The most fascinating thing Small Saga has to navigate is the idea of its own scale.

The opening hour of Small Saga sets its tone well. Anxious mouse Verm is traveling with his brother Lance to Heaven. A place where food is plentiful and sits out in the open. Where the Gods mingle and chat and live in their utopia. The grocery store.

There, the two brothers encounter an exterminator. A Yellow God, who effortlessly commits damage in the hundreds with even noticing, when your heroes have 12 health max at the time. The scale is clear. These are almighty beings that cannot be crossed. You are a mouse.

But the way the game toys with that line is so endlessly intriguing to interrogate. The general twee trappings I expected are present. Magical mouse society living beneath the floorboards, mouse governments and mouse politics, all hidden from the mundane reality of the humans. The humans finish their normal day jobs, unaware of this hidden world beneath their feet. In a normal game, humans regarded as gods would be fun little background set dressing.

Small Saga is about a mouse planning to kill god.

Suddenly, the set dressing becomes gripping to unravel as the game whole-heartedly commits to its ideas. Secret of the NIMH or its other analogues put a clear disconnect between Humans and Mouse. These are different worlds, never to interact directly. By making this connection so direct, by making it clear these worlds can and will interact, the narrative world-building suddenly gets really difficult to square in my head. Not even in a negative sense! But the sheer implications of a mouse’s ability to murder a guy doing his banal 9 to 5 shocks you into truly thinking about this divide between the above and the floorboards. If a mouse could kill this guy, what if the mouse killed me?

It's this tension that helps fuel the game’s wider examination of institutions and oppression. There are several different territories in the mouse kingdom with their own systems of government. They all answer, broadly, to King James, but the King himself tends to let Barons and Dukes run the show any way they please. This provides an easy excuse for the settings to vary in aesthetics. Mole Town of peasants. Mouse Capital with medieval knights and warriors. Grey Squirrel Tree with Fascist Squirrels. Roman Lego Town with Shrews doing slaving and gladiator games. Evil Science Lab run by cultist rats. Variety! And the kind of variety where you get to topple some corrupt systems and dunk on despicable dorks. It’s a hoot.

The gameplay I can mostly just describe as serviceable. Turn based combat, skill trees, effect stacking. It's not complicated, but it's fun to play around without thinking too deeply. Progressing and improving your character build requires very little thought. Nearly every battle in Small Saga is story-required, with level ups plotted out along the same terms. But you also can reformat your skill points at any point. As such, the upgrade system very quickly becomes easy to manipulate to an ideal strategy. This doesn’t mean a lot in terms of challenge for main story or bonus bosses. But the core adventure is also just so tight and fun that it's kind of hard to be annoyed.

The game politics are about what I came into expecting. There was some Steam review bombing for daring to have a majority LGBT cast or frequent Nazi punching. One enemy screams “debate me bro” talking points. The British Hall of Commons is regarded as “Hell” by rodent kind. It's not subtle, but I’m not even really asking it to be. The non-binary mole gets to be besties with the gay squirrel and the bi punk rat. It's good shit. I don’t expect a more elaborate thesis from the cute, if dark, mouse game. At the same time, the character writing of the antagonists is often a little off to me. It sometimes feels like they know that they're villains. One call his empire a "bloody institution", albeit as a positive descriptor. They are perfectly aware that their institutions are corrupt, but they take pride that its corrupt. Corruption is the point. Which is the truth in such matters, but I don't expect the corrupt figures to beso self-aware about it. Just an odd sort of writing distinction that itches in a weird way.

Which is why I was caught so off-guard by my favorite, easy to miss segment in the game. I don’t want to go too deep into broader plot stuff, but I feel it's safe to say you get to topple one of the evil governments in the mid-game. The fascists get owned, it's great. A new society is built over it, determined to avoid the despots of the past by avoiding leadership entirely. The dungeons are freed, the laws are repealed, it's a bright new era.

But eventually, some hours later, you can visit the dungeons to find Captain Aiden. The other fascists chose exile or reform. Aiden refused either option. He demands to be killed or imprisoned. He keeps coming back when they try to exile him. He is a True Believer in The System that used to exist. So, he’s the only prisoner of the town’s new era.

And so, you can sit down and talk to him.

Unlike the Debate Me fascist, Aiden has tangible beliefs to interrogate. When he hears about the new “leaderless” system, he offers counterpoints. Who is running the society then? How are laws and rules going to be governed? How are they going to be enforced? The current New Era system is vague and ill-defined by little else than that it's better than what it used to be. But how long can that last, once the cast as we know it dies out and the seasons change? The existing conditions of the town seem to be largely unchanged. If those conditions breed inequality, Authority and Hierarchies will take control once again.

You cannot change Aiden’s perspective. And like, it goes without saying, fuck him. He would rather sit in jail in his Nazi cosplay than change his mind. But the game is asking you, as a player, to put forth your own political worldview. Saying Aiden is “technically right” allows you to offer counter-plans. You can choose to focus on combating inequality and consider building a system . You can choose to focus on combating institutions and suggest building a society with as few institutions as possible, presenting a community-focused framework instead. Saying Aiden is “completely wrong” builds broader discussion of why he’s wrong and why his philosophy is garbage. Or you can skip those steps and just choose to mock him for being a tool. All of these options are presented as equally valid. But it's your choice. Your beliefs. It won’t change the world or the ending or any gameplay event. It's just a single moment asking the player to truly think about the hows of building a new society.

It’s the kind of polish and consideration that makes this game really shine. Sometimes it's clumsy, sometimes it's simplistic, sometimes it misses the mark of its goals. But it strives and it swings and it goes for it. And it does it all without wasting my time or padding out the runtime. And for that alone, I just gotta adore it.

PERSONAL BEST: 26,430pts

(Based on the port by Github developer Ytiurin, which amazingly recreates the Electronika 60 release)
https://ytiurin.github.io/tetris/

One of the only perfect games in existence since it's just a simple puzzle environment with a closed system. Tetris is beautiful philosophically and ideologically. The only foe you have here is your own lack of imagination and its almost zen-like quality makes it a standard for hardcore and wide audiences alike. Who would've thought Soviet's best export of the feared 1984 would be a video game to resonate with so many generations? I remember my parents not liking video games, but even they liked Tetris, and they were born in the mid-50s. A big reason for its popularity here in Serbia are the small LCD Chinese handheld platforms whose only purpose was to play Tetris and similar block-based arcade games.

My favourite versions to play are this Electronika emulation, the DOS one, and the NES one which has a magical chiptune rendition of The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. It would keep me up for nights where I couldn't sleep. I didn't spend my time with the Game Boy version, sadly.

(Glitchwave project #011)

Contrary to popular belief, Ubisoft is actually really good at building convincing virtual worlds that are genuinely engaging to venture through. The main problem with a lot of their games, however, is that they’re designed around extraneous sets of obligations that the player has to fulfil rather than rewarding the exploration of their worlds in any meaningful way. In short, they tend to be a set of icons on a map rather than a map with content in it, and as such, playing through a lot of these games ultimately devolves into czeching items off a list. Somehow, Ubisoft Reflections managed to take Grow Home— a short, sweet, and linear game game about climbing up to the sky— and turn it into a bloated shadow of its former self that demonstrates this fundamental design problem better than almost any other game I’ve played. Grow Up isn’t a game with nearly enough substance to foster its open world. Part of what makes Grow Home so enjoyable is that it was short enough to make its minimalistic design feel worthwhile. There weren’t any items you had to go outta your way to collect, you were climbing up to the sky and discovering creatures and locations along the way that were interesting enough to pick up and examine. Grow Up takes this same philosophy and expands it into an open world where you have to collect everything across several mostly uninteresting biomes. B.U.D’s childlike, cluttered movement isn’t ideal for exploring an entire world, yet it is put front and centre in this game just like in Grow Home, but for a much longer and wider duration. Since this game shares DNA with its predecessor, it still has a sense of infectious charm for the first several hours, but its charm wears thin once the game stops being centred around exploration and starts being focused on collecting pieces around the bland world. That’s the primary problem with Grow Up, it’s built on a backbone of exploration, but its game loop is centred around clumsily walking across a world to fulfil an extraneous set of obligations. It is a Ubisoft open world without the strengths of Ubisoft’s world design. Grow Up is just the padding of an open world game, and if I wanted to experience that, I could just go to a grocery store I’ve never been to with someone else’s shopping list.

Monopoly is just a rip-off of Florida. Hospice care is also a rip-off of Florida. Florida is basically death's waiting room, and this is the board game that you have to play while you wait. Monopoly is like listening to a terrible teacher lecture you, and that teacher is the father of the Six Flags guy. The most optimal way to play Monopoly is with an oxygen tank while Everywhere At The End Of Time is playing over a loudspeaker, and if you're really hardcore, you should try playing it while on an IV drip too. Monopoly is basically like a disappointing trip to Sea World where you have to also watch the 'trainers' abuse the animals after the show. Playing Monopoly is equivalent to starring in Dallas Buyers Club and then watching it all the way through multiple times. You just sit there and watch yourself physically waste away into nothingness over and over and over again until you're sick of watching yourself in the process of dying and just want the grim reaper grant you the sweet release of death, but instead he just gives you more fucking Monopoly money. I hate Monopoly. I hate Monopoly! I fucking hate Monopoly.

- Takes it upon itself to snub the idea that a game could be interested in anything other than gameplay
- Very much captures the worst of Pre-Gamergate white-male irreverence for the notion that video games should be treated critically
- Makes just enough smart artistic choices to get to pretend it's about American militarism or ""the consequences of your actions"" instead of what it's obviously actually about, which is how cool it is to wear a dog's head mask and eviscerate a guy with a golf club
- Punishes the emotionally invested player
- Actively insults any player interested in lore or coherent worldbuilding
- Treats its one female character as an object to be abused and then murdered to further the protag's blood craze
- Also, the developer sexually harasses women in real life
- Also also, I just don't find it fun

I don't understand why people celebrate this as one of the best indie games of all time and sometimes I feel crazy for disliking it as much as I do.




EDIT Feb 26 2023: I’ve never articulated it as such until now, but I feel confident concluding that Hotline Miami is a successful infiltration of fascist values into a language gamers circa 2013 were amenable to. Hotline Miami is a fascist game. Unfortunately - I am sorry but - I am not interested in explaining this assertion in any further detail in this space.

its good but i didn't finish the christmas case--i just watched the takashi miike movie and got basically spoiled on what happens. the movie sincerely fucking rips though so watch that if you played this?

anyways sorry to be a little semantics bitch, i dont literally think everybody means it this way, but calling games like this and danganronpa "visual novels" often feels like they have this implicit denial of their use of interactive space because they "have lots of words instead of any gameplay", and the way expressions of interactivity get taken for granted like that bugs me. maybe this comes off as splitting hairs like getting upset over "walking sims" in 2021, but the cultural barrier in how narrative games are understood, that in japan this is absolutely an adventure game while in the west it by and large is taken as not counting somehow, makes this more frustrating to me. its less about using the correct label for me than it is more about understanding games for what they are doing rather than what they seemingly aren't doing. watch this bc he talks abt the historical context of this better than i can https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wOtv-J7tOI

Many years ago, Dara O’Briain did one of the only good standup routines about video games. Video games, O’Briain argued, are the only entertainment medium that actively tests the observer, withholding their content behind challenges of mentality and dexterity. Albums, television shows and films will carry on regardlessly from the moment you press play; sections of a book that prove hard to read can be flipped past; but challenging sections of a game have to be bested or even mastered in order to progress. Want to see what happens next in Dark Souls, but can’t beat the Capra Demon? Too bad. Heard that Through Time and Space is one of the best video game levels ever, but can’t grapple with The Witcher’s inventory management and combat systems? Tough shit.

While there’s an amusing honesty to the bit, it kinda belies an uncomfortable truth about video games - that the parts where you’re moving the joysticks are likely to be the only moments of intellectual stimulation that most video games have to offer, with cutscenes more or less functioning as rewarding soap opera spectacle. It’s hard to discuss this kind of thing without sounding like a wanker, but it’s just a fact that even prestigious “adult” game-fiction like The Last of Us or God of War still rarely stirs anything more than an acknowledging “huh” in the players who’ve deigned to step outside the cultural borders of electronic entertainment and other mainstream media. Games narratives still tend to rely on cinematic cutscenes to convey information and drama, and most of the time said information or metatext is barely worth parlaying to the player - $10 million spent on comic book writers telling us “man is the real monster” or “depression is bad”. At their very best, our prestige video games are still just doing replicas of better movies.

killer7 differentiates itself from this convention in a number of ways. It’s a game that makes no concessions for those who expect a linear, event-driven narrative, peppering weirdo pseudo-plot and thought throughout map layouts, door keys (ever thought about what the Soul Shells are?) and helpful hints from dudes in gimpsuits who are prone to taking left turns into Baudrillardian philosophy while directing you to the bathroom. Textual and subtextual ambiguity reigns supreme. The gameplay (on Medium, at least) is unlikely to challenge the player all that much - aside from a few head-scratcher puzzles, it’s more or less a case of walking from point of interest to point of interest to open doors and shoot zombies. And, in a strange inversion of the problem outlined above, it’s the cutscenes and character dialogues that will tax a player’s brain far harder than anything that involves clicking buttons.

I think killer7 is a work of profound ridiculousness. Or ridiculous profundity. Something like that, anyway - I’m not quite sure of the precise term I need here, but I think Suda and Mikami are pulling from the playbooks of guys like Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch with this game - keep throwing potentially meaningful ideas and images at the screen, both within and outwith the realm of the cutscene, and let the true ones stick - the viewer will be too busy grappling with the good to remember the bad. It’s a technique that surprisingly few games dabble in, despite the supernatural properties of the medium and the obnoxious, inhuman lengths that most games require a player to play for.

So what are the good images here? Well, I guess it’s a function of the temporal, political and personal preferences of the player. Like abstract paintings, surrealist movies and post-modern novels, killer7 is wholly open to interpretation through your own kaleidoscopic lens. Unlike most game narratives that more or less bluntly prescribe a story and some associated themes (if any at all), killer7, like most Suda games, seems content to spray blood against the walls and do some interactive Rorschach testing with your psyche. Sure, there’s talk of American-Japanese relations and terrorism and borders and killers and the valise of our personae, but there’s nothing proscriptive or particularly didactic here - it’s more or less a presentation of post-9/11 realities that the player is asked to order and interpret as they see fit; a balancing act of feelings versus facts in opposition with fictions. Hand in killer7, the companion book for killer7, even (deliberately?) contradicts the facts of its own reality within the first ten pages - as if to highlight how pointless an endeavour Making Sense of it All is, especially in our Fukuyama/Fisher-influenced End of Capitalist-Realist History-Present.

By complete coincidence, I played through this game in parallel with the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, and finished it on the same day she was convicted - so Target 03: Encounter (Part 2) - where the Killer 7 head to an Epstein-pre-Epstein prescient-simulacra of Little James Island to take out an organ trader and implied child molester - held particular relevancy to me. The Jeffrey Epstein case and its relevant co-conspiracies are probably the best examples of what I’m prattling on about above - get ten, twenty, or a hundred people in a room together, and you’ll probably get a hundred interpretations of what the inner sanctum of Epstein’s reality really was - a whole smoothie bar of blended facts, news, fake news, Facebook news, speculation, fiction, fact and fuck knows what else. killer7 is often lumped together with The Silver 2425 as part of the “Kill the Past” series, and I think this info-meld of history in the melting pot of public consciousness is one of the chief relationships the games have with each other. Ironic that games about removing the past would so thoroughly realise the future of our present.

How did Suda51 know that the word’s top players would conspire to send an assassin after a sanctioned private ally of the United States government, a living evil who trafficked young girls with both personal and ulterior purpose? And how did he know a global pandemic would (temporarily) return humanity to a road-faring race? As is often suggested with Suda51 (see also: The Silver Case, No More Heroes) he may be one of gaming’s top producers of prophetic works. “Prophetic media” has been in vogue since March 2020 - references to media-elite paedophile rings in mid-2000s Nickelodeon cartoons; references to coronavirus in mid-2010s K-Dramas; references to Tom Hanks getting sick in mid-1990s episodes of The Simpsons. Wow! How do they pull it off?! Well, as with killer7’s imagery, I think it may be down to volume of produce rather than accuracy of content. The Simpsons is able to predict so much shit correctly because every ‘incorrect’ prediction isn’t even recognised as a prediction until it comes close to resembling some form of the truth we want it to be. The same applies to the images that Grasshopper’s games create.

Is this the secret to making remarkable, meaningful art and cultural commentary? Just keep producing, producing, producing until your images become resonant by virtue of the typewriter-monkey principle? That’s maybe underselling what Grasshopper achieved here - the foundations killer7 are built upon are more or less rock-solid. The cel-shaded mono-colour aesthetic is timeless, and the chosen palette for each Target is fittingly eerie. The control system, while initially awkward, is ultimately a solid compromise for a game that distills a gameplay fusion between Mikami’s Resident Evil series and Suda’s Silver Case adventure games - and it feels even better on PC, where 90% of the game can be played with just the mouse.

Although often cited as unconventional, I think the gameplay style of killer7 is a fairly logical compromise for these two creators, who seem more concerned with tone poetry and 2000s-exploration than providing a compelling and practical gamefeel. Anyway, it’s sometimes more important that a game feels good in the brain than on the hands moving the controller. killer7 is a game that locks its content away inside your mind, with progress often being made many hours after you’ve stepped away from the console and allowed your third eye time to process the images your two eyes have seen. It’s all in your head.

I am still obsessed...

I can't easily put into words the emotions pikmin gives me, it's so odd. Pure joy is just...seeing a bunch of pikmin carrying back several things at once and admiring your work. I have spent several hours just reading about things in this game, captains logs about enemies and their biology, theories as to what a duracell battery was, sales pitches for an alien fruit that is just a strawberry to us, cooking instructions for how to prepare a massive grub shaped like a pig that breathes fire.

I really enjoy the gameplay on the face of it too, there are so many unforgettable moments and set pieces, and as simple as the tactical elements are, they really make you feel more in on the action as opposed to a true blue rts.

Search Breadbug on google images.