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.

3.5/5

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

Beneath the surface of Resident Evil 4 Remake’s 4K high-definition models, textures, and overly-polished sterile gameplay lies the rotting reactionary corpse of modernity. Resident Evil 4 Remake represents the logical end-point for art under late-stage capitalism, where creators are in a petrified state of artistic stasis where everything old must be modernised, updated, and ‘fixed’. I cannot bring myself to care about this game or the two remakes that preceded it. It’s become a homogenous and trite blob of nothingness, void of any soul or integrity.

I loved and enjoyed the game with all my heart. It was all I wanted from Dragons Dogma 2, simply more Dragons Dogma. And in the first 30 hours or so I was really satisfied with all of that. Unfortunately, as you progress you realize that the first 30 hours cover all the variety the game has to offer. After that the experience unfortunately becomes somewhat stale.
I had to put the game down after 40 hours or so and I'm mildly disappointed at the lack of innovation, but I also have to admit that before I put it down, I had some of the most fun I've had with a game in a long, long while. Though I haven't finished it, I'm satisfied putting it down now and just reflect on the fun this game brought me.

It Comes In Waves was a lovely little surprise for me. Ive been kind of on a low poly/empty-ish world withdrawal since Automaton Lung and this looked like it might fill the void and indeed it did. Gameplay wise its a sort of openworld exploration game with survival mechanics and whilst I am not one to usually try to be reductive with comparisons, I definitely got some vibes reminding me of other games which I feel I should mention.

The minimalistic exploration of a desert environment reminds me a bit of Sable, the setting is StarWars adjacent, or at least the stuff StarWars stole from Dune. The harshness, raiders, desert and survival mechanics smack a bit of Fallout 1 but with a more consistent tone and the basic premise and mechanic of simply walking about with a speciment behind your back you are trying to grow and deliver does sort of remind one of Death Stranding.

It achieves that wonderful thing that many go to Pathologic and such games for where even the act of walking around holding the W key can be tense and engaging. You are constantly running out of water and need to refill it by either scavenging it from the wild or killing raiders for it (this second one is usually a pittance and they're not all that common that you could rely on it). You are also looking for upgrades to your water tank's efficiency so you can be more resilient, as well as other pistols if you really want to, but combat is more of an afterthought, you can reliably get through the game with the starter pistol. Now whilst I did die once (the game has permadeath, it sends you right back to the start) the game really isnt hard at all, as long as you explore everything and are mildly observant you'll not likely run out of water and should get to the end fairly comfortably, not that you know that going in of course.

"It Comes In Waves" - the title of the game is of course a reference to grief and the grieving process in general. The game manages with very little dialogue and a silly star wars esque setting to do some pretty clever things which I really dont want to spoil for anyone who's interested in the game, I would urge anyone who is to try it out, its like 2.5 euro or something and lasts like an hour or maybe more depending on playstyle and competence.

SPOILERS BELOW
The central theme of It Comes in Waves is grief of course. The character is, without much in the way of exposition established as grieving the loss of a companion for who's demise they feel guilty. A rather effective thing is done in the intro wherein you start In Media Res in a sort of Mos Eisley type place with several NPCs being either patronising or hostile. At first you are both curious but also very confused, mirroring the initial shock that accompanies loss in many cases in the player character with that of the player. After the fact you may realize that some of the villagers seemingly blame you also for the loss of your (thats never really said either, sibling/lover/friend? who can say) companion and so you move on to the desert on a ritual to take and grow a specimen to the sanctuary to redeem yourself. This is both literally a way to cope with the loss (its revealed at the end that the specimen was in fact a flower to take to the grave of your lost loved one, a pretty powerful offering given the scarcity of water in this desert world) but also can be taken to symbolise the grieving process, with its ups and downs, constant discovery and rocky start.

It is said sometimes that videogames can be unsuited to the Three Act Structure because the emotional journey of mastery of most videogames do not match the general narrative structure of the Hero's Journey and stuff like that : the moment before the climax our Hero will be at their darkest hour/lowest point whereas in a typical game we are the complete opposite, at our highest point in mastery ready to overcome the final obstacle. I think what this game made by Mexican Solo Dev Antonio Freyre understands, maybe unintentionally is that the structure does map more accurately to the typical process of coping with loss. Confusion and shock followed by a rocky but enlightening journey with ups and downs yes but overall getting more comfortable by the end wherein the challenge and danger still exist in the game as well as the pain and longing do too but at a much lower intensity. I cannot speak for everyone, but I found it pretty apt. A very meditative game I am very glad I found.

"It Comes In Waves but it never fully disappears"

Do you like music? Me too, man.

One of my favourite albums of all time is Devin Townsend’s legendary prog metal musical, Ziltoid the Omniscient. It came out on May 21st 2007 and it’s something of a marvel, being an album developed entirely by Devy himself. Instruments, recording, mixing, cuts, you name it, he did it. It’s really special to me, and I go back to it every other month. Clocking in at just under an hour - a rarity for prog albums - it has a peerless blend of chunky riffs, auditory storytelling, comedic timing and pacing. Before I gave up on tattoos (don’t have the skin for it - literally), I really wanted the Ziltoid logo on my upper arm.

7 years later, after much begging from fans and several other albums, Devin Townsend came back with Z², the sequel album. Boasting a fucking massive production posse, a much longer runtime and a whole other album packaged in, it’s… Fine. Despite everything being bigger and grander, it’s only a little better than the first album and lacks a lot of the zest which came from being a solo production. By no means a bad album, it’s upstaged by a solo project from 2007 in a lot of ways and for many people it revealed that the original album’s limitations might have bred a greater final product.

Dragon’s Dogma 1 came out in 2012 after a now-notoriously agonizing development process that resulted in a vast majority of their ideas being cut out to meet the deadline set by the suits and an ever-shrinking budget. Capcom really wanted DD1 to be the start of a big series, capitalising on the then-rising popularity of Western RPGs like Skyrim and The Witcher 2. Naturally, it was a flop and the ‘franchise’ was silently canned despite the game attaining cult classic status.

I have been playing DD1 for about 11~ years now. I own it on every single platform it was ever released on and on each of those platforms I have near-perfect saves with both the postgame and Bitterblack Isle cleared in their entirety. I’ve played that game so often that, if I were so inclined, I could do a full playthrough in my mind because I know the game world and quest flow off by heart. I have, and frequently do, give people directions around the world without any need to consult a map or a video or boot the game.

To potentially state the obvious: I am something of a Dragon’s Dogma megafan.

Among people like me, who’re so hungry for new morsels of DD content that we begrudgingly consumed (and loathed) the Netflix series, the hypothetical Original Version of DD1 has attained something of a mythological status. The idea of a ‘complete’ DD1 with Elf villages and beastmen and a whole other continent and the like is just so endlessly intoxicating to a group who’re already enamoured with the best-attempt game we already have.

Dragon’s Dogma 2, judging by the year of comments Hideaki Itsuno has been making about the game, is that mythical Original Version. Complete with Elves, Beastmen, other continents, and more! The prevailing sentiment among older fans was that, given a proper budget and all the technical prowess of the RE Engine and enough time, Itsuno would finally make a True Dragon’s Dogma successor!

Instead he… Kinda just made Dragon’s Dogma 1 again? But bigger, and naturally with the problems that come from increasing the scale and scope.

My first sight upon booting the game was the title screen which rather curiously calls the game “DRAGON’S DOGMA” without any numbers. This, sadly, turned out to be an omen.

I normally like to open with a game’s positives before I get into the issues, which is a problematic methodology to have with a game like this. I’m not going to get into it now, but a lot of what’s good about DD2 is also really really bad when viewed holistically.

On the combat front, it’s better than ever. It’s snappy and responsive and the addition of Vocation Actions (block for Fighters, dodge for Thieves, shoulder charge for Warriors, etc etc) adds a lot to the overall flow of combat. New core skills really help too; Sorcerer gets one to speed up cast timers in exchange for a huge stamina drain which I’m really fond of.
It is DD1’s combat, but better! Especially now that stagger is a mechanic and melee classes can now deal respectable damage without spamming either ‘the damage skill’ or mashing attack.

Vocations, too, have seen a tweak. Realizing just how redundant most of them became in DD1, hybrid vocations were binned and now everyone uses just one weapon - which might seem bad at first but everything is so much more fleshed out and roles more clearly defined. It’s easy to miss Assassin for a bit until you sink your teeth into Thief and realise it’s still there, baby.
Archer and Thief both benefit the most; no longer awkwardly fused to two other vocations they’re now allowed to shine and they’re honestly phenomenal. Warrior meanwhile has had a near-total rework into a more tanky DPS class (rather than the weird and seemingly unfinished mess it was in DD1) which comes with tasty charge attacks, a timing mechanic for faster hits and lots of juicy interactions with the game’s stagger mechanics.
And god, the unlockable vocations are a dream. Thief capitalises on the more gamey world design to allow some utterly amazing stuff with lures and traps, Mystic Spearhand is an intravascular injection of Devil May Cry into the game, Magick Archer is mostly untouched from DD1 and is still a blast, and Warfarer is a joy just for having a high skill ceiling compared to every other vocation - also it lets you wear basically anything which is great for the fashion obsessed.

Likewise, the world design is excellent. It’s very, very gamey; the entire thing is a series of ambush spots, winding paths, sharp turns to hide enemies, precarious ledges and unsubtle platforming spots. It is, somewhat ironically, a better fusion of FromSoft level design philosophy and open world design trends than FromSoft’s own attempts on that front.
Traversing it is a joy both because it’s beautiful and because there’s a decent amount of pacing to the environment that stops excessive amounts of holding forward + sprint. Not to mention the distribution of side stuff. I noticed more than a few places and distractions that were hidden on the way towards something, but clear as day while backtracking. That’s good world design right there.

Pawn AI might be the biggest improvement though; they’re not geniuses, but they’re no longer actively suicidal and grossly negligent. They use curatives, have defined priorities based on their (NOW IMMUTABLE, CONCRETE) inclination, are much less likely to use charge-up skills against an enemy that dances around constantly, and for enemies like Golems they’ll bother to target weak spots. Hurrah!

And, above all else, I need to admire Itsuno’s commitment to his vision for a bit. This is a decidedly old-school RPG, I’d honestly argue it has more in common with Wizardry and Ultima or whatever tickles your fancy. The Eternal Ferrystone is gone, even as a reward. You get oxcarts for diegetic ‘fast travel’, Ferrystones are lootable and Portcrystals are doled out sparingly to give you some fast travel points. Otherwise, you’re walking everywhere. Every bit of damage you take slightly reduces your max healable HP, meaning that even effortlessly stomping trash mobs on the overworld will gradually wear you down, necessitating resting at campfires - using consumable camp kits that’re at risk of being broken.

For the first few hours and much of the first reason, none of these were issues.

Which, in itself, became an issue.

Much of my earliest time in DD2 was defined by me saying just how much they kept from DD1! The encounter placement, the stuff tucked away, the way every NPC speaks in that weird faux-medieval theatrical cadence, the way quests unfold and silent tutorials are dotted around the land…

My later hours in DD2 were defined by me realizing that the game, in most respects, is just DD1 again but bigger.

Just like last time you start in a near-wilderness and go to an encampment where you get one diversionary quest and your main pawn. Soon after you make your way to a big city where 10-15 quests pop up in the first 15 minutes and then no more. After a lot of exploring, some of which involves a shrouded forest and a hidden village and some politicking at capital, you’re shunted off elsewhere because the plot demands it and fuckery is afoot.

The problems start to arise when one considers the scale of this game. I can forgive a lot of the above in DD1 because it’s a very compact experience. Like I said before, the world map was comparatively tiny.

DD2’s is huge, but the content density hasn’t changed at all, which makes the game feel like a ghost town? When you first arrive in Vernworth you get a lot of quests immediately, which might imply the game is a lot denser than its predecessor, but the ones that aren’t “go here, come back” are mere fetch quests that occasionally have a boss enemy at the end. Not a unique one, either, but ones you’ll likely have already found by exploring or even on the way there.
NPCs are… Basically the exact same, too? I wasn’t expecting in-depth CRPG-esque interactions with them, but nothing has changed from DD1. They dispense a quest and, when done, return to being random voices among the crowd of their home turf.

And the world itself… You know, the word ‘friction’ comes up a lot in discussions around this game and rightly so. It’s very obvious from the get-go that even the mere act of exploration is meant to induce friction. Enemies gradually wear you down on the world map, necessitating avoidance of some fights if you can help it due to finite resources, and the world is structured to make detours risky due to deliberately awful lines of sight.

The problem is that there still isn’t any friction because the game is comically easy.

Even before getting into the actual gameplay, camp sites are scattered around the world with reckless abandon which allows for nearly unlimited free healing and buffs so long as you have a camp kit & meat. Much of the hypothetical friction dissolves once this becomes apparent and it completely annihilates any feeling of being ‘lost in the wilderness’ that DD1 sometimes had.

All the changes and buffs to combat up above mean that the player and their pawns are more powerful than ever. There are plenty of panic buttons, fast-casting nukes, evasive options and counters alongside a relatively high amount of free gear.
But what’s really worse is the enhancement system. Each culture has its own smithing style: Vermundian is balanced, Battahli is Strength/Defense focused, and Elven is Magick/Magick Defense oriented. There are two others, or one if you discount dragonforging.
This seems cool on paper, but what it really does is cause a serious amount of stat bloat. Weapons only use one stat for damage, meaning it’s easy to just hop off to the appropriate merchant and get +100~ damage for a pittance of effort and money.
Money, too, is surprisingly commonplace. Simple expeditions into the wild or even A-B-C-A trips would see me coming home with full coffers, which in turn meant mass gear purchases and upgrades.

Together, nothing can pose a challenge. It’s trivial, with even a modest time investment, to reach 500~ or so in your offensive stat by the midgame and hell, compared to the first game it’s actually a smart idea to kit out your hired pawns rather than cycling them - money is just that commonplace.

A lot of these can be considered the developers ‘fixing’ perceived issues with the first game, especially when one considers that vocations now come with their own base stats to prevent accidental softlocks, but in ‘fixing’ these non-issues they’ve made the game a joke.

My first Drake kill wasn’t triumphant or cool. I rolled up to it and killed it in about 5 minutes. End of the Struggle - this franchise’s fantastic ‘YOU’RE ALMOST THERE!’ theme - barely got to peak before it dropped dead. I dread how they’d balance any DLC.

The enemy roster is near-entirely pulled from the first game and its expansion, with many of the ‘new’ enemies being simple reskins of existing enemies, meaning you’ll get tired of Harpy/Bandit/Saurian/Goblin variants that permeate the world. It was harrowing to get to the last region and find out that my ‘new’ threats were Saurians but red and Harpies but black.

As for boss and miniboss enemies… God they could’ve used some sub-variants or something. The Volcanic Island, this game’s final region, still throws Ogres/Minotaurs/Chimeras/Cyclopes at you. The relative lack of variety leads to the game and its exploration rapidly becoming exhausting, because it’s a gigantic swimming pool but the bag of tricks meant to fill it is the size of a teacup.
I praise Bitterblack Isle a lot despite it being a combat gauntlet because there is so much going on there, and so many enemies. Even its reskins add new layers to the fight - like my beloved Gorecyclops. DD2’s brand-new enemies are cool, and your first fight with them will usually be a treat, but after that they become rote. Speedbumps, not triumphs.

Dungeons are basically gone now, too. Nothing like the Everfall, Gran Soren’s Catacombs, the Greatwall, or the Mountain Waycastle. Just caves and mines, caves and mines, caves and mines… caves… mines… the odd ruin… Fuck. There’s so many. It’s like Skyrim but with worse design, somehow.

As I trudged through DD2’s main story, I found myself longing for the postgame. I’m really fond of The Everfall and Bitterblack Isle for being steep hurdles designed for more devoted players to test their builds and equipment on, but… There isn’t one? Postgame has some new boss fights but there’s no final dungeon experience or final exam. The world state change isn’t as intense as DD1’s either.

To speak on plot for a bit, I feel it occupies a really unfortunate place. If you’ve played DD1, you know what’s going on. There’s no real surprises here. If you haven’t played DD1, then you’ll be surprised to find a plot that’s underbaked and somewhat anticlimactic, driven more by excuses than anything of substance.

I think about Pookykun’s Baldur’s Gate 3 review a lot when it comes to RPGs, and doubly so while playing this game.

There are moments in this game that’re outright magical, immersive without peer. All of them are quiet moments with unsheated weapons: Traversing Battahli roads at sundown and seeing the vast temples of Bakbattahl pierce the skyline. Stumbling upon the Ancient Battleground and poking through wrecks from a cataclysmic event long before my time. Seeing the glimmer of a campfire stick out from the trees that dot Vermund’s many forests. Oceanside strolls through the Volcanic Island.
I'm especially fond of the road to the Arbor, which was the first time the game really wowed me and made me excited for the game ahead.

They are phenomenal, a testament to the team’s ability to craft a world, and… I hate them. I really hate them.

Because, without fail, they’re always pierced by another repetitive combat encounter. The 50th Chimera, the 10000th Goblin, the next of a million Harpies. Over and over, I am reminded that I do not exist in this world to explore it, I exist to kill everything in it as though I were American.
My quests are nothing of the sort, for they might as well be called bounty targets.
Other people will likely praise how reactive this game is, and its propensity for ‘randomness’. I would argue that, as all the ‘randomness’ is purely centred on killing, there isn’t actually much the game can do to surprise you - especially considering the enemy roster. It’s neat to see goblins and cyclopes invade a town the first time, but afterwards it’s just more free XP and a slight obstacle in the way of you spending 60k gold on new shoes.
There's an irony to be found in just how badly the world feels claustrophobic. There are always mooks around every corner, and you're never more than a minute away from a fight. Looking out into the distance from a vantage point betrays an endless hamster wheel of caves, mobs, chests and seeker tokens.

All of these complaints might seem quaint, and any DD oldheads in the audience might be wondering why I’m lambasting it for things the first game is guilty of.

The issue is twofold.

First, I try not to have expectations for games. I don’t fuck with trailers or press releases and avoid streams or whatever. It helps keep me grounded, and I think stops me from hating games based purely on them not meeting my hype - Metal Gear Solid V taught me that.

With DD2, I faltered. I was excited, and I lapped up everything about it. Articles, streams, trailers, you name it.

But I don’t really think the issue stems from the game not meeting my hype. Rather, I think it’s because the game was sold on a very specific vision, the one I mentioned up above: This was meant to be “DD but for real this time”, and in reality it’s just the first game but stretched far too thin.

Secondly, I don’t think every sequel has to be a grand, innovative experience. I play musous and Yakuza games after all. But I do expect there to be some iterative improvement, some signs that the developers have grown and improved at their craft. In simpler terms: Sequels should be a step forward, even if it’s a miniscule one.

DD2 is sort of an awkward step to the side. Could’ve came out ten years ago as a mission pack sequel and been lauded for it.

I don’t like to be prescriptive with my critique, I really don’t, but if this game was 1/4th the size and half the length I think I’d be a lot kinder to it. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed about 2/3rds of my time with it, but I can’t really recommend DD2 specifically because a lot of what I enjoyed is just stuff that DD1 not only did 12 years ago but does better.

In the end, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is Z². It’s by no means bad, and for many people this will likely radically alter their preferences for fantasy RPGs. Hell, I still think it’s amazing this game even got made, and a lot of what I think is bad or problematic still runs rings against most of its peers - this is the closest you’ll get to a modern Wizardry game.

But I look back to the past, to Dark Arisen sitting in my library, and I think about all the limits imposed on that game. All the rough edges, the flaws, the executive meddling and the cut content, and all I can think is…

Ziltoid was the better album.

[A sizable delusion sequence where the main character imagines people being turned into meat dango, it’s all very gruesome.]
“Hello, did you order a double cheeseburger and a bacon egg burger?”
I wake with a start at the sound of the voice directed at me. It’s one of the staff holding a tray.
“What?”
“Oops, excuse me,” she says, and continues to a seat further inside.
My heart is racing, and I’m absolutely covered in sweat.
Double cheeseburger.
Bacon egg burger.
Meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat.
“Ugh!”
I hold back the rising urge to vomit with both my hands, and run into the bathroom.
[The rest of the game, and me trying and failing to keep my laughter in with this scene in the back of my head]

Art and atmosphere: 🐱👍
Music: 👏🐱🤝😼👍
Script: 🐱❓

I'll forgive this game for having really thin characters; I get the impression they did not have the time nor the budget to make a long enough game to really explore any of them too deeply. However, the plot is still weak as hell. I suppose all the elements of social alienation, and losing oneself do come back throughout most of the routes, but I didn't really like the payoff in most cases. In particular, the way the protagonist's delusions come back was just so silly. Ultimately the strongest scenes tend to be prior to the "plot" kicking off, or after the story is over. Not good when every time the big narrative events start happening I want them to be over!

The writing quality is usually decent. My main issues were mainly just in how repetitive some of the metaphors and similes can get, but I imagine that's less an issue with the writing itself, and more an issue of how much this game reuses parts of the script in multiple routes. Although, I will say the screen filling repetition of words can be a bit comical, as shown earlier.

Anyway, it's still worth a shot since it's so short (and so you can see the silly bonus scenario.) For a similar 90's horror vibe, I would recommend Atlach=Nacha over this though. That has much more interesting characters, and a villain (who is also the protagonist) that actually makes you curious about her motivations for the entire runtime instead of just monologuing clichés at you like the villain of this game.

It feels mean to compare this to its predecessor but Virtue's Last Reward just doesn't have the sheer joy and thrill that Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors had. Its lore simultaneously wants to develop and exacerbate the insanity that 999 spent slowly unspooling, but it doesn't want to approach that level of multifaceted storytelling with nearly the same drama or heightened sense of panic. When I learned of a new element within the story, I didn't feel as strong of a sense of bewilderment or clairvoyance-level realization, but rather a sense of mild satisfaction. That's the thing that gets me about this game, I suppose: It works, but it doesn't tug at my emotions as much as 999 did. The chaos is ramped up but it just doesn't feel as urgent or interesting.

The character drama in particular is maybe my biggest gripe with the game overall. Every conversation is considerably longer and more quippy at the cost of information density, there's this sense of irreverence that feels extremely out of place. Of course, you could blame this on the advent of the Danganronpa franchise and its mockery in the face of certain death, but that series has its moments to refrain from indulging in its hypersexuality and humor in service of a bigger idea that climbs towards a hostile thriller screenplay. Additionally, the irreverence is used to help build onto the dread—were it not for Monokuma's complete and utter disregard for his subjects' lives, there'd be less panic among them.

The characters in VLR, on the other hand, are poised to joke and shove corny banter in nearly every conversation given enough time, such that it stands to kill a lot of the intensity that the holistic story builds. I would much rather a short, important conversation than a long one that stands to remove any given amount goodwill I have for the main characters. This lack of brevity is also not helped by the gargantuan amount of time that it takes between various novel segments, showcasing a very annoying dot moving across the map for every single possible migration of the characters. At a certain point in my playthrough, I started scheduling for these intermissions and texting friends over actually trying to remain immersed with a medium that ejected me from immersion to begin with.

That's not to say it's a bad game, far from it—once again in no small part to the thoughtful escape room design employed with a similar (but not exact same) grace as its predecessor. The increase in difficulty is something I rather appreciate, even if it comes at the cost of breaking immersion sometimes. I especially appreciate the safe system, though it has its drawbacks with certain room-end puzzles. The broader story itself, divorced from being attached to the game and the individual writing choices I dislike, is excellent scaffolding around the original lore that 999 set up. It's just a shame that this story had to shake out this way, because as a game it fails to excite me beyond its lore and individual chambers.

EDIT, 23-MARCH-2024:

My neglect to mention the very casual misogyny present in this game is starting to bug me greatly, so allow me to comment on the reality that Sigma and the rest of the characters either are victims or enablers of horrific womanizing. In a shocking departure from 999's relatively minute jokes about sexuality that are unimportant, minor facets of individual characters only appearing once or twice, Virtue's Last Reward takes the bold move to make Sigma a sexual harasser. In every possible route, he is poised to interact with at least one of the female characters with a variety of dehumanizing and, frankly, horrible sex pestery. He even remarks that Clover (who in VLR is small and skinny but an adult) is seemingly jailbait.

Misogynist characters are not inherently detrimental to a story if it is done with the tact and angling that it deserves. I hold the idea that depiction is not necessarily endorsement of the depicted. However, VLR's main character being an incessantly horny poon-hound who can be led to do just about anything with the promise of someone's panties getting stripped off is so irritating after 20 hours of playing the game that it ceases to be worthwhile as a facet of a character worth exploring. There is no benefit to it in this story.