Chicory's melancholic unraveling was nothing but an emotional walk for me. It has such a real captivating idea of stress, anxiety, and unease. Despite being a very clearly inviting cozier work to get yourself into, it's all about bringing those anxious dizzy and frictional creative thoughts to life. In a world full of conversations and pieces on the "artist's experience", this is most certainly one that paints a very personal and graceful stroke of the brush on it.

And I just... love it. All of it. I love that every screen is an encouraging attempt for you to color the place however you like, but you are never judged for leaving it how it is. Every earnest effort is given praise and a warm hug, and home and support are always a call away. Even if you choose not to, you'll find support yourself as you journey. I love how the 'trials' are just little things, small but poignant lessons that help you find your center. I felt teary-eyed at all times during the last four chapters, just building up to capturing that feeling inside, that urge and real sense of want.

I also adore its setting, this lightly fanciful but towny vibe, people of all colors of life simply living and looking up to you as you go. A lot of them are soft and charming, but I enjoy the rare but notable pointed characters you come across too. I especially like how they all seem to be dealing with their own baggage and your color helps them work through the day too. Even when Chicory is at its most twee and hilariously cute, it never ever feels like you left that light permeating sadness that you'll have to deal with by journey's end.

Come join us in making a painting about life.

Rain World is a lot of things.

It's one of the most frustrating and challenging games I've ever played.

It's a game where every small success feels like a legitimate accomplishment and where earned comfort, rare as it may be, is relief like no other.

It's a game with a breathtaking world to explore. Every single area is gigantic and inspires your curiosity. Every single screen - of which there are thousands - is lovingly assembled and full of detail.

It's a game that nails its fascinating ecosystem. Animals in this game aren't just 'enemies,' they're realistic creatures with autonomy and personality. Sometimes they'll fight amongst themselves or get stuck and appear frustrated. Sometimes they'll just lounge around and seem uninterested in you.

It's a game that rewards you for being interested in its world, where you can learn things through observation and apply them to improve your gameplay.

It's a game with amazing animations, art direction, and music, which do justice to the rest of its elements.

It's a game full of small details and environmental storytelling that you could theorycraft about to no end.

But more than anything, Rain World is a game about making you feel small and unimportant.

The gameplay tells you this - it doesn't even offer you the precedent of fairness. You will die a lot, sometimes to things that seem unavoidable. The world tells you this. Its post-apocalyptic setting communicates that - even for a people much more powerful than you - this world consumes all. Their ruined architecture exists on a scale you can barely understand.

This overwhelming humility is one of the most powerful things a game has ever made me feel. It makes me sad that no other games like this exist. Undoubtedly one of the best and most unique experiences I've ever had with the medium, and one of my favorite games of all time.

Stray is a game where you assume the role of a cat. This is the entire promise of its outward appearance. You control a сute furball navigating in a world proportionally large for your light presence. You can press B to meow and Y to cuddle with other cats. You can take a nap in allotted by game designer places. The cat mannerisms are meticulously animated and instantly gifable for twitter. An instant crowd pleaser of a concept, as Twitch and Steam numbers immediately suggest.

One of the first big puzzles you solve involves power outlets. You have to scout a room to find 4 cube-shaped batteries. You have to grab them with a floating button prompt and bring them to a computer. You have to MANUALLY (with paws?) plug them in power sockets. Surely, you already see a problem.

Stray takes place in a society of robots mimicking the images and idiosyncrasies of humans. Robots wear clothes, robots eat food, robots live in a police state – not because they need to, that’s just what we tend to do. The greatest irony of Stray is how it’s no different from the robots it portrays. It’s caught up in appearances, stupefied by feline oddness – and completely misses the essence of dubious little being.

Do you want to be a small rascal bumbling the way through, guided only by the most primal of instincts? Wrong game! And it’s mind-boggling to me how attentively every unique keynote of the whole premise is impaired here to create the most nothing hodgepodge of a modern action-adventure. You are pulled through a cat-sized theme park with the main attractions made up of the lightest of puzzles, dullest stealth sections and unlosable chase sequences. Traversal, which must pop with cats’ preciseness and unlimited agility, suddenly turns into a chore, because you can’t have a cat failing a jump, right? Even the animal inaudibility which opens the door for interesting environmental storytelling and silent interactions is undercut by the introduction of a companion drone acting as a translation layer between the feline friend and basically everything else in the world.

There are absolutely glints of creativity and good vibes here, and I decently enjoyed exploring the little hub levels where the game matches its title the best by letting the cat go a little astray. These bright moments though are far and between in this hugely underwhelming affair. Rain World: Downpour can’t honestly come soon enough.

to the best of my knowledge, character movement exists within giant state machines dictated by the player input and the properties of any current collision. if you touch a slope, transition to sliding state; if you press the jump button, transition to a jump state unless you're sliding or etc. etc.. in those behind-the-scenes tales of miyamoto meticulously testing mario's movement in low-poly sandboxes during sm64's development, these state transitions and their corresponding kinematics values were the real meat of the tweaks on the programmers' end. "let's make the flip jump transition available even before the turn animation begins, also if mario jumps onto a slope less steep than X degrees maybe we could try giving him a few frames standing or moving to give the player some time to jump again, also if you collide in the air with a slope steeper than X degrees make sure you don't add horizontal momentum when you transition to a slide" these are just ideas off the top of my head and don't represent the actual code, but this is how I conceive of it. the character is a tightly tuned system that functions as a simulacrum of real movement, realistic where our brain wants it and exaggerated where our hands desire it. code with the model ingrained into its logic teeters the line between pretty and messy, and sm64 perhaps got the closest in its era to actually getting somewhere with this system.

sunshine unfortunately lacks this level of polish. mario's main movement feels tighter and more responsive than in the game's predecessor, but at the same time the introduction of fludd and of dynamic object geometry strains whatever was in the previous character state table. accordingly mario feels at his most chaotic in this entry. floating into a slope could result in him suddenly sliding away with no ability for the player to break out of his helplessness, or a rotating platform could cause mario to stutter as the line between "flat" and "slope" becomes blurred. mario will legitimately phase through objects on the rare occasion he doesn't clip in and out or plummet out of the sky having lost his jump. this distinct lack of polish (likely due to the game's rushed development) pervades each aspect of the game.

second-to-second these movement quirks will likely be the most apparent issue to the player, but zooming out reveals level design and structure indicative of the game's troubled history. immediately out of the gate: no star (or rather "shine sprite") requirements, with the first seven shines of each main area now mandatory and the rest completely optional and pointless outside of bragging rights. the seventh shine of each is a brief shadow mario chase that varies little from location-to-location, leaving just the first six of each area as notable challenges. so how do these stack up?

many of these (at least one per world) are obnoxious "secret" stages that steal mario from the sunkissed vista of isle delfino and drop him into gussied-up debug rooms. the level design here mainly consists of a few half-hearted platforming challenges made from hastily-assembled generic blocks slapped together with a smattering of coins and 1UPs, and none of them are very fun. the rotating objects that mario must ride in a few of these especially aggravate that previously-mentioned unstable character state table, and mastering them requires a frustrating level of practice given how unnatural the physics of these sections are. of special note is the infamous chuckster level, which involves having mario awkwardly thrown from platform to platform over death pits with restricted influence from the player. talking to each chuckster at a slight offset will result in getting thrown at angles that will often result in certain demise, and learning how to best exploit them again requires more frustrating practice in a stage that should be otherwise brief. all of this is exacerbated by the fact that you have no access to fludd, leaving mario with solely the sideflip and the spin jump. these are good moves in their own right, but I can't help but miss a low-and-long movement option like the long jump, or potentially a high vertical option that doesn't require the control stick shenanigans the sideflip/spin jump necessitate.

removing all of the secret stages (of which there are ten) and all of the shadow mario (of which there are seven) yields just 32 unique shines as part of the main game. some more categories of stages quickly become apparent:

sunshine is often criticized for its number of red coin stages, and while the postgame adds one to each secret stage along with a couple other optional ones, the main game itself features just five. the windmill village and pirate ship ones are more traditional platforming challenges, and I'd say the windmill village one is a solid exploration of the titular area in bianco hills. the pirate ship one is frustrating given the difficulty of staying put on the actual pirate ships, but the majority of the red coins are on climbable grating and are much more straight-forward to obtain. the coral reef red coin challenge revolves around sunshine's spotty swimming mechanics (questionable for a game with such a focus on watery environments) and ultimately boils down to a game of I Spy with a fiddly camera. there is also one using the rideable bloopers in ricco harbor (I often failed this one after collecting all the coins by crashing into the pier with the shine on it, which surprisingly enough didn't kill me playing on the 3DAS version), and one that takes place with the underwater scuba controls within a large bottle, which I can't really say is particularly interesting given how few obstacles there are in your way.

boss stages appear frequently throughout each world to little surprise from players of sm64 prior. bianco hills features petey pirahna, whose mouth must be filled with water before he spits sludge at you. his first fight is pretty on-par for what I'd expect from a first boss fight, and his refight is pretty similar with a couple little additions, such as flying about the main area and creating tornados (?). gooper blooper appears no less than three times throughout the game and severely wears out his welcome by his noki bay appearance, although this is proceeded by a legitimate platforming challenge that makes up for it. of note is that his first two ricco harbor appearances are virtually identical except for that one fight requires one extra spin jump in order to reach the arena. wiggler, mecha-bowser (who you fight with rockets from a rollercoaster car), the manta, king boo, and eely-mouth all have singular fights throughout the other worlds that generally are the better shines of their respective worlds. they fall about on the level I would expect from a 3D platformer: not necessarily enthralling, but decent diversions from the actual platforming.

there are also three il piantissimo races akin to koopa the quick from sm64. I would say some of the latter's races are somewhat challenging, whereas the former's chosen routes leave a lot to be desired and thus can easily be thwarted by anyone with a reasonable understanding of the controls. they unfortunately feel like 30-second throwaway shines. there is also a time attack on the rideable bloopers with a couple minor obstacle that seem pulled right out of the secret stages.

all of the above shines removed from the total, we now have 13 shines left. in theory these are the "interesting" objectives, the ones that would hopefully pop up when reminiscing about what made this game special. when I look at this list, the first one that pops out to me is sand bird... the infamous filter for many new players, including myself when I first finished this game. this stage actually involves collecting red coins, although this objective is somewhat auxillary considering the first seven can be scooped up in less than 15 seconds and the final one can't be reached until the bird that you stand upon finally reaches the top of the tower in the middle of the area. rather, the main obstacle is simply that the bird rolls 90 degrees, releasing you into the ether if you don't scramble over onto the bird's side before it completely rotates. learning to correctly time mario's walk over the edge between the different faces of one of the bird's many cubes (I usually do it at the tail) is entirely unintuitive and unforgiving. once it clicks, the stage becomes an auto-scroller without any point or challenge, as it has the last couple times I've played it. there is no sweet spot in the middle where the shine feels obtainable with some effort; it either feels insurmountable when you're first trying it and then rote on each subsequent playthrough.

this describes a lot of these remaining shines unfortunately, especially when it comes to the proper platforming challenges in each stage. the caged shine sprite in ricco harbor atop a large structure of steel girders caused me to tear my hair out initially with the wind sprites that assault you, requiring a full tower reclimb; on this attempt I forgot the intended path and instead skipped about 60% of the area with a well-timed spin jump. the runaway ferris wheel stage in pinna park had the same result for me: on my original playthrough I struggled greatly with the electrified koopas and their unpredictable movement cycles, whereas on this playthrough I skipped past the entire top half of the climbable grating with another spin jump, making the challenge moot. simply knowing the movement tech completely obliterates the challenge, and yet I feel obligated to do it because without using it I'm thrust into the jank. the same goes for those who know how to use the spam spray: timed slime-clearing levels such as the one in sirena beach are incessently precise without knowing how to shotgun your water blasts, but once you do they become pointlessly easy. simply knowing discrete strategies or moves renders the game moot, and thus there is no linear difficulty curve. between my first playthrough and now there is simply a void where a fun game should be; never has sunshine felt like a accessible trial to be overcome. there is simply a gulf between aggravation and tedium.

this is to say nothing of the hub, the optional content, the one-of-a-kind environmental throughline, hell, even fludd itself. it just all feels... slight in its rushed nature and uneven scope. levels are expansive but exploration is heavily discouraged given how scripted many of the individual shines are, and on this playthrough I felt like I missed entire swaths of each level. new fludd abilities or yoshi aren't given bespoke unlock levels such as in sm64, and instead simply are dropped from even more shadow mario chases. the plaza hub does come to life more and more as the game continues, but compared to peach's castle it lacks progression even as it opens up new challenges (among which are the particularly infamous sunshine levels everyone discusses like pachinko or the lilypad death river). the one thing that keeps me going is that sense of locality that few other games of this era can point to, that feeling of seeing the ferris wheel far off in the background of another stage, or the hotel delfino off in the distance. no other game I can think of attempts something so drastically removed from typical delineation of themes between areas like sunshine, and it's a shame that it jettisons a lot of its potential by flooding the shine list with these dripless special stages in a floating void.

in many ways I don't see sunshine as truly mechanically paired with 64 as the "collectathon" mario games. in fact, I don't think 64 was even intended as a collectathon as we understand them today; instead its explorable areas feel more like opportunity seized from technical restraints preventing true linear platforming challenges from really succeeding. sunshine attempts to move more in the latter direction, without the same sense of non-linearity or potentiality that arose from 64's seeming vastness at the time. in this regard it feels more like an ancestor to galaxy; galaxy is hatched from the egg of sunshine, something with the same genes as 64 but woven within a new form and flesh. it may have even been genius in its own right had it not been hastily released in an attempt to bolster the gamecube's faltering performance. in another way it's the reverse of much of nintendo's modern "meh"-tier output: full of soul but completely unpolished.

Playing Neon White casually when I have several friends who consistently rank in the top 50 players in the world is very strange. My personal impressions are clouded more than a little by the secondhand excitement of watching someone grind out better and better times, cheering for them when they overtake their rival, laughing as they look at the excellent names on the leaderboard. I love Neon White the milieu and I've seen up close and personal why someone would adore this game.

I don't adore this game.

There were moments when I thought I might. In the early-middle chapters, the game achieved a graceful balance of complexity and precision that had me excited. The levels were bite-sized without being simple, the weapons were cleverly placed to introduce possibility without breaking the game, and I found myself improving my route run after run until I found something close to the best possible (even if my execution could never measure up to my friends').

But this joy was short-lived. New weapons were introduced that ran against the grain of the game, doubling down on onerous precision and execution requirements in a game that by its nature has plenty of both already. Optimal routing started requiring me to comb the screen for pixel-perfect shots, or (as I actually did for the last chapter) simply look them up online.

Even in its failures, there's a compellingly homemade quality about Neon White. It has such an excellent core idea that it's easy to forgive the various flawed design elements. And although Ben Esposito is a veteran game designer, this project requires a different kind of design than anything he's published previously, with crucial elements of play unfolding from tiny decisions—how many frames should this take? how much ammunition should that have? how will this type of gun inform the level design inform the player's experience?

I spent the latter third of this game waiting impatiently for it to either end or get better, so I doubt I'll pick it up again even if DLC drops. But I'm glad it exists, and I'm glad I played it through, if only so I'll have the context to fully appreciate watching my friends shave milliseconds off their personal bests.

I began playing this game June 19th 2010. That evening during a family bbq my dad collapsed in the bathroom. He was taken to the hospital unconscious in an ambulance. I didn't know it that day, but his iliac artery had ruptured. That night he went through over 100 units of blood while doctors operated and tried to figure out what was wrong. The next morning I went to the hospital. In a waiting room with my mom and many aunts, uncles, and grandparents the doctor came in and said that he was stable. We all cried in relief.

He was in a coma for a few weeks, and in the hospital for more after that. I played this game while he was in the hospital. I had just gotten my driver's license, so for lunch I would go buy 3 $1 Arby's roast beef sandwiches—one each for me and my siblings—and play Zelda. Kind neighbors and church members brought food for my siblings and I while my parents were at the hospital. I played Zelda. I beat the game and it was good. I didn't like it as much as Majora's Mask. Maybe this was circumstantial.

it's hard for me to write a review about this game. i feel like it was designed in a lab to be optimally enjoyable for exactly me, much like how McDonald's french fries are chemically engineered to be Mathematically and Provably Delicious for the general American public.

i can't talk about Neon White without talking about Arcane Kids. in the mid-10s, being someone who staked a lot of identity into playing games was profoundly embarassing. ignoring the truly heinous shit that goes without saying, year after year, AAA studios continued to pump out "mids at best." on the other side of things, "indie" games were no longer new and were in something of an awkward puberty. i can't tell you how many "physics-based puzzle platformers with a gimmick" i had pitched to me that promised to be Actually Good. they weren't. however, during this time, the Unity weirdos were churning away in their art scenes around the globe. the new derisive joke became "make a game in unity, make a million dollars." of course, the people making these jokes didn't know what they were talking about, but i guess none of us really did back then.

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Arcane Kids existed as something of an antithesis to the games of the time. when we had more than enough pixel-art RPGs, they gave us ZINETH. when we got innundated with walking simulators, they gave us Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective. when indies decided to try and be funny with things like Goat Simulator, we got Sonic Dreams Collection, CRAP! No One Loves Me, and this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RNCyc3hzAw). while a lot of these games were "funny" or "jokes," they always had deeper ideas to them beneath the surface around player agency, the joy of moving your avatar, the love of Videogames As Videogames.

i cannot possibly explain how strange it felt to turn on the game and have the title screen after the intro cutscene splash in with a voice echoing "NEON WHITE" as the moodiest witch house track creeps in through your headphones. the fake scanlines, the neon glow on the characters, the tone, the vibes. i thought to myself, "they finally did it." as i played more, i confirmed my suspicions.

Arcane Kids finally made the game it feels like they had been working toward all these years. blazing fast, huge jumps, easy-to-learn-but-hard-to-master, tight, violent, horny, loud, freaky, all at once. in Mission 11, as breakneck-paced breakcore blasted out of my screen, i screamed aloud in my room to my partner who was watching me play "I. FUCKING. LOVE. THIS. GAME." in time with each click of the RMB that shot me across the map at incredible speeds. in moments like this, you know for a fact that moments like Bubsy pulling out an uzi and a katana at the end of Bubsy 3D or them subjecting a crowd of people at a game conference to vape trick videos that inspired their previous game (https://youtu.be/2pO23GTaBtk?si=ldB9w6CU2UC3TkHI&t=1791) was not just them contributing to the general irony-poisoned sense of humor of the time; they legitimately thought that it was tight as fuck.

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one line from the infamous Arcane Kids Manifesto (https://arcanekids.com/manifesto) that i always think about is "the purpose of gameplay is to hide secrets."

at a time when even FromSoft has started to move away from their smaller, more-focused world design in favor of chasing the lucrative open-world design potential in Elden Ring, it feels amazing that we have a game like Neon White that is about intricately crafted and infinitely replayable level design. after years of waiting, we finally have the one true Indie Puzzle Platformer, but this time it has guns.

the gameplay (for me, usually) fell into a flowchart like this:
-beat a level once and get whatever medal you get
-go back to find the secret gift
-during this second trip, notice which parts of the levels you can skip or save time on that were hidden to you before
-play the level a 3rd time to get a gold medal
-use the hint from the Gold medal to get an Ace medal on your 4th time
-over time, you begin to amass a collection of "hey, did you know this quirk" movement secrets like shooting bullets, bunny hopping after a dash, or sliding with the shotgun's discard

game design that calls attention to itself like this is beautiful. level designers are artists. we've known this since Doom WADs. however, in the time since Doom we've had several games like Gears of War, Halo, and their ilk that said "wasn't the sickest part about Doom being a huge buff guy with loud guns just blasting disgusting freaks and seeing them explode???" while that does indeed whip, Neon White is on the other side of the coin saying "wasn't the best part about Doom the level design and the joy of figuring out how to move as fast as you can through a level???"

after 11 years of watching speedrunning streams nearly every day, Neon White finally made me feel like maybe i could do it too. first you pit yourself against the Ace medal time, then your friends, then the Dev Times, then your own ghost, and then the world. to this day, i have yet to have a global #1, but i've had a #2 and two #3s. i'll keep going though.

[EDIT 7/17/23: i did it :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWT2b9pwRMI]

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Neon White is a love letter in videogame form

part of the reason I love old-school sega games is because I just love the way their games feel. games designed by sega straddle the line between nuanced, logical physics and exaggerated, arcade-y physics with aplomb. the sega rally series captures this perfectly, where the terrain material and topography are intimately factored into the performance of your car while at the same time you can perfectly drift around corners and fly over hills with a bit of squash-and-stretch going on. the tightrope here is between making the player feel like they're in total control of the car (with the consequences that result) while simultaneously hand-waving the internal mechanisms that limit player expression. the early monkey ball games are the same way: the level design is punishing yet it's addicting because any strategy you devise can probably work thanks to how controllable the ball is. it's why I've stuck with this series so long: from barely making it past beginner as a young child, to learning the extra levels as a high schooler, to finally conquering master and master extra in both games as I whittled away time during a global lockdown.

that being said, I didn't want to go into this game with unrealistic hopes. I knew the original engine was not being used here, so I figured it probably would be a bit stiffer and maybe a little hand-holdy. after all, this remake is partially meant to introduce new players and give them leverage to actually succeed in comparison to the original games, where over half of the levels were tucked behind some serious execution barriers. when I popped it in for the first time this mostly held true: I ran smb1 beginner (newly christened as "casual") without much issue. it wasn't until I touched smb1 expert immediately after...

167 deaths. 167 deaths without including expert extra no less, which I accidentally voided myself out of thanks to misreading the helper option menu that pops up automatically (protip to UI designers: don't make both your selected and unselected options bright colors!!!). these levels are no cakewalk, let's be clear, but I know these levels by the back of my hand. I've 1cc'd expert + expert extra in the original many many times, and even now out of practice I can manage 10 - 15 deaths. it just shocked me that this game felt so different, and so much less precise. in a lot of ways it felt like the original levels popped into Unity with a basic sphere physics plugin, and the results were not pretty. my roommates (also long-time monkey ball fans) also immediately wrote off the game after playing it. even though we had been so hype about finally getting an HD monkey ball - a monkey ball game that wasn't garbage and didn't require us to pull out our CRT - all of our energy immediately dissapated once we got our hands on the game.

so what exactly is the issue here? basically everyone agrees that the physics in this game are noticably different from that of the original, but I want to delve into why. after playing this game for quite a bit (all of story mode, up through master mode in smb1, all the deluxe levels, and poking around into other stuff here and there) I think I've narrowed it down to frictional differences between the two games. for those of you who haven't taken high school physics in some time, let me present the equation f = μN, where f is the frictional force applied parallel to surface we are moving upon (usually horizontally), μ is the coefficient of friction, and N is the normal force applied perpendicular to the surface (hence the name "normal"). before your eyes glaze over, let me connect these to some intangible game-feel statements:

coefficient of friction: this refers to how difficult it is to move over a material; for example, it accounts for why it's more difficult to slide your coffee table when it's on a shaggy carpet versus a finished wood floor. as it relates to the how it feels in this game, I'll borrow a quote from my roommate when he was playing the game: "it feels like every single floor is made out of glass"

normal force: this refers to how hard the object is pushing down on the surface, which in this case mainly refers to the gravitational force the object exerts. this scales with the mass, so we can think of it as how much the object weighs; a cardboard box is a lot easier to move than a full wardrobe. this affects the game-feel, as my girlfriend eloquently put: "it's like there's no monkey at all, and you're just rolling around a hollow ball"

so tldr: there's a severe lack of friction in this game in comparison to the original. in the original game, the ball was weighty, and the friction on the goal posts or ledges allows you to grip them easily (and a bit unrealistically for that matter). these things are boons to the player that go a long way towards making impossible looking courses just barely doable with practice. here the stages refuse to budge when you try to force them to, and you end up without a lot of the gravity-defying tricks you could initially pull off. I'll give some examples of situations that pop up that break under the new physics:

stopping the ball: this took a lot of adjustment for me, and while it's just a matter of relearning muscle memory it very noticeably makes some stages harder. in the original game you could stop pretty much on a dime (unless you were rolling to the point of sparks flying), whereas here the ball will sliiiiiiiide all over the place unless you very deliberately deccelerate. this is more of a general issue but a good example of where this becomes frustrating is Twin Cross, where you're expected to roll across a series of 1x1 tiles in diagonal lines. you need to keep a certain level of speed up to avoid falling off when crossing the corners of two tiles, but then also must deccelerate at the right moment to keep your ball from flying off at the end of a line (which itself is just a 1x1 tile floating in space). Edge Master also becomes more annoying than its prior appearances thanks to this issue, as staying within the bounds of the upward face of the first rotation becomes very precise given how much speed you gain when the stage rotates.

narrow lines: approach a ledge in this game and you'll notice that the bottom of your ball will just be barely close to the ledge when your character starts trembling and attempting to balance themself. compare that to the original, where the characters won't start said animation until their feet are literally touching the ledge, far closer to the center of mass for the ball. you basically have a lot less wiggle room on the edge, and it can become very apparent in certain levels that depend on this. kudos to the dev team for adjust Catwalk to accommodate, but on the flipside look at Invasion. I'd say this level was middle of the road in terms of its original difficulty, but here it's fucking brutal towards the end, where you're expected to navigate in a curve on a ledge around staggered bumpers. comments I've read on early gameplay capture on youtube were quick to point to this stage as one of the biggest difficulty bumps for a remade stage.

slopes: friction is the reason why we don't instantly slide down slopes in real life, hence why we use snowboards and skis instead of just standing on mountains waiting to gain speed. however, in monkey ball the goal is usually not to slide down slopes unless you're explicitly supposed to, and many levels depend on you being able to balance yourself on slopes either while waiting for a cycle or when speeding through before you have a chance to fall off. Drum and Twister back-to-back in smb1's ice world were originally breather stages, where you simply had to keep yourself balanced in brief intervals before reaching the goal. here they became much more precise than I feel was intended, as even slightly moving from the narrow top of the curve on either of these levels will send you careening to your death with no recourse. from smb2 I can absolutely not forget to mention Warp... oh my god Warp. this level was already surprisingly difficult in smb2, given that the flatter part of the curves here are covered with bumpers and maintaing yourself on a slope is already a trickier technique to learn (I see a lot of more casual players get stuck on Floor Bent from smb1 for this reason). here it's nigh impossible to do thanks to how little grip you have. Cross Floors is another smb2 example that requires a lot of practice in the original and here feels terrible to attempt.

centripedal force: some of you may have seen charity donation recepticles shaped like curved funnels (I've seen them in american malls at least), where you can put a coin into a slot and it will spiral around the funnel down and down until falling through a hole at the bottom, much like water spinning in a drain. there are multiple areas in the original monkey ball games that utilize this phenomenon to great effect, and it relies on the friction of the slope or wall that the ball is on to keep it from dropping out. however, when I first played Spiral Hard in this game, I was very surprised to find that I could not simply drop in as I was accustomed to, as even with a decent amount of speed the ball does not grab onto the slope and instead falls off. it took me several tries to successfully drop in, where I had to come in with an exceptional amount of speed, heavily tilt against the slope to avoid falling off, try to balance out before I lost the speed I needed to stay in, and then continue on my way. this level is already difficult enough as is, with a path that narrows the further it spirals down and a goal that is difficult to aim for, so I don't see why dropping in needs to also require a lot of set up when it didn't originally. the end of Stamina Master is also much more difficult than before thanks to this, as the spiral towards the end becomes nearly vertical, and I would often drop out of it completely before I reached the goal. the pipe stages also seem to struggle with keeping you moving, such as the smb1 expert extra stage Curl Pipe, where the second hill virtually always stopped me dead in my tracks (though I've had this happen occasionally in the original as well).

this would be a good time for me to also mention how the camera has changed significantly from the original games. the camera used to rather aggressively stick to the ball's back, whereas here the camera will follow your stick without really staying glued to a particular orientation on the ball. to solve this there is now camera control on the right-stick... this sort of defeats the purpose of the original one-giant-banana-joystick control scheme, but I'm sure plenty of players will feel more comfortable with it there. the big issue here comes when trying to line up straight lines: in the original game it was very doable to turn in place with the camera lining up directly with the center of the monkey's back. here it's already hard enough to turn in place given that you slide around with so little provocation, and now you must center the camera manually using... non-analog controls? yes, the right stick does not seem to have a real gradient of turning from my time playing with it, giving it little more functionality than d-pad camera controls. you can at least adjust camera sensitivity, but I feel like you're forced to sometimes go in and change it per stage, ie high sensitivity for when you need to turn quickly or steadily on fast stages, and low sensitivity when you line up precise shots. the latter was a necessity on Exam-C (a particularly infamous stage) and the aforementioned Twin Cross, as well as Checker, and it made all three of these stages much more tedious than I would've liked. sometimes the camera just breaks entirely, most notably on Centrifugal from smb2, where the speed of rotation in the giant wheel of death causes the camera to get stuck outside the level geometry, or flip in front of you to mess up the angle you're tilting the stage in.

I wanted to include this diatribe about the physics in here just to have some sort of document with the issues I've noticed with this game, and as to provide a detailed summary of why and where the physics are different without just saying they are. players who know the levels above might have noticed that they're virtually all pulled from expert and master: this is because the beginner and advanced difficulties (casual and normal) are totally playable regardless of the changes. that is not to say they aren't still difficult (I still have not beaten Polar Large in this game and, much to my consternation, can not even figure out a good route through it for some reason) but if you're coming in just to fuck around a bit, play through part of story mode, enjoy the cameos, and play minigames with friends, you're not going to notice the different game-feel to the extent of it being overbearing. on the flipside, I do feel justified in presenting my opinions on this in pedantic detail because beginner and advanced only make up 108 stages out of the 258 total stages between the non-DX games, which is to say that for over half of the game you will likely notice what I mentioned above unless you have never played the originals.

regardless of everything listed above, I've actually rated this one a bit higher than super monkey ball deluxe, a collection that still has the original physics intact. my rationale: banana mania is an amazing package overall. what honestly frustrates me more than anything about this game is that it perfectly captures the features and content I'd want in a remake of these games without the tight gameplay I originally adored in the originals. whereas deluxe (on ps2 mind you) was a poorly performing mess with overly-long course structure and a lack of improvements over smb2, this game is packed to the brim with extra modes, great cameo characters, and accesibility features. not everything really hits, but I appreciate how much effort and material there is here with so little development time.

the main game specifically deliminates between the first two games for its courses, unlike deluxe where stages from both games were interleaved. each course is 1:1 with their original set of stages, with extra stages now being unlocked if all the regular stages were completed without the helper functions active. master mode for smb1 is now accessible just by completing expert without the 1cc requirement or even extra stages being finished. there are also marathon modes for each, which while not as wild as the ultimate course from deluxe, still are great additions. stages in both have been rebalanced, with the original layouts being included in a special purchaseable game mode. overall the rebalances were really well done: probably the most notable for me was Arthopod, a stage from smb2 that was complete bullshit originally and has now been made less annoying to deal with by far by removing gaps. virtually all of smb1 master was rebalanced as well, with Stamina Master getting a much-needed nerf to its infamous middle 1x1 moving tile balancing section (which balances out the more difficult first and last sections a bit). the other master changes honestly make some of the stages like Dodge Master and Dance Master trivial, but I don't really mind considering that the requirements for obtaining master are less restrictive now. other changes are more subtle, such as adding curved inlets to the titular launchers in Launchers (which honestly don't help very much) or an extra 30 seconds for the timer in Exam-C (which helps an insane amount).

there's a story mode identical to that of smb2, with truncated cutscenes in mime retelling the lovably bizarre plot of the original. personally I don't mind this change, as the story isn't really that important or complicated. I'm a little puzzled at why they didn't use the expanded worlds of deluxe's story mode, but it's not a big difference either way. as I mentioned prior stages that were changed have their original versions present in a standalone mode, and all of the deluxe-exclusive levels have a mode as well. playing through them all back to back, I have to say I still like them for the most part, as there's a lot of great ideas present (maybe one too many maze stages tho). there are also a few modes that remix the levels. golden banana mode is probably the best of these, where you need to collect every banana in a stage in order to clear it. this actually changes how the stages need to be approached quite a bit. the opposite of this is dark banana mode, where any banana touched instantly causes a game over. while the idea is good in concept, they're designed for a level of precision I just don't think exists in this game. finally there's reverse mode, where certain levels start you at the goal and make you work your way back to the starting point. the best level of these is Free Throw, where they make you throw yourself backwards onto the starting platform in a cool twist. the others mainly just require you to tread the same path as whatever the hardest goal is, so they come across as rather redundant.

minigames are also back in full force, with all of the features from deluxe retained to my knowledge. the big thing that turned me off here was the lack of alternating multiplayer, which even in a patch could be such a trivial addition. I bought this on ps4, where I don't really have extra controllers to work with, and it's frustrating that my roommates and I can't play monkey target or billiards by passing the controller around. overall the minigames seem to be pretty much as I remember them from the old games, with all the customization you could want to boot. I can't really pretend something like monkey race isn't scuffed as fuck, but they were in the originals as well so it's pretty faithful. all that I played other than monkey target look very solid... monkey target is honestly a "Made in Dreams"-ass game here, but it's so annoying in its original form that I'll let it slide here. most of the other games here I can just experience via yakuza or really don't care that much about, beyond perhaps trying to go for completion later down the line.

I also wanted to briefly mention the art design for both the menus and the levels, which are absolutely phenomenal. beyond some UI nitpicks I mentioned earlier I think the interface is very clear and clean, and feels like an accurate translation from the older games to a modern style. the world designs are really gorgeous, and blew me away with their accuracy. I really would not have thought a quickie project for RGG would capture the style and detail of the original worlds so well in HD, but they absolutely nailed it here. the banana blitz-era monkey designs I'm not crazy about but they do the job fine, and the cutesy redesigns of kiryu and beat are so fun; I still can't believe they're in the game!! the music has all been remixed as well, though I personally think they're pretty middling overall. the original soundtracks are legendary so I definitely didn't expect them to live up here, but they really veer into tacky EDM territory more often than I would like.

finally, I wanted to bring up the accessibility options, which are much-needed additions for newer fans looking to try the series out. you can use helper functions in each level to double the timer as well as open up a very useful slow motion mode for the cost of receiving no points upon clearing the level and disabling the extra stages for the course. I messed around with these a bit and I think they do a good job of covering the bases for someone learning a given stage. if stage is too taxing, you can also pay 2000 banana coins to mark it as cleared. which is a hefty toll but honestly worth it when poking around in the special modes to skip annoying levels that would take a lot of practice. finally, the jump from banana blitz has been added in as a purchaseable item, and surprisingly it doesn't void trophies/extra stuff like the helper functions (though it can't be used in ranking mode). when watching trailers I thought I wouldn't touch this at all but I decided to try it out when struggling on Warp and wow did it really save my ass. because the jump wasn't present in the original games, it opens up a lot of ways to break previously challenging level design, and honestly that became the most fun part of the game for me at points. skipping all of the tiring maze levels from smb2 feels so great, and I even managed to pull off a strat equivalent to the speedrun route for Stamina Master by jumping at the peak of the first ramp. it honestly made the final worlds of story mode a lot more enjoyable given how many frustrating and gimmicky levels are contained within it (they were bad in the original too, not just this game). when I eventually get around to smb2 master and master extra, I'm sure I'll have fun finding ways to break levels that originally took me dozens of lives to beat.

I think I've exhaustively covered every aspect of this game that I've played so far... and now that I've finished this giant wall of text I can finally move onto some other games. I don't think I've wasted my time with this game at all, and I'm glad this package exists, but man does it really not scratch that itch that the original games do. perhaps an engine on par with the original simply isn't capable of happening without the original source code available... but at the end of the day I'll still have the original games to return to when I really want to experience monkey ball as it originally felt.

The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.

The top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren - the secret name. This corresponds to the director, who directs the game of your life from conception to death. The secret name is the title of your game. When you died, that's where Ren came in.

The second soul off the sinking ship is Sekem - energy, power, and light. The director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the guardian angel, depicted as flying away across a full moon. A bird with luminous wings and head of light. The sort of thing you might see on a screen in a video game from your Xbox. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defence - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.

Number four is Ba, the heart - often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down like Samson by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka - the double. Most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Sands.

Number six is Khaibit, the shadow memory. Your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

𓂀

In the autumn of 2011, I got my first ‘real’ job, leaving behind the hell of zero-hour retail and office temp work to become an IT repairman at a big library. Finally, I could provide myself with food, clothing, shelter and, most importantly, video games. I loved problem-solving, working with tools and being on the computer so much already, and now had a professional outlet for all of those things that I enjoyed. It was the best job I’d ever had, but there was one weird snag - the librarians really didn’t like the cleaning and repair staff.

I’m not sure what makes librarians think that alphabetising Anne Rice novels is a more noble profession than networking 500 computers together or replacing tungsten filaments in industrial lighting systems, but nonetheless, they felt justified in keeping the workies out of every kitchen and staff lounge in the building. Mugs, coffee grounds, tea bags, milk, plates and microwaves were all kept in locked cupboards that only “academic” staff could access. Fresh out of retail hell, I just accepted this as a natural law of the universe (of course I was unworthy of a plastic cup for some water!), but in retrospect, it was a little fucked up. My “non-academic” colleagues responded to this in kind by hiding kettles, instant coffee and tin cups in electrical cupboards and storerooms, an essential act of survival misconstrued as spiteful by the microwave-havers. Without anywhere to store fridges in a stock cupboard, there was no milk to be had. Black tea or black coffee were our only options at break-time in the library.

This is how I learned to love black coffee. I had been a white-and-sugars type guy until this point in my personal hot-drink history, treating coffee more as a vehicle for warm milk then an experience in and about itself. Thirsty as hell from running around physically installing Microsoft Excel patches on computers still running Windows 98 in 2011, I had no choice but to forgo my preference for milk and just get used to gulping hot acidic bean water day in, day out when I needed to restore my hit-points. At first I didn’t enjoy it all, but like everything else in life, cultivating patience of habit can allow you to accept and adapt to almost any situation you find yourself in. 11 years later, I now drink nothing but black coffee. I could, probably, somehow - like those wine wankers you see in movies - even tell you the difference between different blends of the hot acid gloop that is burning my insides. Such is my passion for #coffee.

In the autumn of 2011, something else happened. A video game called Dark Souls launched on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, to some degree of fanfare that is still up for debate to this day. Video game historians like to mythologise the rise of the Souls series, and often claim Dark Souls launched to very little acclaim - but from my own historical perspective, I contest this claim. My memory leads me to believe the contrary - that Dark Souls had an exciting buzz about it right out of the gate - for game-fans and game-readers, at least. I was mostly a Halo and Street Fighter IV player at the time, and even I’d felt the urge to buy it on opening week. For some reason... I can’t remember why... That was over a decade ago. An age past. I don’t remember my motivation for every video game I’ve ever bought.

Friends of mine who’d foolishly bought PlayStation 3s to play Metal Gear Solid 4 derisively informed me that Dark Souls was the sequel to Demon’s Souls: their painful memories told mine that Demon’s Souls was a “stupid” and “unfair” game that treated its players with contempt and that I should consider getting Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 instead because this one was gonna have all-new ways for 12-year-olds to militarily abuse me through the internet. I wasn’t the type of person to listen to my friends, though - I preferred to listen to anonymous message board posters and professional video game journalists. With one of my first paycheques as a fully-fledged computer janitor, I purchased a Cafe AeroPress coffee maker and a copy of Dark Souls.

... And I hated it. As my friends had prophesied, Dark Souls was relentlessly unfair. Enemies came back to life and stabbed me in the back; pathways crumbled and sent me tumbling to my doom; evil knights shrugged off my attacks and responded in kind with bigger and badder swords of their own. The infamous curse status - an affliction that permanently halves your health and prevents you from becoming human - was my final straw. I recognised the gauntlet that was being laid before me in the Undead Depths and chose to reject the challenge. I found solace in the darkness of my coffee maker and put the game away forever.

A few months later, while trying to avoid studying for the most important exams of my life, I picked the game up again. I had decided that wading around damp dark sewers as a cursed little half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit was less daunting than preparing for my final exams before my adulthood-proper. I persevered, #coffee in one hand and a Wiki in the other, learning the ins and outs of the game’s mechanics in far greater depth than any of the Relational Database Management Systems textbooks on my study desk. I would rather prepare to die than prepare to pass.

Like many rookie Dark Souls players, parrying was my Everest - though perhaps over-emphasised by the playerbase as an essential skill for completing the game, it was certainly a far more important mechanic back then than that it is today. I spent many hours in the Undead Parish practicing my defence; learning the intricacies and timings of the mechanic and its follow-ups with my undead knight partners until the synapses solidified and I could pull a parry out of my reflexes without much mental effort. It was the key I needed to unlock my progress through the game, and I proudly rode my parrying prowess to the Kiln of the First Flame, linking the fire in ignorance of an unintended side-effect this new reflex had developed in me in the new ages to come.

Years later, I got the chance to play the now-infamous Dark Souls 2 demo at a video game expo and felt compelled to put my parry skills to the test once more. Despite the fact a coked-out Bandai Namco Games employee was offering free t-shirts to anyone who could beat the Mirror Knight in their allotted 15-minute slot, I persevered in the starting area until I could get my timings down once more. After a few whiffs and some off-colour comments from our jaw-clicking host, I finally managed to bat back a shadowy blade. It was at that moment that I discovered that Dark Souls 2 had a brand new feature - the parries smelt and tasted of black coffee. Despite all the gamer sweat and farts and poorly-ventilated electronics in my environment, I could sense coffee inside my brain. Hours of parry practice while sipping black coffee in my bedroom had built a permanent association between parrying and coffee in my mind. A soul memory.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of soul memory, even if you know it by another name (Mikhail Bakhtin calls it the chronotope, for instance). The taste of spaghetti bolognese reminds you of a good day at your friend’s house in 2002. The fresh scent of factory plastic that emanates from a new video game takes you back to the summer holiday when your mum finally bought you Timesplitters 2 despite it being rated a 15+. Perhaps a particularly bad hangover from a night of drinking rum and coke has forever ruined the taste of Pepsi for you. Petrol makes you think about the forest, for some reason you don’t remember. And so on. You’ve all seen Ratatouille, I guess. I don’t need to labour at this point.

Soul memory is the currency of the sequel and the franchise, and in our current era, soul memory is undergoing hyperinflation - Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Spider-Man: No Way Home; Ghostbusters: Afterlife - filmmakers are eagerly trying to collect soul memories so they can take them to the bureau de change and cash out in dollars. You might baulk at this suggestion that the scent of your grandmother’s baked potatoes can be commodified, but I think there’s ample evidence to suggest that no link in your mind is safe from capital’s claws.

Video games are perhaps the most egregious traders of soul memory. Video games, even the best ones, are standing tall on the shoulders upon shoulders of prior moments in space-time - real and imagined - all the way back down to Donkey Kong. Re-releases and remakes and remasters and retro collections are nostalgia-primers for experiences you might not even have been alive for - we all love Pac-Man, even though we may not have met him in an 80s arcade hall; you and I replicated those experiences instead with a movie) or a PlayStation 3 Arcade Archive or a Pac-Man music video on MTV; phenomena best exemplified by the teenagers I saw on Twitter who are collecting Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles promotional Happy Meal toys from 1993 to bring their souls closer to their blue-haired messiah. By letting you collect and play your figurative Rainbow Roads again and again and again in generation after generation after generation of product, video games explore the loss of a childhood place, and our attempts to recreate it.

And so what if the place that we are in the midst of is different from the physical space that we currently inhabit? What if the things we yearn for are located elsewhere, in another place or a falsely-remembered past, and all we now carry within us is an image of this place. We may remember only elements or impressions of it: there may be certain objects, sounds, a level, a character, special moves, cutscenes, or online battles; all of which come out in a manner that we cannot control or understand. Yet any of these elements or impressions make us feel at home in a way that we cannot find in the physical space where we are now stuck. Being displaced and yet capable of remembering the particularity of place: it is the state of being dislocated yet able to discern what it is that locates us. We have a great yearning, but we often cannot fulfil it with anything but memories from our soul.

In my review of Halo Infinite at the end of last year, I suggested the possibility that game developers are attempting to harness soul memory in new and exciting ways, the limits between your imagination and theirs almost fully removed in this gilded age of RTX and NGX and Speed Tree and shader-caching and other computer stuff I don’t understand; the world expanding ever-wider as we slot in more and more chips, spreading the channels between CPU and memory (both silicon and cerebellum) ever-wider. The end-state, no doubt, is a game that never ends, expanding outwards like our universe, all contained in the heart of an eternally-burning electric star on the platter of your hard drive. But how do you fuel a world-game of such approaching-infinite size? With the dependable financial and artistic mainstays of gaming, of course - the memory of/reverie in/nostalgia for/ known experiences, known systems, known self. Which makes Halo - a DirectX-based comfort food of the 18-35 crowd - an ideal candidate for colonisation via constant computer creation.

With Halo Infinite, it’s hard to gauge the intentionality of the author (and the multi-billion dollar corporation employing the author). By all accounts, Infinite was a scrap-piece, a million shattered pieces of contractor work and discarded concepts fused into a Holiday Product - something that, at least initially, presents itself as a never-ending ring-world: Zeta Halo could not be more apt as a setting for the beyond-open world template that’s come into vogue this generation (see also: Microsoft’s other tentpole, Forza Horizon). But was this product forged with any purpose greater than a shareholder deadline, a gilded-gold ring that can’t sustain itself beyond a financial quarter (never mind an eternal age!)? Fields upon fields of the same retrofuturistic alien base and knowing remarks about crunch and copy-pasted environments from your maiden, Cortana Weapon, imply that Halo Infinite was an illusion produced by profit - a defective ring-world, nothing more; but there are, at the very least, implications that game developers know what they create. In this new Halo instalment, Master Chief, regretting his transition out of cryostasis, is the only character in the game who opposes the rebuilding of the Halo installations. Too bad, John - you’re going for another last-minute warthog ride to the sounds of early-2000s progressive hard rock.

Does Halo Infinite sound familiar? Well, you might have played Dark Souls 3 and its downloadable follow-up: The Ringed City. Hidetaka Miyazaki's Souls series homecoming may have been hailed as a "return to form" for the franchise after the polarising reception to Dark Souls 2, but this oft-quoted games-journalist soundbite has a double-edge to it - namely, that it quite literally returned Dark Souls to its original form, repurposing locations, bosses, and emotional beats from the games that came before it. Lothric isn't a million lightyears away from Zeta Halo - it forges a similarly flimsy ring of questionable geography and architecture, a Dark Souls Disneyland built from item and character references that no longer mean anything beyond commercialised self-sabotage, names and item descriptions appearing only for the purposes of cynical, cyclical continuity with its predecessors. The game knew what it was creating with itself in its Bandai-Namco-hued orange-yellow wasteland - an idea perhaps best exemplified in the Abyss Watchers, a gang of frenzied Artorias fanboys from the Firelink Shrine who serve no literary purpose beyond infighting among themselves about the ways Artorias of the Abyss was like, really, really cool. (For some reason, I am now recalling the fact my PlayStation 4 copy of Dark Souls 3 came with a mail-order slip for a £344.99 statue of Artorias from the Bandai-Namco Official European Store...) These references without continuity, these connections without purpose... all they do is ring a Pavlovian spirit bell of soul memory in your brain for a fleeting moment. Nothing more. And Dark Souls 3 didn't just know this - it made it a central tenet of its thematics, even building its last-ever DLC around the concept of painting a forever-world made of the Dark Soul itself. Known experiences, known systems, known self, known forever. Consuming the Gods without question, like Gael, until the coming Age of Dark.

[[LAUNCH DEADLINE REACHED - BACKLOGGD SHAREHOLDERS ARE DEMANDING A Q2 LAUNCH OF THIS REVIEW ]]
// TODO: placeholder for another 9 paragraphs discussing the cyclical ages of fire depicted in the Dark Souls trilogy here and how the idea can be metatextually applied to the development cycles of each Souls game and their growing commercial impact vs. receding artistic impact. This part will be included in a post-launch patch to this review at an undetermined date. Hopefully never.

In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths are the truths of the “Noble Ones”: those who are deemed “spiritually worthy". These truths are:

- Dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara, the world-cycle of death and rebirth we all live through. Existence is pain, to some degree.

- Samudaya (origin, arising, combination; 'cause'): together with dukkha arises taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment, lit. "thirst”). While tanha is traditionally interpreted in western languages as the 'cause' of dukkha, tanha can also be seen as the factor tying us to dukkha, or as a response to dukkha, trying to escape it; a suffering often understood to be a combination of a consumptive desire for fleeting things, destructive hatefulness, and ignorance of the world as it truly is.

- Nirodha (cessation, ending, confinement) dukkha can be ended or contained by the renouncement or letting go of this taṇhā; the confinement of tanha releases the excessive bind of dukkha; the end of suffering. We are finite flawed creatures with only two ways out: either cyclical death, or transcendence through enlightenment.

- Magga (the path, the Noble Eightfold Path) is the path leading to the confinement of tanha and dukkha. The next path in the teachings; Buddhism’s sequel, post-launch DLC or content update.

☸

Elden Ring is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki and made in collaboration with fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin, who provided material for the game's setting. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on February 25, 2022.

Elden Ring is presented through a third-person perspective, with players freely roaming its interactive open world. Gameplay elements include combat featuring several types of weapons and magic spells, horseback riding, summons, and crafting. Elden Ring received critical acclaim, with praise for its open-world gameplay, fantasy setting, and evolution of the Souls formula. The game sold 12 million copies within three weeks of its release.

Elden Ring is From Software's first game of a new decade that follows an Age of Dark.

The exciting thing about a long voyage like Elden Ring is that it can inhabit so many spaces and times within your life, entwining its soul memories with your own in so many more ways than just an association between coffee and parrying. Due to its epic scale, brutal difficulty and my desire to travel through it as un-aided as possible, it took me four months to beat the game. Looking back from the now, the distance from February until May feels, as it often does in modern times, like a lifetime and a moment. Nothing and everything happened within the standard cycles of my life. I got up and went to work every day, playing through Elden Ring in spare moments and evenings. A war broke out while I was playing Elden Ring. I finished all six seasons of The Sopranos and four seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the time period I existed within while attempting to beat Elden Ring for the first time, and I noted that Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleed for the PlayStation 2 plays surprisingly similarly to Elden Ring. I went abroad for the first time in over two years, often thinking about Elden Ring while looking at the cathedrals and sweeping vistas of Barcelona. I saw a bunch of my friends in person for the first time in years while playing Elden Ring, and we discussed what builds were cool and which characters were cool. When I started Elden Ring, social distancing and facemasks were still mandatory in many places; when I finished Elden Ring, they were not.

So how do these new memories of mine intermingle with those presented in Elden Ring? Does Hoarfrost Stomp taste like marzipan? Is the Altus Plateau a portal to the golden fields of childhood freedom? Have I come to understand Godfrey as a Tony Soprano-like patriarchal figure in relation to Godrick's AJ? Perhaps nothing as crass or immediately interdependent as that. Has playing Elden Ring while existing in 2022 caused me to draw personal and societal parallels between my different lives? I'm tempted to say yes. I'm tempted to take apart Elden Ring's Elden Ring piece-by-piece and point at its golden roots and talk about the scarlet rot and the human ashes that drown the golden skyscrapers of Leyendell and all the ways in which this tale of souls and swords can be applied to someone who travels in the world of our present. But I'd be here even longer than I already am, hanging onto the dying embers of a rambling essay that has gone on too long. In a sense, choosing what aspect of Elden Ring to unpack and explore is exactly how the game makes you feel when you're contemplating which path to take at a crossroads in the Lands Between - whether to explore a cave, a castle, a peninsula, a continent, a realm, a galaxy, an age, a concept of the afterlife turned into a video game level. Naturally, you have to let go of possibility and walk down a single path in order to move forward.

This painful push and pull between potential possibility and your (perhaps pre-determined) path is what makes Elden Ring so compelling. Of course games like Breath of the Wild have already explored this concept of 'go-anywhere', but not in an artistic sense that exists beyond the controller and the things that are happening literally on the screen. In Breath of the Wild, going up a hill will get you into a fight with a bird and you will do a puzzle and you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun - but experiences begin to entwine and overlap, memories becoming overwritten and jumbled in endless plains of rolling green and goblin. Memories require delineation if they are to be stored within containers of consciousness, and in Elden Ring, going up a hill can turn into a 20-hour odyssey through the ashes of time to explore an all-out conquest that was once fought over the very nature of Godhood, where you will meet and contemplate primordial, psychological and philosophical concepts in the form of a dude with a wolf head who reads Berserk. Or maybe you will explore the entirety of a lost kingdom on the edge of the afterlife's cosmos and wonder why it exists or even existed at all, all while the ghost of a forgotten world-serpent caves your skull in. And you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun and those unique, memorable moments will bond with a greater space and time in your head.

Exploration of space beyond the time is a fundamental element of Elden Ring and the Elden Ring. From Software understand that space-time extends with video games, through video games, in video games - that old cliche of a gamer living a thousand lives. In much the same way that it can be confusing to refer to Elden Ring as both a video game product and a concept within the world of Elden Ring itself (it is amusing to note how difficult it is to get the wiki page for the Elden Ring on the Elden Ring Wiki), so too can it be confusing to separate memory and space-time as they exist within and outwith ourselves, our Golden Orders of subjective fact and fiction; moments and how we place ourselves inside them, the near-infinite subjectivity of experience that so often causes people to argue with each other over matters that are ultimately our inner order of perception and recollection. Was Radahn right? Was Malenia right? Sound off in the comments below.

For a long time, one of my most-visited YouTube videos was this performance of Dragon Quest V’s music by the NHK Symphony Orchestra. The music is a fantastic soundtrack to a comments section full of positive nostalgia in a foreign language. Google Translate doesn’t get the full meaning across, but you can feel all that’s being said despite the barriers between people on opposite sides of the internet's round table. This is the comment that always stands out to me when I scroll down:

“This was a game of my dad’s era, but it makes me nostalgic for that time all the same.”

I only beat Dragon Quest V in 2019, but I feel this same nostalgia, these same memories, this same realisation of a video game world as a portal through soul memory. I beat the iOS port of the DS port of the original Super Famicom version while sitting on the toilet at work, but my shared DQV reality with that kid, and his father before him, who played the game on different hardware in a different space in a different time, allows me to understand them. We saved the world and that adventure will stay with us all for a lifetime. Bur this feeling isn't anything unique - throw a dart at the board of YouTube's video game soundtracks and you'll find this phenomenon replicated for pretty much every video game ever made. Queen Rennala stands in a Grand Library and offers you endless rebirth.

The beauty of Elden Ring's length, scale and scope is that it's also capable of playing with this concept of chronotope from within. Whereas Dark Souls 3 relied on imagery and ideology from previous entries to invoke soul memory with (intentionally) cheap referentiality, Elden Ring instead chooses to loop over itself many times over in order to play new games with your mind. There are many ways in which the game achieves this, and if you've ever griped about "reused content", you probably know the kind of thing I mean - fortresses reappearing in different states of decay and ruin; enemies returning again and again as if pursuing you through the Lands Between; the souls of wolves and trees and tree-avatars haunt the earth; the same dungeons and dragons in different locations, sometimes appearing as battlefields of the present, sometimes appearing as sites of historical importance - Great War memorials on a school field trip. The game even deigns to reference the wider From Software cosmology (I am using every word in my vocabulary to avoid typing the term "Soulsborne"), but interestingly chooses to place a lot of these capricious callbacks in dank, dirty, decaying swamps - they are deemed to be hollow, undead references. In a sense, it's a game so vast that it's able to create nostalgia for itself.

For me, the most interesting way the game exemplifies soul memory is in its boss battles. In our realm, the bosses of Elden Ring are something of a contentious topic - out of some 150+ battles that put grand old names above life-bars, only five in the whole game are wholly unique. "How could the developers be so lazy as to do this?!" is the rallying cry of the passionate masses who are seemingly unwilling to afford From Software any artistic agency or intentionality of design. In a series/franchise/whateverthisis like the Souls games, isn't the whole point that you're prepared to die, over and over again, in the same battles, just like the demigods that you seek to surpass? You're in battle against spiritual and physical elements of the universe itself! The Fallingstar Beast appears twice in the game, but you didn't fight him twice, did you? I'm willing to wager you fought him five times, ten times, twenty times, maybe many times more. Why delineate by encounters in space when you can just as easily use time? Was each death and rebirth just "reused content", or was it an intentional part of an experience that the game's developers wanted you to live through? The game's named after a big old circle, for crying out loud!

This isn't an attempt by me to reframe the reuse of content as a purely artistic choice - of course it was done to gild the game's vast size and ensure every crevice of the world map had some experience of some form for the player, but practical compromises made within the constraints of development can be moulded, with appropriate care, into art. We can challenge From's tendency to rework frameworks, but aren't they trapped in their own never-ending cycle by capital, working to the drumbeat of 100 million sales? You may rankle when yet another boss pulls off the iconic Scarlet Aeonia (itself a reference/homage/repetition of a Magic the Gathering card ), but it's all in aid of your personal character development and the development of the game's characters and their relationships in the Lands Between. While I certainly wouldn't call any of my many, many, many battles with Malenia and her acolytes art in and of themselves, my memories of these multi-faceted repetitions tie back to an essential theme of the Souls series - overcoming the greatest boss of all: yourself.

It would be trite of me to spend a ton of time telling everyone about a universal human experience and how it applies to a series of video games that have sold enough copies to make them almost universal gamer experiences, so instead I'll just share a soul memory of Elden Ring that I think embodies this value of repetition and self-mastery. The Subterranean Shunning-Grounds (the names in this game rock lol) is essentially the final dungeon of the game, a terrible theme park of sewer content that long-time fans of these games will immediately recognise - pipes, poison, basilisks, curses, rats, little fucked up gargoyle dudes. It's essentially all the most annoying things about playing a Souls game in a single package, ramped up to 11 by twisted virtue of the fact this is the final area in a 100-hour game that stands at the end of a path of six other 100-hour games with similarly wicked ideas. 11 years after giving up on Dark Souls, I was once again a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit. Indeed, it is a punishingly difficult experience to be a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit - even with a high-defense build, certain enemies can take you out in a hit or two. And if they aren't capable of taking you out in a hit or two, they have almost certainly been carefully positioned next to a giant pit that can take you out in a single hit. It's an infuriating area, yet entirely optional. You don't have to do it to yourself, but at this point, it just feels right that you should pursue whatever nebulous reward that the Shunning-Grounds harbour. And what is the final test at the end of this dungeon? A dragon? An army of the undead? Another cosmic deity? No! It's a jumping puzzle in a tomb of skeletons and corpses piled to the ceiling - an incredibly tricky test of wits that combines your physical dexterity with an eye for problem-solving. It took me dozens of tries to master, and memories of the hallways leading from the bonfire to the puzzle chamber have now been seared into my mind. A video game challenge that made me scream out in pain for the first time in years... Fuck that bullshit!!! And at the end of it all, what is your reward for completing this task? No runes or swords or armor. Just a spell called Inescapable Frenzy, an incantation that sends the minds of humans towards madness. Let it never be said that From Software do not have a sense of humour! No wonder some players choose to enter into a covenant with Chaos a few moments later...

"try jumping" is a message you see a lot in Elden Ring. One of the oldest pranks in the Souls fan playbook, it's a nasty little trick that encourages the freshly chosen undead to leap from high places with promise of some unknowable reward. Inevitably, it always leads to one thing - a painful, costly death. Why do players take the time to encourage people they'll never meet to commit suicide, and why do so many people mark these messages as helpful to others? Probably for the same unknowable reason that people tell each other to kill themselves via other mediums of the internet. Ugly as "try jumping" may be, it has always fit comfortably with the artistic notions of Dark Souls as an analog for the neverending battle against depression and misery, the difficulty that comes with suppressing one's urge to die, to give up, to leave it all behind. One of Elden Ring's first concessions to new players is to finally explain this meta-mechanic - if you fall for the very first "try jumping" message that the game places before you, you end up in a tutorial area. Hopefully you won't make the same mistake twice now. From Software know that the Internet-at-large is one of the most lethal enemies their games have to offer, and I fought against that wicked foe by making a point of putting down some "no jumping ahead" messages while on my journey.

The online component of these games has always existed, but has never really been explicitly acknowledged within the game-world beyond a few experimental instances like The Ringed City's Spear of the Church. As the ostensible herald of a new age Elden Ring takes the first steps toward acknowledging ours, supplementing a mechanism with a metaphor. To avoid beating around the bush - I think the Roundtable Hold is the Internet. A realm inaccessible by horse nor foot, where the people of the world meet up to sell shit, trade stories, gossip and fuck around, all under an oath of no physical contact. Per Varre's comment, the Roundtable is "a place for has-beens trying to look important but unable or unwilling to actually take any action". Sound familiar? There is a place in Leyndell Royal Capital that looks exactly like the Roundtable Hold, but no one is there - the Hold is, in effect, a virtual, imagined space; a simulation in parallel existence to reality. It's a trick that From has pulled before, but characters and their occupation of parallel space-times with differing persona spells out that this is, in some classic weird-ass cosmic FromSoft way, a digiverse within a digiverse.

Ensha, Dung Eater and D are the most vivid exemplars of this idea. Three masked edge, lords who spend their time in the Roundtable acting aloof and cool and above it all; their corporeal forms lashing out with hatred against women in the meatspace of the Lands Between, giving away their Inner Order to pursue violence against Malenia, Fia and - in the Loathsome Dung Eater's case - every woman and child in the known universe. (See also: Gideon/Seluvis and their relationship to the class-conscious Nepheli Loux: Gideon as a gatekeeper who encourages you to overcome your Maidenless status and venerate yourself in the eyes of the Roundtable's men ("the road of champions"); Seluvis as a PUA who tries to involve you in a date-rape scheme.) In the case of D, the game implies the existence of a "twin brother" - an alternate persona - who behaves differently depending on the space-time he inhabits. We see him in reality, unreality and Nokron's post-reality afterlife, behaving more aggressively in each plane until he loses bravado when faced with with the bare-faced truth of inescapable Death itself. The player has the option of giving him back his mask and suit of armour, which ultimately leads to a violent death for "that bitch" Fia, a woman who recognises men possessing a warmth that has nowhere to go. In the case of the Dung Eater, whose mortal form is trapped within the aforementioned ur-Souls palace of the Shunning-Grounds, the connection to our ugly internet personalities is a little more explicit, a seeming admission by From Software of all the ugliness that arises from building one's personality around a nexus of digital souls and swords. If From are shackled on some level to this medium of expression, the least they have done here is develop some self-awareness and critique. At the game's climax, the Roundtable burns out, telling us more or less everything we need to know about the developer's feelings on the Web Between Worlds that we inhabit and the paths we choose to walk in each realm of spirit. Will this Roundtable fall to the mortal ashes of Leydendell too, or is there potential for All to achieve Magga, the enlightened transcendence of Buddhist teaching?

The natural follow-on from this topic is an exploration of the golden Grace, the "maidenless" concept and its real-world implications, but I feel the paragraph above demonstrates why it's unwise to provoke red phantoms in the hold through discussion of certain topics and experiences. Elden Ring is a game where not every path should be taken, and, as I already said like three times before (lol), the same holds true of a review; I'm not sure I have the experience or incantations necessary to step into that toxic swamp, lest I provoke an invasion. Instead, I choose to focus on the light that casts this darkness: Friendship. The golden light of the summon sign is the natural enemy of the blood-red invader, and Elden Ring makes this relationship more explicit than its predecessors by mandating that human invaders can only go after parties of two or more players - the eternal war between the "git gud" and the "git help" is now more aggressive than ever before. By changing the mechanics of the franchise's online component, From Software have peppered their latest instalment with challenges to the sensibilities of try-hard players that remind me most of Sakurai's implementation of the anti-competitive tripping mechanic in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While I think the omnipotent anger and cultural overpowerment of the "git gud" crowd is perhaps overstated by the fans at large, it's an unfortunate signifier of their ever-presence that after seven of these games I still get second thoughts about asking for help when I need it.

The kindness of strangers is an enduring motif of Elden Ring, a natural tonic to the toxic anger that permeates every environment you journey across. Melina, the thematic emodiment of this kindness, turns your experience and soul memory into strength, a companion who appears to those at risk of stoking personal flames of frenzy as a guide who leads you towards the Erdtree and the Elden Ring. I don't think it's a coincidence that the game gets inordinately tougher to handle by yourself in the wake of her ultimate sacrifice; investments in endgame Rune Levels feel less substantial, less meaningful, than those conversions of experience made while travelling with Melina at RL100 and below. (The Ranni questline, with its literal idolation of a young girl as a peculiar doll the player can contemplate in silence by the fire, dovetails nicely with Melina's death and serves as an interesting pair of endgame decisions the player can take, further compounded by the Roundtable stuff discussed above) The final stretch of the game demands, almost explicitly, that the player look beyond themselves and extend a hand of need to those around them in much the same way one should following a deeply personal loss.

If you did not touch a summon sign or ring a spirit bell or read a fan-wiki after Leyendell, know that I know you are a liar and a punk and you will be judged far more harshly by my council than the guys who spent six hours outside Maliketh trying to bring in a sorcerer called Pigf#cker or whatever other desperate means they chose to undertake in order to realise their ambitions. Everyone needed help to finish Elden Ring; everyone needed help to stave off the Frenzied Flame that the Elden Ring's Golden Order was trying to stoke from within you on your personal path to enlightenment. Fought the Godskin Duo by yourself, did you bro? Well, the Godskin Apostle didn't. He brought in someone to help him. Are you really that stupid? The legend of Let Me Solo Her didn't develop from the tremendous feat of beating Malenia solo - was this noble pothead the first person to ever beat her by himself? Of course not. The legend developed as a veneration of kindness, a manifestation of will and memory and dreams of ambitions, a symbol of those Tarnished who offer their help to those who need it most: Let Me Solo Her is our idealised savior, a breakup bro for the maidenless, a hero who will help you fight your hardest battles and overcome your most painful soul memories. Stay isolated and lost in your past, or find your friends on the path and start living your life.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.

How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.

And yet it all seems limitless.

So what of soul memory, the idea I spent so long talking about at the start of this review? Well, that's another thing that's beautiful about Elden Ring - I'm not done playing it yet. Much in the same way I wasn't done playing Dark Souls after I'd put down the pad, Elden Ring has manifested itself in my everyday life and my relationships with the souls and space-time and coffee granules around me. It's difficult to write a conclusive conclusion for an Elden Ring review because it doesn't feel like the game is over yet. I fought the Elden Beast, I saw an ending, I saw the credits, but evidently I can't stop thinking about the game and the ideas and memories and experience it imbued me with. I'm walking on an invisible path in a consecrated snowfield of boundless white, trying to find my noble truth and inner order and greater will by constantly making sense of everything I've seen, heard and felt through, with and in my lives lived, tilting at windmills in the gardens of madness within this life and beyond. You are too. Let's face it together.

𓂀

The seventh soul is Sekhu. The remains.

Bottom line: it’s fine. My 8 year old nephew 100%’d this game twice, and that feels like all that should matter. But - this game makes me uncomfortable. Because my nephew did not 100% Super Mario Odyssey, or any game before this, which provides the lens I need to dig into this game’s funny feeling.

That funny feeling started as soon as the game booted up and asked me to share my data. I know many games do this, but seeing it in the context of Kirby planted this seed in my head of “market testing.” That seed blossomed as I played the game and thought about how this game was marketed, how it reviewed, and it’s now franchise record sales. There are so many touchpoints that made me feel like I was playing game product as much as an actual game.

Forgotten Land’s whole gimmick, of Mouthful Mode, feels like a reaction to Mario Odyssey as much as an imitation. People responded well to the weirdness of Mario becoming a photo-realistic T-Rex and chilling in New York City. And by well, I mean twitter loved it. And by loved it, I mean it had high engagement. The weirdness was gif-able. My real world friends are still weirded out by the real people in Odyssey’s New York City. (I hate them!)

And so we get Carby. Carby is weird. It’s transgressive. It’s meme-able in the same way Mario’s capture mechanic was. Making characters that can glom onto any real world thing or object is marketing genius for building unexpected associations with your character and product. The merchandising potential is high while having to maintain few new character trademarks. Gimmicky transformations are nothing new to Kirby. Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Planet Robobot featured plenty. But something about the way they are used in Forgotten Land put me on edge. And I think that’s because the basic gameplay of playing as Kirby in the Forgotten Land is boring.

The best Kirby games have smooth movement and a wide range of character actions for Kirby that make it fun to explore his otherwise simple levels. Transitioning to 3D in Forgotten Land came with some compromises that took away freedom of movement without offering substitutes. Kirby can no longer fly vertically infinitely. It’s perfectly viable to fly over levels in most 2D Kirby games, but the act of mashing the jump button gets tiring enough that you’ll eventually fall back to properly engaging with the game. Kirby no longer can run. The input for doing so in 2D was a double tap, something that can’t be registered as easily in 3D. So instead of adding another button for running, Kirby’s stuck on one speed.

As a result of these restrictions, the level design is plain. The camera lets you tickle it, but the levels are linear enough you’ll forget the option exists. Walk around, projectile spam with the same-y feeling copy abilities at enemies who mostly stand around giving the stink eye. Wait for a gap in canon ball blasts, hop over a bottomless pit. After enough of these elements have been remixed to feel like a game level, it usually ends with a Mouthful Mode transformation sequence. Yes, its funny when Kirby becomes a vending machine or a set of stairs, but you’re kinda wandering through barren levels getting pointless trinkets until something funny happens and then the level ends. Because if the level ends on something funny, that’s what you remember, so it must have been a fun time, yeah?

Forgotten Land reminded me of the difference between how critics and customers play games. Critics binge games, so love tangible details that are easy to write about. Variety and novelty work well on them because they are unlikely to replay levels, and games with lots of different powers and meme-able moments are easier to remember and describe to fill space. For me, it feels like the set pieces and gimmicks are to distract from the fact the base interactivity of the game character just isn't that fun or engaging.

Nothing sparks my intuition for a game’s insecurity like checklists, and Forgotten Land is brazen. Finishing any level immediately shoves a scorecard in your face with everything you did and did not accomplish. I appreciate games that let you track trinkets, but the presentation belies the intent. Unlike Mario Odyssey that hid its checklist in a menu you had to seek out, Forgotten Land is constantly making you aware of your “progress.” The main pause menu has a big completion percentage taking up more screen space than anything else. And to finish a world, you need to have accomplished a certain number of checklist items to challenge that world’s boss. These multiple systems in place guiding you to think about playing a level again, mere seconds after you’ve finished it the first time, irk me.

These systems irk me because they exist alongside other systems that feel even more sinister. Not in a vacuum, but because this is a Kirby game. Kirby can upgrade his copy abilities, but to do so, requires you find a trinket and amass quantities of two in-game currencies. One of these currencies is earned in separate challenge rooms from the main game levels. It feels so disconnected from the experience of playing the game one might ponder, “why couldn’t the hidden trinket just… be the ability upgrade, if we had to have one?” And the answer to that is to normalize children to the kind of game environments that have microtransactions.

Forgotten Land does not have microtransactions. However, it does have a “history of Kirby” book containing info about previous Kirby games. Notable, however, is it only shows Kirby games that are currently available for purchase on the 3DS, Wii U, and Nintendo Switch systems. Many of which are free-to-play spin-off games with currencies, upgrades, and menus very similar to the ones found in Forgotten Land - except these currencies cost real-world money. Notably absent from this picture book are older games like Kirby 64 and Kirby Super Star, which contain most of the inspiration in enemy and level design that Forgotten Land is aping.

This context also explains something odd that bothered me about the gacha-style collectible figures in Forgotten Land. (Another system that is pointless and dumb in any video game and is here being used to normalize gambling in a children’s game.) Figurines of enemies and bosses have pointless fluff Pokedex descriptions, but only those introduced in Forgotten Land. Series mainstays have no descriptions, lest they mention their origins and engender curiosity for these older, self-contained, non-monetizable games. (A departure from the historically themed collectables from the 3DS games, I might add.)

All of this modern gaming garbage - the achievements, the crafting, the currencies, the gacha, the base building, the incessantly chittering NPCs, the extreme number of reminders to upgrade, the data collection, the ads - I just hate it. And I know it works. It wouldn’t be here if it didn’t work.

When my nephew played Mario Odyssey, he’d find a challenge he thought was fun, and do it over and over again. He didn’t care that he didn’t get a moon. He didn’t need to collect every dumb hat, or scour the world for every trinket. The gameplay caught his interest, and the menus stayed out of his way. With Kirby, I know that isn’t the case, which makes me go from “wow, he really loved Forgotten Land!” to a sense of unease I can’t quantify.

In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is… fine. If you’re the type of person who only has time to play a level or two after work, it’s fine. If you are trying to get someone into gaming, it’s fine. (The co-op sucks. (Why no upgrades for Bandana Waddle Dee?)) But it’s not good. It’s expensive without feeling quality. I have no nostalgia for it, but Kirby Super Star is still the best Kirby game on the Switch. I find this expensively-produced mediocrity so weird.

Someone worked very hard on vector graphic animations for every level, (something that also feels like a response to Odyssey’s travel stickers), but the levels are so insipid in concept that the decals do nothing to help you remember what happens within them. The sound design lacks punch, relying on sound effects that have been in use for decades without expanding the soundscape to match the graphical fidelity of a 3D player space. The main theme song is hummable not due to its musical merits, but because it is reused and remixed in so many environments. One rendition has a guitar “wail” so embarrassing it conjures to mind parodies of Christian rock.

There is no greatness in Kirby and the Forgotten Land. There is no pulse that implies the work of great artists, but plenty of fingerprints left by corporate entities. I can more easily imagine the meetings of suits discussing what transformations to be shown in a Nintendo Direct than I can whoever drew the terrible boss designs. It feels like a project not striving to make something good, but a well-managed, well-funded project that allowed its average minds ample time to finish their tasks. I hope none of this nonsense represents KIrby in the next Super Smash Bros. game.

If I ever have to see that stupid sexy cheetah woman again and her terrible glittery eyeshadow I'll scream

absolutely whips. incredible design, sound, art, worldbuilding, pacing, and length.

a game that asks the question of what community is to you: is it the body you occupy, is it the world around you? is it your friends you help or simply every life you touch? do the people you love in far away places form that community as well, even those you are incapable of remembering? all of these questions balance on a knife's edge in a world that hates you, one that actively plans for and expects your death. they Necessitate it. in a life and a world where control is so nested in corporations who will never see consequences for their actions or remember that you exist, waking up feels like protest, choosing your own life is the new punk.

Elden Ring found me at a transitory part of my life. The cultural shift to work from home due to the pandemic allowed me to purchase and move into my first house on March 30th, 2022. In the following weekends since that time, I've wandered through this house while performing some much needed updates, and the whole time I can't help but wonder what the story of this place is. The selling agent told me that the house was previously owned by a husband and wife who lived here with their four children.

There is not enough space in this house for four children. The upstairs has two bedrooms. One, I imagine, was used for the husband and wife. I am now using this bedroom as an office; it has a door. The other bedroom on is slightly larger, and is what I am using for my own bedroom. This room did NOT have a door. I've heard stories of parents who don't respect their childrens' privacy taking the doors off their bedrooms. I have to imagine the 4 children crammed into the room that now houses my queen sized bed grew up, generally, without any sort of privacy. Perhaps the door removal wasn't even malicious on the parents' part. It's totally possible that there wasn't ever enough room in the bedroom for a door and the necessary 4 beds.

Which makes me wonder why they didn't convert the large downstairs living room into a bedroom. You could even fit 2 bedrooms down there if you wanted to. Maybe some of the children did sleep down there. I'm not sure.

The owners left me a poorly written note about the light switches that control the outside lights. I've spent weeks trying to decipher the arcane method with which the previous owners turned off the LED floodlights; and, for the most part, I've failed. The guidance from the Elder owners left me feeling confused and lost.

The note, combined with the NRA stickers that were slapped on both the front AND rear doors of the house caused me to wonder whether lead could be present in the water. It's in a lab being tested right now.

All that to say, I've spend a lot of time thinking about the history of this place and how I'm going to change it.

Elden Ring feels like a game burdened by its history. How can you possibly create the next Dark Souls? We've seen something like this in the past. Little game (Dragon Age: Origins/Dark Souls) becomes something of a cult hit. It sells a LOT, but the sequels never quite live up to the original. Years go by, you make Mass Effect & Sekiro, some people like you, others don't. What the People really want though, is another of those Dark Souls games. But you can't just make Dark Souls 4.

So you make Dragon Age: Inquisition. You cram their face full of so much Dark Souls that they'll be satisfied for the next 25 years. You make the world so large, so densely packed with enemies and hidden dungeons and items and vistas and forts and other NOUNS that a player can easily spend over 100 hours exploring the digital landscape you've created.

But for what? What is gained by making the world so large? Dark Souls already had beautiful vistas, it had multitudes of memorable encounters, it had hidden dungeons and forts. It already had things! The quasi-open world nature of Dark Souls allowed for a game where encounters, either with enemies or with the environment, could be scripted. We all remember how to navigate the world of Dark Souls 1, and that's because it has intended, scripted pathways. How do you get from the depths in Dark Souls back to Fireline Shrine? There are a million ways, different paths, some hidden. It lights up the part of your brain that you use for navigation in such a novel way that even thinking about how to get from point A to point B is fun. In Elden Ring, you get on your horse.

That's my biggest issue with the game. When Elden Ring is Dark Souls, it's amazing. Scaling castles, hopping from roof to roof, uncovering shortcuts, challenging boss fights, fashionable clothes, it's all there. But where Dark Souls carefully guides you from moment to moment, vista to vista, combat to combat, Elden Ring meanders. It's a pacing problem. You'll spend 10 hours in a mega-dungeon (fun!), then 5 wandering around a giant snowfield on your horse while you mash LB and wait for a dragon to die (boring!). I'm just not sure what the Dark Souls formula gains from switching to an open world.

It's frustrating. You can see the good ideas they had (and I do like the game quite a bit), but I can't help but feel like so much of the changes FROM made were because they didn't want to make Dark Souls 4, but Elden Ring ends up feeling like Dark Souls 4 anyway. It feels like a half measure, taking the familiar mechanics from Dark Souls and slapping them into an open world. It's not as innovative as it could be; it's just More.

There's this sense I got while playing Elden Ring of being burdened by the past. The decisions made by those who came before you that weigh on your mind. The compulsion to wear their shoes, to try to understand who they were, what thoughts they had. How could you ever make the next Dark Souls?

And just where did all those kids sleep, anyway?