For a god-like all-knowing powerful being, the puzzles it throws at you are a really pitiful attempt at stopping you... Something ludonarrative dissonance something something.

I was enjoying the game whenever it let you explore (specially those sections that give you the illusion of an open world), that's where the dev's world design shines (great atmosphere for what is a minimal style), that's accompanied by some interesting moments of subtle world building or quirky interactions. But sadly ruined by mundane puzzles and clunky platforming sections that take away from the experience. Also, what's the point of the breathing mechanic? You use it for like 10% of the game, and it practically only exists to distract and not let you immerse yourself. Maybe the devs should've stuck to the premise of it being an "artistic experience" and not a game, even though it sounds pretentious as hell in the steam description. Anyway, I don't want to rip too much into this game since it's free, and the most offensive thing it does is being amateurish... Overall, a decent short game. Discovered "BLAME!" thanks to it too, so I'll probably go right ahead and read that.

(Oh, if you have a monitor with an energy saving feature that turns it off whenever the screen is black, turn that off before playing because the game's really dark, and lifting the gamma to max on the settings seemingly doesn't help lol.)

everyone even the least bit inquisitive about beat 'em ups as a genre should play this, full stop. i cannot think of a more textbook representation of the idea that for a beat 'em up, encounter design is level design; divergence from this principle in final fight 2 results in perhaps the most anemic beat em up i have ever been subjected to. absolutely lifeless brawling in overlong stages as you contend with wall-to-wall waves of three polite barely dissimilar crooks at a time. devoid of any spirit even compared to some of its home console contemporaries. sure FF2 has a couple of things going for it compared to its predecessor but streets of rage 1 came out two years before this and while it is comparably centered around simplistic crowd control, it thoroughly overpowers this game on the basis of its encounter design, aesthetics, soundtrack, pace, etc. shout outs yuzo koshiro. FF2 does have maki though so who can say whether it's bad or not. bring her back in SF6 capcom i'll be very grateful

Song Accompaniment

mil rosas (2021) is an autofiction about Gaby fighting cancer while her family pop in and out to offer words of support. Meanwhile she is playing through as one of the sisters put a 'very boring' fetchquest part of an RPG game on her GBA. The player is tasked with completing this fetchquest while the family pops in to say hi at triggered points in the journey basically interrupting the 'action' of walking and talking with visual novel esque dialogue the that you have to look up from the screen and nod about.

I put emphasis on explaining this because it is to my mind a completely unique set up for a more narrative driven 'story within a story' video play, its worth checking out for that reason alone. I also think given the story is touching on an aspect of disability and illness that is actually ignored, that being a marked lack of mobility and desire to locomote regardless. This double narrative works immensely well and conveying the sense of stasis and isolation that accompanies such a struggle.

The play doesn't settle with just stopping here though. It does something a bit bold and shreds away the conventions of proper names attached to any of the speaking characters whether in the GBA or the IRL characters. This obviously marks as a form of confusion for the player, but it also forces them to pick up the IRL story through context clues. After all we don't walk around outside of work with name badges attached to us so it makes sense not to do so. Along with this the action button, usually used to pull all of the text on screen, here it just skips to the next line instead. So you have to wait for all of it to scroll on screen before hitting the action button. These two factors work in tandem to 'slow down' the normal pace of play, it also makes narrative sense the couple times you make this mistake because one of the psychological effects of chemotherapy is fogginess so it makes sense you would mess up. This whole mediation on health and family works phenomenally well.

My favorite factor that the narrative so elegantly teases at is the idea that handheld consoles have a specific unique quality in their focal experience that elevates them as anxiety suppression devices. A lot of us are used to the concept of sitting down and playing a video game on giant monitors or huge pieces of hardware. This is all fine and well, but it can shred away the appeal of having something in between your hands to mess around with on a trip or as a way to relax between social moments. Handhelds perform a similar function that light novels and magazines do. One of the earliest Nintendo success stories that caused them to pivot was the Game and Watch series which was literally a cheap digital clock with a bit of arcade gameplay for business men to pass the time on the train. The technology has expanded many times over since then allowing for more complex actions and narratives, that's the value mil rosas touches on. The imagined town and delivery situation is a bit more broody than people might initially expect from a top down GBA game, but I really like that idea of a serious and slightly gothic hand held adventure. To this effect how occasionally sassy and poetic the GBA dialogue is works for me, and makes me yearn to play these sorts of hand held titles over the more breezy titles associated with it. My guess is that this distinction in style is due in part to the spanish cultural background. There's rose beads and, going off the name of the work, it was written primarily with a spanish culture and background in mind. So that's likely where the gothic flair is coming from, which I can appreciate.

There are some thorns to this flower though. I mentioned earlier that I liked the dialogue design but I have some caveats: The fact that it functions equally in both the game and IRL the same seems awkward to me. For one I think the GBA characters having names when they talk would have made sense since that's a notable convention worth some parody on. More specifically though the pace and function of both dialogues operating and scrolling the same reveals an issue of narrative monotony. These two realms should operate distinctively because the whole point is that the Handheld is a form of escape. On top of this, the rather dreadful song adds a lot to the piece but doesn't change or stop when you enter or exit a room. Real missed opportunity for immersion here. That being said an argument could be made that the music is not actually playing from within the GBA, that its just an auditory hallucination or non diagetic accompaniment. If this is the case, it does improve the sense of monotony and dread but even here I think it should have lightened up or changed as the story went along from the initial sense of disorientation since its indicated within the plot much the same idea.

With that said this is a really unique and profound reflection far worth giving a shot. Especially in terms of the spatial nostalgia during illness makes it absolutely worth giving a try!

P.S. I recognize that assessing the 'value' and formal reflection on an autofiction may come off as rude or meanspirited. I notice that a lot of people get too shy when talking about the formal qualities of a 'personal' work. I think this can do a disservice to the art form though. Almost all poems are about grief, trauma, or personal love but we take no mind in analyzing poetry and form. Poets usually don't get hostile against poetic analysis of their very personal poems. I think if we really want to develop our minds and engagement with this medium its worth assessing what even the most personal works did and where they may have faltered. In particular the way critics seem to treat criticizing very personal videoplays as if you're battering somebodies brainchild reveals a quite false assumption that art cant be personal if its made by more than a half dozen people. All art has the element of 'personal' in it, and to assume we should hold back our thoughts on assumptions of how personal something is I think misses the point of good criticism in being agnostic to this fact entirely. No I think the reason people jump to this idea that its 'too personal to criticize' is out of a veiled sense of embarrassment of experiencing (and often enjoying) something outside the bounds of what they are 'supposed' to. Stop being so shy then! People love to know about the obscure. Just food for thought.

I honestly don't remember which taught me about video games as an art form first, LSD: Dream Emulator or Shadow of The Colossus... But anyway, I'll always appreciate this game for that, even if I didn't quite understand it at first (I remember a childhood friend in primary school talking about this game and I thought it was dumb hippie stuff, lol).

Coincidentally, I've just played a few dream logic games before this, and they didn't quite grab me. I think what LSD excels at is creating those dynamic unique moments, be it scary, bizarre, or beautiful. I guess those previous game felt a lot more linear... like there's a trail to follow, but at least to me, that's not really how it works in dreams. I mean, just a few days ago I had a dream where I was in Asgard(?), a golden city full of people, then the dream turned into a horror scene where I was being chased by a dark figure in a tunnel, which that figure turned out to be Orlando Bloom in a monster(?) suit. After, I remember an image of a car getting out of control, and I woke up hysterically laughing from that image. Pure nonsense, just like this game. Perfect.