Nothing says “Gameboy” quite like a kitchen sink aesthetic and slightly melancholic music. Ok and slowdown, flickering, ghosting, compromised platforming, short game length…

I’ve actually played through this on og hardware a few times in the last couple of years, but today I played the whole game while Conbaby was napping. Sweet Prince… u would have loved Mario Land. I think this is a remarkable and charming game even though it’s basically an early tech demo for Mario Land 2.

But don’t let the HATERS bury the REAL STORY: the koopa sprite in Mario Land 1 is the CREAM of the crop. Conbaby core. The itsy bitsy teenie weenie… sprites are WONDERFUL.

"The enemy of this place is not the Golden Rule, but human failings"

I first heard of this game when it got released as there was a positive word of mouth spreading around it but I was very surprised to find out it had in fact started out as a Skyrim mod before expanding into a game in it's own right. Even with the positive reviews around it I still hesitated due to my dislike of the Elder Scrolls games but fortunately due to a user here duhnunuh and his perpetual steam giveaway I was given the chance to try this out. Having finished it 100% in two days my reservations were extremely unfounded. It's fantastic. I found myself absolutely engrossed in the city and story around it's Groundhog day time loop premise.

The Forgotten City is a hard game to actually discuss though as much of the joy of playing it is making the discoveries as the narrative unfolds. A couple of parts really made me go "well dam!" as I played through it. The short spoiler free version is that you wake up next to a river in modern times before stumbling into an underground Roman ruin whilst searching for a man who had entered it prior to you. Once in there you realise it's a one way entrance and you are now stuck inside except for a portal that takes you back 2000 years before when the city was still a vibrant community. To get out you need to find out why it became the ruin it was in your time and prevent it from happening.

Though it does have plenty of options, branches and endings the game is actually more linear than it appears overall with talking to all the residents of this ancient Roman city to unlock more information, items and quests to constantly progress with loop shortcuts built in once enough progress is made. It's a clever little game but the cast of characters and usage of history and myths is what really makes it such a winner for me. I love historical settings and though Rome is often used in large scale war games and gladiator titles it rarely gets as intimate a background as this. Conversations of normal people of the period, gods and politics all mixed in but each conversation actually serving a purpose to push the story along towards it's conclusion. The characters all have their own lives and backgrounds and although some are more important to the overall narrative than others they all feel like people rather than background models in the world. The small setting allows for the characters to each have their own personality, worries, history and flaws.

Outside of the dialogue and conversations you will spend your time exploring the location. The game is called the Forgotten City but it's more a small village or town than a city. There is still plenty to explore and see however with temples, markets, forums, caves and secrets. There is some occasional basic combat in first person which is kind of weak though extremely limited with only one section really requiring it as the main point is the mystery. If I'm really nit-picking flaws, some of the animations for their faces and how characters stand can pull you out of the immersion a little as they stare at you cross eyed. The thing is I actually do think it's a fantastic looking and sounding title overall. It has great art design, vistas, music and voice acting to pull it all together cohesively, especially for a game made by a core group of only 3 people from scratch off the back of a mod idea.

Overall I think this is a game that will stay with me for a long time that occasionally I will just think about. Whilst I like a great many games in a variety of genres there are only a few for their story that really stand out to me for the overall experience. Games like Soma, Mass Effect, 13 Sentinels and now, The Forgotten City. "The many shall suffer for the sins of the one?" No, no, no. The many shall enjoy due to the work of a few.

Recommended.

+ Great historical references, narrative and characters.
+ Gorgeous art design.
+ Just an engrossing experience.

- Combat though limited isn't that fun.

This will sound like a backhanded compliment but it almost cozy-ifies the classic survival horror. All the basics of the genre are there - the specific suite of weapons (handgun/shotgun/magnum/flamethrower), the UI aesthetics, save rooms, post-game unlocks etc. Yet both tonally and formally it is much less oppressive. Enemies and traps are plentiful but so are resources. The nasties themselves are gruesome and the environments dingy but the writing is frequently leaning towards the humorous and compassionate. The PS1-style, avowedly FF7-evoking graphics/framing of scenes, an OST that's low-key even when dissonant and lumpy character models imbue a sense of nostalgic warmth into things.

The game still carries an unnerving air as the walls groan and creak but it isn't 'scary' or tense in any real sense, more so a rather pleasant jaunt through a singular, heavily interconnected level. The satisfaction comes from the expected gameplay facets: uncovering new areas, becoming familiar with the various paths, solving the kinds of puzzles you've seen in RE/SH (with some charming mixups and occasionally multiple solutions/even multiple ways to find those solutions), finding keys, reading notes - you know the deal but it's all very well-crafted. Progression hits a sweet spot of not so taxing that you'll get stuck for ages yet sprinkles in enough moments where you have to actually stop and think or carefully observe your surroundings, with enemies more of a bit of light friction on top instead of a proper threat. There's a suprising flexibility to the order in which you can do things or when events play out to be discovered on multiple playthroughs. And, as is standard, with the genre replays are heavily incentivized via a nice compact runtime alongside getting higher completion ranks.

It's a strange experience, in a positive sense. A game that is recognisably 'survival horror' in all respects but ends up being comforting to play. Genuinely quite a feat to create something that replicates influences closely yet feels different due to just a few smart changes. The presentation is the big star of that. Every room is gorgeous and rich with atmosphere. Leverages an older style but adds to it using modern lighting techniques and grater detail, losing not an ounce of character in the process. Love some fixed camera angles but having control over the camera along only the horizontal axis is nice, it allows them to hide little things for you to find by rotating it, an almost diorama feel when combined with how the assets are constructed. Builds to a nice little mystery near the end of its story too. Strong, confident work! There's a hard mode coming in a future update for something a little spicier.

Well it's definitely better than Vampire Survivors! Unfortunately this game makes some baffling design decisions - some characters have functionally useless abilities, while other characters have abilities that can break the entire game in minutes. Also the game's color palette is appealing but for some ungodly reason the colors for enemy bullets and health pickups is identical, and the summons use the same colors as the enemies so at a certain point it becomes difficult to tell where your summons end and the waves of enemies begin. Overall a decently fun game that you can probably 'beat' in the first 2-3 hours.

Policy

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Recently a mild friend of mine and game designer I'm a huge fan of released a video about Vampire Survivors as a sort of 'non-game'. You can view it here. So I first want to say I respect where she is coming from and how a seasoned game designer sees the same exploitative psychology in slow upgrade action RPG rougelikes as having the same skinnerbox habits. Essentially, she demands a specific rage on a particular point, when talking about the game she notices the lack of combat design, that regardless of your loadout the approach is always the same, dodge into the infinite void. "This is not combat design, this is NOTHING".

This argument is well put and rhetorically focused, and the focus on not wasting audience time is an apt starting point for most sensible game experience vehicles (although it's exactly where stuff like The Beginner's Guide comes in to take friction, but I digress). However, I do feel like 20 Minutes Till Dawn has something to include into this sort of discussion.

20 Minutes Till Dawn is an absurdly, vastly, better game for anybody who has played it. There's aim based weapon variety which require aiming at the enemy + slightly increased obstacle evasion, better aesthetic sensibilities, and a 10 minute decrease in overall time spent with the game. And all the characters you can play are slender girls with aesthetic principles rather than just Castlevania cardboard cutouts. You would be surprised how much difference these small changes make to the game experience.

At 10 minutes in, the combat variety is increased with a boss fight in a limited section of the map, it's not just mindless shoot and dodge. Your character load outs are all different with different effects they have and guns they can choose from.

This is not to say that 20 Minutes Till Dawn is a game you should play, it still has a randomness factor in the level ups and permanent upgrades, along with a lack of enemy variety but there's a measurable improvement on all other areas of play. But it's also not one that I can say with any degree of reprehensibility that you shouldnt.

Most early arcade games were not actually intended to be played ad infinitum, and so didn't have much difficulty throttling besides endurance and usually underdesigned obstacles. One that comes to mind is shown in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters where one of the primary subject Steve Weibe tries for the high score on Donkey Kong. In it his 2 main obstacles to success here are endurance and behind the scenes corruption in the high scoring scene itself. Yet there's a few moments splintered throughout Donkey Kong as an endurance test where the obstacles prove as Absurd, particularly one moment the documentary goes in depth about is 3rd Elevators. As shown by the example here, this is not good game design, this is game design that you're purely trying to outperform against, it's gaming as a higher level endurance sport with these janky obstacle getting in the way, but when we talk about it from the perspective of 'pure design' it becomes obnoxiously under considered and frustrating. Vampire Survivors is trying to bring this older style of play and experience as a rigourous test of endurance into contemporary progression systems. The idea is that you will eventually learn more optimal builds and try to finesse around the randomness to your best ability and endure its counting clock to a satisfying end. It's a neat idea of course but as an actualization of that system it's a fucking failure due in large part to its genuine lack of difficulty in general. Vampire Survivors is easy and genuinely uninteresting, its popcorn entertainment you can bloat on. But 20 Minutes Till Dawn is by all metrics an improvement and an actualization on that system, one that I think could be further improved upon but it a great step in the right direction, with fair inputs and a decent balance of difficulty and variety. The variety offered from skilled play means improvement exists.

The issue though is that 20 Minutes Till Dawn is a blatant clone of Vampire Survivors. We can't talk about it without admitting its apeing the formula with the exception of course that some people will decide to play it first.

Sometimes when we write about genres we don't like, I think we have a habit of trying to 'outsmart' the habits of the average gamer by implying that what they are doing is lackluster. The mobile gamer is a moron because Candy Crush is worse Bewjewled and they are both braindead match threes. FPS games are needlessly violent but its also point and click, nevermind that COD, TF2, and Splatoon all play and look completely differently. Incremental games are often derided as 'cookie clickers' and with the forward momentum of socio-cultural movement the nuances and interests start to roll into one another.

In the beginning of July, a close online friend of mine Nyx, who is a fashionista and film geek came over to my parents house which at 25 I'm still trapped in. I sat around with extreme anxiety about 'what were we going to do'. I didn't like going outside, and I was nervous about the fact all I had to do was really play on a computer. But those anxieties were severely eased when I realized how low maintenance my friend Nyx was, me and her would play this game a half dozen times in the morning hopping on and off the 1 player remote commenting on the general improvements as they happened. "I unlocked a new character!"..."Check out this new gun!". "Woah there's an upgrade system in here I didn't even know about". etc.

It was a blast and made me realize a certain nuance, a zen and kinship to gaming that is often ineffable to describe. And while I'm often deeply wracked with regret and anxiety I'll always look positively on this experience as I used to in a similar way when I went over to my other friends house and played Bloodbourne on her PS5 and traded idle chatter between some of the most incredible moments in a game. Or when the love of my life was around with me as I played the frustrating and slow No More Heroes system on the Wii as she cheered me on.

For me, gaming is one of the most deeply engrained social experiences I have, and a game constantly demanding a perfect difficulty curve is not always wanted. As much as you can trash something like Vampire Survivors, its Action RPG rougelite elements share a degree with Spelunky etc. It shares an 'evasion mechanic' with Binding of Isaac which despite Nyx's limited experience with games shares it as a favourite 'time waster' game.

But no matter what there will be downtime or lulls or things that are not perfect, things that are innovated eventually with time. Vampire Survivors had to walk so that 20 Minutes Till Dawn could take stride, and who knows, there will be another game in this genre yet we dont even know about. But it takes time, and game design is a paintbrush with time itself as the chronological palette. For what other art form has racing through the painting or enduring through it as long as possible as a genuinely lauded sport you can improve on. If nothing else I thank videogames for being able to give me an innovative solution to a long standing anxiety I have around how to passively loiter time with your friends, and with yourself. Videogame's are not limited to just doing this of course, but its one hell of an advantage its history benefits from. Most people I've seen successfully play Vampire Survivors with merit, have done it while streaming or with friends. I think its a bad game, but only in part because I know what the next best thing is and that's where I feel the focus is worth bringing. This is also why I don't believe in intellectual property rights, you could quite easily argue that 20 Minutes Till Dawn as a paid for 'mod' of Vampire Survivors in an abstract sense, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. There's lots of mods for Slay the Spire that use the engine itself. Lots of great games are really just borrowing a large degree of its resources from something else. I believe all people who make games or mods of games deserve financial compensation for their work without the threat of jail by those who own the original assets. As this game genre continues to mutate it'll begin to harmonize more with what Heather desires in these sorts of games, not less.

Games that tell stories only capable of being relayed through the medium of gaming will always hold a special place in my heart. Since my first encounters with video games as a whole, I've never quite found any method of storytelling to even compare to it. Sure, the occasional film or manga or what have you might catch my attention, but those I hold at the peak of any other medium don't really come close to the experiences I've had with gaming.

Return of the Obra Dinn has once again solidified this idea for me, and it does so in such a way where I feel that everything within the experience is deserving of commendation. The actors, writing, art, music, and everything all together unite for an extremely fleshed out and cohesive experience that held my attention the whole way through. I believe this holds true for much of the game's playerbase due to the incredible completion rates seen on each of the achievements. Return of the Obra Dinn manages to create a very unique gameplay loop I haven't quite seen elsewhere, it's an incredibly fresh and engaging experience that I feel anyone with a brain could hold appreciation for. It might not be a grand story in comparison to other titles of today, but it sure as hell is a good one, a GREAT one.

A game that will constantly have you thinking, theorizing, trying new things, finding new angles, and most importantly, keeping you engaged following through its bizarre and beautiful storytelling. This is a game that I believe couldn't and shouldn't be passed up, if you're interested, play it. You won't regret it.

i really really don't like this style of writing? i don't know how to describe it other than exceedingly zoomer-ish. it's just the vibe it has going on - it feels really stilted, unnatural, is a headache to keep track of, and often just fills like taking up space until you get to what the game is actually about, which is also very obvious unfortunately. it goes on and on and on, with very flowery and winding narration/description, but it's never really in service of anything or communicating anything to the player. the dialogue can be even worse sometimes, characters just going on and on about nothing. it's just exceedingly overwrought, it feels like a first draft that needed many more lookovers, many more eyes on it, people asking the writer what exactly she meant by some of the lines in here, and changing those so that they can be better understood. idk, maybe it's a skill issue, but i've read more than a few visual novels (though admittedly not a lot) and this one has the worst prose by a good margin i'd say.

as an aside that isn't directly connected to the game, but i'm really tired of religion (christianity) being just. Evil. in every queer story it's in. like i understand why, it's very obvious why, but as someone who has christian queer/trans friends, i would really like to experience more stories that weren't so black and white with this kind of thing

(i didn't know how to put this into the review but the sound mixing is also really bad, the music at the end of the normal routes is so much louder than the rest of the soundtrack it made me jump in my chair lol)

" Alright we're in charge of localizing this, what's the story like again? "

" The world in the near future reached such a stage of late unregulated liberalism that 2 companies have more power than every other nation combined, and they declare war against one another because they would rather destroy half the world than not have a total market monopoly. "

" Hmmm how about we change that so that capitalism is good actually and there's a shadow government manipulating those companies who are innocenet and don't know any better (also their leader is named Aurora, thats important), and when you beat them... you achieve eternal world peace? "

" Sure. "

Ico is the type of game I dread to play, critically acclaimed, landmark classic of the medium, influenced various games and designers I love. I dread playing those because of a fear I have, a fear that's come true : I don't like ICO, in fact, I think I might hate ICO. And now I will have to carry that like a millstone around my neck, "that asshole who doesn't like ICO". Its not even really that external disapproval I dread, its the very reputation that causes me to second guess my own sincerely held opinions. I thought I liked minimalism in game design, and cut-scene light storytelling and relationships explored through mechanics but I guess I don't. There's some kinda dissonance, cognitive or otherwise reading reviews by friends and writers I respect and wondering if there's something wrong with me or if I didnt get it or played it wrong or any other similar foolishness that gets bandied around in Internet discussions. "I wish we could have played the same game" I think, reading my mutuals' reviews of ICO. Not in a dismissive asshole way of accusing them of having a warped perception, but moreso in frustration that I didnt have the experience that has clearly touched them and countless others.

But enough feeling sorry for myself/being insecure, what is my problem with ICO exactly? I don't really know. Genuinely. I wasnt even planning on writing a review originally because all it would come down to as my original unfiltered reaction would be "Playing it made me miserable". Thankfully the upside of minimalism in game design is that its easier to identify which elements didnt work for me because there are few in the game. I think the people who got the most out of ICO developed some kind of emotional connection to Yorda, and thats one aspect which absolutely didn't work for me. As nakedly "gamey" and transparently artificial as Fallout New Vegas' NPCs (and Skyrim and F3 etc) locking the camera to have a dialogue tree, they read to me as infinitely more human than the more realistic Yorda; for a few reasons. Chief among them is that despite some hiccups and bugs the game is known for, you are not asked to manage them as a gameplay mechanic beyond your companions and well, my main interaction with Yorda was holding down R1 to repeatedly yell "ONG VA!" so she'd climb down the fucking ladder. She'd climb down, get halfway through and then decide this was a bad idea and ascend again.

ICO has been to me a game of all these little frustrations piling up. Due to the nature of the puzzles and platforming, failing them was aggravating and solving them first try was merely unremarkable. It makes me question again, what is the value of minimalism genuinely? There was a point at which I had to use a chain to jump across a gap and I couldnt quite make it, I thought "well, maybe theres a way to jump farther" and started pressing buttons randomly until the circle button achieved the result of letting me use momentum to swing accross. Now, if instead a non-diegetic diagram of the face buttons had shown up on the HUD instead what would have been lost? To me, very little. Sure, excessive direction can be annoying and take me out of the game, but pressing buttons randomly did the same, personally. Nor did "figuring it out for myself" feel particularly fulfilling. Thats again what I meant, victories are unremarkable and failures are frustrating. The same can be said for the combat which, honestly I liked at first. I liked how clumsy and childish the stick flailing fighting style was, but ultimately it involved hitting the enemies over and over and over and over again until they stopped spawning. Thankfully you can run away at times and rush to the exit to make the enemies blow up but the game's habit of spawning them when you're far from Yorda or maybe when she's on a different platform meant that I had to rely on her stupid pathfinding to quickly respond (which is just not going to happen, she needs like 3 business days to execute the same thing we've done 5k times already, I guess the language barrier applies to pattern recognition as well somehow) and when it inevitably failed I would have to jump down and mash square until they fucked off.

I can see the argument that this is meant to be disempowering somehow but I don't really buy it. Your strikes knock these fuckers down well enough, they just keep getting back up. Ico isnt strong, he shouldnt be able to smite these wizard of oz monkeys with a single swing, but then why can they do no damage to ICO and get knocked down flat with a couple swings? Either they are weak as hell but keep getting remotely CPRd by the antagonist or they're strong but have really poor balance. In the end, all I could really feel from ICO was being miserable. I finished the game in 5 hours but it felt twice that. All I can think of now is that Im glad its done and I can tick it off the bucket list. I am now dreading playing shadow of the colossus even harder, and I don't think I ever want to play The Last Guardian, it just looks like ICO but even more miserable. I'm sure I've outed myself as an uncultured swine who didnt get the genius of the experience and will lose all my followers but I'm too deflated to care. If there is one positive to this experience is that I kept procrastinating on finishing the game that I got back into reading. I read The Name of the Rose and Rumble Fish, pretty good reads. Im going to read Winesburg Ohio next I think.

A person's tolerance for Harold Halibut is going to depend on how much mileage they get out of slower games where inhabiting the space and conversations are the key focus, rather than anything resembling moment to moment gameplay.

I don't blame anyone who doesn't get on with that or think that any single approach is objectively better or worse, but I was drawn in by the game's beautiful handcrafted aesthetic and its hold on me never really faltered throughout the runtime. The ship you live on is full of memorable characters with their own unique idiosyncrasies, all helped along by a strong voice work - for Harold specifically there's a great balance between goofy ignorance and sentimentality, and that personality is probably one of the major factors that kept me going.

But I must emphasise again that this is a very slow game and there are quirks that come with that - sometimes your movement speed is slowed to a crawl as you'e made to follow another character, sometimes the dialogue goes on a little longer than expected, and this will put some people off. Thankfully for me, I used that time to take in the absolutely gorgeous world, animation and the small details dotted around all the locations you visit.

Ninth bar.
"My, my, my", you say as you take a sip from your 300$ cup of Dom Pérignon, "what a misstep from a professional violinist that is..."
Little did you know that only a couple of minutes later you will get blown off orbit by Alfred Schnittke, inevitably staining your way-too-expansive-for-the-average-joe-huh costume.

For a (broad) genre that is so commonly associated with elitism and bourgeoisie, using atonality in classical music has always been a hell of a thing as it directly challenges orthodox forms of Western music but also goes against the conservatism way of seeing everything under the veil of """beauty""".

Most of the droning conversations surrounding Drakengard are about its janky (to say the least) gameplay and whether or not this was Yoko Taro's intent (as if meaning slipping away from the artist's hands would undermine all artistic value).
There's little to no room for discussion about these ear-scorching violins, making a soundtrack exclusively out of unapologetically aggressive sound collages in a world of grand melodramatic orchestras and nice subtle ambient tracks is a hell of a feast from Nobuyoshi Sano and Takayuki Aihara.

Heck, I'd even argue that it doesn't even serve as a mere companion piece for Drakengard, this is as much of an incredible exploration of the cycle of violence as the whole design use of detachment from death games usually provide, and both the soundtrack and the core game are much more effective at doing so than most works wearing their "so subversive" title up their sleeves I've experienced yet.

I want more abrasive and nightmarish soundscapes to drown in, this is pure hell through and through, I am crying, I am curled up in a ball, I feel like shit, I am gasping for air, I need more.

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