending- wait what do you mean my chair just fell apart irl and I have to get a new one before class starts-

THE PONY FACTORY:
This was a fun little boomer shooter. The short of the game is that you’re travelling through this abandoned factory for something that lies at the center of it, fighting creatures called “ponies” along the way, and… for the most part it works in how simple it is. I like the fact that you can’t carry your gun and your flashlight at the same time, forcing you into a situation where either you can see enemies but can’t fight back or you can fight back but can’t see them. I’m also into the level design — how conductive it is to surprise encounters, and how it changes up once you collect the something and you start going through the levels backwards to get out. I think the difficulty is tuned up a bit high — and I’m pretty sure switching down to an easier mode did nothing — but aside from that it was a neat way to spend ~30 minutes. Dunno how this would expand into a more “full” experience but I’d be down to see it.

SHATTER:
I love the vibes in this one, both in how it wears the PSX throwback graphical style (I love this one’s use of colours in particular, I feel like you never get to see lush greens and pinks in a game like this) and how much it evokes the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk dystopia it’s trying to be. In terms of being a teaser, it feels more like one to set up a world rather than to set up a game, and to that end it worked — I liked walking around and seeing and learning about where exactly I was. I… wasn’t particularly a fan of how restrictive and annoying the stamina bar is — for something that’s ostensibly a walking simulator most of the runtime, forcing you to walk super slow unless you get a secret upgrade just made going around everywhere much more of a chore than it had to be — but… yeah, I’m sold. Really wanna see what a bigger version of this is like.

CARTHANC:
This one’s sad because for as much production value is here and for how good the vibe is this felt more annoying to play than anything. I love the artstyle of, like, this alien temple that takes the aesthetic of ancient Egypt but adds a futuristic spin on it but the core of this is like, a first-person platformer — and not one that plays particularly well. The use of first-person makes your perspective rather limited in a way that makes platforming frustrating, since it’s hard to really gauge how good your jump is or where you are on a platform — I failed so many times because I’d accidentally walked off a platform before I jumped or because I was standing on something dangerous and didn’t know it. Combined with enemies who… basically scream in your ears constantly while they spawncamp you, and a lack of an idea on what the player is supposed to do at any point and… yeah. Like the idea, like how it looks, but god did this one feel so frustrating to play.

Summer Night > Hand of Doom > Shatter > The Pony Factory > Mr. Bucket Told Me To > Outsiders > Don’t Go Out > Carthanc > The Pay Is Nice > Rotgut