Bad news, you've agreed to remake Resident Evil 4. You can't do a dead space where you just make it look prettier and make obvious improvements because RE4 isnt the sort of game to benefit from that and is about as close to a perfect action game as has ever been produced. And unlike your previous, considered remakes which even at their worst have value in portraying the same events differently, you cant change this one too much because that'd make less money. Also, corporate demands you remove the tank controls the original game is completely built around because modern gamers dont understand not being able to move whilst aiming.

It's a testament to the fine state of modern Capcom that this realisation of terrible ideas sort of works. Give this project to the capcom of 2016 and it'd almost certaintly be a remake on the level of Demons Souls 2020 where even if it looks """"prettier"""" it ultimately contributes basically nothing and just looks kinda off. Given what must have been ludicrously tight limitations considering the straight regugitation of RE4 with modern menuing and movement is probably the version that sells best - I think the job here is a good one.

Perhaps the boldest, though basically unspoken decision, is basically to drop the part where RE4 is this really clear, methodical and calculated action game. Whilst RE4make is still kinda decent in this regard, and it's encounters are often very fun, the focus is far for more on chaotic situations and reacting on the fly, in real time, to stuff. The decision alone to adapt RE2make's pretty stupid crit mechanics, along with enemies now focusing more on flanking (i get the feeling many way well spawn behind you but am not gonna state that definitively), variable stun damage, and the way animations interact and are rarely invulnerable - the end result i'd say is unquestionably a worse action game in terms of replayability and depth, but it does heighten how intense the encounters often feel. It almost feels crass to make this comparison considering it's lineage - but it feels a lot like the last of us.

And I think it's neat. Its kinda fascinating how significant the change in gameplay feels with nearly identical encounter design, weapons, general structure - to the original. I like how it rewards a different set of tactics and sort of fiddles with things like the balance of the original not by neccessarily buffing and nerfing things, but the game system changing neccessities. Grenades for instance are good in OG RE4 but here they are insanely good thanks to them simply allowing a way through masses of bodies.

The best changes, and the ones you can clearly tell the devs are most confident of, are those to the knife, probably the only real glaring fault for my money of the original RE4 combat system. Speeding up ground takedowns alone helps a lot, but I think limiting it as a resource and it's use defensively is very well done, and works particularly well with all the grabs and flanks the game throws at you. It's the one thing i see in this game as somethig which, with balance accordingly, i'd say "straight up mod that into RE4" were it that easy.

More questionable decisions come in the story and tonal changes. The middle ground adaptation of still keeping the story pretty fucking stupid (this is a good thing) whilst having the characters and general tone be much darker and less in line is not too great, though it could be worse. The character portayals being so good does sweeten the deal though. Ashley and Leon's growing friendship over the course of the game is legitimately lovely, the new Luis stuff is fantastic, the somehow made the Merchant better, and I like how Ada seems a bit more conflicted in this version. The antagonists definetly do take a blow in being less fun though. Whilst the original is clearly better overall, I will say there is fun to be had playing a serious version of Leon experiencing all this stupid shit.

Overall, I find it hard to judge. Part of the brilliance of particularly the RE2 remake is in how it accompanies the original work, provide an alternate take on events, and the entire "RE2 experience" is raised from having the two versions regardless of which one is "better." RE1 and 3 also benefit similarly (Even if the 3 remake is pretty weak). And with RE4 being such a conservative remake, the risk was that it would be almost pointless. Fun, yes - its Resident Evil 4 - but ultimately contributing very little. But I do think it is worthwhile. It certaintly isnt the best version of RE4 and it's more confused than any prior remake, but the changes here are interesting and make for an interesting take on the game, and particularly the character changes which can kinda feed back into enjoyment of the original.

Also, it really is a title that really makes you appreciate the original. Nothing can hammer home just how strong the encounter design, pacing and scenarios are in the original like them being nearly unchanged for the most part 18 years later, put in a different game system thats not as good, and it still is fun as hell. RE4 really is one of the best to ever fucking do it.

In a perfect world, the RE4 remake is a much bolder title. In my head I imagine something similar to RE1make with fixed camera angles and making greater story changes to give things to give more contrast - but that was never going to happen when that would not sell so well. RE4 is not the best remake and probably never could be burdened with the reality that it will sell 10 million copies if it just played it safe. With the constraints in mind, I think it's about as good as we were going to get.

And the silver lining is now Capcom has drunk the poisoned chalice, it's shackles are gone. The potential with Code Veronica and even RE5 for remakes which have the alternate take potential of RE2 is now ripe for picking. And im really up for that.

I have a soft spot for NMK. For the classic arcade game enthusiast, they are one of those devs - the small, plucky dev with like 15 people on staff that manages to pump out 3 games a year that are somehow mostly quite good (UPL, Athena, Jaleco, Video System are other examples) - that is always so wonderful to discover the library of. And before the 90s, they're kinda like most of those examples - fun but mostly a curiosity. No one these days is going to play Argus over the other shooters of the time from Konami, Taito and Toaplan because it's legitimately the best on offer.

But with the turn of the 90s, and acquisition of some incredible talent, NMK really started hitting some home runs. Gunnail, P-47 Aces, Super spacefortress Macross 2 are truly top class shooting games to this day, and their magnum opus Thunder Dragon 2 is one of the absolute best in the genre. They are really up there with Taito and Toaplan as the STG kings of the early 90s.

Yet at the same time, they never stopped being NMK. Whilst many of their games look pretty "generic", they almost always contain some ridiculous game design quirk or just... oddball decisions, and it's great. Saint Dragon has you basically play snake and R type at the same time. P-47 Aces has a bizzarely chirpy soundtrack and scoring based on you bouncing inside of enemy hitboxes, and Saboten bombers is Saboten Bombers.

Saboten bombers is quite frankly, unhinged. It is an almost self-parodical take on the snow bros/bubble bobble, fixed screen elimination platformer formula. It really just is snow bros with lots of explosions, ultimately. And that does make it a better game (sorry Toaplan ilu too) - Snow Bros really becomes a very methodical, slow game with tonnes of setup when you actually want to play it well, and whilst Saboten does have it's level of setup at a very high level, it is much more chaotic and way faster paced, and I really think it nails it's balance in terms of having to act fast to beat the time limit, but with enough care to avoid getting caught up in your own, and others explosions.

But chaos alone does not make Saboten so wack. It must be mentioned Saboten is essentially a sister title to 91's truly heinous Hacha Mecha Fighter - one of the most adorable shooting games ever produced which is also extremely hard and unbelievably cursed. I'll spare you the full details but a huge part of scoring in that game involves hugging the right border of the screen. Where enemies spawn from. Without warning.

And somehow, Saboten is even more ridiculous for high level play. You will struggle to find a game that is more random and full of as many insane secrets. You will get a random bunch of points at the end of each stage for no reason. You can hold start for the first two stages after inserting a coin and get multiplier items. You can deliberately die straight up for multiplier items. Item spawns are mostly random. Extends are mostly random. Enemy actions are mostly random. You can freeze your multiplier at 8x after deaths but only the WR holder knows how. Start the game holding P1 jump and P2 bomb (even if P2 isnt playing) to get half a free extend. If you hold jump for a whole stage, you get a free peach. If you ignore one of your extremely rare extends, you get a 9x multiplier, and that isn't even a quarter of it. Of course, outside of an extremely rare handbook NMK made none of this is conveyed to the player remotely. Brilliant.

Watching a high level run of Saboten is about the most ridiculous game experience you'll ever see. Doing absurd snow bros chain setups at the same time as relying on a bunch of luck and doing some random other shit to make things happen, all ocnducted by a silly cactus. The scoring potential is frankly ridiculous too - this game can be counterstopped in it's first loop with a combination of insane luck and skill, yet new players probably won't even touch the top 5 digits on the scale. Stupid-ass game.

And yet is also extremely well made. Perhaps the most obvious thing about Saboten is how utterly pretty its pixel art and particularly the animations are. There was absolutely no need for them to go so hard on the adorable cacti dancing on the name entry screen. There was no need for so many background screens. There was no need to make that enemy cactus to a delinquent pose and smoke whilst standing still. But they do, and Saboten as a result feels utterly alive. Things are constantly moving, even going AFK enemies are probably doing a silly dance or something, and it's just quite joyful. As aforementioned, it's also extremely fast paced by the standards of a fixed screen platformer, and a lot more interesting as a pure survival game imo compared to snow bros, which really only gets interesting for scoring. Saboten's level design is also great, with stages embracing the bouncyness and the AOE of the bombs. Of the Shitpost duology, I definetly think it's the better game than HMF, and i find it a fun game just to embrace the silliness of. Especially if you can wrangle a friend into fightcade and continually bomb them.

Now, for the real plot twist. Whilst actual credits for Saboten Bombers are unknown, as it doesnt have any - based on other NMK games of the time, it is very likely that this game's composer was Kazunori Hideya (HIDE-KAZ). AKA the lead sound engineer on Metal Gear Solid 3. And if it wasnt, it was legendary composer Manabu Namiki. And it's designer/lead? Based on other credits around the time, it is very likely to have been Gunnail head Morio Kishimoto. The current head of Sonic Team and director of Frontiers. That explains a lot, I feel.

Anyway, Saboten owns. It's so stupid.

Is it weird that I mostly want to talk about Hopping Girl Kohane EX's progression system? For what is a pretty unusual and weird semi-physics based precision action/puzzle platformer with plenty of questionable design decisions, the boring GDC talk topic is its truly compelling bit.

Said progression, of course, is cute clothes. For a game with a rock-bottom budget otherwise, D-O enterprise have put in a stupid amount of outfits. Legitimately as many outfits as there are stages in the entire game, most with unique models, different hairstyles and stuff for our bubbly protagonist Kohane as she basically plays pogo stick monkey ball. They do also come with stat boosts, which is questionable but they're never over the top and never required to get the S ranks or all the coins on a stage.

And that's the real hook of the progression. Those cute outfits can all be bought from a shop for grinded out currency... or you can get an S rank in the stage they're attached to. And as the balance of grind for cash is obnoxious enough, but you really want to see Kohane in the virgin killer sweater (yes, really, how is this game rated 7+ PEGI), the game pushes you to go for those S ranks, to get all the frog coins.

Which is good, because it's in the score attacks where the gameplay itself shines. Played as just a start to finish game like monkey ball Kohane is a pretty mid game, and it's level design is kinda weak. This is something the original kohane suffers heavily from - sprawling, huge levels that miss the point because the path of least resistance and most clothes is beelining it to the finish. When really, the way of playing the game that is by far the most fun is to route out the maps, go for full combos by constantly be jumping on special blocks, do it fast, get all the bonus coins and dont get hit. And then you get rewarded with a cute bolero dress which Kohane looks so happy in...

EX also generally improves on a lot of the general problems of the original, despite largely being comprised of the same assets and structure. The levels are still wide, but nowhere near as labyrinthe, long and massive as lategame OG. General pacing and game speed is higher, and there are a lot more sections of actual perilous precision platforming that will kill you rather than just hurt your rank upon failure. Moving platforms are predictably pure hell to deal with on a pogo stick, and learning how to deal with their timings and how to carry momentum onto them is particularly rewarding.

Kohane EX is a really telling exercise. The original I found, frankly, extremely mid and this sequel is in so many ways as similar to it as Fifa 23 is to Fifa 22 - hell, it removes content such as the championship mode and multiplayer, which is a bit of a shame even if they kinda sucked, and production values for the story is way lower. And yet, through careful repackaging and tweaking of it's formulas and how it's presented, it becomes something pretty great.

Seriously though, how is this game rated 7+ it's like Dead or Alive Extreme level horny at times.

On the one hand, I think gacha is an interesting move for Project Moon. For the billion problems inherant to the genre, the gameplay in previous Project Moon games could easily fit well into it, and a game like Arknights (and maybe ONLY Arknights, though im sure theres others out there under my nose) proves that the medium has legitimate value as a means for some pretty excellent long form storytelling. And the sheer amount of money involved with a successfully operating gacha enables high production values and things like high amounts of voice acting and out-of-game official content, which i personally feel could be well suited to Project Moon's styles of game design and obscenely long storylines.

On the other hand - oh god project moon made a live service game, it has already fallen apart, and they will probably not get away with it. It runs like complete shit, it has already required enough maintenance to justify them sending out 20 free pulls to everyone, it is buggy beyond belief, and the general user experience is absolutely terrible in a genre that will eat you alive for not being tip top in terms of polish.

Main thing that needs to be said is that Limbus company is a game that feels an awful lot more complicated than it actually is. When you get down to it this game is heavily streamlined versus most Gacha (Genshin is a more complicated game than this, unironically), and the gameplay is essentially a bottom of the barrel autobattler with a colour matching minigame beforehand. The UI and onboarding process are utterly abysmal and really dont help matters, as the game flashes by way too much information way too fast, and then obscures pretty important stuff such as the coin flips and support skill stuff to an extent where it really just feels like a game you're meant to outlevel and turn your brain off.

This is compounded by the game being way too RNG heavy. It's not like its a game where you can really influence rolls or work to create strategies which work with variance, the game is just constantly flipping coins and rolling dice on what skills and stuff you get and who's getting the upper hand in fights. And it all happens so quickly its so, so easy to glaze over everything thats happening.

Maybe it's just knowledge of the other Project Moon games, but the whole thing has this impression that its really just another game in their universe that's been crowbarred into a gacha format rather than something built from the ground up to accomodate and really work with the model. It really shows with the particularly bizzare decision to make the game consist of only 12 units, with you essentially rolling your gacha for alters and special moves for them. I get it's going for a sort of MTG planeswalker thing where they show up in different forms all over and whatnot but, still seriously feels like writing yourself into a huge hole for a game set to be being built upon for years and years.

It isn't helped by a truly shit launch. If gacha gamers have standards for anything it's polish, and boy does this not have that. Performance is terrible, with hitching and frequent stutters on mid range phones and god forbid you've got anything over a few years old. Servers have already crashed multiple times, they've had to pull a pack from the shop for being underpriced (not a good move). Some UI buttons just don't work! Tooltips and menu stuff still come up in Korean! I can only imagine the state it must have been in before it got delayed.

I do still think the conceit of Project Moon doing a gacha has potential, but this isn't the realisation of that. This is more like another Project Moon singleplayer game that's been chopped and beaten into a gacha shaped hole, when they have two perfectly serviceable and extremely content rich games right there!

The writing and art chops of Project moon do seem to be here, even if "Mysterious amnesiac becomes commander of cool team" as a setup in gacha has now been beaten like a dead horse, and despite what's claims to the contrary, this really doesn't seem like the best jumping on point to the moonverse. And frankly, I would have serious doubts that the loyal fanbase can prevent limbus reaching end of service before it's story is done.

Maybe I was too naive with my hopes, but Limbus Company really just is a worst case scenario. Beloved developer goes live service, reaps all the negatives without a single thing for the good.

Y'know, maybe I should have been more wary. RGG have now proven they have a serious track record of fucking up re-releases. Monkey ball 1+2 got borked physics. VF5 got racist netcode. Yakuza 1+2 got Kiwami'd. And now it really feels like Ishin has as well.

RGG will really add an unforgivably terrible gacha Card system on what already seems like a way too bloated game, but not address that you can just bait one attack and gun down from across the room every story boss.

RGG will really just change what seems like a pretty well thought out original cast considering the conceit in what is obviously a shortsighted fanservice move that will reek in like 3 years.

RGG will really just not address the game's blatant issues like a quarter of the runtime consisting of you running to and from work, attaching Kiryu's morality system onto thi main character requiring consant contrivance and the game's map clearly being hamstrung by loading times on the PS3.

Deep,, deep under Nu-Ishin is the best Yakuza game. And frankly, I get the impression that it's buried a fair bit under the original Ishin as well - I don't think the Yakuza stuff helps tell the story at play (not-Kiryu just sucks the life out of what seems like a truly fascinating real person imo) there's a pointless aount of RPG nonsense that only detracts from the combat that I can't blame entirely on the remake, and the map is probably the series' weakest if you arent a huge nerd for this shit like me.

But im a huge sucker for stories from this period (WATCH YOJIMBO) i love the aesthetic, the combat whilst having issues gainst greatly from swords and guns, and the general plot is really cool. Frankly, just experiencing thils state of japan from the viewpoint of an RGG game is satiation enough for me, huge nerd. But god it could be so much better.

And Nu-Ishin is just the worst kind of re-release. It reminds me a lot of Strange Journey Redux - making pointless changes that dont help and just alienate, whilst adding pointless new stuff that's both terrible and bloats out a game that if anything needs cutting down.

RGG are a very competent studio, but god they need to stop doing this shit.

PS: the translation/localisation here feels really rough. To the point i've spotted multiple spelling mistakes. Makes it particularly tempting to go back to the original once i've improved my Japanese... a lot.

So, I decided to do a little digging on the development and circumstances of Wanted Dead and im convinced this is like a money laundering scheme or something. Like, this is definetly a crime right. Some rich asshole forms an entertainment company in switzerland called 110 Industries, which seems to consist almost entirely of this, Vapourware, and selling the debut album of Stephanie Joosten - most notable for playing quiet in MGSV - on Vinyl. He seems to really want to just make a game that's john wick, so he picks up Soleil and they just use his money to make a sequel to Devil's Third instead, being sure to cast Joosten and a Phillip-Morris model in lead roles, and put in the movie references the rich funder wanted in.

And yes, this game is just Devil's Fourth. Whilst Itagaki is oddly absent considering this game feels like a scam, It's the same Valhalla game studios team from Third, and it plays remarkably similarly. The main change is that combat is slightly less shit. You get pretty standard combos with your sword intermixed with a ludicrously powerful pistol used to stagger and parry enemies at a pretty high range. There's a heavy emphasis on canned finishers to restore health (Think doom 4), and the general sense is the game really wants you in the thick of things at basically every moment, slashing and dashing amongst the gunfire. It's a very chaotic system, and I would hesistate to say it's good, the enemy variety just isnt there, and enemies are just a bit too tanky to keep the flow great, but it's far improved from Devil's Third and is a serviceable action game with a pretty nice high degree of difficulty. I would go as far to say that it's bosses are pretty good, and I really like how fast the player dies - make the wrong mistake to even a single grunt and they'll kill you straight up, even on the difficulty that gives you cat ears.

But let's be real, that's really not appeal of Wanted dead when you get down to it. What is - is that will not see a game as truly baffling as Wanted: Dead in a long time. So many times it will make you question why. Why is there a relatively high production value full shmup included? Why is there this kinda rad mix of animated cutscenes intermingled in? Why do some scenes feel pieced together out of dialogue from different drafts? Why does the game clearly jab at some heavy stuff like health insurance and Margaret Thatcher for like 2 seconds and then drop it? Whats up with the Cooking videos featured heavily in the advertising but not in the actual game? Why is there a single (one) ladder that you can climb in the whole game? I legitimately could go on for much longer than this you have no idea, you go like ten seconds in this game and you wonder what the fuck the motivation behind the decisions was.

The game is all over the place to the point where I am in denial that it's just incompetence. A police officer pulling stuff from an interview that the SUPECT REFUSED TO TELL HER to go on to the next plot point is something Neil Breen would catch in the edit. The game's developers have been open that it's a throwback to cheapo PS2 games (presumably oneechambara being the point of reference?) but I seriously feel like this is all a bit. Am I being made fun of? Are Soleil making fun of this rich swiss asshole by making a shitpost? Am I now an accessory to money laundering?

Wanted: Dead is not a "weird game" in the way something like a Suda51 or Swery game is, or even LSD Dream Emulator. I'm tempted to compare it to kane and lynch 2 but that game is a million times more focused in it's vision and what it's trying to portray. I can't stop thinking about it, every decision it makes is so... wrong, yet also so deliberate. I've seriously never played anything like it.

It also, at times, also shines legitimately super brightly. I really like the banter between the gang, as weirdly odd as the voice acting is. I really like that one of it's primary characters is straight up mute and its a nice representation even. The mixing of media types and stuff is sick, there's one absolutely brilliant boss fight and the very final moments of the game provides a legitimately ace story twist which honstly makes me view the whole thing much more fondly.

The whole thing is bewildering. I can't stop thinking about it.

----------------------------------------------

Other "huh?" things I didn't mention for the sake of pacing

- Final level is absurdly long after the rest of the game was pretty good in this regard
- Claw minigame does basically nothing
- Difficulty curve insanely and blatantly all over the place, the first mission is one of the hardest.
- The degree to which the world is altered from the real world is odd and excessive.
- There's like 6 shower scenes
- Why do you get a free single revive like half the time when the game is overwise commited to being a tough classic action game? But you only get it when one member of your squad is there?
- Why is there such detailed gun customisation in a 5 hour action game
- Why is the one loading screen a very dated meme.
- Why does the one ninja elite enemy look like it's from a different game
- Why do the protagonists just not even mention sometimes why they're going to do a thing.

Make it make sense.

Keika Hanada is the only person that could make an april fools game that is both a meta meme game but also a laser-guided grief missile. A very odd, very specific story that is full of contradiction - it's so clearly a parallell story to Fata but it also so definetly isnt. The characters are Yakuza Ishin'd with them playing seperate people - but they also clearly are meant to draw on their original counterparts. It reads as extremely autobiographal, yet that doesn't add up.

Seventh Lair is a game that is clearly made for maybe less than a thousand people worldwide. It is almost explicit about that in it's own text. For everyone else, it's anything from ignorable to a downright managling of a work that is very impactful to them.

Still, even if you disregard the meta weirdness, Hamada remains just the absolute best at writing a story that will absolutely rip your heart out. The "life of a creator" chapters of Seventh Lair captures such relatable thoughts and emotions, as good as the peaks of Fata Morgana does. And I bawled my fucking eyes out.

Boot up game. Have to agree to like 9 EULAs. Konami now owns my soul. Message of the day pops up on my screen. "Apology for online play issues". It details how some of the major mechanics of baseball are not working in the online mode.

There is no offline mode.

Also this game literally has a typo for buttons. It refers to ZL and ZR on the switch as SL and SR. I didn't even think nintendo would approve that for their store.

Edit: apparently SL and SR exist as the teeny buttons on joycons... but i was still playing in handheld mode... :Cirsnap:

Tango, what do you think you're doing. After three games of the purest, unadulterated mid you can't just drop this joyous, gen 6-ass, best action game in a decade out of nowhere.

If you go looking for it, there is stuff to complain about in Hi-Fi Rush. The mid-game isnt nearly as good as the first few or last few chapters, the combat feels like it has a relatively low skill ceiling compared to the absolute peak of the genre, I think it could have done with a few more licensed tracks, the assists are a bit clunky to use, and it feels like Tango didnt quite have the time or budget to put everything they wanted in. But I don't really care about that.

Y'know what i care about? When the game throws me through window, sticks me with a room of enemies and the world pops off to one of my favourite tracks from when I was 15. God, what the hell, it actually did that.

Hi-Fi rush's world moving to the rhythm, and the sheer enthusiasm of it all could have probably carried a game with combat of something like DMC1 or even a Ratchet and Clank, but the combat here is legitimately fantastic. I guess having Masaki Yamada - old guard from Capcom's Clover team and platinum's glory days - as lead game designer helps, but you could honestly make a case for this being his finest achievement. Not quite up to Bayonetta 1 combat, sure, but I don't feel bad about mentioning it in the same breath, which is insane for this stupid gimmick idea for an action game. I have no reservations saying its a miles better action game than DMCV, for instance.

And y'know, I even liked the characters and dumb jokes, most of the time. Yes, a lot of that is just Korsica and Macaron's accents, don't at me.

Tango has really captured lightning in a bottle here. Mad respect for Shinji Mikami and crew for fostering such a "Not 2023" concept, and also someone should help them because Director John Johanas is clearly a master manipulator to get everyone on side for this.

How rude is it to say that I enjoyed Majin and the Sacrificial Girl's Itch.io page significantly more than the game itself?

It is a page that offers so much. An incredible near-monochrome aesthetic with great dithering, weird ass sensory video 3D models, cool little guys, dungeon crawling and the cool prospect of diving deep into this weird, wonderful little world.

Sadly, the prospect is all you get. Majin starts as a game that indeed, contains the contents of those lovely screenshots. It is nice to see that weird guy that gives you extra health on the first stage. And its kinda intriguing the first time you're dumped into the cardbuilding combat.

From there, literally everything else is downhill. The primary focus of the card combat is baffling to me. I get the idea for there to be something in this dungeon crawler to actually do, but its such a complete nothing of a combat system that manages to thoroughly wear out it's welcome even in this game's hour runtime. It's such a stock deckbuilder, with enemies that at the very best will just alternate healing and doing set amounts of damage. Its super uninteractive, the balance is bad, and there's very little in the way of strategy. I don't know what it's trying to do.

The obvious solution would for Majin to ditch it entirely and be little more than a glorified walking simulator, but the floors of this dungeon themselves have nothing going for them. That one little guy and a diamond that tells you the story on each floor is literally all you get.

Short as it is, Majin stretches what it has way too far. Even as it is, had it been condensed into 5 floors instead of 15, the fatigue wouldnt set in nearly as badly. Had it piled it's 7 fantastic models into a 10 minute walking sim sort of thing even with the weak story, it could have been really somehing, even.

But it's not. Stick with the Itch page.

It's a pretty standard horror situation. Enter a room. Doors close behind you. Biohazard detected - and you're locked in with it. If you counted the amount of times this sort of thing happened in the dead space series you'd probably need a calculator. But this time, in the medical bay of the USG Ishimura in 2023 it's different. The lights are out. Necromorphs fall from the ceiling, lit up for frames by the impeccably timed remnants of environmental lighting that persists. I pull out the ripper - a buzzsaw launcher essentially - and start just going wild. Flesh squelches, sparks fly off the blade, giving tiny glimpses of the other assailants that threaten Isaac clarke. 30 seconds of near invisible ultraviolence later, and the lights turn on. But I'm still stomping, smashing R2 until the flesh has been pounded to sludge.

And in that moment I wonder. Why couldn't Demons Souls 2020 have been like this?

The ultimate strength of Dead Space '23 is it's willingness to change whilst having immense respect for the source material. Where other developers just lie and tell you that a remake is from the ground up, Dead Space truly is. The layout of the ishimura is changed, the story is vastly expanded, the combat takes a lot of new elements from 2/3, Zero g sections are basically all brand new and there's countless other things. It is in so many ways, nigh unrecognisable. I went back just now to watch some footage of the original and wow, it looks both like ass and almost fundementally different - and yet, DS23 feels unflinchingly faithful to it simultaneously.

The biggest change in aesthetic is the lighting and general ambiance. Whilst scenes like the one mentioned above are standouts, the whole game is far, far darker and more claustrophobic than the original. You're commonly stuck in areas with thick volumetric fogs and gasses, and relying on your torch to see. You will get ambushed more and jumpscared more, no doubt. But the general higher level of focus on this sort of thing feels very "right". The sheer level off fidelity in the game means everything that needs to be legible remains so.

Probably the biggest change overall though is the expansion of the story, particularly with regards to Isaac being a much more active character and actually having a voice, which is a particularly excellent performance from Gunner Wright. Again, it's measured, but goes a long way. The new side stuff is nice too, particularly the hunter sideplot, and just what generally feels like a good second pass on story elements. There's just a whole bunch of little changes that feel like "oh yeah that makes that moment work a bit better" which add up to a pretty hefty improvement. Great stuff!

And it gives me so much pleasure to say it's all just like that. The new layout of the ishimura is spot on, giving it a better sense of space as you can now move inbetween the tram hubs through passageways, and the locations themselves are now more differentiated in aesthetic whilst still clearly all being of the same ishimura "vibe".

I do have some issues with the remake - I do seriously think cutting maybe one or two chapters would improve the game a lot overall as there is a real sense that Isaac is just running errands for like 2/3 of the game and then the plot starts - but I understand that's probably a step too far for many and I get it. It is also a little bit buggy - not bad by any means but when everything is so polished otherwise a few AI quirks and weird effects do stand out a bit - but in the time ive been writing this up a patch has already gone out to fix a fair amount of it.

It's a fantastic remake. On a very similar level to Residen Evil 2's and i think it would be fair to say in many regards it exceeds it. It makes me appreciate that original game more too - a game which packaged together the right bunch of Gen 7 tropes, obvious sci fi horror influences, and cults to put together something that stood out, and for a while the series absolutely gave it's era of Resident Evil a run for it's money.

It really feels like Dead Space has found it's new steward in EA Motive (who have previously only made bad star wars games what the hell) - and I think it speaks to the regard i hold in this remake in that if they go on to make a new Dead Space - i'd be more than good with it.

Still, would have been nice if EA didn't murder this series and Visceral in the first place.