It's not Circle of the Moon's fault that it had to follow in the foot-steps of Symphony of the Night, nor that it had to be an early Game Boy Advance title, but both those things are very much the case. Gone is the distinct personality each area held in Symphony, always leaving you excited to see what they're going to do next, instead replaced with a collection of copy-paste hallways and stairways full of increasingly tankier reskins of the enemies you've been fighting all game long. I never thought I'd be relieved to see an extremely basic box-pushing puzzle, but I'll take just about anything to break up the monotony.

This game also brings out the worst elements Metroidvanias can have. Checking the map every 15 seconds as you follow the route from A to B, undergoing huge amounts of back-tracking when you gain a new ability only to be rewarded with an additional 10MP, the game secretly being very linear with a clear intended route for progression and almost no option to sequence-break it, seldom warp points shoved in the most awkward corners of the map meaning that you'll spend a lot of time back-tracking through the same places over and over. A lot of this would be less of an issue if the game world or level design invited my curiosity, but it sadly does not, and the fact that running requires you to double-top a direction makes all the back-tracking even more unpleasant (my thumb is actually sore from this after my final 3 hour session finishing this game off).

The DSS system is also quite disappointing. Some of the abilities it gives you access to are legitimately quite cool, but in order to gain these spells you need to collect cards that are rare drops from enemies; I focused on making my luck stat as high as possible to try and get as many of these cards as possible and yet ended the game only being able to cast 15 of the 100 total spells. I really wanted to see more of what I could do with the magic system but the game just never gave me the chance.

Despite all of this the game was honestly fine. Castlevania's aesthetic is so strong that even here, where it's not being used to its full potential, I still found myself enjoying this aspect a decent amount, and slowly filling out the castle, finding horrifying boss designs, and watching your movement pool grow is satisfying enough, even amidst everything else that is wrong with the game, that I can't really say that Circle of the Moon is bad.

Summer Games Down Quick just finished a few days ago, and as per usual I had the event's Twitch stream open basically any waking moment of the day that I wasn't either working or hanging out with one of my partners. It's partly that I love the atmosphere of the event and what it stands for, partly that it acts as a showcase for all sorts of cool stuff, but also that watching speedrunning is just immensely fascinating to me. People are honestly just incredible, and high-level speedruns act as this really impressive display of commitment, knowledge and skill.

That said, I've never really understood what would make someone actually want to pour thousands of hours into a single video game both just generally, but more specifically in search of making your time as low as possible. When I think of the things that draw me towards video games, their strengths as an artform, I think of the potential for self-expression, the depth of worldbuilding, the manner in which they can provide experiences and stories that feel unique to you. The thought of getting to grind the same route through the game many hundreds of times to shave off a few seconds doesn't really crop up there.

I'm not sure I'll ever really get it, but my early days with Neon White are the closest I've come. It starts with you figuring out the route for the level, getting a silver medal on your first try, and thinking "huh, why not push for gold then?". Upon attaining the gold medal the game gives you a hint for how to get the platinum, a shortcut you maybe missed, so you feel compelled to go back and add that to your run. Suddenly you're only a couple seconds behind someone on your friends list leaderboard so you return again, tightening up your lines, lining up a shot you didn't think of, and before you know it you're fighting to claw up the overall leaderboard, a flurry of F-space-F-space-F-space as you try to get the perfect opening. That iterative fight to become the best you can be.

It wore off for me, ultimately. As the game goes on the levels get longer in a way that makes fighting for a good time much more of a commitment, and the longer the game has been out the more ludicrously competitive the leaderboard has become to the point where the best times are at once both mind-blowing but also demoralising for anyone who hasn't spent years honing pinpoint accurate mouse-twitching. The rest of the game after I crashed back to reality was a solid enough romp, before a genuinely thrilling final 15 or so levels that explore really cool mechanical territory. The magic was gone, and my interest in grinding out good times is unlikely to come back, but it was a fun moment whilst it lasted.

Unrelatedly, I feel like the response to the writing in this game has been a tad harsh. The "social link" style hanging out portions are quite bad, to the extent that even I started skipping them at the halfway point (and I read visual novels), but the various backstories are solid enough, I liked the characters when the game wasn't straining itself to be funny, and the final third of the story is legitimately pretty good. Faint praise, but I certainly didn't hate this aspect of the game like a lot of people did.

Immensely charming and sweet. I think there's an argument to be made for the relative simplicity of this game as contrasted with Kirby Super Star as it certainly adds to that charm, though the downside is that even at a little under three hours long Kirby's Adventure just barely manages to sustain itself.

I love the graphics here, Kirby's Adventure holds up aesthetically in a way that almost no other NES games truly have. It's unfortunate that the cost of this is sometimes-brutal amounts of lag popping up at points all throughout the game.

In basically every conceivable sense the worldbuilding of Outer Wilds is remarkable. Each planet has a memorable, creative, strikingly unique identity that is fleshed out and toyed with in multiple different directions, the rich history of the Nomai is fascinating, emotionally and thematically resonant, and interweaves with the history of these planets in compelling ways, and then on top of that all of this interconnects like some celestial jigsaw puzzle both in regards to the events in the distant past that led to this point in time and in regards to how the cycle you find yourself caught in interacts with itself. The number of "aha!" moments in the game is impressive in and of itself, but the fact you can make these discoveries in so many completely different orders and still piece together what's going on in a satisfying way is just wonderful and a testament to how compelling this game's exploration can be at its very best.

Outer Wilds is also quietly thematically very dense. If you want to just enjoy the joy of exploration and the fear of the unknown you can do that, but under the surface there's so much to enjoy within here about human nature and what pulls us into this need to discover and learn even in the face of danger, that human urge to develop and grow and quite literally reach for the skies, science and religion and belief and all the tension and questions and confusion and peace these things can represent, death and endings and decay and how we both resist these things but also can learn to accept them as something natural and inevitable. Community, and love, and home. Underneath the solemn unearthing of words long past, places in decay, on your own amongst the silence of space, there is a deep emotionality running through the veins of this game that somehow both interweaves with and yet also runs counter to that calm.

I've heard a lot of people say they wish they could play Outer Wilds for the first time again, or that it's a game you can only really play once, and I can't really relate to that sentiment. I had some pretty marked frustrations with my playthrough, some of the puzzles felt obtuse enough to seriously impede my progress and kick me out of the vibes the game was giving, and the controls are very awkward and took as much as several hours for me to become comfortable with (there's a lot of slow, awkward wiggling around early on in the game). These frustrations feel like they'd distract far less from the game's beauty, wonder and ideas on a second playthrough, and whilst the sense of discovery may not be there in quite the same way I'm still so curious to revisit these records of the Nomai, scattered throughout the solar system, with a more full context of what they all mean. Somehow, despite the game's reputation of being a one-time deal, I'm left both excited to return and hopeful I will fall in love when I do.

Update; heard the Outer Wilds music out of context, immediately burst into tears, decided to come back and add half a star to this review :p This game has grown in my mind considerably after I finished playing it.

Clearly archaic, most notably in how obtuse a lot of the progression and secrets are. The worst part is definitely everything associated with the bombs, hidden doorways you need to blow open with no indication as to the points you're meant to lay this somewhat scarce resource in front of. That kind of design mentality spreads to a lot of different places outside of just the bomb mechanic, making the game somewhere between tedious and frustrating to progress in without outside advice; I get that at the time this would make the game seem more mysterious and expansive, but this style of design has largely disappeared for a reason. I also hate how much the game encourages grinding due to not fully restoring your health when you respawn and requiring you to collect large quantities of money for progression-critical items.

I enjoyed this game quite a bit more than my score for it indicates (maybe a 3/5 or thereabouts), but only thanks to using an overworld map that listed where every character, dungeon and bomb/fire secret was, a guide for the last few dungeons, and save states to generate money with the gambling minigame; I'm fairly sure I would have abandoned The Legend of Zelda in frustration well before the end without these things. I'm glad I played the game, it's an important piece of game history, even now it still retains a sense of wonder to its exploration at times, and it's easy to see how it really helped develop the language of video games, but I really can't recommend people actually play the game outside of anything other than historical curiosity.

Before Your Eyes was an intensely emotional experience for me on many levels. I teared up at a few different points, and the ending caused me to weep. The game is only an hour and a half long, the passage of time in the game is controlled by your real-life blinking, and it goes on to explore a lot of challenging and engrossing themes that were paid off very effectively in ways I wasn't expecting even partway through; if this sounds appealing then I advise you learn nothing more about the game before playing it, even though I am someone who isn't particularly spoiler averse this is absolutely one of those rare examples of a game that is best played with as little foreknowledge as possible. If you're not convinced you want to play this game, hopefully me touching on its strengths in this review can help in some way though be warned I will talk a fair amount about the emotional impact of the mechanics and I lightly hint at the themes of the game's narrative.

Two things really stand out to me thinking back on this Before Your Eyes. The first is the game's exploration of memory and transience, which just on a textual level is already fascinating and moving to me, but the blinking mechanic breathes life into this discussion so beautifully. The are moments where you're caught in a moment so warm and safe you want to linger there forever, and you try and hold your eyes open so you can, but then you come to this acceptance that time has to move on, everything will pass eventually, and you give in and finally learn to let go of that moment, that precious memory of the past, and move on to what waits for you in the future; you give in and blink.

Conversely there are moments where you're in the middle of listening to what your mum, your dad, your best friend, has to say and then you reflexively blink without intending to and that moment disappears; memories, and time, slipping away from you like sand through your fingers. There were moments where this happened and I was okay with continuing onwards, but also multiple occasions where time escaping me like that, where this relentless march of time leading to sentences being cut off in your memory, half-formed, felt like an emotional gut-punch, leaving me longing to be able to turn back the clock even for a moment.

The blinking mechanic is, sadly, not perfect. It worked well enough for the game to absorb me into its world like it did, and led to some incredibly emotional moments as I detailed above, but there were definitely a handful of moments where I blinked and it didn't register (though thankfully the alternative, registering blinks that didn't happen, didn't occur which is good as this would have been much more dire I feel). These imperfections are the main thing stopping me from giving the game a perfect score, though they aren't so notable as to stop me from loving the game and all it has to say and show.

The other thing that stands out to me about the Before Your Eyes is the themes it explores via its narrative. Partway through the game I actually had a few different things I wasn't entirely onboard with about this narrative, and yet by the end every single one of these concerns had been directly addressed and often subverted in ways that paid off the fact that I wasn't entirely onboard with them earlier. I don't want to go into the themes here too explicitly since I don't want to ruin the ways in which they come together so beautifully, but I will say that the game's final notes are remarkably mature having something to say that we dearly need to hear in this time of rampant capitalism. The way this messaging was delivered was deeply affecting, incredibly healthy for me, and left me feeling very well-nourished.

Seems to be considered FromSoft's masterpiece by many. Certainly Bloodborne has the most impressive art direction of the Soulsborne games, which is saying something considering this is one of the strongest aspects of the series as a whole; the realm of Victorian England, nightmares and lycanthropy, eldritch at its most icky and slimy and wet, leads to some stunning and haunting imagery throughout. The level design here is similarly superb, both visually and in regards to how FromSoft manage to take the principles of Dark Soul's wider world design and apply it within individual areas.

I appreciate the more kinetic, fast-pace of the combat here, and the rally mechanic is a lot of fun and offers a very different flavour to the other games in the series, whilst the trick weapons are incredibly cool to use and visually stylish. I also think that stripping back the rpg mechanics a little bit helps Bloodborne craft itself a reasonably unique identity compared to the other Souls games; the weapons you start with remain feasible options all through the game, you can dress your character however you want without having to worry too much about stats (and there are some incredible pieces of fashion here), and even the stats system has been noticeably streamlined to encourage towards focusing on the hunt.

Despite all of this, Bloodborne does fall short for me compared to my favourite FromSoft games, even though I did enjoy it immensely. There are a scattering of smaller issues that contribute to this. Much has been said about the blood vial system, and whilst I can appreciate the thematic way that grinding for blood vials represents you literally being bloodthirsty, desperately searching for sustenance, as hunters are prone to being, the reality is that having to stop attempting the exciting boss fight you keep dying to in order to go grind together some vials is a painful pace breaker; this didn't affect me too many times as this was the final game I played from the Soulsborne games but I can only imagine how frustrating this must be to someone less experienced with these when contrasted with the estus system where you get to keep making attempts and learning.

Chalice dungeons suck. Whilst Bloodborne does have have more enjoyable combat than the games that came before it, the reality is that the big draw to these games is their atmosphere, worldbuilding and level design, and chalice dungeons strip away so much of this in an effort to be a roguelite-esque jamming together of the same ten rooms over and over instead. I tried playing these for about three hours or so, they never meaningfully improved outside of a couple cool boss fights and I swore to not touch them again. The worst thing about chalice dungeons is it's not like you can even totally ignore them because they actively effect the main game too; there were many times where beating a boss or getting to a hard to reach treasure chest in the main game would give me an item whose only use was for a chalice ritual, content that I was never going to engage with, which would feel disappointing every time.

I also found Bloodborne's collection of bosses honestly very uneven? Early phases of human bosses are very prone to getting stun-locked which both feels weird and also makes having to repeat those early phases boring, and I found wrestling the camera against the game's various different giant, savage, relentless, constantly-screaming beasts to be frustrating (the fight against Ebrietas was ruined by this for me). As with everything in the game, the visual design of these bosses are so good that it's hard for me to be too upset about any of this, or even call any of the bosses bad; even fights like Rom, Micolash, The One Reborn and Celestial Emissary are all very memorable in their own ways even if the gameplay itself wasn't great. Still, the number of bosses I'm actually enthusiastic about here was not terribly high and that makes me a little sad.

Probably the biggest problem for me is that the lore and storytelling in Bloodborne didn't connect with me as potently as it does in the Souls games. I wish I had been given a clearer motivation for what I'm doing at the start of the game, rather than just being told some stuff about locating paleblood (which meant so little to me due to a lack of context) and Gerhman hand-waving the very notion of me worrying about why I'm doing what I'm doing; compared to the Souls games I found myself feeling weirdly purposeless here, like I was just going through the motions on some level. On top of this a lot of the game's thematic content fell flat for me; I loved its look at madness, dreams and nightmares and found a lot of the material surrounding this very compelling in large part because of the places the game gets to go aesthetically as a result, but its look at the evils of the church felt very old hat, and I couldn't find much more to grasp onto here beyond all of that. It's perhaps harsh of me to be contrasting this against the excellent thematic content in the Dark Souls games and their look at entropy, decay, patriarchy, cycles of life and death, and maintaining determination in the face of adversity, especially as Bloodborne is certainly ahead of a lot of games in this regard, but I find myself reminded of another review I read earlier this year that commented about how Bloodborne's storytelling ends up feeling too elusive to connect with, yet also too specific to function as a mood-piece.

It feels like I'm ragging on the game needlessly harshly here; Bloodborne is great, I loved my time with it, it just happened to fall a little short for me in some regards and it takes a lot of words to justify why that is the case when a lot of what FromSoft is doing here is so impeccable and exciting.

I loved this game so much when I was a teenager. Revisiting it all these years later I found it still largely enjoyable, but it has not aged perfectly. There's still some of the frustrating cryptic progression-gating from the NES original here that forced me to look at a guide a couple times for where on Hylia I was meant to be heading next, whilst the story is a barely-glorified fetch-quest that gave me very little reason to care about its characters (though the opening, breaking into the castle in the pouring rain, still gives me chills).

The dungeons blurred together at points due to the extent to which I felt funnelled from one to the next without that much of a breather, something later Zeldas would avoid via both actual-plot and more substantial side-quests, but they're pretty fun in general. Skull Woods and Thieves' Town were my personal favourite dungeons, with the structure of Skull Woods somehow feeling innovative even almost three decades later, and the boss fights throughout the game are consistently great too.

Overall I still like A Link to the Past, and I certainly respect its historical importance and how huge of a leap forward from the NES original it is, but I think nowadays I see it primarily as a solid foundation that later, sometimes better, entries in the series would build more interesting things on top of.

In Defence of Bloodborne

The notion of Bloodborne needing defending is patently absurd; it's one of the ten highest rated games on this site, one of the most beloved games of the last ten years, and seems to be the most common answer when people are asked for their favourite FromSoft title. That said, whilst I really enjoyed the game first time round it was with considerable reservations (a 4 star rating and no more), and only on my recent New Game+ playthrough did the game flourish for me as all my former complaints, amounting more or less to a list of most of the common complaints held against the game, melted away. This review won't address any of the already widely praised strengths of the game (the stunning art direction, atmosphere and level design; FromSoft's best collection of weapons; the kinetic, fast-paced combat brought alive by the rally system; etc etc etc), but instead just seeks to talk through my change of perspective on those weaknesses.

The two most widely criticised aspects of Bloodborne are the blood vial system and the chalice dungeons, and these are both aspects that bothered me in my first playthrough too. Blood vials are very thematically effective, periodically putting you in this bloodthirsty place when you run low on them, desperately searching for sustenance by slaughtering early mobs over and over, truly making you the hunter, but they also necessitate grinding and are ultimately pace-breaking when you're forced to abandon a tough boss fight to go scavenge. Chalice dungeons stand in stark contrast to the tight, creative, intentional level design that FromSoft is known for to instead be more like a Souls roguelike with even the premade chalice dungeons feeling procedurally generated, and it's easy for them to be disappointing with this in mind.

Something widely commented upon about Elden Ring was how the various caves and catacombs allowed you to scale the game to your liking. If you're really experienced with these games already you only had to do a handful of these excursions to stock up on smithing stones, whilst those who are struggling, held up from making story progress by Margit or some other imposing boss, would have a lot of this optional side content to go grind through in order to gain a few extra levels, find a couple nice new pieces of equipment, and return to face The Fell Omen more prepared than before. I think this is how the chalice dungeons are actually meant to be treated. If you vibe with them then cool, go chalice it up to your heart's content; the level design might be a bit janky, but Bloodborne's combat is good enough that the chalice dungeons are still honestly more solidly fun to wander through than I originally gave credit. But if you're getting murdered by a boss so much that you have nary a blood vial left then it's possible what you need isn't just a vial refill, but also a couple extra levels or another good gem to plug into your weapon. People who find places in Souls games to go grind out souls and get those extra levels is already a well-recorded phenomenon, and chalices are honestly the perfect answer to that; near-endless content for people who do want to grind out those extra levels. The blood vial system is the one part of the game I still regard as Decidedly Not Perfect, but I've grown to appreciate the way it says "hey maybe stop just bashing your head against this clearly-too-difficult-for-you-right-now boss and go level up a bit first?", and think that actually listening to those cries and taking breaks from Orphan of Kos to go do chalice dungeons for a couple hours would have led to a better experience than thinking all I needed was to go grind enough blood vials in a mid-game area for a few more attempts at beating that very screamy child.

On a minor note, Bloodborne is the FromSoft game that most wants to support the existence of New Game+ with the last couple chalice dungeons, leading up to a super secret bonus boss, very clearly being content that is meant to be scaled to a New Game+ (or higher) character, and with progress on chalice dungeons being retained between New Game+ cycles. Whilst this might not excuse some of the frustration of running out of blood vials on your initial playthrough, the moment you enter New Game+ and proceed through the game for a second time you'll be earning enough echoes that it becomes trivially easy to have 100+ vials available to you at all times. These frustrations are unfortunate but are also only temporary.

The bosses of Bloodborne are also a point of contention, and I found them uneven initially with some standing out as all-time great boss fights whilst others end up being far less mechanically engaging and even a bit awkward at times. To circle back around to Elden Ring again, one strange thing that game did for me was make me appreciate the boss design of Demon's Souls a lot more. Elden Ring's boss designs follow a very consistent style, and that certainly suits what that game is, but with less than a handful of what could be referred to as puzzle bosses a lot of this content can blur together. Demon's Souls definitely has a bunch of bosses that are not very mechanically challenging or that read as gimmicky, but there are maybe only two or three bosses in that entire game that wouldn't count as memorable. I think the best bosses in these games being ones like Artorias, Gael and Lady Maria, combined with the SoulsBorne reputation of being challenging, has brain poisoned us to want every boss in these games to match that template. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that playing through Elden Ring has turned me into the kind of person that will die on the hill that Rom, One Reborn, The Witches of Hemwick and Micolash are all genuinely good bosses, despite not being that challenging nor testing your combat skills particularly, because they all stand as memorable experiences. A year after originally fighting Micolash I would still quote his lines, the visual design of the Rom encounter remained seared into my brain right up until the start of this New Game+ playthrough, and ultimately the fact that these bosses contrast against the rest of Bloodborne serves as a strength rather than a weakness as it stops the overall experience from homogenising.

Finally, the lore of Bloodborne stands out as the one part of the game I wasn't completely onboard with on my first playthrough that most everyone else seemed to love, but this is an aspect of the game that really comes alive with repeat visits. I don't want to go too deep into this, people have done this enough already and this review is long enough as it is, but two things to consider are; what initially seems like a fairly simple condemnation of the church and the power institutions can wield over people gains a lot more depth when you realise that Bloodborne is less about supernatural critters and madness than it is about eugenics, classism and the myth of intelligence; most of the supernatural critters in Bloodborne were initially harmless, just kind of vibing and doing their own thing, and only became so dangerous because people made them so in our lust for knowledge and power.

Anyways, Bloodborne kind of just whips.

Echoes of the Eye is all the best and worst parts of Outer Wilds, amplified. The sometimes obtuse reasoning behind some of the puzzles, and the sense that you risk wasting large amounts of time (due to the nature of the loops) if you want to experiment with a solution is even more pronounced. Some sections in the dlc (that I highly recommend you turn on the Reduced Frights mode for to make the gameplay more tolerable) honestly just suck to play, a lot of wandering around blindly in the dark and hoping. Even the nature of the loops finally started to get to me upon the twentieth time in a row of having those exact same opening couple minutes.

But there are so many moments that are just breath-taking or outright mind-blowing; in particular the opening hour is up there with the very best parts of the base-game. The planet it is set on is remarkable in many ways, and potentially overtakes Brittle Hollow as my favourite world of all of those in this solar system. The tale this expansion tells is so enjoyable for all the reasons it contrasts with and deviates from the base game, and ultimately hit more emotional notes for me personally than the base game did too.

So, it's the base game but more. I was much more frustrated at points here than I was with the base-game, but also somehow more rewarded also.

It's been almost three decades since Myst's release and its world is somehow still just captivating. The bizarre mechanisms, aged artifacts and writings of those now gone both serve to create this sense of connection with another time, another place and the former inhabitants, whilst also emphasising how alone you are right now as you wander these abandoned and oftentimes silent lands, proceeding as an archaeologist of once magically conjured worlds.

As alluring as this sounds Myst is certainly far from perfect. The caves section was a wholly miserable low-point for me, sufficiently awful that I looked up a guide to save myself some pain, the 'good ending' I found fell flat on its face for me, and just generally a fair chunk of the puzzle-solving in Myst has been out-performed by time and those that would follow in its footsteps. Really Myst has aged substantially more than my rating for it necessarily indicates and that makes it hard for me to recommend as such, but the whole thing is just so fascinating to me, and whilst its age has led to some frustration in parts it also adds an almost meta element to playing it for the first time nowadays like the archaeological pursuits your character is engaging with in these mystical worlds are also being reflected in turn by you unearthing this old, time-worn game and trying to figure out what makes it tick.

Ori and the Blind Forest actually reminds me a lot of Metroid Fusion in terms of how it's not really a Metroidvania as the game is very keen to push you down a clear linear story-driven path, but the Metroidvania-style exploration is still there in the late-game for those who want to engage in it to go find some more collectables and see a bit more of the world. Ori's story-beats aren't quite as compelling to me as Metroid Fusion's so this structure doesn't work quite as well for me as a result, but the game has enough going for it in other regards that I'm still largely on-board with what the Ori and the Blind Forest is trying to do.

The main thing I kept hearing about Ori before going in was how pretty it is, and gosh it really is. I think this can sometimes be to the game's detriment weirdly, the number of times I didn't notice the spikes that kept killing me because they just blended into the aesthetic was, uh, many. Being so pretty definitely helps contribute to the game world being generally pleasurable to exist in though, and the way the movement develops over the course of the game leads to the feeling of there being multiple solutions to a lot of the late-game platforming puzzles, and ends up feeling fluid and just a ton of fun (when you aren't colliding into the same enemies you've been killing the exact same way for the past few hours whilst dashing around).

That's the thing, everything great about Ori and the Blind Forest comes with a heap of caveats. Sure the escape sequences are intense, inventive and even majestic at points, but they're also just very frustrating at points as you repeat the same sections over and over just to get to the same unpredictable trial-and-error moments for the nth time. The platforming as you proceed from one area to the next is incredibly solid, and presents some enjoyable moments and challenges, but the way that checkpoints work looms over you ready to make you feel bad if you use them too aggressively and don't have enough left, but also invoking those same feel-bads when you don't use them aggressively enough and are forced to repeat sections over and over as a result.

I've heard the sequel iterates effectively on all of this and I'm very excited to check it out as I love a lot of what is going on here but gosh there's a bunch that bugs me too and it's so close to being much, much better.