Music Accompaniment

A solid murder mystery story that obeys the premise it set out before going for the 'twist'. A genuine whodunnit as a birthday party game for Amy. It's important to note in a slew of contemporary whodunit stories willing to break their own rules for a story: Disco Elysium (2019), Knives Out (2019), and even I would argue Tangle Tower (2014); The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog (2023) stands as a completely honest and 'solvable' mystery. There's a contained reasonable mystery to solve before it ramps the plot in the 3rd act. Impressive on its own, far moreso for an 'april fools' work. Not willing to settle on just this the text also flirts with the mundane realities and interest that shape our 2020s world: infinite runners, beatboxing, escape the room entertainment, and even the anxiety of labor as 'many hats' gig economy service worker. To be clear my point here is regardless of whether it's manifestly 'critical' of each of these factors, for instance many of the nerds among us might be disappointed that the game doesn't poke fun at infinite runners. Regardless though even the acknowledgement that these are reflections of contemporary helps the player feel more immersed in the world. On top of this, the decision to make the player character the 'watson' sidekick is a great way to offset failure states in a fun and realistic way such that if you are wrong about some fact Tails can wrestle the falsehood of your reasoning away allowing for the story to remain on rails.

As a light comic strip style 2 hour romp into the world of Sonic as a fun cheeky cartoon world, this is fantastic. It's nice to see the Sonic cast intermingle in mundane and non combative environments, something that has truthfully not really been done aside from the comic book series, even the cartoon show is your general 'enemy of the week' formula, so I hope that they feel comfortable exploring this friendlier character driven side of the world of Sonic. All we have to do is look at another story involved game like Sonic Frontiers (2022) which admittedly seems perfectly servicable as a 3D action platformer, to see the comtemporary problem with sonic. It's not an issue of tone but an issue of centralizing 1 protagonist at the expense of the ensemble. What Sonic Frontiers represents is Sonic as a military general because its constant planning and preparation through him, crucially none of the other characters talk to each other. The ensemble cast approach to sonic has been discarded ever since the 3 character structure of Sonic 06' (2006) was written off as a mistake. As such, Sonic has been the default protagonist, which is monotonous when you have many other main characters you could explore, like in the case of Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) because in SEGA's view this and the ensemble approach is probably hurting the bottom line. The most endearing factor of Sonic in the view of the fans is how characters that arent Sonic interact with each other, the ensemble story building element, one that by design depicts Sonic as stageplay with all the shakespearean matters of miscommunication and deceit that come with. It's a genuine tragedy that this side of sonic has been unexplored and, as such, we can see The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog as the first signs of finally awakening from that hibernation. If viewed that way, then its a wonderful awakening by all accounts.

My colleague Cadensia is a lot more sour about the entrapment of this work as an april fools prank, for her

"It may be a shame to point this out, but The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, while a harmless experience, reveals the franchise's structural problems. Caught up in its own nostalgia and struggling to innovate around a character from another era, the Sonic Team proved incapable of coming up with a subversive and fresh concept. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog manages to do so, but the title is still plagued by being an April Fool's joke, and only seen as such by SEGA. There's something about the company's management that prevents them from really trusting a new generation that might have insights to offer on a truly major project." (link)

However there's two rebuttals to this line of reasoning I want to note here. This is a cynicism that over rides the corporate future based on what we already know, but we can't exactly rule out the idea that this is a test pilot work from SEGA to see if people would be interested in this side of the Sonic world merely disguised as an april fools joke. All we have to do is glimpse at the blatantly unfinished nature of other April Fools VN titles like Bug Fables: April Fools! (2018) to see how the formula of such a prank is supposed to go. It's not supposed to be a rich and finished story its meant to be a gag. There's no gag here, its a full free Visual Novel with a firm 3 act structure and an evolving minigame. So I wouldn't really rule this out based on that extra polish and care put into a 'joke' as a form of test piloting.

Beyond just that, the work is so flourished and well considered that even if it is just a shallow gag on SEGA's part this is a 'gag' that slipped through the cracks and let be told a millennial tale. An important note here is that compared to other corporate mega giants, SEGA is not that interested in copyright takedowns. This is obvious when looking especially at the development of Sonic Mania (2017) being made in tandem with fan developers. I don't want to go all 'glory to the corporation' but if we consider it as SEGA continuing to sabotage their own world, the lack of IP restriction means that regardless of what gets made in a stuffy 'canonizing' office building this work functions regardless as a joyful emission to other fans as a reference point for acceptable fan games that take the world into account as an internal space.

Anyway regardless of all that, the art is great and the positioning of all the characters is wonderful. I only have a couple minor complaints: I was not actually able to gather information and properly interrogate Rogue and Blaze in the casino and I really wanted to especially since Rogue is my favourite character. Aside from that the 'what would Sonic do' logic that tails puts forward, messianic blasphemy aside, doesn't really make that much sense. The sonic run minigame sections are meant to reflect your character thinking, but I don't know, the quickness and desperation of doing it reads to me a lot more as paniced 'racing thoughts'. Aside from just that, Sonic is not that forward thinking, in fact literally the core point of Sonic Adventure (1998) and the cartoons generally is that while he has a great heart and is proactive, he's not that thoughtful so relying on him as a way of life doesnt make sense in that context. This is an easy enough fix though, if you have somebody smarter like tails in the piloting seat during these minigames. However its not a huge loss that it is this way regardless. I also didn't play the story all at once either, so unlike my good pal Cadensia these runner sections didn't bother me much. Not to be too maternal but if you feel something as exhausting that may be a good sign to take a break! :3

All in all I think The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a perfectly fine detective adventure romp, and the fact that it takes place on a sci fi enhanced train makes it all the more satisfying as a way to keep the story both self contained and enjoyable. If you like train transport like me it satisfies that itch immensely. A great way to spend a couple hours and in the process connect to the genuine aspects of Sonic's franchise that adult fans try to talk up. Really hope detective novelists check this one out, might play it again someday, that really is how much fun I had with it C:

CW: Discussions of Transmisogyny

The common response to vulnerable niche play experiences like Video Game Feminization Hypnosis (2019), Cave Story Sex RPG 2007 (2021), and He Fucked The Girl Out of Me (2022), is mockery both for the boldness of name and of content. Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is a psychic-design-manifesto with lines like "i dont care about the "puzzles" i just wanna explore weird islands & mess with the machines" and "ive half-joked about my games being laced with estrogen but i wonder how powerful they could be. what if we could use video games to forcefem ppl all over the world" nested as hyperlinks throughout her vent towards a better girly gameworld. Written in lowercase text and using internet acronyms like 'ppl', she speaks with a casual concern for unfettered femme exploration games as a way to potentially rewrite the social code.

It has not been product tested for review, nor has either of the other 2 games mentioned. The problem here is that the culture of 'gaming' itself is unable to step beyond the bounds of product review. Franz inquires into this problem around Cave Story Sex RPG 2007

"Why do we seek to quantify something clearly very personal based on how much it resonates with us?

I think my problem is that I think people are looking at this game as they would a product. Like it needs to have some value to me, otherwise it's not "worth playing".

Nadia, Fewprime, Blood Machine, npckc, communistsister, bagenzo, and [pourpetine] (https://xrafstar.monster/games/). These are in my mind the most notable transfemme gamedevs and their relevant store pages for their work¹. It's obviously not a comprehensive list, but this is my notation for who is the most publicly notable and prolific within the scene. Notice that all of the games on these pages are free as are the 3 games I opened with at the start. That's because transfemme gamedevs more often have to make their corpus free just to get eyes. So what are gaming spaces assessing the 'worth' of a completely no strings attached free simulated experiences? I think its the fact we dare to make people uncomfortable and borrowing a modicum of their time (across all the devs I've mentioned I cant think of 1 that takes more than 3 hours to finish, usually only being around 20 minutes in length at most). My sisters have to cheapen themselves to 0 just to get your ear and its still just met with mockery, harassment, and belittlement².

Even when a transfemme game dev gets the chance of any success at all she is thrown down again. In pourpetine's Hot Allostatic Load (2015) she notes among a litany of pained observations that

"One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked."

Video Game Feminization Hypnosis beats to a much more Utopian drum. A belief that we can mesmerize people into a more pure goo out of this vindictive rut, create a games made out of love, show people feminine Exits.

I believe in all that. I also believe that my words and those of my sisters are constantly being cast a sidelong jeer of disposability. That I and my sisters are then to blame for when a mobbing happens and not the world's own biases and outrage. This world has made this all quite non-negotiable, no more playing along with the democratic cesspits and hateful comedy routines. Here's to reflecting on the play experience others treat as compost as if its the most meaningful urtexts in the world because to quote pourpetine again "Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain." trash art is my queendom.

I hope it suffocates society before it can flee to their patriarch Arks. As princess put it here 'flood the world and dilute the sludge'.

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1. 2 notable exceptions I know of with pay to play games by transfemme is princess/Girl Software's other games, and the cowriting of Aevee Bee on Worst Girl Games. Also key in on the fact here I'm making no judgements on individual pricing of games as a moral decision.

2. Does not remotely just happen On Backloggd³ if you think this is just a grievance I have with this site you're gravely misreading me and I urge you to slow down your social media outrage use for a bit qt~

3. Although I should not lie, social media sites are remarkably more unreliable habitats for trans people than they initially appear, this place has been a great learning experience of that in my case

I'm a huge proponent of games which do more with less, so it's little wonder I adore Michael Brough and his design philosophy. He is a gem of the TIGSource-era indie scene who believes above all else that games are about making choices. Always making choices. His brand of roguelikes, endearingly referred to as Broughlikes, embody this ethos well, be they designed by Brough himself, or his ardent supporters. Their most important features are:
Small play areas
Zugzwang (compulsion to move)
Singular control (moving is identical to acting)
Predictable randomisation
Maximal exploration of a singular element of roguelikes

This foundation is an immediate and apparent departure from the prototypical roguelike experience, wherein boards can be very large, their spaces ultimately uninteresting, where players can freely wait for an advantage in combat, where actions are discrete from one another, where random elements can make the totality of the experience feel dependent on luck. That notion of luck is superficially present in Broughlikes as well, but only due to a lack of understanding fundamentals of their design.

As detailed in his dev notes, Broughlikes have each tackled different elements of Rogue[-likes] such as single-use items (Zaga-33), reusable spells (868-HACK), empowering items (Imbroglio), and in the case of Cinco Paus, item identification. Stemming from a conversation with Zach Gage, Brough wanted to explore how Rogue[-like] items don't need to be approached in binaries of knowing nothing and knowing everything, rather, if an item has multiple effects (like cursed items in many RPGs and roguelikes) some might be apparent up front, and others are only known later. Furthermore, some effects might be arcane to those unfamiliar with a game's vocabulary. Drawing from his own experience of learning Portuguese, Brough replicated this abstraction through having every scrap of text be in the world's sixth most spoken language.

As perhaps the most distinct of the Romance languages, this wonderfully approximates a vague understanding of the terms at play here. I can deduce, from context and my own scant knowledge of French and Spanish, that 'pontos' means 'points,' but cognates can only carry one so far. As one uses their wands to determine their effects, little icons appears next to them which can convey some meaning, but nonetheless leaves some layer of non-understanding. Only through greater experimentation then could one reasonably ascertain that 'Tesouro Escondido' means not only 'Hidden Treasure,' but that it mechanically requires your beam to end in an area with three walls. One of the most befuddling effects in my experience was 'Terremoto' -- 'Earthquake' -- which only goes into effect when the beam crosses the centre-most tile of the room.

When the particulars finally snap into place, the feeling of understanding is unmatched by almost anything else I've ever encountered in a game. It is a pitch-perfect recreation of how learning works. The issue is that, like learning, it is a largely uphill battle with little perceived reward until it is completed. This is perhaps what most puts people off of Cinco Paus, as they have not put in enough effort to reap the benefits of that effort. Without knowing how wands and effects and enemies and items and everything coincides with one another, it reads as chaotic, random, and arbitrary. Like with a puzzle, chance success reads as just that, chance, a feeling of 'How was I supposed to know that?' whereas naturally reaching the solution feels earned through the application of tools and rules.

Cinco Paus follows a stepped curve, much like learning. Progress is staggered and by no means smooth. With enough time and effort, one reaches a new plateau. The effects are learned incrementally, the mechanics comprehended, successful runs achieved only for additional layers of complication to, inevitably, be added on top. Collecting five talismans confers an artefact with its own specific effects and use outside the bounds of the wands. Further successful runs completed in sequence add modifiers to existing elements. There is always a next level of understanding to be achieved. That is precisely what has kept me coming back to Cinco Paus month after months, year after year. That is what keeps me coming back to Broughlikes in general. I stumble through 868-HACK runs. I have a low level knowledge of Imbroglio thanks to other people's decks. I am slowly improving at Cinco Paus. I see runs posted others and feel like I'm being presented differential equations. I come across strategies like this and my head aches. Much more than that, I see some of my favourite developers like Derek Yu and Raigan Burns falling head over heels for this goofy games with a silly blue wizard and I am infected by their passion. I see others replicating Brough's philosophy in their own games and I hope these constrained games never stop. Even if they do, the possibilities laid bare in those minuscule grids shows how Brough is a mind on the level of gaming's best and brightest.

CW: Videogame Difficulty Discourse

My Policy Guidelines

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Considering the thoughtfully effusive praise from Maradonna focusing on why its probably one of the best game titles to come out of Brazilian culture. Along with the more reflective post on the game by Archagent focusing on the mechanics of grief and passing away. I would be remiss to write off the game and dismiss it entirely, and following that I'm quite surprised how many people I follow (and I follow a LOT) haven't touched this title yet at all. Lesbian overtones, rewarding top down action combat, post apocalyptic storytelling, and anti human sentiments seem like taken together the sort of interests that would apply to most of the people who read what I have to say. Anybody who enjoyed Hyper Light Drifter for example would likely find great company here. However, I must stay true to my roots here as someone who writes about games mainly to vent a bit so let me get into my caveats.

I think actually the most simple way to put my frustrations are not actually with the game itself per se, but with how videogame difficulty is conveyed to the player. When you start the game you have an option between "Explorer", "Action Girl (Recommended)", and "Robot Apocalypse" difficulty. Most players in actuality on their first play through are going to be choosing between the easy and medium modes, and leave hard mode for when they are actually familiar enough with the game mechanics. I don't think I've ever seen somebody actively choose a hard mode in a game on purpose for their first playthrough as anything other than a joke.

Recently I read a fantastic analysis of the importance difficulty framing by Duranda called How Can Game Options Help Casual Players See The Core Appeal Of A Game?. The stellar takeaway is that difficulty framing is a mechanic that is important to the overall package

"Rather than your average difficulty settings which are often framed as 'the same gameplay, but stricter', difficulty settings that radically alter core game behavior are more likely to spark the imagination and in turn inspire deeper understanding of the game’s core appeal."

In theory this sounds like a huge ask for a 2 person indie title, but the curse I'm speaking of then is not so much specific to the game itself as it is to maybe the weakest point in both games critique and development that exists: Difficulty transparency. Writers often don't mention at all the difficulty they played on or the fluctuation in difficulties midgame. Whether they used assists and what they thought of them. Similarly designers tend to not give a clarity to the distinctions in difficulty. The reason why is because there's often a homogeneity in approach, that if you did not play the game at least on the recommended settings or above then you didn't really experience the game, instead you are just a passive object through it, no better than a journalist. This sentiment that 'casual' play should not be utilized is often undermined by the fact that it usually only applies to a specific type of game experience: The action genre. Compare for example most people's relationship nowadays with point and click adventure games, often dismissing their puzzles as 'nonsensical' and relying liberally on walkthroughs when needed and you get a general understanding that lateral puzzle games need not apply to this rule of thumb. What this rule of thumb fails to keep in mind though is that when it comes to more reflex based games different people have vastly different reflex times depending on various life factors and desires from gaming. Generally human reaction time to visual stimulus rests somewhere between 150 to 300 milliseconds, which doesn't sound like a huge distinction, but seeing as there is 30-60 frames in a second thats the difference between 4 and 8 frames which is the difference between seeing a wind up and responding or not.

In actuality this 'test' of player skill is usually already great for people with already fast reaction times. They get first breakfast to jokes of other players being 'filtered' by godhand etc. the rest have to rely on 2 factors to keep up with swift reaction times:

1. Learning the attack patterns through trial and error

and

2. Exploiting the systems in your favor, consciously or not

Let's actualize this through a game mechanic. In Unsighted there is a parry mechanic where upon seeing a red indicator on screen you hit a button to parry an enemy and then close in with a reply attack. What I noticed is that I was generally following attack patterns and audio cues for parrying instead because due to my slow visual reaction time (somewhere at a resting level between 250-300 for whatever reason) the ability to respond in time was simply not fast enough within that visual parry window. I would be calling the parry unreliable and thus getting annoyed with it, the reality is it was probably completely reliable to the 'average' and 'recommended' player and I fell just far enough out of that range to find that hard to rely on. Thus I had to exploit the Cog mechanic (which give you temporary buffs) and learn attack patterns through trial and error instead. Eventually I would run out of materials for using Cogs so I was floudering more slowly against bosses instead.

The problem is that for Unsighted, the combat itself becomes punishing based on whether or not you can parry in time. Parries are the way to output the most amount of damage so it becomes vital, especially versus boss fights, in order to not die several times in a row. But unfortunately, there's no time to spare here. Each time you die that much more time you lose to being able to help and save NPCs. You're letting everybody down when you die, not just yourself. It no longer becomes an at best tedious process of learning boss attack patterns and instead transforms into something actually stressful.

Far be it from me to make it out like this is just a reflex based issue though, this game in particular is mainly focused on puzzling into action combat. Outside of boss fights, action combat trends towards easy enough that it can be discarded as a general concern. So if you have issues with puzzling things out you will also be stressed by the doomsday clock. I don't for the most part. I can solve problems generally quite quickly. However if that does apply to you then you will want the time to be slower than the suggested amount as well.

This is compounded by the fact that in an environment where games like Majora's Mask and Undertale have already established a general player motivation to not let everyone down, there's often a huge stress to reset and start all over to do right by NPC's better and not have them die. At some point I looked at the amount of time I had left and said 'I can do this better if I restart' but of course that robs the 'authenticity' of the experience. Since I'm a 'memory vessel' of the original player character who knows a bunch of extra tricks I shouldn't this is why impressing difficulty to the player on the outset is incredibly important. Postmodernism aside, game immersion often relies on this feeling of the first time playing being imbued with 'authentic' experience. So if you walk into Unsighted and lose half the NPCs because you're simply bad at puzzle mechanics, that's not good. Sure the game is supposed to be stressful and give you a reason to persevere, but if its a matter of unknown limitations from the outset then you're fumbling around and not persevering much at all. This is the difference I can categorize between a feeling of actual stress and simulated stress. Simulated stress is the yearning to achieve, actual stress is recognizing that in spite of yourself, you just cant.

I can't stand most boss fights in games because they become pattern recognition checks with large health sponges attached to them. Due to my generally slower reaction speed this makes a great deal of sense. Most people with a better reaction time than me feel like they can learn and respond to attacks from a boss even the first time dynamically and quickly whereas I tend to have issues even keeping up.

This is all to say that I think the reccomended difficulty for Unsighted, at least for single player experience, is a bit too hard for what it's trying to push out of a player. You have 5 different dungeons to explore and map out plus a final boss and roughly about 8 hours to functionally do it before almost all the NPCs die. You can get dust that gives some of the NPCs an extra 24 hours of life, these tend to be somewhat rare. Each second a minute of in game time passes on the recommended mode so you're looking at an 24 extra minutes. That sounds like a lot but for example Iris, your 'Navi' character who actively helps you throughout starts with only 194 hours before they terminate and turn into an Unsighted (basically a zombie). That comes out to around 3 and a half hours give or take, and that means you have to shove dust in their maw for the whole game in order for them to be alive and help you progress for as much of the experience as possible. I think the time per minute should probably be closer to around 2.5 to 3 seconds considering the amount of content the game is pushing you to move through.

I may be wrong here, as it seems that most people who played through the game didn't mind and thought positively of it. But I think the fact is when we read Archagent's testimony for example we read the story of somebody for whom almost everyone died and while forlorn reflected that 'I did the best I could.' A completely valid experience, but not one that maps onto my own desires to save at almost all costs virtual NPC and their desolate society. I was pumping dust into everyones mouths to stave off death which meant that for me, death was not going to be slow and induvidual but instead a massacre over the course of 2 days. It wasn't staving off 1 NPC's death I really liked, but pretty much the entire town.

I think one of the other reasons I feel this extra pressure to the degree of either wanting to give up, start over, or get cynical is because the game's narrative pushes a 'chosen one' sentiment. You are the strongest robot of your type, out to save your wife and help anybody along the way, the rest of the town has all but given up on actively fighting and instead imbue all their hope for survival solely into you. In spite of that though, they still have to run shops apparently. I don't know about you but if I was in a dire last ditch effort post apocalypse scenario the last issue that would be on my mind is currency. Currency is usually the result of having to simplify larger logistical networks and trade so that bartering no longer becomes a nessecity. However often in scenarios of war and famine, food for example is doled out on a by person basis of basic need until the situation improves again. In dramatic scenarios merchants and shops fall by the wayside for a moment, so I find it interesting the degree to which games have trouble seperating from this currency process. Usually games more aware of this incompatibility justify it through saying the currency is some other life force, Dark Souls has 'souls' for example with the merchants saying 'I dont need money, I'd rather your souls'. Currency itself also becomes a gesture of the absurd and desperate. That's why it's justifiable that Hollow Knight has the shell currency system, so few people even use it now, and they are all incredibly delusional about the degree to which their way of life can still be maintained. Unsighted unfortunately doesn't have that excuse, all the characters know exactly that they will die next week. It feels like I'm being distanced from the actual help the people left want of me, they want me to help them as an old friend, and I do. But they also want me to be an obedient customer for them, which I don't.

Instead I would have preferred the checks for say, upgrading a sword, to be based on having the raw materials and maybe making me wait like a few hours. That would be much more realistic to what the game is trying to convey mechanically but of course it would be a difficult system to get right.

The only other negative thing I'll say about Unsighted is that it has a similar issue Elden Ring does, you have all these gorgeous iconic and in many cases sexy characters to speak to in the hubworld (a town). In total you have about 20 lines of dialogue for each of them outside of dramatic cutscenes which is not nearly enough to feel close to the characters and their plights. The focus was generally put on engaging combat, exploration, and puzzle design. All to well effect sure. However for me a game about grief and trauma should tend to have much more dialogue. I want to have 10k words from characters, I want to see some of them tear up about their own potential deaths and talk to me about the specific anime we watched together. I don't want to give an NPC 4 dust and get a cool effect from it, that's not the point for me at all.

In spite of all those misgivings I do think the feedback during attacks, variety of weapons, and visual design is quite good. The world is gorgeous and the puzzles are decently engaging although not replayable enough that I'd want to start over. The upgrade system of being based on 'chip' loadouts is novel even though it's hard not to justify running as much defense and stamina in the loadout as possible. The time mechanic itself is well established and I like it a lot, but the game is overall too difficult to actually sit through. It's not that I'm uncomfortable with failure, its that failure feels more like having to clear a giant roadblock rather than being gummed up for a few minutes. But it has to be emphasized here that this is probably some of the best character designs I've seen in a game like this. The sapphic energy of having a pony tailed muscle girl like Ariel and a pink haired pixie cut frown like Vana, with their distinct body types feels great. It's an awareness of the diversity of body types and hair styles that trans-women seem especially good at picking up on. Not to mention that the fact most of the cast is women and the character you play as is a woman just warms up my gay heart, but it's just not enough to pull it all quite together.

I would probably have felt a lot better about it had I played on easy mode from the start. I've set the mode now to explorer mode allowing me to actually fail with much more ease against the bosses, and also switched the combat to an easier difficulty too, but that doesn't avoid the fact that the simplicity in the choices and slow emergence of combat information in the early game didn't assist me well in knowing what I should have preferred. Not to mention that the disctinction between setting the game midgame to an easier mode and starting over does still have those mild knock on effects to immersion. In my subconcious I'll still know that the enemies are easier and the game is slower for a 'magic' reason that has no actual narrative justification. This game should have been trying to convince a player like me at all costs that playing on the easy mode is best suited, but instead dropped me into a pool that I wasn't ready to swim in. It's important to mention here that this has nothing to do with how familiar you are with videogames, as much as these games often try to make it out. This is why I feel like difficulty and its framing should be critiqued more, it's a generic issue for this game to have but one that does disrupt and trouble a player like me to the point of not wanting to play anymore considering the actual intensity of its theming by comparison. I refuse to believe that just due to my slowness in response time and quickness to actual stress that I 'shouldnt' talk about games or play them.

If only for any other reason, I realized today that when it comes to action games I really do start out as a 'casual' player. I think I've finally done my due diligence in recognizing that fact and that will probably reflect more clearly in future write ups. Along with that I'll be sure to make what difficulty I played on more clear in the future to where it matters.

It's possible I'm just wrong in this case particularly, that I need to grow a spine and watch some NPCs die. But I feel like if I'm going to have games based around fail mechanics leading to divergent outcomes, I would rather not be fitted with the 'chosen one' narrative of saving a town on top. It's the exact same reason why I've found Fallout 1 almost impossible to play. This is why my next game I plan to try and play and complete is Lucah: Born of a Dream, a game I played a little of before putting it down due to being distracted by something else. I'll be sure to do a write up on it as well fairly soon.

What a lot of people either fail to realise or refuse to believe is that the best Sonic games are the flawed ones. The games that try to innovate with bold ideas unbecoming of a Sonic game, or any game. We've had 'perfect' Sonic games before like Sonic Mania or Sonic Generations and those games are great but they can't hold a candle to the way-too-serious tone of Sonic Adventure 2, the quaint but pointless Adventure Fields of Sonic Adventure, the audacity to make half the game a slow beat-em-up in Sonic Unleashed. People love Sonic for its ambition, not its accomplishments. People love games for their imperfections the same way they love people despite their flaws. Sonic Team has, for decades now, dared to do things that are new, bold, and weird. Sonic Frontiers is a continuation of that vision, and to reduce it to petty statements of "open world 🤓 sega hire this man 🤓 serious plot in cartoon rat game 🤓 the controls 🤓 but he's slow" is a pitch-perfect demonstration of how Sonic is doomed to fail. Look at your favourite games and try earnestly telling yourself they're flawless.

Credit to smaench for planting this seed in my brain, actual review when I'm done playing it and can let my thoughts digest rather than spewing unfiltered drivel onto your webzone.

Usually when people talk about the Nintendo company being out of touch they are usually referring to the fact they keep shutting down mod creations and stopping smash melee online. While I think this is a fair complaint, I think people often hold a large degree of amnesia or ignorance when they reapply that to their game design and reiteration of popular IPs.

For example the reason they appear out of touch for the most part is actually because they want to make money. Making money may be funtionally out of touch but it's only because those interests don't rely in making the most stellar experience anyway. Puppeteering and using an IP character as abundantly as the mario characters is something that would only ever be accepted in gaming spaces where nostalgia is not just seen as acceptable but actually necessary to the identity of gaming. There's far less skepticism here than say, Avatar 2, on a larger level. The idea that one person can play metroid dread when another older man walks into the room smiles and boisters 'I remember when I played Metroid as a kid' is a fundamental fantasy to gaming's apocrypha. However it doesn't take much to recognize that usually when this same IP overdose is done in other media like Films and Anime its not always so warmly recieved or usually lasts as long. For example in anime you have similar reference points like Lupin or Astroboy, but the Astroboy anime only had 1 newer series after its long TV run and, while Lupin is gigantic, nothing about Lupin is particularly obsessed with coasting on its own tropes and aesthetic. There's lighter titles about ghibli made castle exploration like "The Castle of Cagliostro". And then more recently the darker and more sensual "The Woman Called Fujiko Mine" which is a stylized smokey tone. Then you've got "Goemon's Blood Spray" which is an openly bloody and nasty samurai film. Meanwhile mario has a bit of whismy going on on the side with the paper mario series where there's a bit more engagement with mario as a story and the relatively melancholic Mario Galaxy, but really by all other purposes mario doesn't really change its aesthetic, design choices, or tone much from game to game. Hell the closest we have to something actually haunting and dark is the Mad Father parody game (Mario) the Music Box which as you can probably guess, is a fan game. The reason for this is not actually that complex, the distribution of what is allowed with the IP is held much tighter. Lupin gets a much more involved treatment because they allow Lupin's world to fulfill any niche by giving it to any writer and director that has an interesting idea what to do with it, similar to say how the Batman comic work. You let the IP be wielded by anybody with an idea. Nintendo likes to keep a much more closed door approach, much to the series detriment. This is most clearly seen by the fact that the casting for the new mario movie is as 'safe' as possible. This is because Nintendo is both uninterested as a company in extending that hand, but also is probably the result of having less overall control of the market as they would like to pull off that more hands off treatment especially since game production can actually go wrong via excess glitches etc., while the worst that can happen with comic book production is that the end result just looks kinda ugly.

The best example of them coasting on their nostalgia to me is the New Super Mario Bros. series, which through contrast with this game you see exactly why. All the New Super Mario Bros. games look and play the exact same. Have the same meaningless outdated 'score' and 'timers' that call back to the very first games in the series, and the only marked improvement besides graphics over Super Mario World, and Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3 is that you can play with several people at once, which due to the fixed camera on 1 player just doesn't work as anything other than an extended novelty joke.

The New Super Mario Bros. series performs this blandness most through its slightly more 'jumpy' soundtrack, where on certain beats all the enemies on screen will do a small dance animation at the screen. But for me at least this slightly more jazzed version of the songs just leaves me feeling hollow. Part of the function of nostalgia is that criticizing these decisions as bland and pathetic at all borders on immature, because the games are 'made for kids' and supposed to just be light and fun. However the frustrating design of a lot of the levels in New Super Mario Bros Wii makes me think that is a weak reposte, since unlike those earlier games which are mostly able to be progressed by younger people, this game has a remarkably higher level of difficulty with large lava pits, a lot of run and jump sections, and vertical scroll sections with a bunch of obstacles involved. New Super Mario Bros. is just a gaudy coat of paint where its not entirely a remake of a game, but exists in this limbo state of a reiterative experience to that 2D Mario nostalgia because look, you can still find canons that warp you out of the world, isn't that cool?

This is what I like about Super Mario Flashback, a fangame made with respect to all the bright and light 2D mario games and trying to cultivate on their various strengths while entering in something new. For example the wall jumps from "New" are here but the triple jumps from it, and those spin jumps are removed. Both decisions lead to cleaner platforming as those movement options were usually way too circumstantial to use properly anyway. SMF also makes some other compelling design arguments: What if instead of a timer and lives, we just replace it with an attack score feature that processes how many coins you picked up and how quickly you defeated the the level? Moving the gameplay closer to something like the frantic and optional improvement metrics of Bayonetta or Sonic Adventure. This reprocessing of coins and the elimination of the lives system actually just makes Nintendo who still insists on these outdated features look relatively embarrassing and out of touch in a design sense. Nobody has thought positively about a life system since the early 2000s, seeing it usually as an irritation to play that forces you to repeat sections you already know. We all pretty fundamentally know this, and yet despite Nintendo segmenting levels with checkpoints they still haven't found the courage to move beyond life systems. After all it would reinforce how absolutely meaningless picking up coins actually is. Since the detriment to losing all your lives has never been even remotely harsh enough to encourage that exploration.

Super Mario Flashback adding this score attack feature that grades you at the end for how well you did, thereby justifying the score and coins would have been enough, but matter of factly Flashback has one other trick up its sleeve to distinguish itself: An absolutely baller soundtrack. The reinterpretation of the Overworld song slots itself nicely into as a synthed out groovy remix of the original, using new chord progressions as specific moments to make it seem like an improv jazzfunk reinterpretation rather than simply a faithful remix. The result is something that sounds more like Persona music than strictly Mario music which works much better for its purposes. This is the first time my ears perked up when hearing a Mario song in years because, I'm sorry Odyssey's orchestral mess did nothing for me.

Much like New Super Mario Bros., Mario is quiet here besides letting out a small yelp when he gets hit. Mario has always been significantly more quiet in the 2D games, for the legitimate game design reason that in 3D those hoops and hollers serve a purpose of orienting and being aware of your jumps and decisions more clearly by using a mix of aural echolocation in that space and by distinguishing those aural noises from the surrounding sound effects nessecary for giving your player character even better of a hint whats going on. 2D Space doesn't need this and has never needed this. So in New, the biggest issue was that there was still constantly other noises, coins, lava, a loud soundtrack etc. it was hard to hear your character make the sounds nessecary for 2D control coordination. SMF makes sure to turn those taps and pats way up, which is satisfying as hell.

This shows that nostalgia is ok if its reinterpreted in ways that transform beyond the limitations of the original design expectations into something that merges older tropes with new experiments in form. Also the fact that Mario Flashback does away with the lives system means that it makes it more widely playable to more people by design, but it does lie slightly on the more involved side of player performance, for example having to time and weight a pulley platform, or jump on several flying Koopa's in succession along with its slightly longer level length.

The only reason its not full marks is not because I fundamentally hate mario game (though I don't like Mario as a main character, I can save that grievance for another time), but instead due to two factors: There's no 'boss' or castle to finish the experience off, which is a shame. Also, there's some choice sections in the secret level that due to the mechanics of portal use just read as frustrating. One bit which has no other obstacles is just a 'memorize the order' section that didn't need to exist, and 'guess' based jumping sections with falling goombas. This isn't a deal breaker or anything, but it reeks of Mario Maker style design choices that bring down an otherwise stellar fan game.

One other sidenote on movement is that Mario gets a 'boost run' after a bit, but I'm not really a fan of that mostly because there's really no way for me to know when the boost is going to hit besides getting really used to the timing, some sort of visual indicator for when he goes blastoff mode would have been nice. I imagine if the game was a lot longer I would just get used to it in the same way you learn drift boost timing in a Kart game, but that's my note on that.

Overall this game confirmed a suspicion I was holding on for a while, which is that Mario fangames and overhaul mods are doing far and away more interesting and inviting things with the Mario IP than Nintendo, and in just the way that SMF enhanced that for me to give these fanworks more attention, it also made me fully come to recognize just how flavorless the last 10 years of Nintendo from a game design perspective really have been.

CW:Text Vomit, Excessive Gamer Tangents, Very Mild gameplay spoilers

Est. Reading length: Inchoately N/A
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I should note I got a free copy of the game from the developer because we are cautious friends. Not only for the sake of 'journalistic integrity' but also to point out that there's never been a situation where I played a game a developer gave me for free who I know personally and then I didn't like the game which is to say, I don't have a litmus test for how easy or hard I am to pay off. Who can say if I would have spoken about this game if I didn't like it? That being said the primary reason it is this way is out of poverty and not because I don't think the game is worth the money or anything like that. I definitely think with the amount of time it'll take to figure it out its totally worth it and one of the best games of the year so far.

Anyway, in respect to what everyone else has already offered on the game, I'll skip all the theming and presentation talk and just talk about the game mechanics proper. To me I feel like there's one hanging rhetorical question looming over the game design here which is the fact that it's a score attack game with a narrative. That question is something as follows: How do you make an 'endless score' game good in respect to player proficiency?

Let's take Pacman for example, Pacman is a deeply discussed point of consideration for how to design 'infinite score' games for many reasons. Heather and Matthewmatosis both have poured a lot of their own thoughts into it through DX by considering stuff like randomization, player proficiency, increasing difficulty, etc.

This is all in a good spirit, but the reality is this: You're most proficient player of pacman already knows the exact accurate array of moves, know exactly in what ways to manipulate the AI, and generally never feel like they are 'behind'. On top of this, Pacman miraculously ended up having an accidental end game that only absolute hardcore 'geek' players would have found. I can't say I've 'completed' arcade Pacman, probably almost nobody on this website can, but an ending does exist and thus the beauty of it being an 'endless' score game has dissipated. The difficulty of getting a 'higher' score for dedicated players is gone. A dynamic game has become flatlined with spreadsheets and planning over the years. This is the ideal case to. Compare this pure arcade game with something like Donkey Kong or Galaga to see followup problems. It's fairly clear from the outset what the methodology was for getting a higher score and so thus the motivation of play splits into 2 camps: Players who want to satisfy the urge to execute, and players that simply don't care. For the former it just ends up being an endurance test anyway and not much else. How good is your bladder to hold out to get a high score in a game you can't pause because that's the only thing stopping a highly proficient player to top the leaderboard in most games.

This problem with score becomes intensified immediately with home console gaming in a few different ways. For one, unlike arcade cabinets very few people are centralized and enthusiastic strangers to give enough of a shit about your new high score in Ninja Gaiden on the NES, like ok son thats great have you filed your W-2s yet? You might invite your friend over, but why would they care if they never played it before? The followup problem is that score became an afterthought in itself to 'narrative' design as well. As petty it may seem to bring it up, getting an infinite score in Kirby Adventure is insanely easy, it becomes a simple endurance test of walking to an enemy 10 feet forward, beating it up, walking backwards to cause it to spawn again and doing it ad infinitum until you're either bored or the score is maxxed. Far be that from the only game with that problem, almost every Megaman game has it too. Nobody considered it because it didn't matter, you would only put in the quarter for an arcade game under the motivation to either get further to see more of it or to get the high score. Now that the latter motivation is made defunct, the primary motivators become narrative or experiential. The artificial motivator to do it all better only exists in the minds of the player, to such an extent that it becomes brilliantly exaggerated to stuff like speedruns and no hit challenges, things that for the most part are best left up to the players to derive and find. But what about score as a motivator? What about game proficiency in itself? Without a well thought out score modifier it becomes a rather hollow and insulting piece of player motivation. One that we don't ever feel because it's lost. Our desire to care in a world that constantly churns from one game to the next makes it hard to find the appeal in it again, besides I don't need to be proficient if I can just watch what somebody else's efficiency at the game looks like. I don't need to play a soul level 1 run of dark souls I have too many games to play as it is and I can just watch Lobos Jr. do it and about 100 other things in the game more entertainingly and communally than than I did. Unfortunately, you fucked up too many times score, you have to be the least considered factor now (imprisoned). This is exactly the sort of issues that create games like Neon White, a game where score (time speed) is universally agreed to be its best asset is still its least capitalized on in comparison to its obsession with dating game narratives design and needless lore explanations, and then when you try to consider it in comparison to something like Lovely Planet (which often gets brought up in relate) the issue for that game though is the leaderboards are not global, theres time as a score in that game but its mostly for you and doesn't really 'do' much to motivate play that completing levels doesn't already provide. On a wider level I feel personally like the problem with this is that then both the designer and the player are completely out of touch with one another. Like, far be it from me to proselytize, but even though I like most games the only time I tend to feel like me and the score design are in harmony is when I'm playing absolutely silly shit like a golf game like Kirby's Dream Course or something lmao. So like, its only a score through and inverse minimization of score or time, rather than an accumulation of either in the other direction. Even when the motivator of score exists, it's only in its own minimization!

Enter then a game like, Quantum Bummer Blues, which exists within that score abandonment crisis and tries to intervene in some critical ways. The primary one is through health. Score is quite literally vital to beating the game in a way few games actually are, you have to get a threshold of score to refill your characters blood and life, if you don't give attention to it, you're not going to get very far at all. You have to care about getting a score in order to continue the narrative of the game. You can't just 'beat the game on 1 life' by evading everything it's not quite like that.

Following this, there's a deceptively high skill ceiling in the game if you work for it, it's just interesting because that skill ceiling is found mechanically through a very methodical patience with the game. You will fail and fail again, learn a sliver of gameplay information, and then repeat those sections again, different this time, with feeling. I don't want to give it all away but learning tricks for better play help you get just that little bit further. My main advice is read the how to very carefully and then after a few runs, read it again.

Next is the character feel. Early on you're going to be wrestling with the controls because the designer intentionally made the blood flow interstitial sections annoying to navigate. It's not just moving between straight lined pipes, you have to often trudge and crevice around these pixeled steps in the way. Which work to block and slow you down, the whole game is telling you straight from the get go 'slow the fuck down' and this design is reinforced by the fact you can at any time step into the pipes again to freeze the scene safely and just think about the plan of attack. In this process you'll realize that it's only those blue antagonist vertical shots that demand any sense of urgency and that going too fast and losing all your blood is what's going to kill you. Similarly the gravity feels like sludge. You fall incredibly fast and then have to push slowly upward, its like trying to control an sentient oil mine that threatens to end your run if you don't think things through.

Finally is how random it is, the green pellets and your specific situation going into each of the rooms can be accounted for in advance. Those green pellets start in the same place but start bouncing off in random directions very quickly. Meaning trying to section off 3 of them is going to be sporadic and random.

That's why it feels great when you finally piece all the mechanics together and pull off a successful run. You're fighting against the discomfort of your player character to essentially 'farm' points. But the more points you farm the higher your IV bag gets, and thus the faster the turrets spawn. You can very easily reach a situation where you're actually suffering from success and have to leave an area early. Creating these odd situations where getting rid of blood by painting half the screen as fast as and then hiding inside the red is the best move. This isn't even a mechanical spoiler because it's such a bizarre experience you won't even really be able to conceptualize how unintuitive it is until you actually see it in action. It's just a weird moment of balancing the various moving parts. It's the constant trade off of risk and reward and how awkward it all works is to great effect as a narrative device. It often switches between being slow and requiring a reasonable amount of risky movement and shooting. The pressure between moments of downtime to moments of blood bag balancing is incredible and shows that Heather has learned a lot from her thoughts on game design since she experimented with these same score based issues in her previous non narrative endless score game Endless Overdrive. The better you are doing in that game the most hostile it gets. My favorite side effect of this is that you can literally just enter and leave some rooms you don't like very quickly with no interactions at high levels of play with a full IV.

Yet ironically, hidden in this chaotic story about carceral torture is a genuine game where getting a higher score and playing it again not just feels fun but actually cathartic. The gameplay is spontaneous, methodical and has a lot of room for error but feeling satisfaction does not in itself come from getting to 1 million on the score counter. It comes from the wild proficiency and proof of ability to get there. The ability to know how to balance each of the moving parts.

One thing I had trouble bringing up and often do, is how score and game feel actually pervade and change the experience of a work because trying to do so in write ups like this borders on geometrical. As a result I often neglect to try, but that process of neglect is because of a historical and material neglect of the same. I don't have the tools for those kinds of explanations because I haven't had the access or time to hit up those books, but it creates an insecurity there. I can explain the textual ableism or depression of a visual novel just fine but descriptions of game design in itself are far more mysterious and ambiguous. In that sense the games 'ambiguity' around its design demands a special attention to it that you don't see much elsewhere.

The score itself doesn't really matter so much as hearing the squishy noises of a job well done and there's one important reason for that: The score doesn't show on the game over screen and no high score is actually accounted for outside of play. The only way you can commemorate the moment is by taking a screenshot or recording the game. The game makes the historical abandonment of score a genuine piece of its text. Sure whatever the game is about prison violence and the abuse of the young, its about queerphobia and all this stuff. Awesome, me and Heather get along for a reason there. But more importantly to me it's a manifesto about the narrative importance of those little points and what they can and should bring to gamefeel and for me, that's a much appreciated intervention I wasn't really considering. It's made this little few hour long gem almost certainly one of the best games of the year.

This is going to sound extremely panegyric to my friend but this is absolutely brilliant shit, I wouldn't expect anything less from an erudite woman who went to college for game design but it still highlights her far above just a friend or somebody we are all shaking the hand of out of some kind of academic respect. She genuinely is in a league of her own, bringing a much needed catharsis to game design, and for that I can only give a curtsey and a textvomit along with.

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It's not without merit, I'm all for geek games and if you're interested in geometry its worth a shot, but only if you have a video walk through handy. But it's incredibly frustrating and not really worth the effort as an edutainment game, as it suffers from some fairly ease of access related issues. I will now try to 'prove' why.

Well, it's literally just a geometry tool, I got tricked into 'playing' geometry the puzzle game. Finding angle degrees, making parallel lines, making squared inside squares, etc. Expect the issue is I was constantly running into issues where I quite literally did not know the theory behind the questions being asked of me, and there's no hint button in the game besides 'explore' mode. Since all the answers have to be incredibly precise this 'explore' mode of seeing the otherwise obvious answer is quite useless. Another problem is you can't 'label' anything in the game. In geometry usually a side of a triangle will be labeled, after all this sort of abstraction is how we got proofs like A + B = C. Without the ability to mark anything in game you have to 'instill your own markers onto the game, which is ok for early puzzles but gets quickly overwhelming when the game wants you to make, say, a hexagon and you have a couple dozen indistinguishable circles and lines on the screen. This is probably in the justice of making the game artificially harder, which in theory puzzle experts would enjoy, what it really does though is people are using outside tools to solve puzzles, rendering it as an educational tool fruitless. Even when I was using a visual tutorial, I had problems following along, because it would use the abstraction as proof.

The other thing is you can't skip levels on the web version, so you just get to sit there feeling stumped until you look up the solution and find out how alien it is.

But the issue goes 1 piece forward more than that even. Because unless your geometry textbook introduces these theories in a conducive order, you're going to hit a wall where you 'cant come back'. Puzzle experts explain it as bad on ramping, and this game certainly suffers from it in the browser version, because there is no clean introduction to how the systems really work or what they do, more particularly that you have to input the intersections and vertices points yourself.

There's an even bigger problem: you cant play future levels unless you solved the current one your on. Which means you're always trapped in a dungeon of what feels like stupidity but is more often than not just a theoretical limit of average geometric in understanding. You will be solving the angles of a triangle, and then out of nowhere the concept of finding the 'cosign' of a line length the next.

And the worst part of it all is it doesn't keep you're puzzle solved so you can go back and look at it, if you missed it, oh well! You better solve it again, its good practice right? Except I'm trying to have fun here, not stress myself out slipping backwards. It really is quite tragic because the issues are genuinely quite easy to ameliorate: let people skip levels (or at least a certain number, like 4 or 5), and let people label things.

Honestly, from the perspective of integration tools this almost comes as a strong recommendation for what NOT to do as puzzle game design. The difficulty would constantly throttle, 4 levels that are generally easy followed by one I wouldn't have known without reading a textbook, this issue existed throughout the entire game, and not just later on as you might expect. I was stumped figuring out a bunch in the alpha stages!

It's ironic because these same issues of not being able to functionally label or simplify mechanisms is a haunting that follows a lot of puzzle games, including for example a lot of Zachtronics game, for example its what made me drop stuff that is inifinitely lauded in hardcore puzzle communities like spacechem and factorio. The reality is, I have trouble keeping track of things, which is why I can only try to play these pure puzzlers narrating my contemplation out to others. Intriguingly, this is why point and click games tend to thrive for me, no worries if you're having troubles with this problem, there's usually plenty to look at and figure out in the meantime, and the puzzle may just be BS anyway and so not worth kicking yourself mentally. Meanwhile, this is fucking geometry, even if the answer is extremely alien, you might get a nudging feeling that its on you for not getting it, which is exacerbated really hard by that lack of skip function.

Perhaps that's what's standing between me and good puzzle games, a label system. Honestly, the ability to skip around in a relaxing moodsetting games like Golf Peaks or Spring Falls highlight those a lot more in my mind even if they are more casual. The amount of levels you can skip for a long time and the 'self labeling' of objects is also probably what makes games like Baba is You exemplary in the genre.

Regardless, there's still a solid 4+ hours to be had with this if you're down for something a bit different, more if you break out the scratch paper or took a class before. It's a fascinating experiment in the sense that you really do feel on the edge of actually learning something more tangible, and it did make me realize that mathematics at large is basically an endless puzzle game for the mad. Also, a lot of the quotes at the end of each level have a lot of contextual flavor, its surprising how durable mathematical quotes are, my favorite one was from pascal:

"Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth."

Logicians might hate it, and it may not have aged well considering how his wager got overturned, but I think there's still a scientific beauty in it both on the matter of the virtues of individuals you meet (who are often filled with contradictions in their preferences and taste, etc.) and the world which has contradictions imbedded from what we don't yet know about its operations. The fact it was able to uplift quotes like this to the forefront means it didn't completely fail on imparting neat gems of knowledge into the core of my functions.

Honestly, I got really far with relatively minimal use in comparison to what I expected, I was constantly belaboring my stupidity and she was like 'babe, this is ADVANCED GEOMETRY and you didn't even know signs and cosigns, what youre doing is far above what most people would even try to do', which is honestly probably true. To a degree it's funny because I got the special treatment of knowing that in this game I'm not actually an idiot*, its all relative and it soothed my negative self talk. But if you don't have people around informing you this you might feel more than a bit insecure, especially if you never actually took geometry like me so fair warning there. You and I imagine most people are a lot more smart on geometry than they might think since unless you have spatial issues its usually considered the most intuitive of all the maths (Ever cut through grass on a triangle shaped walkpath to get somewhere faster? That's geometry.)

That's pretty much all I have to say on this one. It's not often I leave a game abandoned because I'm under the impression I always might come back. So why not mark it as shelved. See, the reality is I would be cheating on all the answers at this point anyway since I've hit end game and its all trigonometry now, so I don't think it would 'count' as finished with this much content remaining anyway. I wouldn't feel fulfilled doing it and I dont even know how much a fundemental education would matter without the ability to label things anyway. I read this fascinating blogpost where a guy who cares a lot about common core and sees this as a great stepping tool for teaching the increasingly abandoned field of geometry, however, "I was not always able to find optimal solutions." which is fine but he hit the wall early on in stage 1.7 and then said "And yet, I was not able to crack Euclidea 10.6. I did it in GeoGebra" (an external open source free geometry program). Then he mentioned that one of the devs tipped him off with a big hint later. I'm sorry but if you are having to give hints to even the smartest players on external websites one on one, even after they are trying with external softwares, then you have not done a great job in making an accessible and easy to use modeling software for geometry. As a teaching tool or as a game.

Side note one the phone version then, trying to make precision connections on a phone is horrible since your finger is in the way, don't bother! I recommended it to my family since they help teach test taking skills and, as such, long for impossibly difficult puzzlers. But they couldn't even get past the UI and the later levels I'm stuck on would be painful on the tiny phone screen anyways. So if you do try it, play the web version.
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*This is foreshadowing for the next write up. Stay tuned. 👁️

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In No One Can Ever know, you play as a depressed dysphoric, and overweight, closeted transgirl in 11th grade, and you go through the journey of a crucially important day in her otherwise normal life. In the process learning her dysfunctional family dynamics and becoming attuned with the various struggles and fears she has to deal with. It's a simplified 'dungeneering' survival game, which lets the text do most of the talking, the aesthetic is similar to old 1st person rudimentary DOS era adventure games, like Rogue. It's simple, and mainly uses text to express the imagery you would expect to see on screen. It's one of the best games I've played in a long time, but let's readjust the discussion to elephants in the room before I continue beating this ivory drum.

The main myth I want to dispel out the gate is the idea that trans people actually need to expose their own suffering/dysphoria/etc. to the world in order for their art and existence to be validated. I know on the surface everyone with any real sensibility 'agrees' with this initial premise, considering this is an incredibly LGBT friendly website with many of the top voices being quite open about their gender or sexuality (ex. Woodaba is the #1 most popular reviewer on here and they are trans). But we would be fools to think this matter 'goes without saying, in that in the rise of ghauling anti trans rhetoric and legislation, one of the primary ways in which people have bothered to interact with them is as traumatized victims, possibly even . Yet this is by design an exploitative and brutal way to gain sympathy with a minority group, anybody who is familiar with the term 'trauma porn' probably also knows that this sort of wound bearing can. When you have people running around using the most tragic young adult memoirs and the fear of young trans people, you run the risk of using them as trauma advertisements for rights not that much different from pushing famished african children on TV for a food drive where only like 30% go to feeding and the rest to 'raising awareness' (anybody remember KONY2012)? Therefore its better to treat the art as made by an artist rather than from an infantilized pat on the head of simple commandeering of emotional validity (which honestly just goes without saying anyway on matters like this). This is one of the reasons I stan Bagenzo's work as mentioned in my other review on the subject, her reflections are much softer and told through indie game nostalgia. In general I find it hard not to see trauma porn art is not that different from tourture porn, in fact all you have to do is look at something like the Saw series and see maybe they aren't so distinct.

So allow me to then say that even though the game itself is about the experience of being not out but trans in high school, it doesn't fall to the concerns of self exploitation I signposted before. The theme of the day here that carries why here, is paranoia.
In the Cave Story Review I said the following:

'The narrator is a snippet on childhood forgiveness and, I think, not losing your memories of joy to the pain flooding and surrounding them.'

If Cave Story Sex RPG is a short poem on self forgiveness, No One Can Ever Know is an arduous painful reflection on dysphoria as paranoia, on trying to forgive the present. They both share a genre of the 'memoir game' . Every line seeps with an internal dread that everyone would hate you and is out to get you, but there's a universal element to this point, most of peoples experiences with public high school was pretending to be something you arent and being paranoid that everyone will find out. Constant vies for status and personhood, but the worries that you don't really have friends or that if you changed a little nobody would care are consistent, because think about it, the purpose of schools are to assign roles to people. Not just in terms of intellectual capacity but socially and interpersonally. Of course youre not allowed in the girl's bathroom its not your social role, just as its not the social role of a cisgender woman to be a football player. This feeling of general paranoia is so strong due to the double life most people run on the internet now that it even further intensifies it as ubiquity to the point it became a major theme in the award winning film Eighth Grade).

The only difference between the LGBT form of role based paranoia and others is that trans people have incredibly justifiable reasons to feel persecuted and dehumanized for the potentialities. One line that really stuck with me was when reflecting on the few people she was out to that 'You told everyone you came out to to still refer to you with he/him pronouns'. The idea of pronouns as a form a function of self repression is a conversation people want to tread lightly usually, but I can't help but think for example of tory member Jamie Wallis coming out as trans, but then tweeting about how he's still figuring this stuff out and to remain using He/Him [for now] (https://twitter.com/JamieWallisMP/status/1509122636810440709 ). This is fine and all but it doesn't take a tinfoil hat to think 'hm, the reason he probably is using those pronouns is because his voter base would be even more uncomfortable with voting for a minister they might misgender, on top of that Boris Johnson who supported him would probably also feel more 'embarrassed' if he had to worry about actually misgendering Jamie. But note this is a voter base and a party who would for the most part want to lock out immigration from the UK and pursue tax cuts for the rich. Like Boris was actually straight up caught saying he doesn't care if the bodies start piling up from covid, at the same time attempting to embezzle public funds these are not people you should even be trying to appeal to in the first place. While this is true, I apologize for this wording here, but this doesn't mean that we should try and misgender Jamie with she/her pronouns in some attempt to territorialize Jamie's sense of gender for himself and/or ask him to take 'gender accountability for himself'. Ask him about the contradictory gender policies his cabinet pushes and hold him and the rest of his party accountable for the policies they enact. There's no reason to actually get bogged down in the Idpol in this particular way but my point is even if its not Jamie himself, we can very easily imagine the repressive element pronouns can play even for the person choosing them.

I would know because I do this, on here I insist on she/her pronouns (and 3rd person occasional they/them) but at the University I'm so deeply separated from my gendered flesh and mixed perceptions I just ask for they/them. That way I can still retain a small trans identity while ultimately not revealing a pandora's box of truth in how I actually want to be seen that due to my incapacities to perform the gender I feel I'd never be able to get back. People would be calling me she/her pronouns while I have scrappy facial hair that day, and in that moment I would feel far worse.

At least..thats the theory. The game allows a more honest conversation that can begin to be processed, do I use these pronouns because they make me slightly more comfortable or is it to avoid the ire and shame from everyone else? Am I playing a substantial role in my own repression because I think I haven't 'earned' my gender or is it more complicated a paranoia than that? Personally at least it feels like people always have to fucking grovel after they misgender you, theres something a little funny about it if it wasn't so irritating and alienating about it, because it feels like really what they are doing is apologizing for the social wall they just kind of put up. I don't have any friends at this university, I don't have many meatspace friends in general aside from 1 family in the suburbs I'm not out to, and 1 childhood friend after a few years of fallout I still haven't met in person. See, paranoia is a complex emotional animal. Hopefully this reflects even just an incredibly small moment of how impactful that theme has been.

By the way, that's not even the most brutal antagonism and distrust I have with social order, I'll leave that for another review in the future, you know, stay tuned for more in the life of my glowing torments.

Also yes, I'm transgender to, anybody who read my biography. Or if your particularly attentive to strange authority im speaking with on this subject matter, you probably picked up on it, it's not really a huge reveal because my most popular review is the Cave Story Sex RPG on also being trans and I don't exactly have the audience to be 'leading people on' that I'm somebody or not, you kind of need a large following for it to be a reveal in the first place. However, I didn't outright state 'Im a transgirl so I can say this' in the opening line. And, as of the time of writing this, I dont have the trans flag emoji next to my name, I dont have my comments for any of my insights turned on, I don't have a cute/cool girl as my profile picture but a writhing mass of lovecraftian squidflesh.

Originally I was going to be antagonistic towards the reader at the point, asking them 'why do you think I'm like this'. But that's not on you, its not on you to quietly motivate me away from my own vulnerabilities when you dont even know me and for me to make you do that would be hideously parasocial and self loathing to ask that of you. Instead I'll explain why to the best of my ability, I do it because by not making my identity a clear subject, I'm not asking the reader to understand what I'm saying through the journey of my origins. They can agree or disagree with me without feeling like in the process the reason why is something core to do with my identity. This subject is so hefty and complicated it threatens to collapse in on me, but I'm not going to sit here and bullshit to you some amount of repression or extremely questionable set of motives doesn't play into this. Repression is not something you simply 'overcome' you know, its a set of interlocking things you do to try and contain and share your thoughts without feeling like a burden. In a less fundamentally unhealthy world we wouldn't do that, and I certainly think there's quite a lot of people on her that actually are better at not having self repression issues. Overtime as I get more comfortable with this place I might try and express those other parts of myself and not hide them, for now though a distancing effect has provided some stability for speaking as boldly as I do. My point of mentioning this is that there's a very unconscious aspect to the desire to conceal certain things, the trick is in figuring out personally how justified or not they are.

Not just addresses and government names, but the divulging of total perspectives and familiarities with the audience. Do I tell you my politics, my eating habits, what experiential details threaten to get in the way? I had my twitter up on here linked for a bit but then took it down because I realized people knowing who I am there might threaten the pathos of my arguments here. Paranoia is not always justified or mentally stable, but hopefully you can see what I mean when I say sometimes it is.

One other way paranoia is reflected is the brutal difficulty of the mechanics. See, in the game you constantly have to deal with the dysphoria status effect through the use of music from your phone to block the bad thoughts out, having a voice speak that isn't your own helps to disembody you from the prison of your racing mind. But the game seems incredibly intent on making you work for the experience. At the very beginning of the game, if you examine your own bed your character will literally decide to sleep for 10 minutes. The 2nd level alone is you having to wander around in school, but you have to wait for the classes to start. You don't know which rooms the classes are because you have to walk into a door to find out what the room is, you have to last 4 different class periods in a row with the dysphoria attacks happening randomly and no reliable way to 'savescum' since it takes 10% of your battery life to even save the game. It's not so much survival horror so much as survival tedium. Seriously, this games difficulty is way higher than it lets on, even though the mechanics are simple there's a deceptive amount of focus needed to get through the labyrinthine 2nd level. The game actively stands in the way of your progression through it, is the text itself not paranoid of you? I couldn't help thinking for example how an easy and simple way to make the 2nd level easier would be by having the names of the rooms you go towards marked on the minimap, instead you just have to wander the halls a lot and get your bearings, fumbling with doors to figuring out whats inside. The game even lampshades this at some point when you try and open the photography room the narrator goes something along the lines of 'This is the photography room, or is it? You don't even know anymore.'

Of course it doesn't take a scientist to see how this sort of difficulty functions as a narrative enhancement, yall are smart and are familiar with games like Pathologic, you get this part. But it's still worth pointing out how minimalism actually becomes a new type of threat to player experience. At the same time despite the game engaging in such openly cruel design traps, it functionally causes the player to feel some kind of 'reward' for making it through the shit, we were able to make it through the next checkpoint so we get another lore dump of experience by the author, more character context. We are becoming an ally in support of her paranoid concerns, regardless of our own identity. And seeing as there's a precise simplicity to everything being said we are allowed to dwell more on the taboo thoughts themselves rather than trying to untangle what the game is saying.

The other reason this game can be identified as non exploitative, is through humor, via the reflection of objects and their placement, despite this game being nothing but halls of walls and doors with text boxes, a lot of focus is given on object representation, early on in the adventure the protagonist mentions how there are 6 placemats on the table despite there being on average only 2 people. Throughout the journey, it seems just as much focus is given to objects as people: guitars, computers, lord of the rings, etc. This care given for object placement fills in each room without you actually needing to visually see it. Which is why its themes on grief work so well, the game primes you for a conversation with loss through these observations as for example you have the family photo or the guitar, objects with clear memory. But also knows objects exist primarily to be fiddled with, your character plays a pinball machine for funny highscores, or playing notes on a random grand piano.

Theres a serious chance of what I'm going to refer to as 'observational runaway effect' happening, when you want to be so comprehensive about a work that touched you personally you scramble to speak about every small nuance or theme you can muster, and as much as I really try not to care about doing that sort of thing, there's two reasons I should probably think twice on doing that:
1. I do actually want people to try the game and read this essay, and the more loquacious I get the less likely people will do either. (Hell I probably already failed, but still..)

2. I think the game again 'speaks for itself' in a lot of ways on the subject matter and trying to reprocess the grief comes off voyeuristic after a certain point. Sure I can start listing off psychological terms or read into the authors voice but its a bit prying.

So instead I'll just focus on 2 other design touches I find substantial to the overall experience. For one, you have the retro font. The font used in this game is from research called MultiType Pixel, an all caps font intended to call back to arcade games of the past. With all the focus given to gaming throughout the piece it makes sense, but this is a story heavy game so this nostalgia actually accentuates the experience as a sort of scar. The text will go on for unbroken paragraphs at a time as giant brutal text crawls, an assault on the eyes and the mind. It takes the process of memory and makes it as exhausting as humanly possible by twisting something intended for arcade glamor, and personally I think it's such a cool thing to do! After a while, you can sort of get used to and be charmed by the font itself and as you can see it's designed in such a way it only really feels overwhelming during the chapter portions.

The other one may cause a bit of quibble but there's the design choice of what music to choose. The game opens up with a quote of a popular Death Grips song 'I break mirrors with my face in the united states'. Theres constant talk of absolutely blasting noise-punk of the highest caliber. Strumming on guitars, making noise with your friends, using ear destroying music to 'tune out' the dysphoria. So to have this be so ingeniously juxtaposed with the ambient pieces from various albums by Patricia Taxxon is a brilliant decision. For one, it allows you on a literal level to just focus on what the game is telling you but also adds an eerie melancholy, you can understand this memory, but this is a facsimile of the experience, the real thing is the rambunctious youthful outbursts almost nobody can handle for too awful long. It's also a smart choice because of the fact Patricia Taxxon is a copywrite abolitionist and just tells people to use her variety of tracks wherever and however, to monetize, remix, whatever. Patricia Taxxon herself is a bit smug about this abolitionism, putting herself in the line of fire of doing unabashed remixes of pop music, writing manifestos against it, and once quite literally putting her name on a song she literally just took from another band to show that even title name changes is all it takes to make something transformative. Again, I refuse to play diplomat, this is fucking awesome and I'm also a copywright abolitionist, down with intellectual property rights. Yadda yadda. But beyond just making logical sense, Patricia also gave a gigantic gift to the world by doing this, every song in this game is from a different album. The girl puts out a shitload of music it enhanced the musical 'creative commons' by an absurd amount, for example this banger by Summoning Salt in a lot of his speedrun videos, you probably heard it before, the girl has a shitload of genre variety in her music. Bless her.

Still, there's a degree where from a practical perspective airing on the side of caution and also having good music to boot takes a degree of self preservation and while I dont expect people to recognize this and add it directly into the interpretation of the text, nor am I doing so. I think it's a charming thing to do. For one it literally is external music you might have heard before reinforcing the musical theme, its from a trans musician, and it operates as a useful 'recycling' of the external world. No need to hire a big band orchestra if you have an MP3 file already that gets the job done and arguably sends a stronger message in the process. These are also really good uses of the music in themselves because the ambience used gives the game an empty atmosphere and allows me to actually focus on the words. I don't know about anybody else but I have a peculiar tick where hearing music and trying to read clash with each other distracting me from what I'm reading especially if the songs have long verbal ballads. So from just a physiological position it allows me to feel more focus and confidence in reading which is absolutely necessary if you're going to use music as a cooling mechanic. If the music was giving me more anxiety then I would feel far too divorced from the experience of the character doing it.

The creator has written her own post on the game here. I've tried not to source that too much in this insight, because making empty appeals to the authorial reasoning is not particularly stellar writing. But even at the time of writing this, this point she made is still unambiguously true:

'Plus I think it's extremely funny to post it here considering I'm the only person who's actually rated the game on this site. It's not called No One Can Ever Know for nothing'.

Until today, when I decided to publish this. You've got Known. But why am I the only one? Despite the game being free, on itchio, and having a fond endorsement by the author even after 2 years of making it read by 2 and a half dozen people, it seems nobody else on the website has admitted openly to playing the game. I don't see literally any reason for that to all remain the case XD

But there is one thing I should warn you about, towards the end of the game the author mentions using computer games as an unhealthy coping mechanism 'Games are great at taking the pain away. But their ability to keep that pain from coming back leaves a lot to be desired.' More then anything else this game seems to exist as a manifesto to the opposite, its an incredibly upsetting and distressing experience. As far as a rush back of pain goes, I've been off hormones for ever since covid originally broke out, this is one of the few times I could think of where I was successfully physiologically brought to tears, a part of my femininity on hormones I miss dearly. I think it's an incredibly effective replication of pain processing, but make sure you're in an emotionally safe enough situation to break open this game, really I think that is the more important point than any sort of set of content warnings. This game is painful and vulnerable in a way you really can't find elsewhere, and on the other hand makes a very clear argument through its own production that we should have more of this sort of experience in games. Only more brilliant is the fact that this game was built with such a minimalism and simplicity that it rebukes the sentiment you 'need to know' how to draw or animate in order to design an emotionally compelling experience. While the main ending of the game is ineffably brutal, this is the silver lining, there is a possibility for expression that doesn't require you to overcome every inadequacy all at once. There's a double meaning there for me because just like in developing works of art developing one's expression of gender is similar. Sometimes you can feel so crushed and burdened down by your incompleteness and inadequacy that it barely even makes sense to try, hell I know I'm dealing with that just in the process of trying to write about games but there's still hope merely just in pushing forward and taking the first step anyway. At the end of the day self forgiveness can't just happen in the past, it has to happen in the present to…

This review is dedicated to not only Heather's' great work and the many excellent insights shes contributed to my growth, but to the many wonderful outspoken and passionate dolls of Backloggd whose insights inspire me everyday:
The warm and compassionate [Whom], (https://www.backloggd.com/u/Whom/)
The horror enthusiast with a voice of gold Venus ThighTrap
The lovely indie landfill surveyor AlexaLily ,
The coolly persuasive Squigglydot
And of course, my stalker gamedev GF BloodMachine who made an account pretty much just to stalk me but gives so much insight behind the scenes on games and life. Also big ups Woodaba, buccaneer nb ready to take on the world, not everything they say spurs me on, but I'm glad they stick to their guns and put pressure on the flames, plus an anodyne 2 enjoyer is just a sign of somebody who knows impeccable taste.

There are probably another half dozen others I'm following. I could celebrate here, but I don't want to out anybody who doesn't wear it as a badge of honor via either their linked twitter or probably don't desire the unwanted attention. Thank you all for inspiring me so much and helping me get through life one day at a time, and thank you for all the great game recommendations in the process.

Policy

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My girlfriend sent me a message before Easter started only saying in bold letters HEX. I didn't know what that meant so knowing she has talked positively on this game in the past I figured I should check this out while shes gone. Miss you!

This game is one where you see the past adventures of various fictionalized characters who have had their IPs warped historically, exploring the different games they were tossed through, using a whodunit style mystery as the main plot conceit. With a motley of small subgames from different genres to play throughout to try and keep an engaging experience. All housed in an dilapidated bar at the end of the earth. Despite its novelty I do not reccomend playing this game unless you are obsessed with the shared universe of Mullin's games, which in my opinion you probably shouldn't be since its as much a marketing gimmick to get you to play them all as much as it is a narrative through point. It's kind of annoying and unfun. If you're really interested you can go watch your favorite youtuber play it or at the very least, have a walk through handy. Now for those interested in a nuanced discussion of the game, read on...

One of the most prominent things that sticks out to me is the culture mashing a generic game and a meta version of it in order to make its point on the thin distinction between meta games and homage (the Legends game being a mix of Final Fantasy & Undertale, or the Shooting game being a mix of Halo/Warhammer/Gears of War & Hotline Miami).

Still, I can't help but think this games strongest moments are nothing in comparison to Travis Strikes again giving cynical homage to Hotline Miami 2 openly in order to make a counterargument to it. In that game, Travis is shown throughout completely addicted to all of these various indie games which you can wear as shirts, all given to the player without commentary besides the origin of the game it came from.

Throughout the game, Suda uses TSA mostly as a vehicle of commentary on some of his older titles, often riffing on them. Only towards the end does it bring Hotline Miami 2 in, it does it with a purpose. Both games hint at an almost unfathomably larger than life apocalypse, one that seems inevitable in the face of life. Why even acknowledge it, why not just cramp up in your shack and ignore it all? By directly using it as intertextuality in the final act, it enhances the whole story about futility and the meaning of fighting in despite it all. It had to use the text of that game as a clear and concise negation point, it also shows Travis sort of waking up from his Walden-esque slumber from a plot position to which makes it doubly effective (interestingly enough, Inscryption here, does obey this open final act negation in its game to).

Compared to that (admittedly niche) example, this game feels a bit trite and hollow. For example, the game will use stuff like streamer spam (which is admittedly the most amusing part of the game and had me laughing a storm in surprise) and shitty mods in order to show how our relationship to games can become warped by the ways we interface with them. This focus on externalities that affect our treatment of a work and their financial trajectory is interesting, but of course the negative feedback needs to seem heart breaking and the mods need to be shitty right? Cheating in the Fallout Tactics clone game needs to be a bit frowned upon.

The problem is all of these micro games felt just awful to play, not just after being warped but right from the beginning to, and whenever they challenged me I just found myself more annoyed than enjoying the experience on any sort of meta level. For example the first game it has you play is a mario clone (which riffs off this little known game Eversion). The base game everyone supposedly likes is ass to play. Why anybody would map their jump to a click is beyond me considering the playerbase and I find it doubtful taken as its own happy go lucky first game people really 'enjoyed' it and that the game was degenerated from steam reviews or that they would express their opinion so simply. In reality I would have probably found this portion both more believable and more amusing had it been on newgrounds, since the flash game community has shorter sentiments as shown there and lower standards. I feel the steam interface was only there instead in order to shock you when your 'friends' leave the negative feedback on the 2nd game, which functions more as gimmick than realistic storytelling. Some of the later sections feel slightly more effective in their cynicism, ie the girl in Legends disliking the game so much she actively seeks its destruction.

While there are certainly amusing moments I can't help but feel a lot of the main messaging of this game (dont sell IPs, dont hoard Gamedevs, dont use money as a power move, don't parade an antagonistic relationship with your fans) kind of comes in conflict with framing those out groups in simplistic ways. The mod community has to be making bad mods that completely undo the actual vision of the Fallout clone. There can't be a fun mod on this abandoned project that increases the games quality it all has to be foolish shit like a texture mod that adds flowers in a wasteland. In reality, the mod community for something like Stardew Valley is so strong they have been able to make expansion packs and stress test it. The mod community of Dark Souls was able to help make the game run on PC when it came out. It kind of makes the point far more murky, regardless of how much you can rationalize it as 'its the main developer who thinks these things' it just feels hollow by conflating targets as way bigger issues than they are. Convenient how the twitch messages grind to a halt so you can actually cheat and bug the game by a person messaging in the chat. The game really only makes clear the artifice of its own gimmicks when it does stuff like this. To be clear here the problem does have a sort of 'both sides' quality to it. Yes corporate capture is going to create buggier messes that don't really capture the charm of the original but using a fattened mole in a wife beater who doesn't care is not only a lazy fat shaming stereotype but also just not what the megacorp would have done. Where you could have had a legitimate point about how not all IP capture is in the main mascot character, and how warping the assets and atmosphere into something still friendly but entirely off, is instead just an easy joke at their expense, there's no punch to any of it!

The game seems to be a fairly concerted meditation on the importance of IP preservation in the face of corporate capture, and how selling out can cause you to become the cycle of hubris in those same corporations you hate. It's certainly interesting as a conversation piece on that and the meaning of meta games as a genre. Whereas I think it only goes to cliches and seems to imply the best IP is the one only held by the original author (something both completely wrong and curiously, effectively overturned in Mullins next game Inscryption what with the technical 'original author' of that one being Hitler and all). The conversation on meta games and their merit as games often being squandered by their own mechanics is actually quite fascinating.

I was able to note the forms of satire and the nods of what meta game was given respect to for almost all of the subgames, Hotline Miami, Eversion, Undertale, ProjectM/Mugen (on the 'making this character overpowered on purpose' stuff). It's interesting because it didn't make the game I was actually playing any better, and now it actually has got me thinking if maybe we are being a little too nice on these other games just because of their 'meta' quality.

It's been mentioned before that metacommentary is probably one of narratively the easiest things a person can do. Compare your text to another text, riff on that text in order to enforce your own. Anybody who sticks around to see it through will by design be an audience in on and amused by the 'injoke'. In that sense not only does meta work as an easy girder for storytelling, but it also works as a filter. We have to assume those people who are not amused by the effect are simply going to leave early. Not much thought is given to them though because they are not 'in' on the joke. They don't get it.

Here's the rub with that sort of dichotomy: While there are obviously people who would leave enjoy due to ignorance with the intertextual jokes at play, it also assumes that the reason somebody would stop playing the game is out of ignorance rather than out of unamusement with the game. Allow me for a moment to try and explain what I mean by this through a comparison point.

Let's use Undertale. Undertale is a game where being in on the 'ingroup' from the outset at least is not at all difficult. If you've played even 1 RPG turnbased game your set. And if your willing to go broad enough, if you played 1 game where you kill monsters at all you're probably fine. As the games purpose is to subvert your expectations on how the game will react to stuff like XP, saving, attacking enemies, tutorialization, etc. So then we can assume that this is a game with a metacommentary so ubiquitous it amuses a broad audience. This is all true but what do we do with the people outside this base audience? Like how in the hell would they have missed the riffing and amusement? That's kind of where our relationship with these games as them being great just because of their meta-referentiality starts to break down.

Almost nobody is going to play this game and get far at all if they don't get the metacommentary. Those people have to be unamused either for how the metacommentary itself plays out as a distracting writing trick or the fundamental game design around it. When we strip back the specific meta elements we find a game that is very boisterous and friendly, with and exceptionally easy difficulty curve, and a lot more distracting spectacle and chatting than actual combat. Personally I found the amount of talking going on in the game vs. the combat actually kind of irritating. I'm not going to pretend I didn't enjoy Undertale at all, obviously its a very flashy game with a lot of evocative moments, but it should be telling that the only time I or most anybody else I know legitimately felt challenged was locked behind content I wasn't supposed to play (being vague here with respect to spoiler). Also while I personally was not so openly bothered by it at the time, man are a lot of these characters invasive as hell. The idea of friendliness for most of them seemed to be some degree of screaming right in your face and pulling your shirt over to something they want to show you. Papyrus whole gimmick is doing this and obviously he is meant to irritate you, but the gimmick is kept for pretty much every character you meet in the game. Obviously the game is trying to egg you to violence, but in a sort of twisted way I couldn't help but feel sorry for the protagonist, who is by design made mute. I only wish I could have them write on a piece of paper 'personal space please!'. Most of the humor and jokes in the game are milked off of this primary interaction with its world, a world so intent on doing dance numbers in front of you that it's telling the only place I legitimately remember fondly is the waterfall for how hands off it felt.

Yet I was and still am a bit timid to point this out because any sort of ingroup can just clammor this is 'the point' and suddenly the exchange is either folded into either you missing an obscure piece of lore or just generally a stress test of how much of an idiot you are. It feels BAD to be in an outgroup on a metatext, you are passively shamed for having such a bewildering and contrarian stance. This is also true in terms of expressing your experiences on passions in a personal sense to.

But like, what if the combat difficulty is just lackluster, what if the writing just gets on your nerves, what if the level design feels like a bunch of meaningless gimmicks? What about the game experience? Do we just sacrifice our in the moment experience with a game in service of an (arguably false) sense of community around having a comparible experience with a fandom? These quiet reservations I have I just buried because look, there's a lot about Undertale to like and it did a great job, but I think I was betraying myself a bit by playing it and assuming it was just about the best this kind of game can get. I guess I must like it because I've yet to experience anything so 'meta' on rpg games. I feel I should have seen it as a test to push forward rather than accept our Undertale overlord with now further questioning. So why haven't I? Far be it from me to make it sound like a problem, but this ingroup/outgroup dynamic functions equally for insights as well. Short simple insights that reflect general consensus are going to be amplified by general appreciation more than longer ones. Despite it feeling kind of bad to be in this outgroup to, I swallowed my envy and stuck to what I want to do anyway simply because I write with the purpose of self discovery, practice, and game experience memory. If I already choose to take the path less traveled here, I can suck it up and start having a more critical relationship with metagames as well, and if you've read this far you probably can to, I believe in you! For me, keeping the comments turned off is maybe just my personal bandaid against people trying to scare me off from doing it.

But having the gameplay in The Hex be so unambiguously fucking terrible it actually got me thinking about it. Genuinely like do not play this game for the gameplay, this game plays like a freeware meme game at the best of times and a schoolyard flash game at the worst. Not even the rpg or fighting sections are that good because the fighting section is a bunch of obnoxious puzzles and the main character of the RPG portion does not want to be in the game, does not want sequels. And a primary plot point is how a lot of these characters in the bar dont want to be paraded in infinite sequels anyway. I think by having the game actually be bad to play it woke me up to this fact though: Meta commentary can not be an excuse for weak game design or a mask for decent criticism. The fact that the game so openly jabs at those sort of metagames makes me rethink my perception on how to approach this fact and whether I was 'tricked' into liking some of those games more than I actually do. To its credit this game does try to mask each subgame by having so many for its short run, but the novelty of a bunch of small bad games doesn't avoid the issue of it then making the overall game bad. Although granted the point and click portions were well designed and appealing, it was nice being able to walk around the area and consort with the other customers as each character, but in a great twist of irony this point and click portion is also by far its shortest part, only barely cushioning my increasing irritation with each part. Each subgame getting longer as it goes on certainly not helping. You could say the text itself gets more cynical with this interaction except the 2 who most desire to escape their IP hells are bookended by the Fallout Tactics game which has probably the most authentic and genuine relationship and character belief this is their game out of all of them so it doesn't really work on that level either. It might have been more effective that way had they moved his chapter right before the chef one oddly enough but that's ultimately not what happened.

The most petty point though is that Mullins decided to rehash the stupid line connection puzzles from pony island and somehow do them even worse. Nobody played Pony Island and missed those puzzles because they are literally everywhere anyway. If I want to play line logic puzzles I'll go play the Witness of something. Move on bro.