ConeCvltist
YOU -- "But what if humanity keeps letting us down?"
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "Nobody said that fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up."
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "I guess you can say we believe it *because* it's impossible. It's our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain... like this..."
---
A 2 week old fetid corpse hangs from a tree, a ghastly sight; a human life reduced to a macabre piñata for small children to pelt stones at in a twisted idea of entertainment. The children themselves, a hopped-up junkie and a nameless orphan respectively, both the result of a broken system that has unequivocally failed them. The district of Martinaise, pockmarked by the remnants of revolutionary war, abandoned by the world at large, it and its people subject to the pissing contests of petty government officials to see who is lumped with the task of looking after the place, the site of a months-long, on-the-brink-of-warfare labor dispute that's about to boil over with the lynching of a PMC soldier who was meant to "defuse" the situation. All of this, left to the hands of a suicidal, vice-riddled husk of a cop who can barely get his necktie down from the ceiling fan without potentially going into cardiac arrest. Disco Elysium is an undeniably depressing experience that isn't afraid to cover the messy spectrum of humanity, from insane race-realist phrenologists to meth-addled children to every kind of ghoulish bureaucrat under the sun. The district of Martinaise, as fictional as it is, is a place I've seen before, reflected in the streets, reflected in the people, reflected in the system; an undeniably full-faced look at the horrors faced by those below, and the resulting apathy expressed by those above.
---
SUGGESTION -- Brother, you should put me in front of a firing squad. I have no words for how I failed you.
---
Every aspect of Disco Elysium reflects its overall theme of "failure". Martinaise itself has been failed by the institutions meant to help it, abandoned by the powers that be, who only intervene when it looks like anyone is trying to enact change. NPCs can reminisce on days gone by, of the tragedies in their past, or of their cynical rebuke of the future. The various schools of political thought you can adopt and their representatives are mercilessly picked apart, from the Communists too entrenched in theory to take notice of the suffering around them, to the frankly pathetic fascists who use their prejudiced beliefs to shield themselves from their own flaws. Our protagonist is constantly haunted by his past and even starts the game recovering from his own self-destructive ways, and on a gameplay level, the way that our intrepid detective can fumble the bag in nearly every way imaginable and still be allowed to make progress in investigations and sidequests is commendable. Failure is so integral, so vital to Disco Elysium that it's not only an aspect deeply ingrained in its story, but also its very gameplay.
---
VOLITION [Easy: Success] -- No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.
---
And yet, despite this cloying cynicism and acknowledgement of the ugliness of reality, Disco Elysium is magical because of the fact that it ultimately believes that there is a world worth fighting for in the end. It would be incredibly easy to be defeatist in the face of such constant, institutional and societal failure we are presented with in Revachol, to be ceaselessly apathetic in the face of your own overwhelming shortcomings, to fall back into the comfort of old vices instead of facing our problems head on. Still, Disco Elysium has that fire inside of it, an untapped hatred for fence-sitting, for passivity in the face of oppression and valuing the status quo over any meaningful change. Roll up your sleeves and fight for a better future.
---
RHETORIC -- "You've built it before, they've built it before. Hasn't really worked out yet, but neither has love -- should we just stop building love, too?"
---
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "In dark times, should the stars also go out?"
---
RHETORIC -- "Say one of these fascist or communist things or fuck off."
---
Disco Elysium believes in the people. It believes in humanity, no matter how messy our supposed paragons are, or how flawed our beliefs and values can be, or how cyclical we can be in the face of it all. In a city plagued by an inability to move on, Disco Elysium says that there is always a possibility of change. If two broke Communists and a junkie wino can defy the very laws of physics in a slummy apartment, no matter how briefly, with the power of their faith and co-operation; imagine what we could do as a group. As a city. As a species.
Disco Elysium says that the cup is half full. Even if we won't see the own fruits of our labor in our lifetimes, it still looks you in the eyes and says:
"The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it," a conviction belted out by the youths of tomorrow.
"Un jour je serai de retour près de toi", written in bright burning letters across a market square.
"TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE/ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD--FOR NEW PEOPLE/IT IS TOO LATE FOR US," painted on the side of an eight-story tenement.
"Disco Inferno...," a lone voice belted out through a boombox's speakers across a frost-bitten sea.
---
MANKIND, BE VIGILANT; WE LOVED YOU
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "Nobody said that fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up."
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "I guess you can say we believe it *because* it's impossible. It's our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain... like this..."
---
A 2 week old fetid corpse hangs from a tree, a ghastly sight; a human life reduced to a macabre piñata for small children to pelt stones at in a twisted idea of entertainment. The children themselves, a hopped-up junkie and a nameless orphan respectively, both the result of a broken system that has unequivocally failed them. The district of Martinaise, pockmarked by the remnants of revolutionary war, abandoned by the world at large, it and its people subject to the pissing contests of petty government officials to see who is lumped with the task of looking after the place, the site of a months-long, on-the-brink-of-warfare labor dispute that's about to boil over with the lynching of a PMC soldier who was meant to "defuse" the situation. All of this, left to the hands of a suicidal, vice-riddled husk of a cop who can barely get his necktie down from the ceiling fan without potentially going into cardiac arrest. Disco Elysium is an undeniably depressing experience that isn't afraid to cover the messy spectrum of humanity, from insane race-realist phrenologists to meth-addled children to every kind of ghoulish bureaucrat under the sun. The district of Martinaise, as fictional as it is, is a place I've seen before, reflected in the streets, reflected in the people, reflected in the system; an undeniably full-faced look at the horrors faced by those below, and the resulting apathy expressed by those above.
---
SUGGESTION -- Brother, you should put me in front of a firing squad. I have no words for how I failed you.
---
Every aspect of Disco Elysium reflects its overall theme of "failure". Martinaise itself has been failed by the institutions meant to help it, abandoned by the powers that be, who only intervene when it looks like anyone is trying to enact change. NPCs can reminisce on days gone by, of the tragedies in their past, or of their cynical rebuke of the future. The various schools of political thought you can adopt and their representatives are mercilessly picked apart, from the Communists too entrenched in theory to take notice of the suffering around them, to the frankly pathetic fascists who use their prejudiced beliefs to shield themselves from their own flaws. Our protagonist is constantly haunted by his past and even starts the game recovering from his own self-destructive ways, and on a gameplay level, the way that our intrepid detective can fumble the bag in nearly every way imaginable and still be allowed to make progress in investigations and sidequests is commendable. Failure is so integral, so vital to Disco Elysium that it's not only an aspect deeply ingrained in its story, but also its very gameplay.
---
VOLITION [Easy: Success] -- No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.
---
And yet, despite this cloying cynicism and acknowledgement of the ugliness of reality, Disco Elysium is magical because of the fact that it ultimately believes that there is a world worth fighting for in the end. It would be incredibly easy to be defeatist in the face of such constant, institutional and societal failure we are presented with in Revachol, to be ceaselessly apathetic in the face of your own overwhelming shortcomings, to fall back into the comfort of old vices instead of facing our problems head on. Still, Disco Elysium has that fire inside of it, an untapped hatred for fence-sitting, for passivity in the face of oppression and valuing the status quo over any meaningful change. Roll up your sleeves and fight for a better future.
---
RHETORIC -- "You've built it before, they've built it before. Hasn't really worked out yet, but neither has love -- should we just stop building love, too?"
---
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "In dark times, should the stars also go out?"
---
RHETORIC -- "Say one of these fascist or communist things or fuck off."
---
Disco Elysium believes in the people. It believes in humanity, no matter how messy our supposed paragons are, or how flawed our beliefs and values can be, or how cyclical we can be in the face of it all. In a city plagued by an inability to move on, Disco Elysium says that there is always a possibility of change. If two broke Communists and a junkie wino can defy the very laws of physics in a slummy apartment, no matter how briefly, with the power of their faith and co-operation; imagine what we could do as a group. As a city. As a species.
Disco Elysium says that the cup is half full. Even if we won't see the own fruits of our labor in our lifetimes, it still looks you in the eyes and says:
"The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it," a conviction belted out by the youths of tomorrow.
"Un jour je serai de retour près de toi", written in bright burning letters across a market square.
"TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE/ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD--FOR NEW PEOPLE/IT IS TOO LATE FOR US," painted on the side of an eight-story tenement.
"Disco Inferno...," a lone voice belted out through a boombox's speakers across a frost-bitten sea.
---
MANKIND, BE VIGILANT; WE LOVED YOU
2003
On September 11th, 2001, the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed, the aftermath of which would change American culture in ways we can still pinpoint decades after the fact. The greater minutia of the War on Terror or the Bush Administration is not something I'll be delving into here, but what's important here is that specific period of time, where the tragedy was still warm on American minds and the War on Terror was just beginning, because it's that specific cultural maelstrom that gives birth to something like Postal 2.
The reason 9/11 is so important to Postal 2 is due to the fact that the transgressive nature of the game lies in its nihilistic social and political commentary about America: From offensive Muslim stereotypes modeled after Bin-Laden who violently ransack churches and yell about Allah, to a 1:1 recreation of the botched Waco Siege operation by the ATF, to a whole in-game task about getting signatures for a petition dedicated to making whiny congressmen play video games, Postal 2 is a game that could have only been made in the transitional post-9/11 period between 1997 and 2003. Yet, despite Postal 2's attempts to be an apolitical parody piece that spares no demographic or political party, there are some aspects to the parody that belie a reflection of post-9/11 American society. The Postal Dude, despite being a violent lunatic who has no qualms about violence, is a model American: He votes on Voting Day, he loves the Second Amendment, and he makes time to go to Church. The fact that the Muslim stereotypes are all part of a terrorist organization, yet reside in the heart of small-town Americana, running the grocery store and hosting their base of operations right in The Postal Dude's backyard, reflect the Islamophobia that was rampant in American culture at the time due to the 9/11 Attacks, the paranoid ignorance that led to wide-spread discrimination against Muslim-Americans. Compound this with critiques of the U.S. Government, from rampant police brutality, to a recreation of the infamous Waco Siege, to the bombing of a Muslim terrorist camp in Apocalypse Weekend by a gung-ho, hyper-violent military force in a way that reflects the worst of the War in Iraq, the post-9/11 nature of the game is prominent in it's bloodstream. It's a perfect time capsule of the era, sensibilities and all.
Following in it's predecessor's footsteps, Postal 2 aims to be transgressive, in a much more aggressive sense than the original Postal, in a way that feels like a direct, personal response to the controversy courted by Postal upon its release. One of the first missions The Postal Dude embarks on is picking up his paycheck from an in-game replica of the Running With Scissors studio, where he works and interacts with real-life staff members in-game, before the studio is besieged by moral guardians protesting against violent video games, who hypocritically, launch a violent assault the studio and its staff. The Running With Scissors office in-game is crafted with love, with photos of staff on the wall, real-world photos of documents, meticulously crafted office spaces, and a whole faction of RWS NPCs that will always support The Postal Dude and whom you are allowed to kill with zero consequence. All of this paints a meta-context for the game going forth: A direct response to RWS' critics and cultural legacy, at a time where Joe Lieberman was still in the headlines and Mortal Kombat was being presented in court hearings on violent content in video games. Where Postal was a statement, Postal 2 is a response.
The most interesting part of Postal 2 as a response piece to the criticism of Postal is the fact that it's entirely possible to complete the game without a single kill. While the original Postal was a mass-shooting simulator that required you to kill in a commentary on the casualness with which we treat violence as entertainment, Postal 2 amped up it's transgression to the surface-level with the political commentary on America, but reworked the core gameplay loop in order to put the impetus for violence on the player. While there are systems in place for all manner of violence and crass actions from a myriad of murder implements to a functioning arson and urination mechanic, there are also mechanics for the mundane: waiting in line, paying for your goals, getting arrested peacefully and non-lethal takedown methods for every enemy you encounter. The meta nature of the game is pushed further than the interaction between Postal Dude and his creators at Running With Scissors, with a complete lack of a 4th wall as the Postal Dude comments on and interacts with the player in a mostly jeering way. The game itself taunts you with tedium and annoyance in an attempt to make you go postal, holding a finger an inch from your cheek while claiming to not touch you. The violence is shifted from a requirement to complete the game to an optional way of approaching a situation, and the casualness with which the average gamer will resort to violence ties into the main underlying theme of the series: the prevalence of violence in the media.
In our entertainment, violence is the most common language with which we communicate. Even in something as innocent as Mario, you still engage in violence to reach your goals, stomping on enemies and bosses, even if the violence is abstracted enough to not feel weird over it. This is not a condemnation of violence in our media, but simply an observation. Postal was so controversial because of the fact it stripped away the layer of dissonance we create by contextualizing the violence in real-world terms: a lone gunman engaging in meaningless violence to fulfill his goals. Postal 2's commentary on violence is much less upfront than the original Postal's, but it's still interesting in the detached way in which it lets the player engage in it. If you kill or if you don't, Postal 2 passes no judgement on your actions. It knows you'll resort to violence just because it's what you're conditioned to do as someone who plays video games, but the only thing goading you into engaging in said violence is the tedium in place in our own reality. It's a horrifically offensive, ultra-violent jankfest. It's cathartic form of virtual rebellion against the mundanity of everyday life.
"POSTAL 2 is only as violent as you are."
The reason 9/11 is so important to Postal 2 is due to the fact that the transgressive nature of the game lies in its nihilistic social and political commentary about America: From offensive Muslim stereotypes modeled after Bin-Laden who violently ransack churches and yell about Allah, to a 1:1 recreation of the botched Waco Siege operation by the ATF, to a whole in-game task about getting signatures for a petition dedicated to making whiny congressmen play video games, Postal 2 is a game that could have only been made in the transitional post-9/11 period between 1997 and 2003. Yet, despite Postal 2's attempts to be an apolitical parody piece that spares no demographic or political party, there are some aspects to the parody that belie a reflection of post-9/11 American society. The Postal Dude, despite being a violent lunatic who has no qualms about violence, is a model American: He votes on Voting Day, he loves the Second Amendment, and he makes time to go to Church. The fact that the Muslim stereotypes are all part of a terrorist organization, yet reside in the heart of small-town Americana, running the grocery store and hosting their base of operations right in The Postal Dude's backyard, reflect the Islamophobia that was rampant in American culture at the time due to the 9/11 Attacks, the paranoid ignorance that led to wide-spread discrimination against Muslim-Americans. Compound this with critiques of the U.S. Government, from rampant police brutality, to a recreation of the infamous Waco Siege, to the bombing of a Muslim terrorist camp in Apocalypse Weekend by a gung-ho, hyper-violent military force in a way that reflects the worst of the War in Iraq, the post-9/11 nature of the game is prominent in it's bloodstream. It's a perfect time capsule of the era, sensibilities and all.
Following in it's predecessor's footsteps, Postal 2 aims to be transgressive, in a much more aggressive sense than the original Postal, in a way that feels like a direct, personal response to the controversy courted by Postal upon its release. One of the first missions The Postal Dude embarks on is picking up his paycheck from an in-game replica of the Running With Scissors studio, where he works and interacts with real-life staff members in-game, before the studio is besieged by moral guardians protesting against violent video games, who hypocritically, launch a violent assault the studio and its staff. The Running With Scissors office in-game is crafted with love, with photos of staff on the wall, real-world photos of documents, meticulously crafted office spaces, and a whole faction of RWS NPCs that will always support The Postal Dude and whom you are allowed to kill with zero consequence. All of this paints a meta-context for the game going forth: A direct response to RWS' critics and cultural legacy, at a time where Joe Lieberman was still in the headlines and Mortal Kombat was being presented in court hearings on violent content in video games. Where Postal was a statement, Postal 2 is a response.
The most interesting part of Postal 2 as a response piece to the criticism of Postal is the fact that it's entirely possible to complete the game without a single kill. While the original Postal was a mass-shooting simulator that required you to kill in a commentary on the casualness with which we treat violence as entertainment, Postal 2 amped up it's transgression to the surface-level with the political commentary on America, but reworked the core gameplay loop in order to put the impetus for violence on the player. While there are systems in place for all manner of violence and crass actions from a myriad of murder implements to a functioning arson and urination mechanic, there are also mechanics for the mundane: waiting in line, paying for your goals, getting arrested peacefully and non-lethal takedown methods for every enemy you encounter. The meta nature of the game is pushed further than the interaction between Postal Dude and his creators at Running With Scissors, with a complete lack of a 4th wall as the Postal Dude comments on and interacts with the player in a mostly jeering way. The game itself taunts you with tedium and annoyance in an attempt to make you go postal, holding a finger an inch from your cheek while claiming to not touch you. The violence is shifted from a requirement to complete the game to an optional way of approaching a situation, and the casualness with which the average gamer will resort to violence ties into the main underlying theme of the series: the prevalence of violence in the media.
In our entertainment, violence is the most common language with which we communicate. Even in something as innocent as Mario, you still engage in violence to reach your goals, stomping on enemies and bosses, even if the violence is abstracted enough to not feel weird over it. This is not a condemnation of violence in our media, but simply an observation. Postal was so controversial because of the fact it stripped away the layer of dissonance we create by contextualizing the violence in real-world terms: a lone gunman engaging in meaningless violence to fulfill his goals. Postal 2's commentary on violence is much less upfront than the original Postal's, but it's still interesting in the detached way in which it lets the player engage in it. If you kill or if you don't, Postal 2 passes no judgement on your actions. It knows you'll resort to violence just because it's what you're conditioned to do as someone who plays video games, but the only thing goading you into engaging in said violence is the tedium in place in our own reality. It's a horrifically offensive, ultra-violent jankfest. It's cathartic form of virtual rebellion against the mundanity of everyday life.
"POSTAL 2 is only as violent as you are."
2014
Nekopara is a series of adult visual novels you've most likely heard of in passing from post-post-post-ironic weeaboos online who wear Ahegao hoodies in public and think being horny is a personality trait. It's the funny anime game about the catgirl cafe that's garnered a status comparable to something like Bad Rats: a gag gift best sent to your friends during a Steam sale for a quick laugh (which is how I obtained my copy back in high school), or something you play so your "hilarious" Steam status pops up on your friend's screens during their CS: GO matches. In honor of the holiday, I thought "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if I played the porn game about cat girls and published a review on it online?", but while I slogged through one of the most joyless visual novels I've ever read, I came away with a lot to ruminate on betwixt the standard anime hijinks and incestuous little sister jokes.
Now obviously, Nekopara is porn, and if you came here expecting anything other than the world's most boring set-up to catgirl hentai, you were barking up the wrong tree. But as I was reading through lines and lines of filler text and moeblob cuteness, I found myself thinking about the common archetypes you find in the female characters written for this sort of media: the incestuous little sister romance, the (worryingly) child-like girl, or in Nekopara's case, pets. These all have a connective through-line, which is a lack of independent agency and an innate dependency on a superior of some kind (usually the self-insert main character of the story.) This throughline isn't something specific to Japanese media by any means, but these are just some of the few I noticed while reading Vol. 1.
The very concept of catgirls as they are written in Nekopara are a bastard child of the aforementioned archetypes mentioned previously: They're pretty explicitly stated in the text to be analogous to cats, displaying numerous cat-like mannerisms. They have a limited understanding of human society and abstract concepts (money, emotional awareness, etc.) and are even required to be "chipped" in a sense via the possession of an "Independent Action Permit", a mix between an ID and a Driver's License, in order to be allowed in polite society without being detained by Animal Control. They mature at roughly the same rate as a regular cat (it's stated offhandedly that a 6 month old catgirl is roughly equivalent to a 12 year old girl), but retain roughly the same intellect and mannerisms of a child. But most importantly for Nekopara's main intent, they can't bear human children, the existence of catgirl-human sexual relations is both normal and widely accepted alongside those who keep them as regular pets or family members in this society, and they are "excessively honest and uncomplicated", which means that emotional miscommunication and conflict basically never happens (unless its in service of anime tropes, like "jealous clingy tsundere").
What this means is that Nekopara's catgirls are the "idealized woman" for the target audience: a walking fleshlight in the shape of an girl, who has an innate attraction to the self-insert main character and will basically never reject them. A mirage of a character who only exists for pleasure. This is taken to the extreme in the context of Nekopara, in which the main character (who has helped raise the two leading catgirls ever since they were kittens and explicitly views them as daughters and family) enters a sexual relationship with what is essentially his pet cats/younger twin sisters, the ultimate fetishistic culmination of tropes to create the most dependent females possible for the express purpose of sexual pleasure. Incestuous threesomes and shower sex are sandwiched in-between the most trite rom-com anime scenarios and paragraphs of pure filler text to create the perfect visual novel for the modern-day weeb, the equivalent of a corporate blockbuster designed to appeal to the otaku equivalent of John Q. Public. This isn't an original conclusion by any means, and it's one that's not even necessarily a negative in terms of Nekopara's main goal (be titillating and provide comfort to its target audience), but it's telling that the series can basically excise the naughty 18+ bits from its story and still achieve success in other medium adaptations with little editing to the main girls' writing.
It's a formula that obviously works: Nekopara has numerous sequels, spinoffs and is one of the biggest rags-to-riches success stories to come from the eroge scene in recent memory. It's the kind of monumental success that makes someone with an ahegao anime girl avatar on Twitter thrust their arms towards the sky in joy to celebrate the "Based" culture of the Land of the Rising Sun, as if the success of an eroge where a guy sticks his dick in his pet cat is some kind of cultural dunk on the puritanical Westerners who would seek to deprive them of their catgirl waifus. Nekopara wasn't the first, nor was it the last time a bog-standard anime-flavored media property with weird sexual content and weirder fans is used as another lamppost for the proverbial moths to flock to. It's just another drop in the bucket as far as weeaboo culture is concerned.
Now obviously, Nekopara is porn, and if you came here expecting anything other than the world's most boring set-up to catgirl hentai, you were barking up the wrong tree. But as I was reading through lines and lines of filler text and moeblob cuteness, I found myself thinking about the common archetypes you find in the female characters written for this sort of media: the incestuous little sister romance, the (worryingly) child-like girl, or in Nekopara's case, pets. These all have a connective through-line, which is a lack of independent agency and an innate dependency on a superior of some kind (usually the self-insert main character of the story.) This throughline isn't something specific to Japanese media by any means, but these are just some of the few I noticed while reading Vol. 1.
The very concept of catgirls as they are written in Nekopara are a bastard child of the aforementioned archetypes mentioned previously: They're pretty explicitly stated in the text to be analogous to cats, displaying numerous cat-like mannerisms. They have a limited understanding of human society and abstract concepts (money, emotional awareness, etc.) and are even required to be "chipped" in a sense via the possession of an "Independent Action Permit", a mix between an ID and a Driver's License, in order to be allowed in polite society without being detained by Animal Control. They mature at roughly the same rate as a regular cat (it's stated offhandedly that a 6 month old catgirl is roughly equivalent to a 12 year old girl), but retain roughly the same intellect and mannerisms of a child. But most importantly for Nekopara's main intent, they can't bear human children, the existence of catgirl-human sexual relations is both normal and widely accepted alongside those who keep them as regular pets or family members in this society, and they are "excessively honest and uncomplicated", which means that emotional miscommunication and conflict basically never happens (unless its in service of anime tropes, like "jealous clingy tsundere").
What this means is that Nekopara's catgirls are the "idealized woman" for the target audience: a walking fleshlight in the shape of an girl, who has an innate attraction to the self-insert main character and will basically never reject them. A mirage of a character who only exists for pleasure. This is taken to the extreme in the context of Nekopara, in which the main character (who has helped raise the two leading catgirls ever since they were kittens and explicitly views them as daughters and family) enters a sexual relationship with what is essentially his pet cats/younger twin sisters, the ultimate fetishistic culmination of tropes to create the most dependent females possible for the express purpose of sexual pleasure. Incestuous threesomes and shower sex are sandwiched in-between the most trite rom-com anime scenarios and paragraphs of pure filler text to create the perfect visual novel for the modern-day weeb, the equivalent of a corporate blockbuster designed to appeal to the otaku equivalent of John Q. Public. This isn't an original conclusion by any means, and it's one that's not even necessarily a negative in terms of Nekopara's main goal (be titillating and provide comfort to its target audience), but it's telling that the series can basically excise the naughty 18+ bits from its story and still achieve success in other medium adaptations with little editing to the main girls' writing.
It's a formula that obviously works: Nekopara has numerous sequels, spinoffs and is one of the biggest rags-to-riches success stories to come from the eroge scene in recent memory. It's the kind of monumental success that makes someone with an ahegao anime girl avatar on Twitter thrust their arms towards the sky in joy to celebrate the "Based" culture of the Land of the Rising Sun, as if the success of an eroge where a guy sticks his dick in his pet cat is some kind of cultural dunk on the puritanical Westerners who would seek to deprive them of their catgirl waifus. Nekopara wasn't the first, nor was it the last time a bog-standard anime-flavored media property with weird sexual content and weirder fans is used as another lamppost for the proverbial moths to flock to. It's just another drop in the bucket as far as weeaboo culture is concerned.
2020
Recommended by XenonNV as part of this list.
Partway through OMORI it dawned on me that there's a timeline where this game managed to release when I was in high school and I would've 100% made it a core facet of my personality for years.
OMORI is more likely than not the game that comes to everyone's mind when they think of the quintessential "Quirky Depression Earthbirth RPG", the hypothetical dead horse that encapsulates a lot of people's gripes with the modern indie scene and all it's eccentricities, and, to concede to that stereotyped image somewhat, it's for the most part true. OMORI is part lighthearted and surreal RPG about the titular main character and his adventures in the wonderfully quirky dream world of Headspace, and part mental health story about Omori's real-life counterpart Sunny and his struggles in the mundane reality of Faraway Town with his own mental health and relationships. The primary issue with OMORI however is not really with it's oft-maligned aesthetic or subject matter, but rather the fact that it's a complete tonal mess.
Headspace, as a dream world inside of Sunny's head, is obviously allowed to be a little surreal, as it's where most of the game's Earthbound DNA is apparent, from it's cutesy enemies to it's fun cast of eccentric NPCs and elevated sense of reality where anything goes. It's where 90% of OMORI takes place and is, for the most part, incredibly charming and fun. The tonal issues start to become apparent though when the Headspace sections lead into the Faraway Town segments, where, despite supposedly taking place in reality, still have a little too much whimsy and Earthbound-esque atmosphere. There's still wacky NPCs to talk to and goofy part-time jobs to have, which, while still enjoyable, isn't enough of a contrast to Headspace and doesn't mesh well with the relatively grounded and serious interpersonal drama between the core cast that revolves around grief and loss. It results in OMORI feeling like two disparate Quirky Earthbound-likes being duct-taped together without any real cohesiveness between the two halves, and only causes more issues down the line when the plot in Faraway town starts to actually go somewhere.
Headspace initially starts off as a low-stakes kid's adventure, which is perfectly fine for the Prologue, where it uses that initial impression to disarm the player when they first enter Faraway Town in the real world, but as is soon made apparent, Headspace is pure fluff, a complete nothing-burger that only really serves to pad out the runtime. Compared to the snappy pace and relative brevity of Faraway Town, Headspace tends to drag on for hours at a time with absolutely jack-shit happening, both literally and thematically. The various sprite animations, fancy textbox effects and UI is very charming and appealing at first, but the frequent use of them & their annoying length results in a start-and-stop gameplay flow that delights in wasting your time, and it's an issue that only gets worse as the game goes on, where long stretches of overly-goofy filler plot happen without anything substantive to bite into, that do nothing but pad out the runtime so the game can hit an arbitrary length quota. In addition to this, the idea of Headspace reflecting Sunny's inner thoughts is frankly underutilized, when that connection to the main character's subconscious could've been used to give the lengthy Headspace segments some more weighty thematic story relevance beyond simple visual callbacks to Faraway Town.
Despite the long stretches of nothing filler that feel like having a sugar crash, when OMORI wants to get serious, it can actually deliver more often than not. The subtle underlying horror of Headspace is pretty effective when it wants to be, and the drama of Faraway Town, while coming across like an afterschool PSA more often than not, is actually quite engaging and emotionally competent, but because OMORI is trying to maintain it's pastel Sanrio Lo-Fi Kawaii Future Bass Tumblr aesthetic at all times, this results in even the serious moments lacking punch because of the fact it's edges have been sanded down as smooth as possible for the sake of palatability. This is made most apparent with it's final plot twist at the very end of the game, which, without going into spoilers, is an insanely dark and out-of-left-field bout of tonal whiplash that is not only a massive misstep in the solid framework of the game's plot up until then, but is scrapping against the game's Instagram Self-Care™ Awareness Post-ass final message of overcoming depression and self-doubt by not being afraid to rely on your friends for help. It's way too big of an elephant to ignore and not something you can just drop in the player's lap and treat with the same levity with which the more mundane mental health struggles are in the plot. It's the most frustrating aspect of OMORI by far because I can see how it could work! It's not even presented badly in-game (in fact, the reveal is one of my favorite moment of the game bar none), but it's consistent adherence to the vibe initially established by Headspace ends up dragging what should be a master-class twist down hard.
OMORI is a frustrating, mixed bag of a game I want to like more than I do. It's playing all the right notes, and even manages to tug at my worn-out heartstrings with a surprising frequency, and I can see the appeal behind it; how it's managed to gather such a devoted fanbase that was emotionally wrecked by OMORI's style and presentation. However, it's too bloated, too messy and too toothless to make the landing it desperately wants to make. The video game equivalent of eating raw sugar by the handful.
Partway through OMORI it dawned on me that there's a timeline where this game managed to release when I was in high school and I would've 100% made it a core facet of my personality for years.
OMORI is more likely than not the game that comes to everyone's mind when they think of the quintessential "Quirky Depression Earthbirth RPG", the hypothetical dead horse that encapsulates a lot of people's gripes with the modern indie scene and all it's eccentricities, and, to concede to that stereotyped image somewhat, it's for the most part true. OMORI is part lighthearted and surreal RPG about the titular main character and his adventures in the wonderfully quirky dream world of Headspace, and part mental health story about Omori's real-life counterpart Sunny and his struggles in the mundane reality of Faraway Town with his own mental health and relationships. The primary issue with OMORI however is not really with it's oft-maligned aesthetic or subject matter, but rather the fact that it's a complete tonal mess.
Headspace, as a dream world inside of Sunny's head, is obviously allowed to be a little surreal, as it's where most of the game's Earthbound DNA is apparent, from it's cutesy enemies to it's fun cast of eccentric NPCs and elevated sense of reality where anything goes. It's where 90% of OMORI takes place and is, for the most part, incredibly charming and fun. The tonal issues start to become apparent though when the Headspace sections lead into the Faraway Town segments, where, despite supposedly taking place in reality, still have a little too much whimsy and Earthbound-esque atmosphere. There's still wacky NPCs to talk to and goofy part-time jobs to have, which, while still enjoyable, isn't enough of a contrast to Headspace and doesn't mesh well with the relatively grounded and serious interpersonal drama between the core cast that revolves around grief and loss. It results in OMORI feeling like two disparate Quirky Earthbound-likes being duct-taped together without any real cohesiveness between the two halves, and only causes more issues down the line when the plot in Faraway town starts to actually go somewhere.
Headspace initially starts off as a low-stakes kid's adventure, which is perfectly fine for the Prologue, where it uses that initial impression to disarm the player when they first enter Faraway Town in the real world, but as is soon made apparent, Headspace is pure fluff, a complete nothing-burger that only really serves to pad out the runtime. Compared to the snappy pace and relative brevity of Faraway Town, Headspace tends to drag on for hours at a time with absolutely jack-shit happening, both literally and thematically. The various sprite animations, fancy textbox effects and UI is very charming and appealing at first, but the frequent use of them & their annoying length results in a start-and-stop gameplay flow that delights in wasting your time, and it's an issue that only gets worse as the game goes on, where long stretches of overly-goofy filler plot happen without anything substantive to bite into, that do nothing but pad out the runtime so the game can hit an arbitrary length quota. In addition to this, the idea of Headspace reflecting Sunny's inner thoughts is frankly underutilized, when that connection to the main character's subconscious could've been used to give the lengthy Headspace segments some more weighty thematic story relevance beyond simple visual callbacks to Faraway Town.
Despite the long stretches of nothing filler that feel like having a sugar crash, when OMORI wants to get serious, it can actually deliver more often than not. The subtle underlying horror of Headspace is pretty effective when it wants to be, and the drama of Faraway Town, while coming across like an afterschool PSA more often than not, is actually quite engaging and emotionally competent, but because OMORI is trying to maintain it's pastel Sanrio Lo-Fi Kawaii Future Bass Tumblr aesthetic at all times, this results in even the serious moments lacking punch because of the fact it's edges have been sanded down as smooth as possible for the sake of palatability. This is made most apparent with it's final plot twist at the very end of the game, which, without going into spoilers, is an insanely dark and out-of-left-field bout of tonal whiplash that is not only a massive misstep in the solid framework of the game's plot up until then, but is scrapping against the game's Instagram Self-Care™ Awareness Post-ass final message of overcoming depression and self-doubt by not being afraid to rely on your friends for help. It's way too big of an elephant to ignore and not something you can just drop in the player's lap and treat with the same levity with which the more mundane mental health struggles are in the plot. It's the most frustrating aspect of OMORI by far because I can see how it could work! It's not even presented badly in-game (in fact, the reveal is one of my favorite moment of the game bar none), but it's consistent adherence to the vibe initially established by Headspace ends up dragging what should be a master-class twist down hard.
OMORI is a frustrating, mixed bag of a game I want to like more than I do. It's playing all the right notes, and even manages to tug at my worn-out heartstrings with a surprising frequency, and I can see the appeal behind it; how it's managed to gather such a devoted fanbase that was emotionally wrecked by OMORI's style and presentation. However, it's too bloated, too messy and too toothless to make the landing it desperately wants to make. The video game equivalent of eating raw sugar by the handful.
In 2006, the first Silent Hill game was adapted into a feature film by French filmmaker Christopher Gans, and while it was an overall critical failure plagued by many of the same shortcomings that are seemingly inherent to the video game movie genre as a whole, what I found interesting was how many of the elements of the film seemed to foreshadow the eventual future of the franchise. The way the film utilized its source material was full of a passion for the series' style & sound, but failed to utilize any of the iconic iconography that it paraded around with any real substance; a frankly nonsensical and masturbatory worship of recognizable figures like Pyramid Head for audiences to point to and go "That's the thing from the one I like!", and a focus on the series' legacy instead of its influences that would lead to the cyclical repetition of the series' Greatest Hits without any thoughts for the future, and there is no better representation of this phenomena than Silent Hill: Homecoming.
Silent Hill: Homecoming is Silent Hill gone direct to video, a foreign pastiche akin to Spike Lee's "Oldboy" that's less 'psychological horror' and more 'creature feature', a story less interested in isolation and character studies and more in wisecracking black guys who go "Ah hell naaaah!" & "Shieeeeet!". It's a game more interested in letting our boot boy protagonist utilize his 'epic' military training to dodge roll & combo hordes of generic monsters rather than indulging in any feelings of powerlessness or vulnerability. It's a game that's afraid of ambiguity and subtlety, where the all-American hero has to cock his shotgun menacingly at monsters and walk into the sunset with his generic blonde love interest, where the abstract is downplayed for the concrete, so the main plot has to be about specific human error instead of any institutional trauma or individual failings. A game that can't bear to leave you alone, so humans are always a hair's breath away, whether it be the NPCs you're always encountering for cutscenes with dialogue wheel options to choose from, or the generic human cult members you face during the climax.
A story about a war veteran coming to Silent Hill was ripe with potential for symbolism and interesting stories to tell, and Homecoming does have its moments where its presentation almost reaches the heights of its predecessors, but in Homecoming's attempts to improve upon its foundations, it reveals it's true form: a vapid and misguided entry that doesn't have a single original idea in its bones. Unlike Team Silent's wide array of influences, stretching from Dostoevsky's "Crime & Punishment" to the art of Heironymous Bosch, Homecoming's only frame of reference is Silent Hill itself, a capitalistic ouroboros of concepts and ideas regurgitated wholesale to sell recognizability. Much of this game's imagery and backstory is lifted from the film, in a way that makes the whole experience feel like a game based on the film's mythos more than anything Team Silent established. Monsters like the Bubble Head Nurses and Pyramid Head are dolled up and wheeled out for the equivalent of a money shot, and even the plot itself is a simple retread of Silent Hill 2's in a misguided attempt to re-sell success, telling a story about grief & loss that's delivered in the language of a B-horror flick that's about as subtle as a brick to the dome.
But Homecoming's biggest failing is that even without the historic legacy of the Silent Hill brand dragging it down, it's just a fucking boring game. It's an utterly generic, buggy and tedious survival horror experience that's trapped in a Catch-22: A game that would never be published without the name of Silent Hill attached, but one who's greatest failings are due to being saddled with the legacy Silent Hill entails. A game trapped in a hell of its own creation made of Pyramid Head figurines and Bubble Head Nurse pin-up posters.
Silent Hill: Homecoming is Silent Hill gone direct to video, a foreign pastiche akin to Spike Lee's "Oldboy" that's less 'psychological horror' and more 'creature feature', a story less interested in isolation and character studies and more in wisecracking black guys who go "Ah hell naaaah!" & "Shieeeeet!". It's a game more interested in letting our boot boy protagonist utilize his 'epic' military training to dodge roll & combo hordes of generic monsters rather than indulging in any feelings of powerlessness or vulnerability. It's a game that's afraid of ambiguity and subtlety, where the all-American hero has to cock his shotgun menacingly at monsters and walk into the sunset with his generic blonde love interest, where the abstract is downplayed for the concrete, so the main plot has to be about specific human error instead of any institutional trauma or individual failings. A game that can't bear to leave you alone, so humans are always a hair's breath away, whether it be the NPCs you're always encountering for cutscenes with dialogue wheel options to choose from, or the generic human cult members you face during the climax.
A story about a war veteran coming to Silent Hill was ripe with potential for symbolism and interesting stories to tell, and Homecoming does have its moments where its presentation almost reaches the heights of its predecessors, but in Homecoming's attempts to improve upon its foundations, it reveals it's true form: a vapid and misguided entry that doesn't have a single original idea in its bones. Unlike Team Silent's wide array of influences, stretching from Dostoevsky's "Crime & Punishment" to the art of Heironymous Bosch, Homecoming's only frame of reference is Silent Hill itself, a capitalistic ouroboros of concepts and ideas regurgitated wholesale to sell recognizability. Much of this game's imagery and backstory is lifted from the film, in a way that makes the whole experience feel like a game based on the film's mythos more than anything Team Silent established. Monsters like the Bubble Head Nurses and Pyramid Head are dolled up and wheeled out for the equivalent of a money shot, and even the plot itself is a simple retread of Silent Hill 2's in a misguided attempt to re-sell success, telling a story about grief & loss that's delivered in the language of a B-horror flick that's about as subtle as a brick to the dome.
But Homecoming's biggest failing is that even without the historic legacy of the Silent Hill brand dragging it down, it's just a fucking boring game. It's an utterly generic, buggy and tedious survival horror experience that's trapped in a Catch-22: A game that would never be published without the name of Silent Hill attached, but one who's greatest failings are due to being saddled with the legacy Silent Hill entails. A game trapped in a hell of its own creation made of Pyramid Head figurines and Bubble Head Nurse pin-up posters.
2005
The long drag of a cigarette beneath the city's smog, the urban firmament of glitzy neon signs illuminating a starless sky. Passersby are flagged down by salesmen trying to drag the drunk and the impressionable into hostess clubs, thugs crowd around shady alleyways and dingy dives, an evil eye aimed at any fool too brazen to wander too close. The city is an ecosystem all its own, a interconnected web of the unscrupulous and the downtrodden ensuring an uneasy system of checks and balances. Stand still and you will surely hear its heart beat.
The crowd gathers, and for a brief moment, the underworld deigns to show its belly to the world above. The sound of flesh meeting pavement, of skulls fracturing and limbs breaking, of glass shattering, bullets firing, the wails of a guitar, dirty and unrefined, as overconfident goons and gangsters punch above their weight class attempting to face the dragon as he tosses them aside like litter.
Yakuza is a filthy game, rough and weathered, a stark contrast to the polish of its successors in both sight and sound. It's a raw, intensely atmospheric game full of grungy guitars and rough characters, a game that seems to truly capture the feel of the streets: Quick. Dirty. Brutal, above all else. Without the bombast of microwaving someone's skull or over-the-top action movie antics, we're left with bottles stabbed into eyes, knives jabbed into guts, curb-stomps upon skulls and the desperate wailing of fists, a much more grounded attempt to capture the swift brutality of dirty street brawls.
Yakuza is a tale of blood money, of corruption, ruthlessness and the lingua franca of the fist. A story about the dangers of ambition, the follies of old men and their pride, the glitz and glamor of the criminal underworld, and the fate such a life seals for those who partake in it. The city of Kamurocho is a city that operates on the most primal of rules: Survival of the fittest. It's a city who's history is written in the blood of ruthless and told by those left standing at the end of it all. It's a hotspot for the hedonistic, and the eventual grave of those who've intertwined their fates with the enticing allure of the criminal lifestyle. It's a city with a bloodied history of urban warfare and shady backdoor politics it's waiting to tell.
Will you listen?
The crowd gathers, and for a brief moment, the underworld deigns to show its belly to the world above. The sound of flesh meeting pavement, of skulls fracturing and limbs breaking, of glass shattering, bullets firing, the wails of a guitar, dirty and unrefined, as overconfident goons and gangsters punch above their weight class attempting to face the dragon as he tosses them aside like litter.
Yakuza is a filthy game, rough and weathered, a stark contrast to the polish of its successors in both sight and sound. It's a raw, intensely atmospheric game full of grungy guitars and rough characters, a game that seems to truly capture the feel of the streets: Quick. Dirty. Brutal, above all else. Without the bombast of microwaving someone's skull or over-the-top action movie antics, we're left with bottles stabbed into eyes, knives jabbed into guts, curb-stomps upon skulls and the desperate wailing of fists, a much more grounded attempt to capture the swift brutality of dirty street brawls.
Yakuza is a tale of blood money, of corruption, ruthlessness and the lingua franca of the fist. A story about the dangers of ambition, the follies of old men and their pride, the glitz and glamor of the criminal underworld, and the fate such a life seals for those who partake in it. The city of Kamurocho is a city that operates on the most primal of rules: Survival of the fittest. It's a city who's history is written in the blood of ruthless and told by those left standing at the end of it all. It's a hotspot for the hedonistic, and the eventual grave of those who've intertwined their fates with the enticing allure of the criminal lifestyle. It's a city with a bloodied history of urban warfare and shady backdoor politics it's waiting to tell.
Will you listen?
1995
Recommended by maradona as part of this list.
If you're even the slightest bit adjacent to the kind of gaming circles that toss terms like 'kusoge' around, then what I'm about to talk about needs zero introduction. The legendarily bad Hong Kong 97 is a shmup about Chin; distant relative of Jackie Chan, kung-fu super soldier and high-functioning heroin addict, being tasked by Hong Kong's government to destroy a herd of "fuckin' ugly reds" 1.2 billion strong, as well as stop China's new super weapon: the giant reanimated head of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. If the frankly ridiculous plot synopsis and screenshots haven't tipped you off, Hong Kong 97 is taking the piss big time. The game was made in 2 days by it's creator, Kowloon Kurosawa, who purposefully wanted to make a shitty game to mock the game industry as a whole, and you can definitely feel it. The music was taken from a second-hand disc Kurosawa got in Shanghai Street, the sprites were collaged from various sources, such as newspapers, movie posters, Chinese propaganda and documentaries, and copies of the game were minted onto floppy discs via a SFC ROM copier. This slapdash approach to publication and development gives it this bizarrely engrossing mixed-media aesthetic that has no doubt aided it's reputation nowadays. But beyond the surface level enjoyment to be had by poking at it's poor quality as a game, there's a lot of interesting design choices made for Hong Kong 97 that deserve to be given a closer look.
See, Hong Kong 97 takes place during the Handover of Hong Kong, where Great Britain relinquished sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. Considering the tension between Mainland China and Hong Kong that exists to this day, a plot about an opioid-addicted super soldier killing the entire population of mainland China in order to keep Hong Kong clean is a little more than just surreal window dressing for the plot. In addition, the final boss is Deng Xiaoping, the "Architect of Modern China", and the man who imposed martial law during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. Couple this with the fact the only music you hear in-game being a 6 second loop of the Cultural Revolution-era children's song "I Love Beijing Tiananment" (specifically the part of the lyrics that translate to "I love Beijing Tiananmen, The sun rises above Tiananmen."), and the fact that some of the random backgrounds you can see in-game include Maoist propaganda and a picture of Mao Zedong, you can pretty quickly figure out that the game holds a strong anti-Communist sentiment, acting as a parody of typical state-issued jingoistic propaganda. When you take into account that the game's publisher, HappySoft Ltd. released another political satire game called "The Story of Kamikuishiki Village", which used a similar multi-media visual approach to lambast the Aum Shinrikyo cult, the idea of Hong Kong 97 being political satire isn't entirely out of the question. Because of this, I hold that Hong Kong 97 is less of a game and more of an interactive parody piece.
As a game, it's barely-functioning hot garbage, but aesthetically: it's unmatched. You have to see this shit in motion, even for just a minute to witness how absolutely unhinged this fucking game is. It's a batshit piece of political parody and wholeheartedly deserves it's status as the cream of the crop when it comes to kusoges.
If you're even the slightest bit adjacent to the kind of gaming circles that toss terms like 'kusoge' around, then what I'm about to talk about needs zero introduction. The legendarily bad Hong Kong 97 is a shmup about Chin; distant relative of Jackie Chan, kung-fu super soldier and high-functioning heroin addict, being tasked by Hong Kong's government to destroy a herd of "fuckin' ugly reds" 1.2 billion strong, as well as stop China's new super weapon: the giant reanimated head of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. If the frankly ridiculous plot synopsis and screenshots haven't tipped you off, Hong Kong 97 is taking the piss big time. The game was made in 2 days by it's creator, Kowloon Kurosawa, who purposefully wanted to make a shitty game to mock the game industry as a whole, and you can definitely feel it. The music was taken from a second-hand disc Kurosawa got in Shanghai Street, the sprites were collaged from various sources, such as newspapers, movie posters, Chinese propaganda and documentaries, and copies of the game were minted onto floppy discs via a SFC ROM copier. This slapdash approach to publication and development gives it this bizarrely engrossing mixed-media aesthetic that has no doubt aided it's reputation nowadays. But beyond the surface level enjoyment to be had by poking at it's poor quality as a game, there's a lot of interesting design choices made for Hong Kong 97 that deserve to be given a closer look.
See, Hong Kong 97 takes place during the Handover of Hong Kong, where Great Britain relinquished sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. Considering the tension between Mainland China and Hong Kong that exists to this day, a plot about an opioid-addicted super soldier killing the entire population of mainland China in order to keep Hong Kong clean is a little more than just surreal window dressing for the plot. In addition, the final boss is Deng Xiaoping, the "Architect of Modern China", and the man who imposed martial law during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. Couple this with the fact the only music you hear in-game being a 6 second loop of the Cultural Revolution-era children's song "I Love Beijing Tiananment" (specifically the part of the lyrics that translate to "I love Beijing Tiananmen, The sun rises above Tiananmen."), and the fact that some of the random backgrounds you can see in-game include Maoist propaganda and a picture of Mao Zedong, you can pretty quickly figure out that the game holds a strong anti-Communist sentiment, acting as a parody of typical state-issued jingoistic propaganda. When you take into account that the game's publisher, HappySoft Ltd. released another political satire game called "The Story of Kamikuishiki Village", which used a similar multi-media visual approach to lambast the Aum Shinrikyo cult, the idea of Hong Kong 97 being political satire isn't entirely out of the question. Because of this, I hold that Hong Kong 97 is less of a game and more of an interactive parody piece.
As a game, it's barely-functioning hot garbage, but aesthetically: it's unmatched. You have to see this shit in motion, even for just a minute to witness how absolutely unhinged this fucking game is. It's a batshit piece of political parody and wholeheartedly deserves it's status as the cream of the crop when it comes to kusoges.
2015
This review contains spoilers
Recommended by gomit as part of this list.
When I was in middle school, I pirated a copy of RPG Maker VX Ace and said "I'm going to make a video game." My very first project was a joke game based on those MLG memes (the air horns, the crosshairs, "MOM GET THE CAMERA!", the works) and it was rough. Even in the limited, easy-to-use confines of RPG Maker, I could barely figure out how to program a map transition, or even set up a basic variable flag. I managed to program one boss fight and gave up. Over the years, ideas would come and go, only ever ending up half-baked ideas that were excuses to try something new, like writing music or learning digital art. An isometric Bully-clone. A Persona 3-style dungeon crawler. The mandatory Quirky Earthbound-Inspired RPG that all indie developers make at some point. A cosmic-horror JRPG with anime girls. All of these ideas living in the margins of sketchbooks or as slap-dash digital sprites drawn with my shitty dollar store mouse. It would take me until I was 20 (7 whole years from the day I pirated that copy of VX Ace!) to actually publish my first completed project. I would feign to call myself a "game developer", but I bring this up because I think it's a substantial part of my life that colors my view of The Beginner's Guide.
The Beginner's Guide is an hour long interactive experience that serves as a commentary on both artist and audience, and the relationship between the two. Before the twist revealed in the second to last chapter of the game, the use of this fictional developer (Coda), their oeuvre, and the Director's Commentary provided by the psuedo-fictional caricature of The Beginner Guide's own creator (Wreden) weave this tale of artistic expression and burnout through the medium most infamous for how it chews up and spits out its creators: video games. The arc we witness of finding the joy in creation, fixating on some kind of platonic ideal for your work, before spiraling and losing your passion, realizing that you're burnt out and that throwing yourself in the grinder day-in day-out isn't going to give you the results you want is something that I as a struggling creative myself can sympathize with.
But after that twist is revealed, that Coda didn't burn out from creative strain, but from being subject to an audience that wanted to live vicariously through his work and pick apart his very being, there is a much more universal struggle revealed: the need for validation and external approval, and the purpose of art. Wreden using Coda's work to validate himself by presenting it to other people, despite Coda's wish to keep his work private; Wreden modifying Coda's games to provide more concrete meaning so as to fit in-line with Werden's sensibilities, even when it was established in an earlier chapter that Coda believed that games didn't need to be so objective or finished; Werden trying so hard to understand Coda's work that he armchair analyzes a creative, when Coda never meant nor really wanted his work to be so emotionally open and raw. The age of hours-long YouTube video essayists and Armchair Critics on Media Logging Websites (wink wink nudge nudge) have made all of this behavior resonate years after release, of people trying to gain validation by analyzing art and showing that they get it, using media as a springboard to share their own ideas and struggles, gain their own audience via their ability to read into art, commodifying the idea of the creative and their struggles to make their body of work seem so much more unique and genuine and meaningful. Publishing anything runs that risk but nowadays putting even the slightest fragment of your soul into something potentially thousands if not millions can observe and pick apart and psychoanalyze borders on cosmic horror.
It begs the question of what art and self-expression is supposed to do for an audience. Do we really know an artist just because they made something emotionally vulnerable? Do we know them even if the art isn't overtly personal? Is it bad to not look into a work? Is it bad to look too much into something? How much should we analyze of an author's persona, and at what point does it stop being media analysis and shift into armchair psychology? That last minute twist raises a lot of tough questions about how we as consumers engage with art and what makes it work so well is that the twist doesn't invalidate the first 95% of the game. It manages to be about two conflicting subjects without really cancelling each other out with the questions being raised by both halves of the game, and as both artist and critic, I don't have any real answers for the conundrums it presents. Would it have been better to look at this as a metaphor for Werden and his release of Stanley Parable, or is that doing exactly what the Werden in Beginner's Guide did by trying to read into someone's personal life based solely on their published work? Am I wrong to have tried to connect this piece of art to my own life experiences, or did it help enhance my enjoyment? Am I engaging with this medium correctly by writing all these words? Would I ever want this to happen to me and my own body of work?
Who knows.
When I was in middle school, I pirated a copy of RPG Maker VX Ace and said "I'm going to make a video game." My very first project was a joke game based on those MLG memes (the air horns, the crosshairs, "MOM GET THE CAMERA!", the works) and it was rough. Even in the limited, easy-to-use confines of RPG Maker, I could barely figure out how to program a map transition, or even set up a basic variable flag. I managed to program one boss fight and gave up. Over the years, ideas would come and go, only ever ending up half-baked ideas that were excuses to try something new, like writing music or learning digital art. An isometric Bully-clone. A Persona 3-style dungeon crawler. The mandatory Quirky Earthbound-Inspired RPG that all indie developers make at some point. A cosmic-horror JRPG with anime girls. All of these ideas living in the margins of sketchbooks or as slap-dash digital sprites drawn with my shitty dollar store mouse. It would take me until I was 20 (7 whole years from the day I pirated that copy of VX Ace!) to actually publish my first completed project. I would feign to call myself a "game developer", but I bring this up because I think it's a substantial part of my life that colors my view of The Beginner's Guide.
The Beginner's Guide is an hour long interactive experience that serves as a commentary on both artist and audience, and the relationship between the two. Before the twist revealed in the second to last chapter of the game, the use of this fictional developer (Coda), their oeuvre, and the Director's Commentary provided by the psuedo-fictional caricature of The Beginner Guide's own creator (Wreden) weave this tale of artistic expression and burnout through the medium most infamous for how it chews up and spits out its creators: video games. The arc we witness of finding the joy in creation, fixating on some kind of platonic ideal for your work, before spiraling and losing your passion, realizing that you're burnt out and that throwing yourself in the grinder day-in day-out isn't going to give you the results you want is something that I as a struggling creative myself can sympathize with.
But after that twist is revealed, that Coda didn't burn out from creative strain, but from being subject to an audience that wanted to live vicariously through his work and pick apart his very being, there is a much more universal struggle revealed: the need for validation and external approval, and the purpose of art. Wreden using Coda's work to validate himself by presenting it to other people, despite Coda's wish to keep his work private; Wreden modifying Coda's games to provide more concrete meaning so as to fit in-line with Werden's sensibilities, even when it was established in an earlier chapter that Coda believed that games didn't need to be so objective or finished; Werden trying so hard to understand Coda's work that he armchair analyzes a creative, when Coda never meant nor really wanted his work to be so emotionally open and raw. The age of hours-long YouTube video essayists and Armchair Critics on Media Logging Websites (wink wink nudge nudge) have made all of this behavior resonate years after release, of people trying to gain validation by analyzing art and showing that they get it, using media as a springboard to share their own ideas and struggles, gain their own audience via their ability to read into art, commodifying the idea of the creative and their struggles to make their body of work seem so much more unique and genuine and meaningful. Publishing anything runs that risk but nowadays putting even the slightest fragment of your soul into something potentially thousands if not millions can observe and pick apart and psychoanalyze borders on cosmic horror.
It begs the question of what art and self-expression is supposed to do for an audience. Do we really know an artist just because they made something emotionally vulnerable? Do we know them even if the art isn't overtly personal? Is it bad to not look into a work? Is it bad to look too much into something? How much should we analyze of an author's persona, and at what point does it stop being media analysis and shift into armchair psychology? That last minute twist raises a lot of tough questions about how we as consumers engage with art and what makes it work so well is that the twist doesn't invalidate the first 95% of the game. It manages to be about two conflicting subjects without really cancelling each other out with the questions being raised by both halves of the game, and as both artist and critic, I don't have any real answers for the conundrums it presents. Would it have been better to look at this as a metaphor for Werden and his release of Stanley Parable, or is that doing exactly what the Werden in Beginner's Guide did by trying to read into someone's personal life based solely on their published work? Am I wrong to have tried to connect this piece of art to my own life experiences, or did it help enhance my enjoyment? Am I engaging with this medium correctly by writing all these words? Would I ever want this to happen to me and my own body of work?
Who knows.
1997
Transgressive art is art that is made to outrage in some way. It's in the name after all: the word "transgress" means to go over some kind of boundary, which in transgressive art, usually comes in the form of shock value utilized for the purpose to offend. In gaming culture, it seems there's a rush to justify the medium's nature as an art form by propping up more palatable and marketable titles that seek to have that arthouse flair or some form of cinematic sensibility, but if gaming is to mature as a medium, we must be able to acknowledge the ugly and the transgressive, and to do so, we can look no further than 1997's Postal.
I'll cut to the chase: this game isn't very good. The arcade-style gameplay is incredibly mediocre and drawn out way too long for its comparatively short runtime, and it really runs out of interesting gameplay ideas about a quarter of the way in. However, if I am being completely honest, the gameplay of Postal is the least interesting thing about it. The most interesting part of Postal lies in everything else surrounding said gameplay.
Despite the series' reputation nowadays, the original Postal does not look nor play the way you think it would. Your goal is to defeat a certain percentage of hostiles on each map, and while civilians can roam the map and flee in terror and get mowed down en masse, the game neither explicitly rewards or condemns you for doing so. There's the occasional morbid joke from an NPC, or a glib one-liner from the Postal Dude's inner monologue, but the "mass shooter" angle is played mostly straight. The atmosphere is top-notch as your rampage is backed by both the diegetic background noise and the occasional piece of droning, industrial ambience designed to unnerve you and really put you into the headspace of madness. Playing on Hard mode opens each stage with a diary entry from the Postal Dude, detailing his descent into madness and his penchant for violence as he believes himself to be on a one-man crusade against a supposed chemical attack from the military that is turning the townsfolk insane. The final mission is a cutscene of the Postal Dude attempting to shoot up a school (predating the Columbine Shooting by 2 years!) but finding his weaponry utterly ineffective at harming children, before he passes out and is finally locked inside a mental institution as a narrator reads off the definition of "going postal," ascribing his violent rampage to the mundanities of everyday life.
While the series' change in tone with expansion packs & future installments, and the direct quotes from Running With Scissors' founder Vince Desi claiming that the game was meant to be "really fun and fast, action-paced" would give the idea that the game's tone is intended to be humorous, the way Postal frames its violence is very purposeful and is not as fun or humorous as they may have intended it to be. One of the most common themes explored in transgressive art is that of mental illness and psychological dissociation, and taking into consideration both Postal's premise and conclusion, there's certainly more thought put into its themes and message beyond being a careless murder spree. Postal posits its violence as a product of contemporary society in a very unflattering, raw light that suggests a grander ambition than the comedic action game angle they claimed it to be (and would eventually fully realize with Postal 2). While Postal 2 went off the deep end of parody and was firing on all cylinders to be as offensive as possible on all angles, the more subdued, classical transgressive nature of Postal actually felt like it had something more meaningful to say, even if it wasn't entirely on purpose. Postal's controversy held up a mirror to the nature of mindless violence in society; the raw, brutal nature of it removing any glitz or glamor that the media would normally use to paint such violence with so as to be "entertainment." It's an experiment born of spite who's creation and ensuing controversy could only come from the minds of disgruntled former edutainment developers who wanted to make a real impact and push the boundaries of acceptability in the gaming landscape. Postal is an ugly, transgressive game that kind of needed to be made for gaming as a whole to mature as an art form.
I'll cut to the chase: this game isn't very good. The arcade-style gameplay is incredibly mediocre and drawn out way too long for its comparatively short runtime, and it really runs out of interesting gameplay ideas about a quarter of the way in. However, if I am being completely honest, the gameplay of Postal is the least interesting thing about it. The most interesting part of Postal lies in everything else surrounding said gameplay.
Despite the series' reputation nowadays, the original Postal does not look nor play the way you think it would. Your goal is to defeat a certain percentage of hostiles on each map, and while civilians can roam the map and flee in terror and get mowed down en masse, the game neither explicitly rewards or condemns you for doing so. There's the occasional morbid joke from an NPC, or a glib one-liner from the Postal Dude's inner monologue, but the "mass shooter" angle is played mostly straight. The atmosphere is top-notch as your rampage is backed by both the diegetic background noise and the occasional piece of droning, industrial ambience designed to unnerve you and really put you into the headspace of madness. Playing on Hard mode opens each stage with a diary entry from the Postal Dude, detailing his descent into madness and his penchant for violence as he believes himself to be on a one-man crusade against a supposed chemical attack from the military that is turning the townsfolk insane. The final mission is a cutscene of the Postal Dude attempting to shoot up a school (predating the Columbine Shooting by 2 years!) but finding his weaponry utterly ineffective at harming children, before he passes out and is finally locked inside a mental institution as a narrator reads off the definition of "going postal," ascribing his violent rampage to the mundanities of everyday life.
While the series' change in tone with expansion packs & future installments, and the direct quotes from Running With Scissors' founder Vince Desi claiming that the game was meant to be "really fun and fast, action-paced" would give the idea that the game's tone is intended to be humorous, the way Postal frames its violence is very purposeful and is not as fun or humorous as they may have intended it to be. One of the most common themes explored in transgressive art is that of mental illness and psychological dissociation, and taking into consideration both Postal's premise and conclusion, there's certainly more thought put into its themes and message beyond being a careless murder spree. Postal posits its violence as a product of contemporary society in a very unflattering, raw light that suggests a grander ambition than the comedic action game angle they claimed it to be (and would eventually fully realize with Postal 2). While Postal 2 went off the deep end of parody and was firing on all cylinders to be as offensive as possible on all angles, the more subdued, classical transgressive nature of Postal actually felt like it had something more meaningful to say, even if it wasn't entirely on purpose. Postal's controversy held up a mirror to the nature of mindless violence in society; the raw, brutal nature of it removing any glitz or glamor that the media would normally use to paint such violence with so as to be "entertainment." It's an experiment born of spite who's creation and ensuing controversy could only come from the minds of disgruntled former edutainment developers who wanted to make a real impact and push the boundaries of acceptability in the gaming landscape. Postal is an ugly, transgressive game that kind of needed to be made for gaming as a whole to mature as an art form.
2003
Recommended by FernandTheFresh as part of this list.
[Content Warning: The Song of Saya (and by extension, what will be discussed in this review) contains content pertaining to sexual assault, gratuitous violence, and lolicon content. Read at your own discretion.]
An endless, twisting expanse of flesh and bone beneath a sky void of color and clouds. The sound of sinew creaking beneath footsteps as a wriggling mass of organs and eyeballs crawls past, speaking in tongues as endless mouths babble at you incessantly in a sickening farce resembling human speech. In this endless labyrinth of parodical biology, where every street looks like a Mandelbrot Fractal of bone and pus, every hallway the stifling intestine of some otherworldly leviathan, every room a humid mess of muscle and putrid, rotting skin, there is a girl, untarnished by this hell of red pulp and twitching tendons. Is she an oasis in this unrelenting terrorscape, or a sign of something far, far worse?
This is the premise of The Song of Saya. After getting into a near-fatal car accident and receiving an experimental brain surgery, Fuminori Sakisaka gains an extreme form of agnosia where everything he sees looks like its made of flesh and organs, everyone he meets looks like they stepped out of John Carpenter's "The Thing", and everything he smells and tastes is like raw sewage. The only thing keeping Fuminori from ending his own life is a mysterious young girl named Saya, who is the sole thing in Fuminori's terrorscape that still looks human. Right out the gate, The Song of Saya has a strong central hook. The horror is visceral and palpable from minute zero, the soundtrack is blaring this horrific Noise Rock present in even the downtempo tracks, and the presence of Saya brings up a lot of questions for the reader to consider within the first 5 minutes: Why is she untouched? What is her importance to Fuminori? If she's the only thing that looks human, what do people who aren't Fuminori perceive her as? Anyways, right after she's introduced, Fuminori is shown plowing Saya the Cronenberg Loli in a poorly-written sex scene, and I turn the game off.
Yeah, it's one of those.
While I'm no stranger to the Visual Novel medium's fraught relationship with eroge content, The Song of Saya's sheer graphic gratuitousness and general unpleasantness is what keeps it from really being a stand-out horror story. Beyond the well-rendered visceral imagery and intriguing cosmic horror elements, the relationship between Fuminori and Saya that serves as the emotional core of the plot is actually quite compelling. We watch their twisted relationship bloom as Fuminori slowly loses his humanity and morals as he descends deeper in love with Saya, and likewise, Saya slowly gains humanity in both the best and worst ways possible. In most good horror, it's that human emotional core at the center that makes it all work. Unfortunately, The Song of Saya is no Cronenberg's "The Fly", and is more analogous to something like "Mai-chan's Daily Life", or "A Serbian Film." It's a story full of absolutely abhorrent material, not limited to Cannibalism, Rape and implicit Pedophilia. Even barring Fuminori's agnosia, why he's going on about the beauty of someone that looks like a child to him and having sex with a pile of pig guts that resembles a child in his eyes is something that is not only never questioned by the narrative, but is something deliberately played up for eroticism by the narrative in its many grotesque sex scenes (Author's Note: Some people online will tell you that you are missing out on the full experience by playing the censored version on Steam. These people are not to be trusted, and you should steer clear of them. The only thing the Steam release removes is all the unnecessary sex scenes that are largely meant for the player to find erotic, and you are missing literally nothing by playing without the 18+ Patch).
Even barring that (which is a lot to bar if I'm being honest with you here), there's also two rape scenes also played for eroticism, one also including the lolicon content. While they do move the plot forward in a sense, even with the edited Steam release you can tell that these scenes were paragraphs of erotica meant to primarily titillate, while any implicit horror or plot impact is a secondary concern, which is a different kind of disgusting from the cannibalism and Meat-O-Vision the reader is subjected to. All of this taints The Song of Saya's other strengths, such as its soundtrack, its art, and its genuine moments of horror both subtle and overt, making The Song of Saya an incredibly hard sell to all but those with the absolute highest tolerance for quote un-quote "weeb shit". If it wasn't for this list, I probably wouldn't have ever touched this game. Which is why it's honestly kind of a bummer that if you took the overtly exploitative content out of the equation, The Song of Saya would probably be the best introductory Visual Novel for newcomers to the Visual Novel medium: it's short, it's easily accessible, and it manages to show off a lot of the medium's strengths without being too much of a slog. It's just a shame that all these qualities are in service of The Song of Saya. There are better visual novels for getting into the medium, and there are better cosmic horror stories that won't get you put on a watchlist. Steer clear, because you're not missing much.
...The soundtrack is pretty good though, give that a listen.
[Content Warning: The Song of Saya (and by extension, what will be discussed in this review) contains content pertaining to sexual assault, gratuitous violence, and lolicon content. Read at your own discretion.]
An endless, twisting expanse of flesh and bone beneath a sky void of color and clouds. The sound of sinew creaking beneath footsteps as a wriggling mass of organs and eyeballs crawls past, speaking in tongues as endless mouths babble at you incessantly in a sickening farce resembling human speech. In this endless labyrinth of parodical biology, where every street looks like a Mandelbrot Fractal of bone and pus, every hallway the stifling intestine of some otherworldly leviathan, every room a humid mess of muscle and putrid, rotting skin, there is a girl, untarnished by this hell of red pulp and twitching tendons. Is she an oasis in this unrelenting terrorscape, or a sign of something far, far worse?
This is the premise of The Song of Saya. After getting into a near-fatal car accident and receiving an experimental brain surgery, Fuminori Sakisaka gains an extreme form of agnosia where everything he sees looks like its made of flesh and organs, everyone he meets looks like they stepped out of John Carpenter's "The Thing", and everything he smells and tastes is like raw sewage. The only thing keeping Fuminori from ending his own life is a mysterious young girl named Saya, who is the sole thing in Fuminori's terrorscape that still looks human. Right out the gate, The Song of Saya has a strong central hook. The horror is visceral and palpable from minute zero, the soundtrack is blaring this horrific Noise Rock present in even the downtempo tracks, and the presence of Saya brings up a lot of questions for the reader to consider within the first 5 minutes: Why is she untouched? What is her importance to Fuminori? If she's the only thing that looks human, what do people who aren't Fuminori perceive her as? Anyways, right after she's introduced, Fuminori is shown plowing Saya the Cronenberg Loli in a poorly-written sex scene, and I turn the game off.
Yeah, it's one of those.
While I'm no stranger to the Visual Novel medium's fraught relationship with eroge content, The Song of Saya's sheer graphic gratuitousness and general unpleasantness is what keeps it from really being a stand-out horror story. Beyond the well-rendered visceral imagery and intriguing cosmic horror elements, the relationship between Fuminori and Saya that serves as the emotional core of the plot is actually quite compelling. We watch their twisted relationship bloom as Fuminori slowly loses his humanity and morals as he descends deeper in love with Saya, and likewise, Saya slowly gains humanity in both the best and worst ways possible. In most good horror, it's that human emotional core at the center that makes it all work. Unfortunately, The Song of Saya is no Cronenberg's "The Fly", and is more analogous to something like "Mai-chan's Daily Life", or "A Serbian Film." It's a story full of absolutely abhorrent material, not limited to Cannibalism, Rape and implicit Pedophilia. Even barring Fuminori's agnosia, why he's going on about the beauty of someone that looks like a child to him and having sex with a pile of pig guts that resembles a child in his eyes is something that is not only never questioned by the narrative, but is something deliberately played up for eroticism by the narrative in its many grotesque sex scenes (Author's Note: Some people online will tell you that you are missing out on the full experience by playing the censored version on Steam. These people are not to be trusted, and you should steer clear of them. The only thing the Steam release removes is all the unnecessary sex scenes that are largely meant for the player to find erotic, and you are missing literally nothing by playing without the 18+ Patch).
Even barring that (which is a lot to bar if I'm being honest with you here), there's also two rape scenes also played for eroticism, one also including the lolicon content. While they do move the plot forward in a sense, even with the edited Steam release you can tell that these scenes were paragraphs of erotica meant to primarily titillate, while any implicit horror or plot impact is a secondary concern, which is a different kind of disgusting from the cannibalism and Meat-O-Vision the reader is subjected to. All of this taints The Song of Saya's other strengths, such as its soundtrack, its art, and its genuine moments of horror both subtle and overt, making The Song of Saya an incredibly hard sell to all but those with the absolute highest tolerance for quote un-quote "weeb shit". If it wasn't for this list, I probably wouldn't have ever touched this game. Which is why it's honestly kind of a bummer that if you took the overtly exploitative content out of the equation, The Song of Saya would probably be the best introductory Visual Novel for newcomers to the Visual Novel medium: it's short, it's easily accessible, and it manages to show off a lot of the medium's strengths without being too much of a slog. It's just a shame that all these qualities are in service of The Song of Saya. There are better visual novels for getting into the medium, and there are better cosmic horror stories that won't get you put on a watchlist. Steer clear, because you're not missing much.
...The soundtrack is pretty good though, give that a listen.
The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is a game about the internet, viewed through the lens of an authoritarian government that monitors its citizens and wipes them out with impunity via their government-sanctioned murderers to maintain the illusion of peace.
It's a game about how even in a "perfect" society where the people up top maintain an iron-grip on every minuet detail of its citizens lives, the biggest threat is the power of the individual and the propagation of ideas.
It's a game about the dehumanizing effects of violence, how those charged with keeping the peace are volatile, reckless goons who kill without remorse and never receive any kind of punishment for it. How killing is innate to the human experience, and how the will to kill resides in all men's hearts.
It's a game about trans-humanism. People turned into biological supercomputers built to retain petabytes of information. People who gain identity on the net. AI's so sophisticated that they become indistinguishable from their creators. People who ascend beyond the biological to become ideals, the purest form of information, unlimited by the notions of life or death.
It's a game about games and the people who play them. The relationship between protagonist and player. The rejection of industry norms. The eschewing of any kind of notion of traditional understanding.
The 25th Ward is a game I have a hard time writing about. It juggles a lot of topics, and yet, it sticks the landing with each and every single one of them in a way that is hauntingly prophetic for what was originally a 2005 flip-phone text-adventure game. It's a bit of a cop-out answer, but after a day or two of writing and rewriting this review, I really do feel it's an experience beyond words. It's a game that resonates even more today in the modern internet age, and it's view of the internet via a fictional social experiment of a city where the line between net and reality is non-existent is an intensely interesting backdrop for the triad of storylines that each explore a facet of this society and how it parallels the modern age.
"Don't depend on the net. Depend on the net. God lives in the net. The net will guide you to all answers and wisdom. Doubt the net. Save the net. Kill the net."
It's a game about how even in a "perfect" society where the people up top maintain an iron-grip on every minuet detail of its citizens lives, the biggest threat is the power of the individual and the propagation of ideas.
It's a game about the dehumanizing effects of violence, how those charged with keeping the peace are volatile, reckless goons who kill without remorse and never receive any kind of punishment for it. How killing is innate to the human experience, and how the will to kill resides in all men's hearts.
It's a game about trans-humanism. People turned into biological supercomputers built to retain petabytes of information. People who gain identity on the net. AI's so sophisticated that they become indistinguishable from their creators. People who ascend beyond the biological to become ideals, the purest form of information, unlimited by the notions of life or death.
It's a game about games and the people who play them. The relationship between protagonist and player. The rejection of industry norms. The eschewing of any kind of notion of traditional understanding.
The 25th Ward is a game I have a hard time writing about. It juggles a lot of topics, and yet, it sticks the landing with each and every single one of them in a way that is hauntingly prophetic for what was originally a 2005 flip-phone text-adventure game. It's a bit of a cop-out answer, but after a day or two of writing and rewriting this review, I really do feel it's an experience beyond words. It's a game that resonates even more today in the modern internet age, and it's view of the internet via a fictional social experiment of a city where the line between net and reality is non-existent is an intensely interesting backdrop for the triad of storylines that each explore a facet of this society and how it parallels the modern age.
"Don't depend on the net. Depend on the net. God lives in the net. The net will guide you to all answers and wisdom. Doubt the net. Save the net. Kill the net."
The friends of Ringo Ishikawa was a game that took me back to my teenage years, viewed through the sobering & cynical lens of hindsight. The titular Ringo & his friends are a bunch of classic Japanese delinquents, with seemingly no initial higher ambitions beyond their schoolyard gang warfare, entering their final year as students with graduation on the horizon. Despite being a gaggle of petty thugs who smoke cigarettes & have seemingly little interest in their own futures, it's shown as the plot goes on that there's more to each of these delinquents than let's on. Your violent, dumb-as-rocks lackey Goro is a surprisingly talented thespian. Your number one brawler Ken has the talent necessary for a shot at a boxing career in college. Even Ringo himself is a shockingly erudite scholar with an interest in literature, a once-promising career in karate, and is a surprisingly idealistic, loyal, man of virtue. The one thing holding them back is their gang lifestyle & ideas, something that resonated with me as someone who saw this same situation play out dozens of times in my youth.
My own high school wasn't great looking back on it. Violence & abuse were common occurrences, drug use & sex in the hallways was an unspoken fact of life, and basically everyone was a minority of some kind from a low-income background. Lots of people I knew came from broken homes, or were working part-time to put food on the table, or were otherwise struggling with something no kid should've been dealing with at that age, the kind of things that can make studying for your history exam seem like small potatoes. It's a structural issue decades in the making that leads to people getting trapped in places like these, and unfortunately not everyone is able to escape it. Schoolyard fights that escalated into shootings. Football players who graduate with bright prospects only to then get arrested for murder. Kids akin to Ringo's gang members like Masaru or Goro, who have zero sights beyond the now & fully believe they'll be set for a life of petty crime after graduation. The short-sighted violent mindsets people box themselves into that end up spelling their own ends because they can't escape the circumstances that put them there.
I vividly remember hanging out in the parking lot after school one day, and I saw a kid reading a book on the hood of his car. His friends came up to him and immediately dogged on him for this and the supposed weakness such a hobby would project on your image, and he sheepishly put it away in his bag before he left with his friends. It's a small event in hindsight, but it was called back to my mind crystal clear during a scene where Ringo's friends rip into their fellow member Goro for his new vested interest in acting.
Ringo, for all his virtues, for all the books you can make him read, for all the training he can undergo, for all the studying & knowledge you can try to impart on him, still fully believes that his gang of schoolyard bullies is going to last forever, despite it being made rapidly apparent that everyone is starting to move on and find their own callings. Ringo still gets into casual street fights & latches onto his childish notions of schoolyard ethics, of "official challenges" and "rules," even as things spiral out of anyone's control & everyone starts to get in too deep. Much like some of my peers that I saw in my youth, he's a bright soul with potential and promise that is being squandered by his own adherence to violence and unhealthy group mentalities & expectations, and the simple fact is that as the days go by, everyone around him is starting to realize that they need to grow up and move past it all.
Everyone except him.
My own high school wasn't great looking back on it. Violence & abuse were common occurrences, drug use & sex in the hallways was an unspoken fact of life, and basically everyone was a minority of some kind from a low-income background. Lots of people I knew came from broken homes, or were working part-time to put food on the table, or were otherwise struggling with something no kid should've been dealing with at that age, the kind of things that can make studying for your history exam seem like small potatoes. It's a structural issue decades in the making that leads to people getting trapped in places like these, and unfortunately not everyone is able to escape it. Schoolyard fights that escalated into shootings. Football players who graduate with bright prospects only to then get arrested for murder. Kids akin to Ringo's gang members like Masaru or Goro, who have zero sights beyond the now & fully believe they'll be set for a life of petty crime after graduation. The short-sighted violent mindsets people box themselves into that end up spelling their own ends because they can't escape the circumstances that put them there.
I vividly remember hanging out in the parking lot after school one day, and I saw a kid reading a book on the hood of his car. His friends came up to him and immediately dogged on him for this and the supposed weakness such a hobby would project on your image, and he sheepishly put it away in his bag before he left with his friends. It's a small event in hindsight, but it was called back to my mind crystal clear during a scene where Ringo's friends rip into their fellow member Goro for his new vested interest in acting.
Ringo, for all his virtues, for all the books you can make him read, for all the training he can undergo, for all the studying & knowledge you can try to impart on him, still fully believes that his gang of schoolyard bullies is going to last forever, despite it being made rapidly apparent that everyone is starting to move on and find their own callings. Ringo still gets into casual street fights & latches onto his childish notions of schoolyard ethics, of "official challenges" and "rules," even as things spiral out of anyone's control & everyone starts to get in too deep. Much like some of my peers that I saw in my youth, he's a bright soul with potential and promise that is being squandered by his own adherence to violence and unhealthy group mentalities & expectations, and the simple fact is that as the days go by, everyone around him is starting to realize that they need to grow up and move past it all.
Everyone except him.
The colossus before you stands tall, eclipsing the sun and shaking the earth with it's very presence. The grip on your sword tightens, the ancient relic of legend feeling near-worthless before the sight in front of you. But even in the face of such a mighty opponent, you will not be dissuaded so easily. No beast is too mighty for you. So you will climb, and you will fell the mighty behemoth, because you have no choice. If you turn tail now, then what was the point in taking the first step?
Shadow of the Colossus is a game about the sacrifices we make for those we love. Our protagonist, the Wanderer, has arrived at the edge of the world, a barren and desolate land decorated with the ruins of a society long past; tasked with the slaughter of 16 Colossi in order to resurrect his dead lover. The colossi in question are majestic in their appearance and scope, veritable Goliaths in contrast to our David, the Wanderer. They move and act with the grace and unseemliness their ancient appearance affords them: slowly and with much difficulty, treating you more like an annoyance than a proper threat. As you figure out how to scale and critically strike these lumbering giants, the articulate animations and camera work come together to properly sell the sense of scale such large creatures should possess. You truly feel insignificant in their presence and your battles against them are akin to ant trying to topple a elephant.
With each colossus felled, the Wanderer slowly but surely succumbs to whatever darkness the colossi contained. Yet, even as the Wanderer decays before our eyes and our resolve falters in the face of the Colossi, who are for the most part, docile beasts being ambushed and murdered for the sake of our objective, we will push on. We cannot question our path or our actions, because we've come too far to turn back. This bloodshed is for a good cause isn't it? We're doing it for love. We're doing it to give a second chance to someone who deserves it. The corpses that we leave in our wake is all for a good cause. It will all be worth it in the end.
...Won't it?
Shadow of the Colossus is a game about the sacrifices we make for those we love. Our protagonist, the Wanderer, has arrived at the edge of the world, a barren and desolate land decorated with the ruins of a society long past; tasked with the slaughter of 16 Colossi in order to resurrect his dead lover. The colossi in question are majestic in their appearance and scope, veritable Goliaths in contrast to our David, the Wanderer. They move and act with the grace and unseemliness their ancient appearance affords them: slowly and with much difficulty, treating you more like an annoyance than a proper threat. As you figure out how to scale and critically strike these lumbering giants, the articulate animations and camera work come together to properly sell the sense of scale such large creatures should possess. You truly feel insignificant in their presence and your battles against them are akin to ant trying to topple a elephant.
With each colossus felled, the Wanderer slowly but surely succumbs to whatever darkness the colossi contained. Yet, even as the Wanderer decays before our eyes and our resolve falters in the face of the Colossi, who are for the most part, docile beasts being ambushed and murdered for the sake of our objective, we will push on. We cannot question our path or our actions, because we've come too far to turn back. This bloodshed is for a good cause isn't it? We're doing it for love. We're doing it to give a second chance to someone who deserves it. The corpses that we leave in our wake is all for a good cause. It will all be worth it in the end.
...Won't it?
2011
Recommended by STRM as part of this list.
Postal as a franchise has always been historically tied to transgression. The first Postal deconstructed the nature of the Shooter genre and its glorification of the one-man killing machine by framing it as a mass-shooting simulator, and its sequel was a meta-textual response to the very controversy the original Postal stirred up, as well as a bizarre time capsule of immediate post-9/11 Americana. The series has always prided itself on being counter-culture, against the grain, purposefully offensive in an attempt to rile-up their critics and moral guardians, but the thing about being counter-culture is that it's a constant countdown: culture is constantly evolving at rates that no one can really keep up with, and once you lose that pulse, you're out of touch, and the only thing you'll have left is the memories of when you used to rage against the machine.
Postal III is already well known for its abysmal reputation, but I posit that its critical reception wasn't the death knoll for the series' relevancy: it was its very conception. Even discounting the external factors that lead to Postal III's poor quality, such as Akella's numerous lawsuits, the 2008 Great Recession in Russia, and Running With Scissors' loss of control that would lead to the numerous delays and bugs, the very concept of a Postal game, a series made by 12 dudes in Arizona on the cheap for the purpose of pissing people off, being outsourced to the Russian equivalent of EA for a big multi-platform console release was a sign of the series' fading relevancy, and this corporate cynicism is apparent in how generic Postal III is. Trading in it's open-world first-person roots for a brown and grey third-person shooter with cover mechanics, escort missions and a surface-level Grindhouse aesthetic belie Postal III's corporate nature. It pretends to have the same juvenile, anti-authority attitude its predecessors did with its surface-level jabs at soccer moms and environmentalists, but its reliance on celebrity cameos and toilet humor can't even generate the same amount of outrage that the lowest of Postal 2's lows could, and Postal 2 contained multiple hate crimes. It's playing pretend-punk, trying to maintain its aggressive anti-authority edge but still trying to conform to what's popular at the time because you can't just let your publisher not make money on an investment.
Postal III was a modern-day Icarus that Running With Scissors never truly recovered from. Even when RWS took down Postal III and created an expansion to Postal 2 after 11 years that would retcon Postal III from existence in an act of goodwill, the death knell has already been rung: Postal's cultural legacy is dead in the water, and all that's left are cameos from right-wing chuds and an eternal encore of the good ol' days with Postal 4, the equivalent of a washed-up Hair Metal band playing their one famous single for a crowd of the geriatric. Postal III is worse than just being a bad game. It's a pathetic game.
Having a fucking morality system in a series that prided itself on its indifference to player violence. Christ.
Postal as a franchise has always been historically tied to transgression. The first Postal deconstructed the nature of the Shooter genre and its glorification of the one-man killing machine by framing it as a mass-shooting simulator, and its sequel was a meta-textual response to the very controversy the original Postal stirred up, as well as a bizarre time capsule of immediate post-9/11 Americana. The series has always prided itself on being counter-culture, against the grain, purposefully offensive in an attempt to rile-up their critics and moral guardians, but the thing about being counter-culture is that it's a constant countdown: culture is constantly evolving at rates that no one can really keep up with, and once you lose that pulse, you're out of touch, and the only thing you'll have left is the memories of when you used to rage against the machine.
Postal III is already well known for its abysmal reputation, but I posit that its critical reception wasn't the death knoll for the series' relevancy: it was its very conception. Even discounting the external factors that lead to Postal III's poor quality, such as Akella's numerous lawsuits, the 2008 Great Recession in Russia, and Running With Scissors' loss of control that would lead to the numerous delays and bugs, the very concept of a Postal game, a series made by 12 dudes in Arizona on the cheap for the purpose of pissing people off, being outsourced to the Russian equivalent of EA for a big multi-platform console release was a sign of the series' fading relevancy, and this corporate cynicism is apparent in how generic Postal III is. Trading in it's open-world first-person roots for a brown and grey third-person shooter with cover mechanics, escort missions and a surface-level Grindhouse aesthetic belie Postal III's corporate nature. It pretends to have the same juvenile, anti-authority attitude its predecessors did with its surface-level jabs at soccer moms and environmentalists, but its reliance on celebrity cameos and toilet humor can't even generate the same amount of outrage that the lowest of Postal 2's lows could, and Postal 2 contained multiple hate crimes. It's playing pretend-punk, trying to maintain its aggressive anti-authority edge but still trying to conform to what's popular at the time because you can't just let your publisher not make money on an investment.
Postal III was a modern-day Icarus that Running With Scissors never truly recovered from. Even when RWS took down Postal III and created an expansion to Postal 2 after 11 years that would retcon Postal III from existence in an act of goodwill, the death knell has already been rung: Postal's cultural legacy is dead in the water, and all that's left are cameos from right-wing chuds and an eternal encore of the good ol' days with Postal 4, the equivalent of a washed-up Hair Metal band playing their one famous single for a crowd of the geriatric. Postal III is worse than just being a bad game. It's a pathetic game.
Having a fucking morality system in a series that prided itself on its indifference to player violence. Christ.
2019
Recommended by turdl3 as part of this list.
BABA IS YOU
Back when I was in high school, my campus offered a Computer Science course as an elective of sorts, and I remember sitting in that classroom with six other kids while our teacher explained the basics of programming.
"Think of programming like a logic puzzle. You have a set of rules you always have to abide by, and you need to figure out a solution to each problem by working within those rules."
Obviously, this is a very reductive way of approaching the subject, but I bring it up because I recognize that same programming mindset is at the core of Baba is You. The game's main mechanic of moving Nouns, Operators and Properties around to change the logic of the world is basically a programming language in and of itself. The internal syntax logic remains consistent, and each level in Baba is You is always centered around working within the logic of a level to achieve the same goal of making some variation of X IS WIN. It's just up to you to figure out how.
BABA IS MOVE AND OPEN
Despite that simple goal, Baba is You is a very difficult game in practice. Baba is You is always introducing a new Modifier or Property to experiment with well into the endgame, making sure that every area is constantly reinventing the wheel in a way that ensures that the player retains that sense of wonder the game held from minute one. But even with this unrelenting avalanche of ideas and mechanics, Baba is You remains accessible through its incredibly free-form approach to progress. The branching path level structure always gives the player options to progress, with completed levels unlocking other levels in an immediate radius instead of a linear fashion. The player is only asked to complete a relatively small fraction of an area to have it marked as "complete", meaning that even if you are truly stumped, you only need to complete the bare minimum to see the game through. The final level is even unlocked once you complete about third of the game, meaning that at any time, you can stop and clear the game if you have the smarts. Baba is You may be rigid in its puzzle structure and logic, but it's sense of progression is anything but.
BABA IS LOVE
Above all else, Baba is You is delightful. It's adorable aesthetic and endless innovation kept me going long after the ending was waiting for me, and even though the game could potentially be beaten after an hour or so, I put off that final level until the very end just to see what other tricks Baba is You had up its sleeve. Even in the final areas, puzzles were still wowing me with their creativity and putting a smile on my face even as I slammed my head against a wall for hours on end trying to figure out the solution. Baba is You is a truly one of the most creative puzzle games in recent memory, and its clear how much passion was put into its creation by the people behind it, and it's a game I highly recommend if you love a good brainteaser.
BABA IS YOU
Back when I was in high school, my campus offered a Computer Science course as an elective of sorts, and I remember sitting in that classroom with six other kids while our teacher explained the basics of programming.
"Think of programming like a logic puzzle. You have a set of rules you always have to abide by, and you need to figure out a solution to each problem by working within those rules."
Obviously, this is a very reductive way of approaching the subject, but I bring it up because I recognize that same programming mindset is at the core of Baba is You. The game's main mechanic of moving Nouns, Operators and Properties around to change the logic of the world is basically a programming language in and of itself. The internal syntax logic remains consistent, and each level in Baba is You is always centered around working within the logic of a level to achieve the same goal of making some variation of X IS WIN. It's just up to you to figure out how.
BABA IS MOVE AND OPEN
Despite that simple goal, Baba is You is a very difficult game in practice. Baba is You is always introducing a new Modifier or Property to experiment with well into the endgame, making sure that every area is constantly reinventing the wheel in a way that ensures that the player retains that sense of wonder the game held from minute one. But even with this unrelenting avalanche of ideas and mechanics, Baba is You remains accessible through its incredibly free-form approach to progress. The branching path level structure always gives the player options to progress, with completed levels unlocking other levels in an immediate radius instead of a linear fashion. The player is only asked to complete a relatively small fraction of an area to have it marked as "complete", meaning that even if you are truly stumped, you only need to complete the bare minimum to see the game through. The final level is even unlocked once you complete about third of the game, meaning that at any time, you can stop and clear the game if you have the smarts. Baba is You may be rigid in its puzzle structure and logic, but it's sense of progression is anything but.
BABA IS LOVE
Above all else, Baba is You is delightful. It's adorable aesthetic and endless innovation kept me going long after the ending was waiting for me, and even though the game could potentially be beaten after an hour or so, I put off that final level until the very end just to see what other tricks Baba is You had up its sleeve. Even in the final areas, puzzles were still wowing me with their creativity and putting a smile on my face even as I slammed my head against a wall for hours on end trying to figure out the solution. Baba is You is a truly one of the most creative puzzle games in recent memory, and its clear how much passion was put into its creation by the people behind it, and it's a game I highly recommend if you love a good brainteaser.