-feel like the other two games in the series do a fantastic job at making u feel as alone as max constantly is and he’s rlly not alone here like at all. too many characters are introduced, too many names mentioned, too much time spent protecting others or having them protect you. the nyc of the first game and sao paulo in three are map designs held up by lonely alleyways that exist only for you to kill as many ppl as u can as quick as possible and this rlly isn’t. the streets feel too alive and it disconnects you from the story bc max is so clearly not a real guy. he only feels real and believable when by himself and stewing in his own self pity and regrets

-has like very strange tonal dissonance that isn’t as present in other remedy games and def feels more like the rockstar influence on this one

-love how much of the in game television content in this is seemingly remedy taking shots at themselves which that’s funny and cute and self aware in a way that’s not fucking annoying. sam lake’s writing is always so deeply unsubtle and on the nose,, makes me smile seeing schizophrenic written in blood or all the diff times it’s mentioned that max is in a computer game.

-I don’t like the story here as much as 1/3 bc max is a piggy here :-// max isn’t acab here :-((

-tbh think mona’s face is probably modeled after julianne moore which fucking owns lol

-would actually be so surprised if anything they’ve ever done is better than the funhouse level

It's kinda funny that the first game I played turned out to be my new favorite game of last year. Funny how things work out like that.

Alan Wake 2 is for my money the best game Remady has made to date and is currently my new favorite pick for best recent survival horror game that's not a remake. Everything from that always great Remedy combat, to Sam Lakes writing feeling REALLY on point this time around, and even the actors and voice actors doing a fantastic job both in live action cutscenes and through VA and mocaping. I can't say I have a full understanding of the story yet, mostly since there's still some lingering pieces that don't fall into place yet but even then the number of twist and turns this story took kept me on the edge of my seat, and the way they were able to weave the story in between neo noir nightmare to a horror mystery and still have story cohesion is honestly really impressive.
I will say the only part I'm meh about in retrospect is how long it takes before it starts becoming a survival horror game. What I mean is for the first 3 to 4 hours or so you're railroaded down this linear line of progression pretty much having ammo given to you and it's not until the first boss when the game finally starts to open up more and spread its wings. On the topic of its gameplay I also really love how Remady was able to explore the different types of survival horror games. In the game you can bounce between two characters; Saga and titular Alan Wake, Saga's gameplay is much more akin to the gameplay of RE4 or Dead Space; where the item management is still an important aspect of the gameplay but it's still more skewed towards action. The titular Alan Wake's sections however are much more oriented towards classic survival horror like classic Resident Evil or Silent Hill, you have half the inventory space that Saga has and only have access to 3 weapons which are kinda unreliable and ammo is super scarce. The titular Alan Wake's sections take place in the titular Dark Place and most of the enemies are these shadow monsters; there's a shit ton of them but only some of the shadows are real enemies. You have to carefully maneuver through these shadow enemies without them seeing you which requires you to turn off the flashlight and move in pure darkness, and if you think one of the shadow monsters is coming to kill you the only options is use up one of your flashlight charges hoping your right and it's an enemy, or waiting to see if it's an actual enemy but also taking the risk of losing health.
It's not perfect, the exploration on Saga's side can feel a little tedious at times and The titular Alan Wake's sections feel really short and don't have the same lasting feeling that Saga's sections have, but even then I feel as thought Alan Wake 2 found that certain sweet spot of balance that rarely see most survival horror games reach without making some limitations.

14 years and Remady somehow hit it out of the park with one of my new all time bangers, and to think..........it's all because Epic wanted a new exclusive game for their shitty pc store front and have nearly infinite amounts of cash to throw around. Good on you Sam Lake and co......good on you for gaming the system.

I absolutely loved this VN. It was dark, funny, and even a little touching and gay.

The scene direction is incredible, with a ton of CGs, and the music is great. It had me cracking up regularly.

Seriously, incredible game.

“Being touched makes me feel safe. But at the same time it also makes me anxious. After all, I have no idea how I could ever repay someone who makes me feel this happy. I can’t find the words to say. With just a simple hug, all of these feelings are revolving around inside me, and I’m just so afraid that I’ll end up crushing this moment into dust. And just like that, the happiness has faded away completely, leaving nothing but coarse anxiety coursing through my heart. Am I just not used to dealing with kindness?”

“Maybe I’m a little lonely.”

Okay now were those quotes from Sayoko, the protagonist of the video game Ghostpia after the first time someone was nice to her in so long that she can’t remember the last time she physically touched anyone, or was that a quote from Ina, the me who’s writing this little thing about the video game Ghostpia four months into an acute mental health episode that my doctor recently described as “really concerning”?

Jkjk obvi these are quotes from the first few minutes of Ghostpia but I did find myself struck throughout the ten or so hours I spent with the game just how well it captured with words the vibe of Being Depressed, which I do think is really hard to do in the format that developer Chosuido has chosen for this story. Being a visual novel with absolutely no player input beyond proceeding the text and which never leaves Sayoko’s perspective means you’re really sitting in the sludge with her, and while she’s a really engaging character, she’s often a difficult one to be around. Unmotivated, sad, and anxious, she actively avoids her friends in the early goings of the story, and even by the end of the game she is still largely nonverbal in group settings. But a combination of incredible scene direction, one of the most clever localizations I think I’ve ever seen, and a really lovely score help bolster an already very strong character voice. I think it’s a lot easier to communicate a VIBE of depression than having to constantly assert the fog of it with a running first person narration, but Chosuido makes it look easy.

“Hopefully I’m not so empty that the wind blows me away.”

Ghostpia takes place in a city surrounded on all sides by a vast desert of snow, populated by immortal people who live nocturnally and whose forms are painfully melted by the light of day. If they’re ever caught by the sun or otherwise killed, they simply reform and wake up within a couple days at the local garbage dump, which also happens to all inanimate objects in the town upon damage or consumption. The population is small and fixed – no one has ever been able to leave, and no outsider has ever shown up. There’s a fascist church that nominally runs the town but given that it’s difficult to cause any permanent harm to anyone or anything, even stuff as extreme as murder or arson seems to kind of slide out of consequence if the perpetrator gets away with it for more than a day or two.

Lots of things “happen” in this game and lots of things “have happened” over the course of ghostpia’s five episodes. It becomes evident pretty quickly that the literal only thing Sayoko is good at in life (death?) is killing people, with guns, with her hands. She’s amnesiac and the church seems to have a vested interest in her not remembering the circumstances around the last time she and her only two friends last tried to permanently escape the town. She gets to know professional worlds both legitimate and criminal. Schemes are hatched, assassinations plotted, battles beyond the scale you might expect are waged. None of this really coalesces into much of anything though. There’s a lot of worldbuilding, and it’s all interesting. There’s a lot of teasing, a lot of implication, hints that there is a coherent vision of What’s Going On here, but Ghostpia is firmly Season One of a planned two seasons and the core of this game is obviously an emotional one, uninterested in answering literally any of the questions it opens up.

“She’s so dazzling, I can’t help but look down at the floor to avert my gaze. She and I are different. The two of us are actually quite distant from each other, but only just so happen to be physically close right now. Just thinking about it like that makes me want to cry.”

The throughline that ties the season together is the arrival of the town’s first ever New Person in, well, no one is sure. Nobody keeps time, they don’t age, they don’t measure things, there’s no real point. All the days are the same, and over time it becomes evident that the milieu that consumes Sayoko enough that she rarely leaves home and doesn’t bathe or eat without instruction is silently haunting everyone. Everyone’s going through their motions, and the thing that makes her different is that she doesn’t have any motions to go through. The ghosts don’t technically have physical needs, so doing things like eating and bathing and staying warm are comforting rituals they keep going to make themselves feel like they’re retaining what they guess to be their essential human nature. Performing humanness is to some degree an essential part of a ghost’s life, and it’s ambiguous how seriously we’re meant to take it when early on one of Sayoko’s friends says they haven’t really hung out with her for several years.

So when a new girl shows up, immediately on the church’s bad side, and Sayoko rescues her, and gives her a name, and a place to crash for a while, well, it becomes immediately harder to be isolated. So as much of the game is taken up by the intrigue of the new girl, Yoru’s, situation, and by association the aspects of the lives of Sayoko’s other friends that she had either forgotten or never taken enough of an interest in before to learn about, the core of the experience is really just hanging out. Conversation. Establishing and re-establishing bonds. Learning to be vulnerable, and getting to know someone well enough that you can be vulnerable with them without being open with them.

“I don’t understand why you believe in her so much.”

“She doesn’t know what it means to love someone. She’s only ever been loved...That’s all she lives for...I find myself unpleasant. I know my mind is warped and repulsive. But I want to keep doing what I’m doing as long as I can.”

“I don’t understand you. But I might be jealous.”

It’s very easy for me to focus on the bits of Ghostpia that I connected with, because they resonate very strongly with me and I think when the game is on it’s so fucking on. I find the main cast pretty uniformly incredible – there’s Pacifica, who is tall and kind and shrewd and confident and ambiguously evil (no one is QUITE sure what her job is but “criminal kingpin” seems not implausible); Anya is handy and moody and warm and deeply invested once she opens up, which comes easier than she suggests it does; Yoru is bubbly and crude and perceptive and unreadable. Sayoko herself, when she starts to feel safe again, never stops being awkward but it does seem like she is kind of just Like That in a way that is flavored differently from the way people clam up when they’re anxious, she’s also a little bit genuinely cruel and deeply empathetic.

Each episode ultimately revolves around Sayoko’s ability to connect with one of her circle of friends or otherwise deeply relate with a side character, often ones who are hostile and cruel. Everywhere she goes she finds mirrors of her loneliness, her fear of vulnerability, her anger, and her aching want for the relationships she thinks other people have. And while this isn’t a game about “getting over it” or otherwise shrugging off depression, through those mirrors Sayoko is able to find a version of herself who is comfortable and able to believe that the people around her want to be there, and believe that when they tell her they feel about her the same way she feels about them, they’re being genuine.

“YOU JUST DON’T VIBE WITH HER.”

That shit isn’t the totality of the game though. Ghostpia is a lot of things, including, often, zanier than I would prefer? Not that I dislike jokes, and I do in fact like a lot of the comedy here, but there’s a juvenile streak that feels really out of place with the rest of it. A strange fascination with the word “poop” that spans the entire game, a mean-spirited running bit aimed at a homeless man that thankfully disappears relatively early on, and a bunch of out of left field otaku goofs at the eleventh hour stand out the loudest in my memory as Goofers that just don’t hit, but Ghostpia’s wacky diversions fall flat for me as often as they hit. If the characters and their dialogue weren’t so compelling through pretty much any scenario they get pitched into this stuff would be way more of a problem for me structurally.

This extends to action and violence too. The game is outright gruesome, and I think it’s to the writers’ credit that when they choose to play that gruesomeness for drama or horror it works really well even though characters are constantly reminding us and each other that death has literally no meaning for them and in fact would often get them out of the pickles they find themselves in. But probably 85% of the time the violence (which is usually like, A Lot, is what I want to emphasize) is played for comedy by the narrative even if Sayoko is taking herself seriously – the people of the town call her The Ninja because she jumps around and is so good at murder, and whenever she’s about to get into something there’s a cartoonish Ninja Flute Musical Cue to herald the coming bloodshed. Characters are bisected, mutilated, impaled, sometimes graphically, almost always for The Bit and I’m not OPPOSED to that sort of thing (I’m a documented sicko and in fact with one character who is the most consistent target of this to the point that it’s a running joke I think it’s pretty funny), I just don’t really get what we’re going for with the tone a lot of the time here. The weirdest bits are when the stakes of the genuine character drama are tied up in this cartoonish violence that otherwise comes off as a really dumb bit. The main plot of one episode revolved around one of the main characters being abused by her employer but the circumstances of this abuse are so brazenly stupid that it’s hard to feel the way I assume the developer wants me to feel about the scene. Nothing really offensive happening, it just feels a little at odds with what feels like the game at its best in multiple other directions.

“I don’t really wanna say something like ‘that’s the power of friendship’ because that’d be so cheesy. So I say it ironically. As a joke.”

Obviously, though, I HAVE connected pretty strongly with Ghostpia. I don’t think of those things I was just complaining about. I think about Sayoko’s endlessly evocative narration, and the soundtrack when it’s jaunty and the soundtrack when it’s melancholic. I think of the way all of the main characters are united in their hatred for Clara, the local nun in training who is so genuinely cheerful and naive that our misfit losers can’t help but be intrinsically disgusted by her mere presence.

I think of how, in chapter one, when she’s reconciling with Anya after going no contact over a slight she can’t even remember anymore, Sayoko says I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and Anya tells her “you don’t have to say it twice.” And then I think about how, at the end of the game, when Yoru is at her lowest and she’s testing the boundaries of the shaky relationship she’s developed with Sayoko, and she’s admitting to her that she knows more about everything and everyone than she lets on but that she can’t say any of it, and needs to know whether Sayoko could understand this, whether she’ll stay with her, Sayoko says “Of course I do. Of course,” and Yoru replies “I get it. You don’t have to say it twice.” I think about stagnancy, and transformation, and how to be content. Those things seem bigger in hindsight. I think Sayoko might agree.

I've tried to do multiple writeups on this to try and struggle with how to present my feelings on this while seeming sincere; it's easy to make something impersonal, to try and have that boundary between me as the writer and you as the reader. After all, it already exists; by you reading it through a screen, the words here can't be felt by your hands. You can't change them by yourself. They exist in a different plane, needing technology to observe and interact with it. But to make something that surpasses that boundary and allows you to see my heart, ripped from its cage and displayed for the world requires detail and care, but it also requires a deep understanding of what exactly one is writing. I understand Crymachina as it feels as its heart has been displayed as a gourmet meal, with all the dressings that surround it, but I am not sure how I as a writer am able to deliver this care to you effectively.

But that feels appropiate for Fuyuki Hasashi and FuRyu's newest work; a work that thirsts for and deeply requires for you to see the extent of its love and hate. How it desires deeply for unconditional love yet despises the world it has been brought into, one that detests that love in the macro scale and works towards destroying and minimizing it in the grind to become larger than life. To scam and kill in the literal and figurative in how one gets ahead of others in modern society, and Crymachina understands this and disparages it in a molotov cocktail thrown towards them. Crymachina is both that, but also a tour de fource of love, with how each part of the cast contains love inside them and sprouts in different manners, but never truly considers one irredeemable for harboring that love; because to love is to be human, and to be human is to love, and to love is to exist for it.

Even more impressive is the lengths that Crymachina goes to to be an anti-humanist yet progressive piece of art, as what it truly hates is the humanist ideal represented by contemporary society. Why do we disparage and discriminate against others? We may be carnivores and utilize natural resources to survive in the current age, yet discrimination and to see other intelligent beings as lesser because of a biased criteria is in itself an act against true humanity. Where we are born, who we love, what we eat and what we believe in does not matter to our value as humans, and Crymachina truly despises those who participate in that culture, representing them as hideous horrors. To take some words from the producer's interview with NISa, to claim that people are precious because they're human is willfully ignorant; it is the degree of human they are that matter.

Beyond that, Crymachina's all-female cast comes at its benefit when its story and cast are unmistakeably queer not just in the clear representation of lesbian love, but also in how it compares with modern society's discrimination of it. Mikoto and Ami's relationship are the most clear on this with their unmistakeable codependency, but Mikoto's fear of truly defining it because of its stigma: she'd like to be "cool". Ami, in contrast, being head over heels, desperately wishes to be unashamedly married and in love with Mikoto, and constantly fights against a society that doesn't allow her to be legally married. That is her goal as a Real Human after all: to be a proper family. And that sort of dialogue feels reflective of Japan's current struggle to legalize gay marriage, where Crymachina represents this with two great leads, and yells at the world to accept them.

Leben and Enoa are also a more interesting angle of it in the sci-fi sense in contrast to Mikoto and Ami's unsubtle contemporary dialogue; while Mikoto and Ami are unmistakeably considered to be humans, their label seems more shaky in terms of Leben and Enoa; Leben being a "human" with no past and a hatred for it, while Enoa being a machine with love for humans. This dynamic does continue to evolve in ways I'd not expand on because of spoilers, but their romantic relationship is the peak of Crymachina's representation of love and humanity, becoming representations of Crymachina's entire thesis statement: to be human doesn't matter without love. By experiencing love, by struggling to love, do you become a true human.

And in that framework of love does Crymachina shine. I adored Crymachina's story. I love its environmental design, taking Crystar's similar aesthetic with its coloring and transfixing that on larger scaled sci-fi arquitecture. Its music by Sakuzyo (who I found out while playing made one of my favorite albums!) is also a great accompanying piece, with the boss themes sung by Enoa's voice actress being the standouts. Everything about Crymachina is a true labour of love, and for that, I embrace it through my screen, appreciating it and loving it wholeheartedly.

"Please continue to share your life with us."

「やさしさで守れるあしたなんかどこにもない」

Anti-humanist yuri SF. All too often stories about sentient robots really only serve to stroke the ego of the humans creating and consuming them -- see the utterly abysmal anime Vivy for a great example of this -- but Crymachina is unwaveringly transgressive, reaching the conclusion that there is no inherent value in "humanity" and going on to posit that human society does not deserve to proliferate if that means trampling on intelligent beings it views as inferior.

As with Crystar, Crymachina's characters are concerned primarily with their own happiness, acting for the sake of the people they hold dear. And yes, the game is unabashedly queer, with characters driven not just by familial bonds but romantic love; indeed I am hard-pressed to think of another JRPG where love is such a strong motivating factor for the principal cast. Leben and Enoa struggle against the system not out of a sense of obligation or duty, but because of their desire for a life with one another, because their future together is being threatened. While the world of Crymachina is built on high-concept SF, taking enough cues from the novel The Three-Body Problem to warrant citing it in the end credits, its conflict remains raw, poignant, and grounded to a degree a great deal of media struggles to achieve.

Where I think the game will prove divisive is actually its runtime. Crymachina clocks in at only 15-20 hours of playtime, so it has to cover a lot of twists and turns fast. I can completely understand someone feeling as though the plot and characters don't have time to breathe, but I personally would argue that the script is tight enough that anything added to it could be nothing more than chaff. On Twitter I stated that it has "Blue Archive pacing," and I meant that in a complimentary sense. Certainly a YMMV aspect of the game, but it personally worked for me.

What I think most players will appreciate, though, is how abbreviated, even cursory, the actual gameplay is when compared to Crystar. You may have to grind a few times, but the stages are short and you are not forced to repeat content ad nauseam; I would estimate I spent only around 5 hours of my 16 hour playtime actually controlling characters. As such, while the game is much shorter than Crystar, I would not be surprised if it actually had more text...

And of course I would be remiss not to mention another one of the game's strong suits -- the audio. Personally I think Crymachina's soundtrack is sakuzyo's best work period, with much more varied compositions than Crystar. It helps that the music is used much better here than Crystar, with fewer and less repetitious music cues letting you appreciate the individual tracks more. As one might expect, the voice acting is also sublime, with Tohno Hikaru's performance as Enoa in particular lending the scenario some real emotional weight.

All in all Crymachina is a very different game from Crystar, but it pleasantly surprised me with its powerful script, acerbic critique of the ugly aspects of human society, and willingness to be fully-fledged romantic yuri in a space where few works meaningfully depict love at all. This is definitely my favorite Furyu game... make of that statement what you will, I suppose.