BeachEpisode
Subway Surfing in the City of Glass.
The OG Mirror’s Edge is a bit of a darling to me - this laser-focused parkour action thrilla that limits it’s scope to densely choreographed sequences through rich, hyper-real urb environments. There’s a weightines to Faith’s movement, allowing the player to feel a sense of inertia to the stunts you string together, putting stones in your gut whenever your unbroken momentum ends in freefall. It’s so lean it’s so Mean.
Ultimately I put off playing Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst for yearz because I knew what they did to it. I knew it was an open world game, a sprawling map peppered with waypoints and collectables and challenges and skill trees and XP and shit. This Human Revolutionification of a game I originally adored because it sidestepped that stuff. With a few concessions (I skipped every cutscene and ignored everything that wasn’t a story mission), I was finally able to get over myself and just give the game a shot, and I’m happy 2 share that I think ME:C is Alright!!! It’s OK!
The shift in focus is almost immediately striking as the art direction of Catalyst shifts from heavily stylised minimal realism, to this catastrophic directionless mush of overexposed modernism. It's like every expensive yacht in the world crashed into one another to form a continent. It’s kind of pretty but it really doesn’t inspire awe in me in the same way as the OG… A lens flare fried calamity of white pointy buildings with an accent colour thrown in for good measure. Whenever I replay Mirror’s Edge, I gawk at the level of attention poured into the texture, staging and lighting work - and I just couldn’t find anything to care about here.
The reason for this visual mulch is, of course, gameplay clutter as a result of moving towards an open world. The environment design is stretched thin by taking a very blunt modular approach as a result of attempting to pad out the vast expanses of rooftop between quest markers. The City of Glass is slavishly built for Faith and her moveset, every canopy littered with pipes and platforms and grappling points with the intent to allow the player to maintain an unbroken sprint across vast expanses. I can’t help but prefer the simplicity and muted realism of the prior game’s world, one that felt almost hostile to the existence of the Runners, which necessitated a more thoughtful approach to the moment-to-moment - scanning the environment for ways to use your moveset to reach places you shouldn’t. Catalyst’s city is Faith’s playground - but who can deny the simple joys of swingin on da jungle gym.
I’m not going to shit on the game a whole lot - the core intent is very different, focused on player retention through endless sidemissions and jiggies, but it’s pretty great when you meet it halfway. Brushing aside the fluff content and focusing on the story missions allows something of a rush through what the game has to offer. It’s bigger, it’s crazier, it’s bombastic, Faith goes crazy scaling wacky luminescent architecture that doesn’t even pretend to feel like places built for civvies. Assault course game design. It even follows many of the same beats as the original game, you just can’t help but compare how differently things come across here. The combat buckles very quickly with miserable enemy variants, but I enjoyed the focus on using the environment against baddies by paddling them around/into each other, it's pretty slapstick but a damng lot more dynamic than what was in the original game.
I dunno, I’m middle of the road on this. Catalyst feels like the flipside of the same coin, Mirror’s Edge but hopped up on Ubisoft Juice. You couldn't convince me that Mirror's Edge needed bandit camps if your life depended on it, but the speed and flow and scale is intoxicating but it all rings kind of hollow when it feels like you’re just playing Aesthetique Temple Run. Maybe all I need to be happy in this life is seeing bullets go through Nvidia PhysX cloth & dats why this game isn’t doin it.
The OG Mirror’s Edge is a bit of a darling to me - this laser-focused parkour action thrilla that limits it’s scope to densely choreographed sequences through rich, hyper-real urb environments. There’s a weightines to Faith’s movement, allowing the player to feel a sense of inertia to the stunts you string together, putting stones in your gut whenever your unbroken momentum ends in freefall. It’s so lean it’s so Mean.
Ultimately I put off playing Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst for yearz because I knew what they did to it. I knew it was an open world game, a sprawling map peppered with waypoints and collectables and challenges and skill trees and XP and shit. This Human Revolutionification of a game I originally adored because it sidestepped that stuff. With a few concessions (I skipped every cutscene and ignored everything that wasn’t a story mission), I was finally able to get over myself and just give the game a shot, and I’m happy 2 share that I think ME:C is Alright!!! It’s OK!
The shift in focus is almost immediately striking as the art direction of Catalyst shifts from heavily stylised minimal realism, to this catastrophic directionless mush of overexposed modernism. It's like every expensive yacht in the world crashed into one another to form a continent. It’s kind of pretty but it really doesn’t inspire awe in me in the same way as the OG… A lens flare fried calamity of white pointy buildings with an accent colour thrown in for good measure. Whenever I replay Mirror’s Edge, I gawk at the level of attention poured into the texture, staging and lighting work - and I just couldn’t find anything to care about here.
The reason for this visual mulch is, of course, gameplay clutter as a result of moving towards an open world. The environment design is stretched thin by taking a very blunt modular approach as a result of attempting to pad out the vast expanses of rooftop between quest markers. The City of Glass is slavishly built for Faith and her moveset, every canopy littered with pipes and platforms and grappling points with the intent to allow the player to maintain an unbroken sprint across vast expanses. I can’t help but prefer the simplicity and muted realism of the prior game’s world, one that felt almost hostile to the existence of the Runners, which necessitated a more thoughtful approach to the moment-to-moment - scanning the environment for ways to use your moveset to reach places you shouldn’t. Catalyst’s city is Faith’s playground - but who can deny the simple joys of swingin on da jungle gym.
I’m not going to shit on the game a whole lot - the core intent is very different, focused on player retention through endless sidemissions and jiggies, but it’s pretty great when you meet it halfway. Brushing aside the fluff content and focusing on the story missions allows something of a rush through what the game has to offer. It’s bigger, it’s crazier, it’s bombastic, Faith goes crazy scaling wacky luminescent architecture that doesn’t even pretend to feel like places built for civvies. Assault course game design. It even follows many of the same beats as the original game, you just can’t help but compare how differently things come across here. The combat buckles very quickly with miserable enemy variants, but I enjoyed the focus on using the environment against baddies by paddling them around/into each other, it's pretty slapstick but a damng lot more dynamic than what was in the original game.
I dunno, I’m middle of the road on this. Catalyst feels like the flipside of the same coin, Mirror’s Edge but hopped up on Ubisoft Juice. You couldn't convince me that Mirror's Edge needed bandit camps if your life depended on it, but the speed and flow and scale is intoxicating but it all rings kind of hollow when it feels like you’re just playing Aesthetique Temple Run. Maybe all I need to be happy in this life is seeing bullets go through Nvidia PhysX cloth & dats why this game isn’t doin it.
I have this propensity to never play games a second time, even the ones I love. It serves me well more often than not, because I greatly value backlog exploration and sheer variety over mechanical or scholarly mastery of any specific title. Where it bites me in the wahooey, however, is in largely skill-oriented titles like character action games, ones that demand keen attentiveness and willingness to retain and juggle knowledge of systems macro and micro. For as much as I love these games for their absolutely unbridled pomp and the hot-blooded verve that courses thru em - I know I’m not going to get the most out of them, I just don’t have that kind of attention. Bayonetta 1 is astoundingly good, but it’s a game I essentially Bronze Trophied my way through, and only watched .webms of people going sicko online for. I only knew what dodge offset WAS when I hit the last level, when it was too late for me 😔.
Bayorigins: Wily Beast and Weakest Creature is just a nice little scrimblo that forces a more steady pace with its longer runtime and focus on action adventure & metroidvania-lite elements. There is a more sensical focus on the storytelling here than in the mainline entries, exemplified through its presentation style of a children’s picturebook narrated by a granny. It’s all just nice, the visual direction is utterly astounding, and is the most blown away I’ve been by sheer artistry in a videogame in a very long time, the shader programmers were spinning in their chairs like the tasmanian devil on this one. With the combat being a touch more of a tertiary focus on the title than the rest, it allows itself time to slowly blossom through the course of the runtime with a steadily increasing amount of abilities, roadblocks and enemy gimmicks - and while there are no post-battle ranking screens to have Stone trophies nip at my heels, it felt immensely satisfying to sense myself mastering it under a more forgiving piecemeal delivery. It’s actually a little impressive how intuitive this control scheme becomes after an awkward starting period; forcing the player to control two separate characters by splitting the controller inputs down the middle. With its smart application within certain story beats, I became more than sold on the way this plays, kinda love it. For all these reasons, it's my favourite Bayonetta game. This is the warmest I’ve felt for a Platinum title since Wonderful 101, and while it doesn’t reach the same heights, it’s a miraculously good little spinoff to patch over my confidence in the studio that Bayo3 had dented.
Bayorigins: Wily Beast and Weakest Creature is just a nice little scrimblo that forces a more steady pace with its longer runtime and focus on action adventure & metroidvania-lite elements. There is a more sensical focus on the storytelling here than in the mainline entries, exemplified through its presentation style of a children’s picturebook narrated by a granny. It’s all just nice, the visual direction is utterly astounding, and is the most blown away I’ve been by sheer artistry in a videogame in a very long time, the shader programmers were spinning in their chairs like the tasmanian devil on this one. With the combat being a touch more of a tertiary focus on the title than the rest, it allows itself time to slowly blossom through the course of the runtime with a steadily increasing amount of abilities, roadblocks and enemy gimmicks - and while there are no post-battle ranking screens to have Stone trophies nip at my heels, it felt immensely satisfying to sense myself mastering it under a more forgiving piecemeal delivery. It’s actually a little impressive how intuitive this control scheme becomes after an awkward starting period; forcing the player to control two separate characters by splitting the controller inputs down the middle. With its smart application within certain story beats, I became more than sold on the way this plays, kinda love it. For all these reasons, it's my favourite Bayonetta game. This is the warmest I’ve felt for a Platinum title since Wonderful 101, and while it doesn’t reach the same heights, it’s a miraculously good little spinoff to patch over my confidence in the studio that Bayo3 had dented.
Cleansed by the surf, a body washes ashore on a deserted beach. Nameless, this soul awakens, eyes gleaming with the will to live, and for all things worth living for.
This was my first full playthrough of the game since maybe 2013, and the first time I’ve tackled the expansion content added to the Dark Arisen release. Game still rocks my world. Something of a Capcom dream team coming together to create a moving Frazetta artwork. Hideaki Itsuno’s combat direction acumen and some Monhun crew in the wings to reign the madness into a more grounded dark fantasy action game with a keen eye for resource management & an iconique soundtrack. An excitable exploration of pure western fantasy through the Japanese lens akin to Record of Lodoss War.
I really do just think it’s special. Every excursion through the world or a dungeon is speckled with emergent Moments that can only come around because the systems the game is built on offer a wealth of synergies and expressive means of interactivity. The regularity with which Dragon’s Dogma punctuates an excursion with sick as hell moments that steal your breath, as well as pure slapstick comedy, it almost rivals a particularly haphazard TTRPG campaign. It pays to take note of enemy AI behaviors and exploits, because your pawns will learn as you do and take actions that repeatedly surprise - when I started picking throwing loose enemies into the wider horde in order to more easily deal AoE damage, I noticed my pawn starting to do it for me and I felt like a proud dad.
The world of Gransys is almost my platonic ideal open-world RPG setting. With transportation options limited, the relatively small scale of the map itself is made to feel gargantuan, aided by the density to which it is decorated with places of interest and rewards for clambering up suspicious nooks. Questing requires planning so careful that even a journey down a road must be approached with trepidation. All with thanks to the game’s downright brutal day-night cycle with realistic lighting, you enter a pitch black forest with only your lantern and the reflection of the starving beastly eyes peering at you through the shrubbery. It was impressive in 2012, and remains so to this very day imo!!! I’ll never ever in my life forget the way I shot out of my chair because I turned on my lantern in the pitch black, to reveal the face of a gargantuan chimera winding up a punch.
Dark Arisen offers a locale with something of a megadungeon populated by new enemies and threats. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had with the game occurred within those dingy stone walls. It feels almost like a Bloody Palace mode so you can unleash your classbuilding prowess on the increasingly monstrous beasties thrown your way. End boss was some pure “ah, so this is why games exist” affirmation, too.
…But, it’s undeniably as half-baked as the rest of the game itself. Dragon’s Dogma feels about as unfinished as I’d dejectedly expect anything that comes across as a double-A passion project to be. Brimming with brave creative flourishes, but lacking in a certain star power to really let it raise the bar. I don’t want to beat the dead horse and lament the concepts on the cutting room floor, but it’s fairly noticeable that the game suffers from an enemy and location variety deficit. The implementation of the Pawn system is downright amazing, but so peculiar with miniscule blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details that they don’t have much of a cohesive bigger picture place in the game, and come across as a patchwork solution to a botched multiplayer mode. The quests are fairly rote in and of themselves, and the characters - while I love their antiquated Tolkienist dialogue style, are all flat and unmemorable. Even the classes themselves, which I’d still say are near-enough goated as far as fantasy action games are concerned, could do with a little more in the way of skill diversity. Bitterblack Isle itself feels like at most five unique rooms repeated a handful of times.
Still, don’t wanna be a downer. Dragon’s Dogma is amazing, scratches such a specific itch that I can only thank The Maker that it even exists in the way it does at all. Didn't mention the story at all, not sure how I'd tackle it honestly - thematically rich and insanely well executed. Grigori gets me weak at the knees, man. How the fuck is this game getting a sequel, nothing I like is ever allowed to do that.
This was my first full playthrough of the game since maybe 2013, and the first time I’ve tackled the expansion content added to the Dark Arisen release. Game still rocks my world. Something of a Capcom dream team coming together to create a moving Frazetta artwork. Hideaki Itsuno’s combat direction acumen and some Monhun crew in the wings to reign the madness into a more grounded dark fantasy action game with a keen eye for resource management & an iconique soundtrack. An excitable exploration of pure western fantasy through the Japanese lens akin to Record of Lodoss War.
I really do just think it’s special. Every excursion through the world or a dungeon is speckled with emergent Moments that can only come around because the systems the game is built on offer a wealth of synergies and expressive means of interactivity. The regularity with which Dragon’s Dogma punctuates an excursion with sick as hell moments that steal your breath, as well as pure slapstick comedy, it almost rivals a particularly haphazard TTRPG campaign. It pays to take note of enemy AI behaviors and exploits, because your pawns will learn as you do and take actions that repeatedly surprise - when I started picking throwing loose enemies into the wider horde in order to more easily deal AoE damage, I noticed my pawn starting to do it for me and I felt like a proud dad.
The world of Gransys is almost my platonic ideal open-world RPG setting. With transportation options limited, the relatively small scale of the map itself is made to feel gargantuan, aided by the density to which it is decorated with places of interest and rewards for clambering up suspicious nooks. Questing requires planning so careful that even a journey down a road must be approached with trepidation. All with thanks to the game’s downright brutal day-night cycle with realistic lighting, you enter a pitch black forest with only your lantern and the reflection of the starving beastly eyes peering at you through the shrubbery. It was impressive in 2012, and remains so to this very day imo!!! I’ll never ever in my life forget the way I shot out of my chair because I turned on my lantern in the pitch black, to reveal the face of a gargantuan chimera winding up a punch.
Dark Arisen offers a locale with something of a megadungeon populated by new enemies and threats. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had with the game occurred within those dingy stone walls. It feels almost like a Bloody Palace mode so you can unleash your classbuilding prowess on the increasingly monstrous beasties thrown your way. End boss was some pure “ah, so this is why games exist” affirmation, too.
…But, it’s undeniably as half-baked as the rest of the game itself. Dragon’s Dogma feels about as unfinished as I’d dejectedly expect anything that comes across as a double-A passion project to be. Brimming with brave creative flourishes, but lacking in a certain star power to really let it raise the bar. I don’t want to beat the dead horse and lament the concepts on the cutting room floor, but it’s fairly noticeable that the game suffers from an enemy and location variety deficit. The implementation of the Pawn system is downright amazing, but so peculiar with miniscule blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details that they don’t have much of a cohesive bigger picture place in the game, and come across as a patchwork solution to a botched multiplayer mode. The quests are fairly rote in and of themselves, and the characters - while I love their antiquated Tolkienist dialogue style, are all flat and unmemorable. Even the classes themselves, which I’d still say are near-enough goated as far as fantasy action games are concerned, could do with a little more in the way of skill diversity. Bitterblack Isle itself feels like at most five unique rooms repeated a handful of times.
Still, don’t wanna be a downer. Dragon’s Dogma is amazing, scratches such a specific itch that I can only thank The Maker that it even exists in the way it does at all. Didn't mention the story at all, not sure how I'd tackle it honestly - thematically rich and insanely well executed. Grigori gets me weak at the knees, man. How the fuck is this game getting a sequel, nothing I like is ever allowed to do that.
2021
Data File-
//defragmented
[#FORCED START OVERRIDE - - LOG OPENED]
BROADCAST: DSE Backloggd - - RA 18h 06m 0s | Feb 20th 2023
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XENOGLYPH I
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Writings by “BeachEpisode”
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[Translation Accuracy: 86%]
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“Never should have smoked that ҂ѼҎ҉֎ (excrement? physic?), now I’m in the Abyssal Scar.
I must admit to having been left gobsmacked and dumbfounded by how much Returnal has left such a strong impact on me. I don’t have much history with Housemarque’s library of games, despite Super Stardust HD being such a near-permanent fixture on my PS3 that it could have passed for my TV’s screensaver. Outland is relatively slept on these days too, I reckon, but ƺƻƛʥʭФѩ (unneeded digression?). Returnal finally received a PC port, allowing me to give the title a shot. The ᵬᶚỻӜѯ (electronic device?) is so deprived of games it’s genuinely heartbreaking…”
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XENOGLYPH II
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Writings by “BeachEpisode”
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[Translation Accuracy: 91%]
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“Typically I’d run for the hills whenever someone threatened me with a roguelite - a genre I often find ƛʥ؆ٱᵯᶈ (disinterest in?) at the best of times, and one that stands in stark opposition to what I personally find fulfilling about videogames at worst. There wasn’t much in place to prepare me for how deftly Housemarque utilised their core arena arcade design tenets around this Cronenberg/Villeneuve aesthetic pastiche with equal parts confidence and purpose. It must be said, because it is ﬗꬳꬲﭏ (true?), that this is the best-feeling third-person shooter I’ve touched. The degree of freedom of expression in the general character movement, as well as the broad utility of the tools available allow for some astoundingly gratifying excursions through arenas fraught with enemies spewing endless pointilist bullet patterns in easily analysable & counterable on the fly attack patterns.”
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XENOGLYPH III
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Writings by “BeachEpisode”
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[Translation Accuracy: 95%]
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“The compounding subtleties and delicate touches to the way Returnal’s roguelite structure was sculpted for purpose to encapsulate Selene’s purgatorial journey convinces me of this being one of the best character studies I’ve seen since maybe Silent Hill 2? Blurring the line between ﬕתּﻼἕ (symbol?), metaphor and physicality and never prescribing strict and demystifying literalisations. I think it is a very special thing when taking a moment to enjoy the environmental art design can yield subtle narrative realisations, lines drawn between the fragments of a character that they allow you to excavate. The world of Returnal is so dizzyingly all-encompassing.”
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[!!!!CONTENT WARNING: Topics of suicide!!!!!]
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XENOGLYPH IV
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Writings by “BeachEpisode”
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[Translation Accuracy: 0%]
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“Rot13 Rneyvre va gur jrrx, V znqr na nggrzcg ng raqvat zl yvsr. Qvqa’g nppbzcyvfu zhpu orlbaq fbzr oehvfrf naq n srj qnlf fcrag va n orq va RE. Va gur zbzragf yrnqvat gb zr npgvat ba zl vqrngvbaf, vg sryg yvxr funeqf bs vpr jrer cvrepvat guebhtu rirel cneg bs zl obql - svyyvat zr jvgu n qrrc puvyy naq fgvyyarff, nyzbfg nffhevat zr gung vg’f bxnl, gurer’f ab funzr, V’ir nyernql orra qrnq. Jura V neevirq onpx ubzr, fgvyy n yvggyr qehax bss gur cnva naq funzr bs vg nyy, V qvqa’g xabj jung gb qb. Guvf ebbz qvqa’g srry yvxr zl bja nal zber. V qvqa’g erpbtavfr gur crefba va gur zveebe, gur crefba jub jebgr zl grkgf be zrffntrf. Yvfgyrff, V gubhtug abguvat bs pbagvahvat zl cynlguebhtu bs Ergheany, vg jnf whfg na rnfl cvrpr bs abeznypl V pbhyq fyvc onpx vagb.
Fryrar ernjbxr ba na nyvra cynarg jurer fur nyjnlf qvq, gur napube cbvag ng gur fvgr bs gur vavgvny nppvqrag. Fur znqr n pbzzrag ba ubj haerpbtavfnoyr gur raivebazrag jnf sebz ure ynfg yvsr, fur yvfgrarq gb nhqvb ybtf erpbeqrq ol urefrys naq rkcerffrf qvfthfg naq pbashfvba ng ubj guvf crefba pbhyq cbffvoyl or ure. Univat na nethzrag jvgu tubfgf naq ybfvat gb lbhe bja ibvpr, qrfcrengryl pynjvat sbe n yvtug ng gur raq bs gur ghaary bayl gb erirny gur znyvtanapvrf naq cnenfvgrf rngvat njnl ng lbhe bccbeghavgvrf sbe frys shysvyyzrag. Fghpx va n fvflcurna gevny sbe frys, sbetvirarff, ngbarzrag gung bsgra srryf qbjaevtug shgvyr.
V xabj nyy bs guvf fbhaqf evqvphybhfyl gevgr, ohg Ergheany fgehpx n areir jvgu fhpu cerpvfvba vg sryg nyzbfg vainfvir. Univat guvf yvggyr fvzhynpehz bs n wbhearl gb puvc njnl ng naq zrgnzbecubfr bagb zlfrys unf urycrq prager zr, svaq pbagrkg va gur abvfr naq pbashfvba, znqr zr srry yvxr V pna nvz gb or abezny ntnva. Znlor gur wbhearl V'z ba vf n shgvyr bar, gurer'f rirel cbffvovyvgl V'yy ybfr zl sbbgvat naq snyy gb gur onfr bs gur zbhagnva lrg ntnva - ohg orsber gura, V'yy fgevir sbe nppbzcyvfuzragf gung whfgvsl zl cynpr va guvf yvsrgvzr. V'yy fubj zl gunaxf gb gur crbcyr jub znxr yvsr n wbl. V'yy xvpx gur jbeyq va gur qvpx orpnhfr fcvgr pna or n cbjreshy zbgvingbe.”
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[LOG CLOSED]
//defragmented
[#FORCED START OVERRIDE - - LOG OPENED]
BROADCAST: DSE Backloggd - - RA 18h 06m 0s | Feb 20th 2023
====================
XENOGLYPH I
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Writings by “BeachEpisode”
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[Translation Accuracy: 86%]
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“Never should have smoked that ҂ѼҎ҉֎ (excrement? physic?), now I’m in the Abyssal Scar.
I must admit to having been left gobsmacked and dumbfounded by how much Returnal has left such a strong impact on me. I don’t have much history with Housemarque’s library of games, despite Super Stardust HD being such a near-permanent fixture on my PS3 that it could have passed for my TV’s screensaver. Outland is relatively slept on these days too, I reckon, but ƺƻƛʥʭФѩ (unneeded digression?). Returnal finally received a PC port, allowing me to give the title a shot. The ᵬᶚỻӜѯ (electronic device?) is so deprived of games it’s genuinely heartbreaking…”
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====================
XENOGLYPH II
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Writings by “BeachEpisode”
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[Translation Accuracy: 91%]
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“Typically I’d run for the hills whenever someone threatened me with a roguelite - a genre I often find ƛʥ؆ٱᵯᶈ (disinterest in?) at the best of times, and one that stands in stark opposition to what I personally find fulfilling about videogames at worst. There wasn’t much in place to prepare me for how deftly Housemarque utilised their core arena arcade design tenets around this Cronenberg/Villeneuve aesthetic pastiche with equal parts confidence and purpose. It must be said, because it is ﬗꬳꬲﭏ (true?), that this is the best-feeling third-person shooter I’ve touched. The degree of freedom of expression in the general character movement, as well as the broad utility of the tools available allow for some astoundingly gratifying excursions through arenas fraught with enemies spewing endless pointilist bullet patterns in easily analysable & counterable on the fly attack patterns.”
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====================
XENOGLYPH III
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Writings by “BeachEpisode”
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[Translation Accuracy: 95%]
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“The compounding subtleties and delicate touches to the way Returnal’s roguelite structure was sculpted for purpose to encapsulate Selene’s purgatorial journey convinces me of this being one of the best character studies I’ve seen since maybe Silent Hill 2? Blurring the line between ﬕתּﻼἕ (symbol?), metaphor and physicality and never prescribing strict and demystifying literalisations. I think it is a very special thing when taking a moment to enjoy the environmental art design can yield subtle narrative realisations, lines drawn between the fragments of a character that they allow you to excavate. The world of Returnal is so dizzyingly all-encompassing.”
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[!!!!CONTENT WARNING: Topics of suicide!!!!!]
====================
XENOGLYPH IV
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Writings by “BeachEpisode”
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[Translation Accuracy: 0%]
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“Rot13 Rneyvre va gur jrrx, V znqr na nggrzcg ng raqvat zl yvsr. Qvqa’g nppbzcyvfu zhpu orlbaq fbzr oehvfrf naq n srj qnlf fcrag va n orq va RE. Va gur zbzragf yrnqvat gb zr npgvat ba zl vqrngvbaf, vg sryg yvxr funeqf bs vpr jrer cvrepvat guebhtu rirel cneg bs zl obql - svyyvat zr jvgu n qrrc puvyy naq fgvyyarff, nyzbfg nffhevat zr gung vg’f bxnl, gurer’f ab funzr, V’ir nyernql orra qrnq. Jura V neevirq onpx ubzr, fgvyy n yvggyr qehax bss gur cnva naq funzr bs vg nyy, V qvqa’g xabj jung gb qb. Guvf ebbz qvqa’g srry yvxr zl bja nal zber. V qvqa’g erpbtavfr gur crefba va gur zveebe, gur crefba jub jebgr zl grkgf be zrffntrf. Yvfgyrff, V gubhtug abguvat bs pbagvahvat zl cynlguebhtu bs Ergheany, vg jnf whfg na rnfl cvrpr bs abeznypl V pbhyq fyvc onpx vagb.
Fryrar ernjbxr ba na nyvra cynarg jurer fur nyjnlf qvq, gur napube cbvag ng gur fvgr bs gur vavgvny nppvqrag. Fur znqr n pbzzrag ba ubj haerpbtavfnoyr gur raivebazrag jnf sebz ure ynfg yvsr, fur yvfgrarq gb nhqvb ybtf erpbeqrq ol urefrys naq rkcerffrf qvfthfg naq pbashfvba ng ubj guvf crefba pbhyq cbffvoyl or ure. Univat na nethzrag jvgu tubfgf naq ybfvat gb lbhe bja ibvpr, qrfcrengryl pynjvat sbe n yvtug ng gur raq bs gur ghaary bayl gb erirny gur znyvtanapvrf naq cnenfvgrf rngvat njnl ng lbhe bccbeghavgvrf sbe frys shysvyyzrag. Fghpx va n fvflcurna gevny sbe frys, sbetvirarff, ngbarzrag gung bsgra srryf qbjaevtug shgvyr.
V xabj nyy bs guvf fbhaqf evqvphybhfyl gevgr, ohg Ergheany fgehpx n areir jvgu fhpu cerpvfvba vg sryg nyzbfg vainfvir. Univat guvf yvggyr fvzhynpehz bs n wbhearl gb puvc njnl ng naq zrgnzbecubfr bagb zlfrys unf urycrq prager zr, svaq pbagrkg va gur abvfr naq pbashfvba, znqr zr srry yvxr V pna nvz gb or abezny ntnva. Znlor gur wbhearl V'z ba vf n shgvyr bar, gurer'f rirel cbffvovyvgl V'yy ybfr zl sbbgvat naq snyy gb gur onfr bs gur zbhagnva lrg ntnva - ohg orsber gura, V'yy fgevir sbe nppbzcyvfuzragf gung whfgvsl zl cynpr va guvf yvsrgvzr. V'yy fubj zl gunaxf gb gur crbcyr jub znxr yvsr n wbl. V'yy xvpx gur jbeyq va gur qvpx orpnhfr fcvgr pna or n cbjreshy zbgvingbe.”
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[LOG CLOSED]
2022
True enough, a game I wholeheartedly consider to be a watertight little marvel was graced with a sequel that promises bigger and better - and in their attempt to deliver, it begins to burst at the seams. There was a certain elegance to the way the Okomotive, the main mode of transport in FAR: Lone Sails, was designed. In the context clarity for which every function and dial coexists with the rest of the machine and how breezy it felt to dart around its internals. Much of that game’s appeal was in the ease with which you could Zombie Mode it, stringing together repeated steam release speed boosts while spinning all the other managerial plates thrown your way, all with enough spare time to enjoy the journey you’re making.
FAR: Changing Tides trades the Benz for the boat, with an interesting inversion of the previous title’s control scheme, and a very different internal routine you’ll have to learn and adapt to as an increasing amount of plates demand to be spinned. I’m all for a spot of intentioned friction in my games, but it felt as though I was struggling with the control scheme more often than the barge itself. Changing Tides’ doesn’t let you hold on to the momentum you build for very long before you need to grind to a halt, it’s a very harsh stop-and-start routine you have to rigidly follow. My main source of disappointment is in how I felt as though I stared at my vehicle’s gauges and switches for far longer than the stunning environments rolling by, bumping around its cramped internals and trying to nurture any semblance of speed I built. All of this is a thorn in the side of a game that deserves to be absorbed into. It pains me to hear a wonderful piece of background score coming to an end before I can reach the finale of a setpiece or chapter. There's a lot of strained silence in stretches of Changing Tides that smack less of Muted Immersion and more that I’m Fucking Up Somewhere. This kind of lack of clarity tends to extend to the puzzle the segments that break up the boat trips, I’m somewhat in disbelief at how often they’d place items or levers behind obstructing pieces of geometry.
Not without its flashes of brilliance, don’t get me wrong. When the going gets going, and you hit the supercharge, carving your ship through the cerulean nebula, I felt like I was driving a carmine dagger and dealing the killing blow to God. In a stunningly good final act, Changing Tides is genuinely host to one of the biggest sentimental sequel popoffs I’ve had since Shadow Moses in MGS4. I can forgive all matter of ooo clunkiness when a game makes me loudly exclaim “No Fucking Way”.
FAR: Changing Tides trades the Benz for the boat, with an interesting inversion of the previous title’s control scheme, and a very different internal routine you’ll have to learn and adapt to as an increasing amount of plates demand to be spinned. I’m all for a spot of intentioned friction in my games, but it felt as though I was struggling with the control scheme more often than the barge itself. Changing Tides’ doesn’t let you hold on to the momentum you build for very long before you need to grind to a halt, it’s a very harsh stop-and-start routine you have to rigidly follow. My main source of disappointment is in how I felt as though I stared at my vehicle’s gauges and switches for far longer than the stunning environments rolling by, bumping around its cramped internals and trying to nurture any semblance of speed I built. All of this is a thorn in the side of a game that deserves to be absorbed into. It pains me to hear a wonderful piece of background score coming to an end before I can reach the finale of a setpiece or chapter. There's a lot of strained silence in stretches of Changing Tides that smack less of Muted Immersion and more that I’m Fucking Up Somewhere. This kind of lack of clarity tends to extend to the puzzle the segments that break up the boat trips, I’m somewhat in disbelief at how often they’d place items or levers behind obstructing pieces of geometry.
Not without its flashes of brilliance, don’t get me wrong. When the going gets going, and you hit the supercharge, carving your ship through the cerulean nebula, I felt like I was driving a carmine dagger and dealing the killing blow to God. In a stunningly good final act, Changing Tides is genuinely host to one of the biggest sentimental sequel popoffs I’ve had since Shadow Moses in MGS4. I can forgive all matter of ooo clunkiness when a game makes me loudly exclaim “No Fucking Way”.
“Find a sacred square of earth. Lay down, so you have the dirt at your back. Close your eyes. Close everything. Your ancestors are in that dirt. All the living and all the dead are holding you up. Now Stand. They’re still there, aren’t they? It’s time to move. To entangle yourself everywhere with everyone. So that next time you lay down in the dirt, you will have so much more to tell them.”
As I’m sure many of us can, I recall the time we moved out from our childhood home - the rooms I spent my most formative years and the battle scars they earned through the hustle and bustle of young family life. I’m thinking of my bedroom; my wooden crew bed riddled with teeth marks and Cartoon Network stickers. The pale blue colour of the paint on the walls, frayed and cracked in the areas I gormlessly taped posters without my parents’ permission. The doodles I hid in the corners of the furniture their eyes couldn’t reach, depicting my aspirations for the future, the riches and gifts and moments I’d give to my dearest friends and family. It’s been a good twenty~or-so~ years since I last saw those remnants of my past, and I’m a little stunned in how Season allowed me to think back to them so vividly for the first time in nearly as long. Everything can tell a story, host a spirit of the past - miniscule but never completely insignificant. I wish I could see them again, I wish I had the foresight to have taken photographs or something.
Ultimately, this is what Season: A Letter To The Future is about, sculpting in time out of photographs, sketches and audio recordings. Preserving memories of the world as it stands before a vague concept of calamity threatens to change it. In its opening moments, your character Estelle and her mother are making a pendant to protect Estelle’s mind on the journey ahead. Doing so means Estelle’s mother has to give up five memories of her own. The courtyard where you’re asked to gather your first recordings is staged perfectly. Decorations from a party last night still hang in a tree, and signs of the village’s lived-in past are everywhere. A leisurely stroll to capture all I could of the gorgeous little village, rendered lovingly with painterly oranges and purples.
I couldn’t believe my luck, it’s an amazing start to the game. The establishment of melancholic urgency and the world being rich with cultures and theologies that beg to be preserved for future generations, and the understanding of how frail the mind really is… How eager it seems to omit and alter the past to safeguard ourselves from oversentimentality. Couldn’t have been more captivated. And as my bicycle crested the final stretch of the hilltop, I tip over the edge, letting go of the controller, letting gravity take over and pull me down the long and winding road ahead, I realise that the game is a little special.
Season’s secret weapon is in its journal mechanic - wherein the player can freely personalise the entries afforded to you with custom placements of polaroid photographs you’ve taken, as well as sketches, decals, flora and whatever else you find on your journey. There’s a decent amount of freedom of expression here allowing you to capture the essence of a location however best you see fit. The kicker is that you only have two pages per key location. It can often be all too tempting to just sweep through a videogame map and hoard every shiny collectible like a kinda crow, but imposed upon the journal is a limited framework per key locale that forces you to be mindful of the things you choose to omit. My mind was on hyperdrive during this early stretch of the game; viewfinding striking angles for my photographs and designing the best notebook pages I felt an area deserved, and deciding what records were of the most importance.
Sadly, this doesn’t last too long. Eventually you reach the open-world segment where most of the playtime is spent - Tieng Valley. While clearly a lovingly realised zone filled with historic locales and mindful touches, it introduces a monotonous feeling to its exploration as things become increasingly clear that the scope of the game falls too narrow to match what I was hoping for. This isn’t Kino’s Journey, it’s one episode of Kino’s journey stretched thin over a 5~6 hour playtime. It slows down in its variety of unique stimuli and begins to focus more keenly on the mystery of the sole opposition in the game and their goal of ushering forth the ‘end of the world’. That’s not necessarily a problem on its own, but neither the mystery nor the few remaining citizens of Tieng Valley are all that compelling. The people of the valley are traumatized by memories of past conflicts, and much of life there is centered around how to live with that trauma or forget it completely. Season settles into the most anodyne musings on memory and how people live with the past… the transience of memory and the collective ability to heal. The themes tackled are so broad, it’s hard to pick a message out of all the noise, and it truly doesn’t help that the delivery is so flat. Its focus on small human stories and creative expression is admirable, even as they’re drowned out by a lukewarm plot, and the world’s beauty can’t be overstated. But rather than the meditative, meandering journey its opening suggests, Season gets locked into a single story that centers on the cataclysmic fate approaching its world more than the wonder that already fills it.
I’m disappointed, ultimately, but it was a nice pilgrimage.
As I’m sure many of us can, I recall the time we moved out from our childhood home - the rooms I spent my most formative years and the battle scars they earned through the hustle and bustle of young family life. I’m thinking of my bedroom; my wooden crew bed riddled with teeth marks and Cartoon Network stickers. The pale blue colour of the paint on the walls, frayed and cracked in the areas I gormlessly taped posters without my parents’ permission. The doodles I hid in the corners of the furniture their eyes couldn’t reach, depicting my aspirations for the future, the riches and gifts and moments I’d give to my dearest friends and family. It’s been a good twenty~or-so~ years since I last saw those remnants of my past, and I’m a little stunned in how Season allowed me to think back to them so vividly for the first time in nearly as long. Everything can tell a story, host a spirit of the past - miniscule but never completely insignificant. I wish I could see them again, I wish I had the foresight to have taken photographs or something.
Ultimately, this is what Season: A Letter To The Future is about, sculpting in time out of photographs, sketches and audio recordings. Preserving memories of the world as it stands before a vague concept of calamity threatens to change it. In its opening moments, your character Estelle and her mother are making a pendant to protect Estelle’s mind on the journey ahead. Doing so means Estelle’s mother has to give up five memories of her own. The courtyard where you’re asked to gather your first recordings is staged perfectly. Decorations from a party last night still hang in a tree, and signs of the village’s lived-in past are everywhere. A leisurely stroll to capture all I could of the gorgeous little village, rendered lovingly with painterly oranges and purples.
I couldn’t believe my luck, it’s an amazing start to the game. The establishment of melancholic urgency and the world being rich with cultures and theologies that beg to be preserved for future generations, and the understanding of how frail the mind really is… How eager it seems to omit and alter the past to safeguard ourselves from oversentimentality. Couldn’t have been more captivated. And as my bicycle crested the final stretch of the hilltop, I tip over the edge, letting go of the controller, letting gravity take over and pull me down the long and winding road ahead, I realise that the game is a little special.
Season’s secret weapon is in its journal mechanic - wherein the player can freely personalise the entries afforded to you with custom placements of polaroid photographs you’ve taken, as well as sketches, decals, flora and whatever else you find on your journey. There’s a decent amount of freedom of expression here allowing you to capture the essence of a location however best you see fit. The kicker is that you only have two pages per key location. It can often be all too tempting to just sweep through a videogame map and hoard every shiny collectible like a kinda crow, but imposed upon the journal is a limited framework per key locale that forces you to be mindful of the things you choose to omit. My mind was on hyperdrive during this early stretch of the game; viewfinding striking angles for my photographs and designing the best notebook pages I felt an area deserved, and deciding what records were of the most importance.
Sadly, this doesn’t last too long. Eventually you reach the open-world segment where most of the playtime is spent - Tieng Valley. While clearly a lovingly realised zone filled with historic locales and mindful touches, it introduces a monotonous feeling to its exploration as things become increasingly clear that the scope of the game falls too narrow to match what I was hoping for. This isn’t Kino’s Journey, it’s one episode of Kino’s journey stretched thin over a 5~6 hour playtime. It slows down in its variety of unique stimuli and begins to focus more keenly on the mystery of the sole opposition in the game and their goal of ushering forth the ‘end of the world’. That’s not necessarily a problem on its own, but neither the mystery nor the few remaining citizens of Tieng Valley are all that compelling. The people of the valley are traumatized by memories of past conflicts, and much of life there is centered around how to live with that trauma or forget it completely. Season settles into the most anodyne musings on memory and how people live with the past… the transience of memory and the collective ability to heal. The themes tackled are so broad, it’s hard to pick a message out of all the noise, and it truly doesn’t help that the delivery is so flat. Its focus on small human stories and creative expression is admirable, even as they’re drowned out by a lukewarm plot, and the world’s beauty can’t be overstated. But rather than the meditative, meandering journey its opening suggests, Season gets locked into a single story that centers on the cataclysmic fate approaching its world more than the wonder that already fills it.
I’m disappointed, ultimately, but it was a nice pilgrimage.
S&P:SS is a rock solid rail shooter, albeit a much more crowd-pleasing affair than its predecessor, which was akin to an iron-deficient recollection of End of Evangelion as reflected through the lens of a fever dream. Star Successor takes a more generalised approach to the rail shooter formula, with fewer gimmicky segments and an easily digestible rosary of stages that begin & end in the ways you could predict. Being the sole game Yasushi Suzuki has expressly worked on as Art Director, their calibre of style and pageantry in Star Successor is absolutely off the hook - I doubt I’m being controversial in my assessment of their skill as an artist being some of the most refined aesthetic sensibilities to have blessed the medium yet. The level of planning here for boss variety is particularly impressive, I’m convinced the bones are here for a knockout boss rush title. Huge fan of the guy that turns into dolphins that bounce beachballs and jump through hoops which all become dangerous projectiles. As a whole, I’m fairly convinced that this game is more smartly designed overall than its predecessor, as the consistency with which it dolls out mindful bullet patterns that compound effortlessly on the mental stack, and contextualisations for the multi-layered hazards are nothing short of impressive.
Where things turn sour for me is in the dodgy hitboxes and how drawn-out the stages feel, as the excursions buckle under their padding and turn into fairly languid drifts across locales and enemy swarms. Nothing lasts as long as I’d feel they should, and I repeatedly find myself sighing with fatigue when another mob corridor is punctuated with another miniboss as opposed to a more meaningful perspective or narrative shift. Credit where it’s due, it’s ultimately a good thing that Treasure took a very different approach for this sequel, one that effectively showcases the ways their aesthetic and design tenets matured in the span of a decade. My preference for the original is just a consequence of it winning me over in the battle of appeals - in the personal and artistic fulfillment I gain from “imperfect” games that scan as confused little miracles. Star Successor is solid, but far too articulately concocted to give me any real sense of impact - feeling more like a product, and therefore more prone to being scrutinised over the mechanical minutia. Ultimately a miss for me, but a stunning little simulacrum of a game I still find otherworldly.
Where things turn sour for me is in the dodgy hitboxes and how drawn-out the stages feel, as the excursions buckle under their padding and turn into fairly languid drifts across locales and enemy swarms. Nothing lasts as long as I’d feel they should, and I repeatedly find myself sighing with fatigue when another mob corridor is punctuated with another miniboss as opposed to a more meaningful perspective or narrative shift. Credit where it’s due, it’s ultimately a good thing that Treasure took a very different approach for this sequel, one that effectively showcases the ways their aesthetic and design tenets matured in the span of a decade. My preference for the original is just a consequence of it winning me over in the battle of appeals - in the personal and artistic fulfillment I gain from “imperfect” games that scan as confused little miracles. Star Successor is solid, but far too articulately concocted to give me any real sense of impact - feeling more like a product, and therefore more prone to being scrutinised over the mechanical minutia. Ultimately a miss for me, but a stunning little simulacrum of a game I still find otherworldly.
2016
“Whatever he’s planning, it’s going to happen, and I don’t want to be here when it does. If there’s one thing I’m sure of; everything’s about to fall apart”.
A couple days ago, I was calmly and cooly lamenting the way Half Life 1’s cinematic setpieces still remain somewhat unique through to today. There’s something I find incredibly cathartic about cataclysmic things happening to a gigantic facility while the player Mr Bean’s their way through falling platforms and rubble, all the while gormlessly operating critically important, high-powered machinery you have no qualifications for. Everyone wants their FPS to have a shotgun with lots of recoil or something, but I want an elevator shaft sequence with massive casualties.
INFRA is a rough-around-the-edges little anomaly of a game - if it isn’t outsider art, it skirts dangerously close. It’s just so rare for a title to lean so far into its own neuroses alongside such genuinely impressive production values.
Tasked, as a structural analyst, to do a routine survey of the crumbling water treatment facilities on the outskirts of the fictional city of Stalburg, there is little more for the player to do mechanically than take photographs of OSHA violations and flick switches. Even still, the average first playtime of INFRA is 22 hours long. An oftentimes painful linear first-person adventure where the common roadblock is the odd wildly cruel puzzle and level design. It truly begs belief, the shit they make you do in this to earn a crumb of progress.
I really do love the good majority of what this game accomplishes - there’s an engrossing sense of scale on the journeys between the puzzles. Though the game is linear, there is a lot of wriggle room for alternating paths and solutions to key events, all the while the set designers filled every nook and cranny with surprisingly mindful details and assets that make the city feel lived-in and rewarding to poke around. It’s even replete with intense large-scale destructive setpieces that remind me of something like Disaster Report, and the player character's dialogue has that tired in-over-his-head everyman energy that I luvv. Navigation requires careful deliberation as you have to scan the environment for the most subtle nudges in the right direction; finding keys, notes containing passwords, manuals explaining how to operate machinery. Dizzyingly many things here are purely optional and only affect your playthrough way down the line, if at all.
Where INFRA loses me is in how rotely demanding it can be. The kinds of puzzles here are these legitimately tricky logic tests that tend to be sprawled out over a large playable area - often obscured by too much detail and not-enough lighting - meaning that to even test out a hypothesis, the player has to do a not-insignificant amount of travel between inputs. The developers have this undeniable keen interest in civil engineering, the way these facilities and utilities are connected to one another in a grand network of city planning and infrastructure…… but it’s the sole thing that extends the playtime, and it fucking wore me down. There’s a grand conspiracy element to the game’s overarching story and I could hardly pay it any mind because I just wanted the water on the floor to stop electrocuting me. It wasn’t until the game entered its closing act where I finally felt as though I had clocked to the designer’s puzzle logic. I wanted INFRA to kill its darlings, cull extraneous sections and give me more simple problems to solve - but the game’s more interesting with the sheer friction it poses. Imagine you turned the difficulty of Half Life 1 to the max, only for it remove all of the enemies and guns, & make Black Mesa more annoying instead.
While the game routinely lost its balance on the knife’s edge between demanding and frustrating, I found myself completely enamoured by the way Loiste Interactive hyperfocuses on the spectacle, genuine lived-in immersion, of the decaying infrastructure of the fictional city of Stalburg. Allegedly inspired by watching a documentary on the crumbling network of civil engineering that the USA relies heavily on, INFRA is a game about corruption and decay. It’s a crude image, one of vainglorious despots causing corporate neglect to eat away at the infrastructure we rely on, cataloguing the rebar and cabling that protrudes the crumbling concrete like scabs, but it’s truuu.
INFRA ain’t a game for everyone, but there’s a lot here for folk with saintly patience to appreciate. If you do give it a miss, please at the very least say “tyvm :3” to the overpass you drive under for being kind enough not to fall directly on top of you. It’s very tempted, I’d be too.
A couple days ago, I was calmly and cooly lamenting the way Half Life 1’s cinematic setpieces still remain somewhat unique through to today. There’s something I find incredibly cathartic about cataclysmic things happening to a gigantic facility while the player Mr Bean’s their way through falling platforms and rubble, all the while gormlessly operating critically important, high-powered machinery you have no qualifications for. Everyone wants their FPS to have a shotgun with lots of recoil or something, but I want an elevator shaft sequence with massive casualties.
INFRA is a rough-around-the-edges little anomaly of a game - if it isn’t outsider art, it skirts dangerously close. It’s just so rare for a title to lean so far into its own neuroses alongside such genuinely impressive production values.
Tasked, as a structural analyst, to do a routine survey of the crumbling water treatment facilities on the outskirts of the fictional city of Stalburg, there is little more for the player to do mechanically than take photographs of OSHA violations and flick switches. Even still, the average first playtime of INFRA is 22 hours long. An oftentimes painful linear first-person adventure where the common roadblock is the odd wildly cruel puzzle and level design. It truly begs belief, the shit they make you do in this to earn a crumb of progress.
I really do love the good majority of what this game accomplishes - there’s an engrossing sense of scale on the journeys between the puzzles. Though the game is linear, there is a lot of wriggle room for alternating paths and solutions to key events, all the while the set designers filled every nook and cranny with surprisingly mindful details and assets that make the city feel lived-in and rewarding to poke around. It’s even replete with intense large-scale destructive setpieces that remind me of something like Disaster Report, and the player character's dialogue has that tired in-over-his-head everyman energy that I luvv. Navigation requires careful deliberation as you have to scan the environment for the most subtle nudges in the right direction; finding keys, notes containing passwords, manuals explaining how to operate machinery. Dizzyingly many things here are purely optional and only affect your playthrough way down the line, if at all.
Where INFRA loses me is in how rotely demanding it can be. The kinds of puzzles here are these legitimately tricky logic tests that tend to be sprawled out over a large playable area - often obscured by too much detail and not-enough lighting - meaning that to even test out a hypothesis, the player has to do a not-insignificant amount of travel between inputs. The developers have this undeniable keen interest in civil engineering, the way these facilities and utilities are connected to one another in a grand network of city planning and infrastructure…… but it’s the sole thing that extends the playtime, and it fucking wore me down. There’s a grand conspiracy element to the game’s overarching story and I could hardly pay it any mind because I just wanted the water on the floor to stop electrocuting me. It wasn’t until the game entered its closing act where I finally felt as though I had clocked to the designer’s puzzle logic. I wanted INFRA to kill its darlings, cull extraneous sections and give me more simple problems to solve - but the game’s more interesting with the sheer friction it poses. Imagine you turned the difficulty of Half Life 1 to the max, only for it remove all of the enemies and guns, & make Black Mesa more annoying instead.
While the game routinely lost its balance on the knife’s edge between demanding and frustrating, I found myself completely enamoured by the way Loiste Interactive hyperfocuses on the spectacle, genuine lived-in immersion, of the decaying infrastructure of the fictional city of Stalburg. Allegedly inspired by watching a documentary on the crumbling network of civil engineering that the USA relies heavily on, INFRA is a game about corruption and decay. It’s a crude image, one of vainglorious despots causing corporate neglect to eat away at the infrastructure we rely on, cataloguing the rebar and cabling that protrudes the crumbling concrete like scabs, but it’s truuu.
INFRA ain’t a game for everyone, but there’s a lot here for folk with saintly patience to appreciate. If you do give it a miss, please at the very least say “tyvm :3” to the overpass you drive under for being kind enough not to fall directly on top of you. It’s very tempted, I’d be too.
1998
Can you feel the heat?
When the tires kiss the street
Move into the beat
Ever since I learned about occlusion culling, a technique deftly handled by Naughty Dog with their first PlayStation 1 title, Crash Bandicoot, my appreciation for the more graphically stellar titles for the system was granted a new shade. It helped offer me a frame of reference (granted, of one of the more extreme use cases) for the necessity to obscure unneeded geometry to save what precious few resources the console could afford - as well as giving me something to mull over whenever I play a 3D PS1 game that looks suspiciously good. Much akin to Crash Bandicoot, racing games benefit from what is essentially a densely curated linear track. With limited camera movement, every attainable viewing angle can be accurately poured over by the designers, letting them carefully weigh up exactly how much they can get away with at every meter of game space. This is very apparent in visually stunning racing titles like Wipeout 3, Colin McRae Rally 2.0, and Need for Speed: High Stakes; their tracks are glutted with turns, verticality and obstacles that exist to obscure as much model pop-in as possible, and offer a new piece of visual stimuli at every turn. This has a knock-on effect for how these tracks are actually driven on, too. Track designers are by necessity discouraged from long straightaways where the world noticeably phases into existence, and instead ensure that the player has very little if any downtime from cornering, maintaining a thrilling tempo that only stops when the chequered flag is waved. I say all this, because I really do miss the era where racing games were these hardware-defying explosions of style and skill, with enough big-money backing to allow the designers to let their perfectionism and neuroses get tangled in the engine’s crankshaft. I can only go in a straight line down a massive realistic unreal engine map for so long.
Anyway. Ridge Racer Type 4 is a Swiss watch. One of very, very few games I’d describe as “meticulous”. Every one of its moving parts serves a key purpose in its grand design. Its mechanisms are the result of painstaking consideration for the most minute details. Built to last, and never lose its sheen. The only game my dad likes (real). It all just moves & breathes with this air of confidence and romance, exemplified by the way the penultimate setpiece is the final lap taking place at the exact turn of the millennium - a genuinely affecting gesture to barrel through doubt and seize your future by any means.
One thing I’m particularly taken by is the overall stylistic presentation of Type 4. Among the first things you see upon loading it up are the game’s signature tail/headlight afterglows leaving trails across the screen. The preamble at the start of this review was for no reason other than the fact that R4 actualises the PS1. Its environments use every trick in the book with a healthy serving of incredible models & baked-in textures to make the world feel rich beyond the scope of the road. The game’s UI alone is worth studying for its consistent use of very few colours, empty-space and minimalist decoration (every game needs a "PLEASE" in the corner at all times). In establishing a universe that seemingly exists solely for the purpose of racing fictional cars around the fictional Ridge City, the developers at Namco have populated the series with a mountain of logos, icons, banners, signs, patterns, manufacturers, liveries and colour palettes. They work to establish the curves, hills and tunnels as very real places with a history all their own. How did Wonderhill get its name? Why is it called Shooting Hoops? Where are these places in Ridge City and how do they fit into the Ridge Racer universe?
Look at the Helter Skelter track’s logo, for instance. One of the things I enjoy about this logo is its deceptively simple construction that results in a complex visual illusion of sorts. Essentially, the structure is a series of circles that reduce in size from top to bottom. The circles do not change shape in the slightest, only in scale, and by removing their intersections and filling in some minor spaces to complete the shape, is this illusion achieved. It harkens to the track’s multi-levelled nature, conveying a sense of movement as you rapidly weave through overpasses and underground tunnels w/ the ferocity of a hurricane.
The whole game is like this. A veritable archive of mindful audio, visual and game design, of weapons-grade artistic talent. Beyond aspirational and genuinely medium affirming.
When the tires kiss the street
Move into the beat
Ever since I learned about occlusion culling, a technique deftly handled by Naughty Dog with their first PlayStation 1 title, Crash Bandicoot, my appreciation for the more graphically stellar titles for the system was granted a new shade. It helped offer me a frame of reference (granted, of one of the more extreme use cases) for the necessity to obscure unneeded geometry to save what precious few resources the console could afford - as well as giving me something to mull over whenever I play a 3D PS1 game that looks suspiciously good. Much akin to Crash Bandicoot, racing games benefit from what is essentially a densely curated linear track. With limited camera movement, every attainable viewing angle can be accurately poured over by the designers, letting them carefully weigh up exactly how much they can get away with at every meter of game space. This is very apparent in visually stunning racing titles like Wipeout 3, Colin McRae Rally 2.0, and Need for Speed: High Stakes; their tracks are glutted with turns, verticality and obstacles that exist to obscure as much model pop-in as possible, and offer a new piece of visual stimuli at every turn. This has a knock-on effect for how these tracks are actually driven on, too. Track designers are by necessity discouraged from long straightaways where the world noticeably phases into existence, and instead ensure that the player has very little if any downtime from cornering, maintaining a thrilling tempo that only stops when the chequered flag is waved. I say all this, because I really do miss the era where racing games were these hardware-defying explosions of style and skill, with enough big-money backing to allow the designers to let their perfectionism and neuroses get tangled in the engine’s crankshaft. I can only go in a straight line down a massive realistic unreal engine map for so long.
Anyway. Ridge Racer Type 4 is a Swiss watch. One of very, very few games I’d describe as “meticulous”. Every one of its moving parts serves a key purpose in its grand design. Its mechanisms are the result of painstaking consideration for the most minute details. Built to last, and never lose its sheen. The only game my dad likes (real). It all just moves & breathes with this air of confidence and romance, exemplified by the way the penultimate setpiece is the final lap taking place at the exact turn of the millennium - a genuinely affecting gesture to barrel through doubt and seize your future by any means.
One thing I’m particularly taken by is the overall stylistic presentation of Type 4. Among the first things you see upon loading it up are the game’s signature tail/headlight afterglows leaving trails across the screen. The preamble at the start of this review was for no reason other than the fact that R4 actualises the PS1. Its environments use every trick in the book with a healthy serving of incredible models & baked-in textures to make the world feel rich beyond the scope of the road. The game’s UI alone is worth studying for its consistent use of very few colours, empty-space and minimalist decoration (every game needs a "PLEASE" in the corner at all times). In establishing a universe that seemingly exists solely for the purpose of racing fictional cars around the fictional Ridge City, the developers at Namco have populated the series with a mountain of logos, icons, banners, signs, patterns, manufacturers, liveries and colour palettes. They work to establish the curves, hills and tunnels as very real places with a history all their own. How did Wonderhill get its name? Why is it called Shooting Hoops? Where are these places in Ridge City and how do they fit into the Ridge Racer universe?
Look at the Helter Skelter track’s logo, for instance. One of the things I enjoy about this logo is its deceptively simple construction that results in a complex visual illusion of sorts. Essentially, the structure is a series of circles that reduce in size from top to bottom. The circles do not change shape in the slightest, only in scale, and by removing their intersections and filling in some minor spaces to complete the shape, is this illusion achieved. It harkens to the track’s multi-levelled nature, conveying a sense of movement as you rapidly weave through overpasses and underground tunnels w/ the ferocity of a hurricane.
The whole game is like this. A veritable archive of mindful audio, visual and game design, of weapons-grade artistic talent. Beyond aspirational and genuinely medium affirming.
Wanted to give this game a shake out of sheer curiosity about contextualising the upcoming Dungeon Fighter Duel fighting game. There is a surprising amount of variety to the myriad playable classes, if the preview videos in the character creator screen are anything to go off - each subclass is replete with heavily stylised animations and unique playstyles, it seems genuinely a little sick when things get going. Not to mention I had to wonder how an "MMO beat em up" even worked, if at all. Most immediately striking is the sprite artstyle, as busy & clashing as a day at the races @ Maplestory or Gaia Online. Consider me a cow for this kind of tacky maximalism.
But like. Somehow I got autobanned halfway through making a character. Don't know what kind of cowboy anti-cheat they're running over there but my ass couldn't even leave the station lol - and it seems many of the Steam reviews are people raving about the same issue. Could it be because I chose the subclass the game beautifully and artfully named "Geniewiz"?? Hopefully the fighting game kicks you to the main menu the moment you pick your character from the roster for the authentique xperience!!!
But like. Somehow I got autobanned halfway through making a character. Don't know what kind of cowboy anti-cheat they're running over there but my ass couldn't even leave the station lol - and it seems many of the Steam reviews are people raving about the same issue. Could it be because I chose the subclass the game beautifully and artfully named "Geniewiz"?? Hopefully the fighting game kicks you to the main menu the moment you pick your character from the roster for the authentique xperience!!!
2021
One of the more worthwhile candidates from recent years for a Noclip documentary. I can't help but want to peer behind the veil and see how they published and repaired a bad dump of a missing & presumed dead arcade project from 1992. Clockwork Aquario hit my aesthetic taste just right, so I spent a couple of years after hearing of it praying to jeezus for a chance to see it in action; it's a rare treat for something like this to come out at all.
Not much to write home about here. It's okay! Studio Westone's DNA is plenty apparent in Clockwork Aquario's design, very much feeling like a Wonder Boy game with an arcade platformer spin. Chunky sprites and heft to the character movement as you break and throw stuff. It does some fun stuff with its scoring system that encourages greed and dastardly deeds, but on the whole, it's an alarmingly easy game. Vague memorisation of level layouts in its short 20-min runtime will have you chugging invincibility powerups effortlessly, and it even gives you them during boss fights which totally trivialises them. The difficulty settings at the frontend of this release sadly only seem to change your continue count, rather than anything gameplay oriented... vvvv little meat on this bone. Clockwork Aquario particularly shines in its 2-player co-op - some much-needed chaos is filled in by you bouncing off of / getting thrown around the screen by your partner.
Loathe as I am to admit, the urchins at the ""location test" (toesucker convention) were probably spitting a few kernels of truth in their assessment that ultimately buried this game for thirty years; Clockwork Aquario only barely works - and why would I pour coins into a middling platformer when the fightgame scene is blowing up? It's, on the whole, an excellent thing that the gaming landscape has shifted to a point where it's viable to restore and publish niche treasures like this, and I'm very happy for the closure and cute sprites.
Not much to write home about here. It's okay! Studio Westone's DNA is plenty apparent in Clockwork Aquario's design, very much feeling like a Wonder Boy game with an arcade platformer spin. Chunky sprites and heft to the character movement as you break and throw stuff. It does some fun stuff with its scoring system that encourages greed and dastardly deeds, but on the whole, it's an alarmingly easy game. Vague memorisation of level layouts in its short 20-min runtime will have you chugging invincibility powerups effortlessly, and it even gives you them during boss fights which totally trivialises them. The difficulty settings at the frontend of this release sadly only seem to change your continue count, rather than anything gameplay oriented... vvvv little meat on this bone. Clockwork Aquario particularly shines in its 2-player co-op - some much-needed chaos is filled in by you bouncing off of / getting thrown around the screen by your partner.
Loathe as I am to admit, the urchins at the ""location test" (toesucker convention) were probably spitting a few kernels of truth in their assessment that ultimately buried this game for thirty years; Clockwork Aquario only barely works - and why would I pour coins into a middling platformer when the fightgame scene is blowing up? It's, on the whole, an excellent thing that the gaming landscape has shifted to a point where it's viable to restore and publish niche treasures like this, and I'm very happy for the closure and cute sprites.
2013
Following a particularly stressful, turbulent few weeks, I picked up Old School Runescape, hoping that a smattering of nostalgia and what I believed to be mindless grind would center myself a little. This is a game I hold near and dear with some sense of cloying ironic detachment (I have a framed picture of Tutorial Island in my room. My FFXIV character is named “Runescape”.), yet hadn’t actually played since highschool. Back then, I never once had the opportunity to be a paid member because my parents, wisely, were against the idea of telling the evil computer my name, let alone bank card details. I’ve spent the past week finally delving into the Member's content that Child Me couldn’t, longingly looking at the closed-off swathes of the world map and gated sections of the skills guide like a hungry orphan and dreaming of adventures out of reach. I must say, this game is pretty great.
To my surprise, there’s a certain magic to the way Old School Runescape approaches quest design. In a genre infamous for repetitive “get 30 bear asses” drudgery, OSRS instead decides to make quests something akin to a Sierra or LucasArts point and click adventure. A wide array of common world items and enough context clues in the witty dialogue for you to know what to do with them. It helps that the aesthetics are charmingly simple, but it still demands a surprisingly salient level of environmental awareness as even mundane decorations cannot be ignored for the potential solutions they could be.
There’s even something funny about this being a complete MMO with all the “combine x and y item” and “use x on y” trimmings, so often I’d be exploring the world and run in to another player busying themselves with God Knows What - the world feels alive in moments like these, games struggle to give players meaningful interactions with the world aside from Kill, and even the MMOs I like tend to flounder at this. Where I’d normally see people running rings around an enemy spawn zone killing everything in one hit like a combine harvester of content (and people can still do that in OSRS)... here, I find myself taking the time to watch the world go by, as another player character does some fucked up shit on a weird contraption I have no context or understanding about. In moments like these, I understand the appeal of open worlds lol.
The more subtle thing I realise OSRS gets right is its micro and macro scalability. If you were to set yourself a long-term goal, there is an almost dizzying amount of potential player expression here that will allow you to approach it. The game has at its disposal an absolute ton of in-depth quests and side activities that give meaningful rewards by way of transportation and helpful niche equipment. The game even boasts an Ironman mode that heavily restricts the amount you can trade or receive support from other players, and while that’s definitely not for me, it all feels totally viable. Suffice to say, it’s exactly what I need right now - a world to lose myself in for a while, and never feel like my time is being wasted because I keep finding new motivators around every corner and skills that collide satisfyingly into one another. Even if you just want to be the little adventurer on the wind, the game will make you feel perfectly cared for. I mean christ I just unlocked fairy leylines and I feel like the world is my oyster right now. Genuinely accomplished and fully-realised tabletop RPG chic. Let's kill a green dragon and visit some wizards in a tower.
Goes without saying, but what great music. These harpsichord and trumpet midi soundfonts are absolutely foundational. The game is so charming, man. I love that you can Right Click > Examine everything for a nugget of flavour text, I love the tone of the writing being filled with comfy eye-rolly UK boomer shit, I’m pretty sure I saw a Rising Damp reference. Hyooge world map gushing with mindful detail and cultures upon subcultures.
I wholeheartedly recommend giving this game a shot, whether you're a long-time returner or a first-timer, OSRS remains very unique. I'd push for you to use the Runelite client, a free open-source container for the game filled with options and mods to allow you to set your experience how you'd like. I'm using a graphical plugin called "117 HD", but there are a number of other ones that can come in handy, like a quest helper and timers.
"Death is in the fading scream borne on the wind. Death is in the bubbles from the deep, as dying lungs gasp their last. Death is in the soil, as the deceased become one with nature. Death is in a chair downstairs." - Gnome Child
To my surprise, there’s a certain magic to the way Old School Runescape approaches quest design. In a genre infamous for repetitive “get 30 bear asses” drudgery, OSRS instead decides to make quests something akin to a Sierra or LucasArts point and click adventure. A wide array of common world items and enough context clues in the witty dialogue for you to know what to do with them. It helps that the aesthetics are charmingly simple, but it still demands a surprisingly salient level of environmental awareness as even mundane decorations cannot be ignored for the potential solutions they could be.
There’s even something funny about this being a complete MMO with all the “combine x and y item” and “use x on y” trimmings, so often I’d be exploring the world and run in to another player busying themselves with God Knows What - the world feels alive in moments like these, games struggle to give players meaningful interactions with the world aside from Kill, and even the MMOs I like tend to flounder at this. Where I’d normally see people running rings around an enemy spawn zone killing everything in one hit like a combine harvester of content (and people can still do that in OSRS)... here, I find myself taking the time to watch the world go by, as another player character does some fucked up shit on a weird contraption I have no context or understanding about. In moments like these, I understand the appeal of open worlds lol.
The more subtle thing I realise OSRS gets right is its micro and macro scalability. If you were to set yourself a long-term goal, there is an almost dizzying amount of potential player expression here that will allow you to approach it. The game has at its disposal an absolute ton of in-depth quests and side activities that give meaningful rewards by way of transportation and helpful niche equipment. The game even boasts an Ironman mode that heavily restricts the amount you can trade or receive support from other players, and while that’s definitely not for me, it all feels totally viable. Suffice to say, it’s exactly what I need right now - a world to lose myself in for a while, and never feel like my time is being wasted because I keep finding new motivators around every corner and skills that collide satisfyingly into one another. Even if you just want to be the little adventurer on the wind, the game will make you feel perfectly cared for. I mean christ I just unlocked fairy leylines and I feel like the world is my oyster right now. Genuinely accomplished and fully-realised tabletop RPG chic. Let's kill a green dragon and visit some wizards in a tower.
Goes without saying, but what great music. These harpsichord and trumpet midi soundfonts are absolutely foundational. The game is so charming, man. I love that you can Right Click > Examine everything for a nugget of flavour text, I love the tone of the writing being filled with comfy eye-rolly UK boomer shit, I’m pretty sure I saw a Rising Damp reference. Hyooge world map gushing with mindful detail and cultures upon subcultures.
I wholeheartedly recommend giving this game a shot, whether you're a long-time returner or a first-timer, OSRS remains very unique. I'd push for you to use the Runelite client, a free open-source container for the game filled with options and mods to allow you to set your experience how you'd like. I'm using a graphical plugin called "117 HD", but there are a number of other ones that can come in handy, like a quest helper and timers.
"Death is in the fading scream borne on the wind. Death is in the bubbles from the deep, as dying lungs gasp their last. Death is in the soil, as the deceased become one with nature. Death is in a chair downstairs." - Gnome Child
1997
"But rest assured, it was spectacular"
Eye-opening little piece of videogame heritage - an early RPGMaker project that was released in 1997 for the PC-98, yet has many of the modern quirks you generally expect from similar titles that are shared nowadays. Being the sole handiwork of a young creator, there's a certain naivety to the way it presents its little vignettes of despair and hope, but they're handled with such sensitive care that they simply don't fail at being evocative. While I'm not particularly blown away by the subject matter nor symbolism, it's so easy to get swept up by how emotionally charged it comes across, and thorny in the ways all the most resonant stories are. I must extend some laudation for them having the courage to publish it at a time where this was far from the norm or in demand.
RPGMaker trappings are present, but relatively forgivable if only because I have no idea how inflexible RPGMD98 is. Despite structural rigidity, it manages to play with the form - the spell list is formatted like pages of a diary, the player's level suggests the character's age, etc. Rest assured, there is no combat, I have to wonder how easy it was to resist implementing it despite being the engine's primary function - there are a handful of modern atmospheric/emotionally forward RPGMaker titles that insist on it despite no benefit. Azusa 999 is even stylised in a way that honestly feels timeless (I honestly thought for the longest time that this was a Bitsy game!), minimalist environs and slim colour palettes - even atmospheric ambience shifts to match story beats, it really did suck me in!
Azusa 999's English translation was as recent as 2020, gracefully packaged with an application holder that casts aside the headache of setting up a PC-98 emulator, as well as a wonderful player companion guide by translator Obskyr complete with a historical foreword and cultural notes. It's all a wonderful read, and fills me with hope that any number of old, forward-thinking, experimental or personal projects from the early Japanese indie scene are still just waiting to be shared across the pond.
Eye-opening little piece of videogame heritage - an early RPGMaker project that was released in 1997 for the PC-98, yet has many of the modern quirks you generally expect from similar titles that are shared nowadays. Being the sole handiwork of a young creator, there's a certain naivety to the way it presents its little vignettes of despair and hope, but they're handled with such sensitive care that they simply don't fail at being evocative. While I'm not particularly blown away by the subject matter nor symbolism, it's so easy to get swept up by how emotionally charged it comes across, and thorny in the ways all the most resonant stories are. I must extend some laudation for them having the courage to publish it at a time where this was far from the norm or in demand.
RPGMaker trappings are present, but relatively forgivable if only because I have no idea how inflexible RPGMD98 is. Despite structural rigidity, it manages to play with the form - the spell list is formatted like pages of a diary, the player's level suggests the character's age, etc. Rest assured, there is no combat, I have to wonder how easy it was to resist implementing it despite being the engine's primary function - there are a handful of modern atmospheric/emotionally forward RPGMaker titles that insist on it despite no benefit. Azusa 999 is even stylised in a way that honestly feels timeless (I honestly thought for the longest time that this was a Bitsy game!), minimalist environs and slim colour palettes - even atmospheric ambience shifts to match story beats, it really did suck me in!
Azusa 999's English translation was as recent as 2020, gracefully packaged with an application holder that casts aside the headache of setting up a PC-98 emulator, as well as a wonderful player companion guide by translator Obskyr complete with a historical foreword and cultural notes. It's all a wonderful read, and fills me with hope that any number of old, forward-thinking, experimental or personal projects from the early Japanese indie scene are still just waiting to be shared across the pond.
1996
Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, and as was the custom of that dynasty, her parents were brother and sister. In fact, kings were required to marry their sisters in order to acquire their power. Cleo herself was married to her 10-year-old brother when she was 18 years old. In keeping with her genetic line, she bore marks of inbreeding, one of which was chibi.
Ghibli-esque artstyle as a front for, no exaggeration, the game equivalent of fracking. Set your phone down on the table and do something else while it aggressively autoplays through quite literally all of its content. With blockchain integration and NFTs proudly on the game's roadmap, how can you not be excited to let this piece of shit suck your battery dry.