Recommended by PKMudkipz as part of this list.

The Mega Man franchise is something I've held dear to me as a fan of classic no-frills side-scrolling run-n-gun action, but despite the plentiful spinoffs into nearly every genre under the sun, I've never actually ventured very far into any of the franchise's numerous spinoff series. So, at the behest of one user's suggestion, I'm dipping my toes into yet another Mega Man spin-off series with Mega Man Zero.

Taking place in the far, far future, Zero (from the Mega Man X series) has been revived by a struggling Reploid rebellion force to help aid in the fight against an X that has gone from all-loving hero to genocidal despot. Already, the concept of turning your old hero into the villain of a spinoff is novel, and transforming the dynamic from law-enforcement agent snuffing an attempted rebellion in Mega Man X to rebel fighter struggling against a powerful government agency is something MMZ runs with at full speed. MMZ is no doubt about it, the hardest Mega Man Game I've ever played. Your resources are incredibly limited, the enemies you face are tough as nails and are always placed in a way to wreck an unsuspecting player's shit, and the way missions are structured means running out of continues can lock you out of content and chances to get additional resources. This constant struggle against the game's many challenges really sells the struggle the characters deal with, and makes you feel like every victory is earned by the skin of your teeth. Despite this, I can't say it ever dips into outright unfair territory. If you're patient and pay attention to your surroundings and enemy attack patterns, the game can quickly become a breeze, especially with the breadth of weapon options and the ease with which Zero controls, sliding and wall-jumping everywhere while never feeling slippery or loose.

MMZ, while fun and challenging, suffers from a lot of systems that feel superfluous. The Cyber-Elf system is very helpful for newcomers and skill-impaired players, offering many boons that can help take the edge off the game's difficulty, but it feels a bit like an afterthought and the amount of resource grinding required to make the most out of some of them feels like a waste of time. There's a ranking system that encourages replays and mastery, but it's incredibly demanding, knocking off points for many, many actions in a way that discourages using a lot of the tools the game offers a player, and it's pretty frivolous even if you do care about that kinda thing, as there's no immediate reward for getting S-Ranks outside of bragging rights. But as a whole, Mega Man Zero was a solid time. It wasn't enough to immediately sell me on the rest of the entries in this sub-franchise, but it's a solid action-platformer and a good dose of Mega Man X-flavored action if you still need that particular itch scratched and (somehow) haven't tried this spinoff series out yet.

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.

Recommended by Squigglydot as part of this list.

While I'm no stranger to the Touhou franchise, I'd still consider myself pretty uninformed when it comes to the finer details of the whole thing. While I've certainly dabbled with a few of the mainline titles and a couple of high-profile fan games, the majority of my (and if I'm to presume, many others') knowledge of Japan's frontier doujin shmup franchise is from passionate fans and shitposters on the internet. From being one of the most represented fandoms at Comiket, to the deluge of fangames available both unofficially and on actual publisher storefronts, to all that fucking fumoposting, Touhou is as much a product of the fandom as it is the creator, and it's that kind of hands-off approach to copyright enforcement that lets stuff like CBT With Yuuka Kazami exist.

With the absurd title and low price point, first impressions scream "Low Quality Steam Trash™", but when I actually played it, any worries I had going in were dispeled. No frills, no goofs, it's exactly what it says on the tin: Cognitive Behavior Therapy with Yuuka Kazami (of Touhou Project fame!). Yuuka Kazami, rendered in a faithful recreation of ZUN's art style, offers you an extremely elementary crash course on the basics of CBT and how to apply it to your daily life, with examples and activities to really drive the point home. There's an actual heart to the proceedings here that makes it really endearing. It's no substitute for real therapy obviously, but it has a 100% sincere approach to its subject matter and wants you to do your best, which is much more than I actually expected going in. The amount of separation from the source material going on with CBT With Yuuka Kazami is kind of surreal, but I think it's kind of endearing in a way, using characters we are already familiar with to try and help other people. It's something that only comes about due to the unmonitored nature with which the Touhou franchise has been left to grow and prosper, and I'm glad that something like this is allowed to not only exist, but be sold on a global marketplace like Steam without any interference.

Recommended by Cold_Comfort as part of this list.

Shmups are a genre I've always been interested in but never really got into. Much like their Arcade-origin ilk, they are gaming in its purest form: an exercise in skill and score. It's a genre all about throwing yourself against an insurmountable wall and trying to achieve not only completion, but mastery. It's a genre that's for the most part, rather light on story or characters because the in-universe stakes are unimportant when the true conflict is between player and game. When I'm tired of longer, story-heavy games, this kind of primal, back-to-basics approach to game design is therapeutic in a way: much like a rouge-like, it's non-committal and allows me to put in a run or two a day, get a little further, and not feel like I need to commit to anything longer than that. But despite my interest, I've never had a shmup that really hooked me. At most, I'd find something neat that I would credit-feed until I reached the end and promptly forget about a day later. But when I booted up ESCHATOS for the first time and heard the glorious FM Synth sounds of Yousuke Yasui's score pierce my ears as dozens of enemy ships flew on-screen and the camera made these big, cinematic sweeps and took these wild angles during the action, I could tell I had something special on my hands.

ESCHATOS takes a sink or swim approach to its game design: it lays down the ground rules and hands you all the tools you'll need, before throwing you straight into the deep end. You have 3 buttons that each serve a specific purpose: a narrow shot that travels to the top of the screen, a wide shot that covers more horizontal ground but doesn't go full-screen, and a shield that can both block shots and deal contact damage. To get a higher score in ESCHATOS, you need to destroy each enemy wave without letting a single enemy escape, which will increase your score multiplier. Let an enemy live, and the multiplier goes down. In order to get the best score, you need to learn each individual enemy's behavior, each wave's formation, and how to best use the tools at your disposal in order to keep the multiplier rising, encouraging multiple attempts to help you learn and master each of the game's Areas and Stages.

While it's not the toughest game on the market, ESCHATOS is no walk in the park either. Screen-clearing bombs are an instant-use pick-up and not something you can hold for later, and lives are few and far between, meaning that learning enemy formations, bullet patterns, and how to maneuver your ship carefully to both dodge, attack, and claim Bombs and Extends is essential to your survival. Despite its difficulty, what kept me from shelving ESCHATOS is how it encourages replays and multiple attempts. ESCHATOS keeps track of your total accumulated score over multiple runs and offers rewards at specific milestones to keep you engaged, from more lives when you start, to more continues, to the ability to start your run from later stages, meaning that even as you fail, it always feels like you're making headway, and each run always felt like I was getting closer and closer to the end.

Outside the standard game mode, there's also a remixed Advanced Mode that applies a new risk-reward power-up mechanic to the standard game mode, and a Time Attack mode that removes the traditional lives/continue system in favor of a time limit that increases as you do well and decreases when you get hit, both providing a good amount of variety and challenge if you ever get bored of grinding out runs in Original Mode. If you have even the slightest interest in the shmup genre, I would highly recommend this as a entry point. It has the right balance of challenge and spectacle that'll keep you coming back no matter how many times you've failed.

Back in September of 2017, I stumbled upon a little game on itch.io: a freeware dating sim called Doki Doki Literature Club! At the time, I was broke, dumb-as-rocks teenage weeaboo who really didn't wanna do their Algebra II homework, so I decided to spend the afternoon checking it out. It looked cute enough, and it was free, so what was the harm (besides the damage to my GPA)?

Well, if Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! now being billed as a psychological horror game didn't already tip you off, you can probably guess how that afternoon went.

So why bring this up? It's because despite my best efforts to re-evaluate Plus with a new frame of mind, that one September afternoon is too deeply interwoven with my opinion with the game. Before it became yet another contentious western Visual Novel, before it became the subject of hundreds of Let's Plays and Game Theory videos, before it became a line of marketable merchandise you could pick up at your local retail fashion store, it was just a subversive freeware horror game I was absolutely enamored with. The absence of discussion around DDLC at the time I played it meant that the glitch horror and surprise metafiction angle caught me completely off-guard, and all of it's Creepypasta-tier parlor tricks and 4th-wall-breaking meta-puzzles worked wonders on me, since I had yet to have been exposed to that kind of storytelling in my games. It was the most mind-blowing thing in the world when I figured out how to finish Act 3. I didn't even really think that games could do shit like that!

But at the time of writing this, that was 4 years ago, and a lot has happened since then: My interests have changed. I'm a different person now. I've expanded my palette and I've dipped my toes into so many other genres and experiences. But even barring that, DDLC, which was dated at the time by the likes of Eversion, Irusu Syndrome and You & Me & Her: A Love Story, is even more old-hat as glitch and meta-horror have become their own saturated brand of storytelling on the internet. The air of both success and contention afforded by the conversation around it and its legacy hangs heavy in the air now. Revisiting this after so long, a small part of me was worried that coming back to this with a fresh pair of eyes would retroactively ruin it somehow, like finally beating your dad in a game of basketball: He was never that good at it, you were just younger and more inexperienced.

And I guess in a way, it was ruined. The scares that caught me off guard years ago fell flat, both because I was now expecting them, and because the overt jump scares and glitch effects were so juvenile and cliché. The cynicism in the text is more apparent looking at it now, it's sly jabs at "anime and dating-sim tropes" taking on a more overtly cynical tone when taking into account the game's origins: It was born out of Salvato's love-hate relationship with slice-of-life anime, and the fact that the parody aspect of the game generalizes all visual novels as dating sims shows a level of both ignorance and contempt for it's own medium and the history behind it. It's a trend we've seen before with other developers holding a certain level of contempt for their own medium and it's inspirations (see: Necrobarista, YiiK, etc.), but what's most ironic is that in DDLC's case, its strengths shine much brighter when it's indulging in the tropes it's trying to poke fun at.

Despite the supposed horror elements being at the forefront of both the marketing and the cultural legacy of the game, it's when DDLC is trying to be a pastiche Visual Novel that it succeeds the most. Even if the main girls fall into the generic pitfall of "cute broken girl for generic MC to fix via high school romance," the main cast and their struggles are relatable and the grounded depiction of depression with Sayori is something that hit very close to home for me and many others (even if something like Yuri's self-harm is treated a little more exploitatively in the narrative.) With Plus' new side-stories removing the horror elements and focusing on a more realistic and slice-of-life story about communication and mental illness that's treated with tact, it becomes a lot more engaging and heartwarming in a way that, ironically, becomes what it once sought to decry with the base storyline.

Separating me from the equation for a second however, I don't think I would ever recommend DDLC+. It's horror is weak and old hat nowadays, and since that's the angle the game is marketed with and most well-known for, it's impossible to really get much enjoyment out of it approaching it from that mindset. It's confused with what it wants to be, and even if it's strengths lie in everything else it does, hardcore VN enthusiasts are not going to be impressed with what both DDLC and Plus contains. It's a game I honestly think you just had to be there for to fully enjoy. But even if I wouldn't recommend it, I don't think I can bring myself to call it bad with the vitriol everyone else seems to have for it now. It was important for me, as a gateway to VNs and a game in general. It reminds me of a time in my life that, even if it wasn't wholly positive for me, was important nonetheless.

Cheap special effects. Over-the-top violence and gore. Hokey acting. Gratuitous sexuality. These are the hallmarks of the classic Halloween staple: The B-Horror Movie, where high concepts, low budgets, and mid-range actors band together to produce certified schlock for the silver screen! In an interesting parallel however, we have the mid-budget late 90s video game, which has the same kind of soul we find in B-cinema: ambitious ideas, middling budgets, and acting of dubious quality. It was only a matter of time before someone noticed the common ground there, and so, enter stage right Crazy Games and their loving send-up to B-Horror, Illbleed.

Illbleed is a virtual horror house all about exploring different attractions based on in-universe B-Movie horror films; in which you focus on disarming traps, fighting monsters and making it to the end of each stage without bleeding yourself dry, giving yourself a heart attack, or just flat-out biting the dust. From Psycho to Child's Play to Tremors, Illbleed wears its influences loud and proud, but in the same breath, it's not afraid to poke fun at itself, its influences, and the very nature of the B-Horror. In between some horrific monster design and genuinely unsettling moments of terror, there's moments where the game will peel the curtain back a bit to reveal the inner workings of the setting and poke fun at itself, from employees complaining about malfunctioning equipment in the park, to some stages flat out requiring you to break the rules of the universe to proceed. It's all incredibly surreal and bordering on full-blown Dadaism, but it all works in Illbleed's favor, lending the game this enjoyably irreverent tone throughout.

Illbleed can be hard to parse at the best of times, and the first level will test your patience like no other, but much like any B-Horror film, if you can stick with it past its rocky start, you'll be in for the ride of your life. Illbleed is a cult classic for good reason: It's a loving homage to B-Horror and an unabashedly earnest celebration of the medium and it's influences that isn't afraid to revel in the absurdity of it all.

[Disclaimer: I was a beta tester for this game before it launched]

Wouldn't it be nice to escape the doldrums of life? Go back to the womb and not have to deal with the suffering existence entails? Stay in your happy place for the rest of your days?

Within the walls of a genius loci apartment complex located somewhere in Russia, our protagonist Lera explores a recreation of her own memories after leaving home and driving into the middle of a harsh snowstorm. While the influences on FBC are very apparent, calling to mind the original Silent Hill with it's snow, it's rust, it's ethereal ambient soundtrack and focus on psychological horror, it manages to set itself apart with it's distinctly European sensibilities and it's use of body horror and visceral bodily imagery a la Saya no Uta's weird meat dimension to unsettle the player and create this nauseating atmosphere that permeates the entire experience. It's themes of existentialism are heavy yet executed with tact and grace, and it's short runtime makes for an experience akin to a Twilight Zone episode or a Junji Ito one-shot. It's about half-an-hour to complete and it's perfect way to kick off the Halloween season if you love RPG Maker horror games.

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."

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.

Surfing through petabytes of information, a storm of myriad colors clouds my vision, a harmony of sound and visual stimuli overclocking my senses. There's a rhythm to be found in the chaos, a flow to the motion, a song that's built upon a cacophony of sounds, bullets and explosions creating an orchestra in my mind.

Rez is less of a game and more of a transcendent audiovisual experience. The gameplay is hypnotic, putting you into that trance state as you take aim and shoot before your brain can process what you've done, but the real point of Rez is it's aesthetic, a style so thick and permeating it becomes the substance. Shots that fall in time with the music, the soundtrack that gradually builds and builds as you progress through the level, it feels less like a rail-shooter and more like an improv jam session: everyone's feeling out the tempo, the rhythm, the harmony, working out the kinks as you go along until it all falls into place and everything starts to harmonize, the song in your soul finally coming out in full force, an iridescent moment in time where the instruments sing and everything is perfect. Rez is a reminder: Take in the sounds, witness the lights, let it wash over you like the waves of the ocean lapping the coast. That's what it means to be alive.

The 6th console generation was an era of experimentation: A lot of ideas were being thrown at the wall just to see what would stick, and even big-name IP's were getting in on this trend, with sequels and spinoffs that would completely eschew their predecessor's norm in lieu of brand new uncharted waters and gameplay ideas. Experimentation always runs its risks, and for every revolutionary idea, there's a hundred others that failed to deliver anything of note, and the latter is where Galerians: Ash unfortunately falls.

Taking place 6 years after the original Galerians, Rion is brought out of cryosleep by the last vestige of humanity in order to defeat the titular Ash: a walking nuclear reactor who's rendered most of the planet uninhabitable and plans to revive the villain of previous game. What follows is a bizarre sci-fi military action film/cyberpunk think-piece about identity and the dangers of AI that is equal-parts entertaining and borderline nonsensical in terms of its pacing and plot revelations.

Galerians: Ash distances itself from its predecessor's roots in many ways: shifting from Galerians' Y2K aesthetic and survival horror sensibilities, the sequel is an action-adventure game full of grey hallways and much less creative scenery and architecture in its levels. While AP management is still here, and your resources are still limited, enemies now re-spawn endlessly and drop both consumables and permanent stat-boosting items upon defeat, meaning combat has gone from a liability to a boon. However, while it's more emphasized and encouraged, the combat itself has not seen a step up in terms of quality. Aside from a new lock-on function and a dodge roll, the combat is still the same, clunky PSX-era survival horror combat the first Galerians had, and considering the first Galerians was trying to dissuade you from fighting enemies in the first place, encounters here can be tedious and incredibly unenjoyable. Compound this with a tendency towards tedium in it's structure, forcing you to constantly backtrack back and forth across samey maps looking for NPCs and key items to use in increasingly obtuse ways, and the game rapidly becomes a chore to play for extended periods of time.

While I've been exceedingly negative in my review up to this point, I can't really say that I didn't enjoy this game. Even if everything's a step down in terms of quality compared to Galerians, it still has that early 6th gen charm and the sense of style that made the first entry so enjoyable, and if you liked the first game, I would say Galerians: Ash is worth a shot, just to see how they expound on a story that really had no business having a sequel in the first place.

"Where did your true self go? You are now nothing but an empty vessel pretending to be human. "

There's a pounding in my head it hurts its screaming its crying my heart is beating too fast way too fast it's gonna burst my hands are cold my skin is cold my skin is hot its too hot too hot too hot too hot too-

The Delmeter finally kicks in, and the splitting headache fades. The world stops spinning and I can finally feel my own two feet. There's a corpse by feet, it's face a gnarled mess barely recognizable as human. There's blood pooling beneath my shoes, and I can feel the Delmeter fading already.

Galerians is a 2000's survival horror game about Rion, a young boy who wakes up in a hospital, with no memories of his past and a sudden batch of psychic powers, who's only motivation is to locate the girl who's been contacting him telepathically. In doing so, he unravels a conspiracy surrounding the sentient supercomputer running the city that wants to replace humanity with a race of psychic superhumans known as the Galerians, and how the girl he's looking for is the key to stopping the AI's ascension to godhood.

As Rion, you have to manage your limited psychic powers via the multiple types of drugs you will inject and ingest over the course of your adventure. Rion can switch between different types of psychic attacks by injecting himself with three different types of drugs, and each attack used will slowly drain your drug meter until you need your next fix. Compounding your limited usage of Rion's psychic powers is the AP meter. By attacking, taking damage, or even simply running around, the AP Meter will fill, and if it hits max and Rion tries to use a psychic attack, he will Short, making him a walking death trap that will instantly kill all enemies that come near, but will slowly drain Rion's HP until he either dies or takes another drug called Delmeter (of which there is only a finite amount of in the whole game) to reset the gauge to 0. The limited resources, alongside the ticking time bomb that is the AP Meter heavily discourages combat in Galerians. Outside of a few forced encounters, combat is completely optional and provides no tangible benefits for Rion, meaning that in true survival horror fashion, hoofing it is usually your best option in any given situation.

The puzzle solving is fairly simple, usually consisting of key hunting and very basic fact recollection. Rion can use his psychic powers to gain hints for item locations and puzzle solutions, which means that it's very hard to get truly stumped. While the puzzle solving is basic, the moment-to-moment gameplay is mind-numbing and the combat is rather clunky when you're forced into it, Galerians' aesthetic is what really makes it stand out. The story is a wild ride full of insane plot twists and heady themes that aren't really tackled in a very deep or clever manner, but this alongside the sparse moments of Scanners-esque ultraviolence and beautifully rendered early 2000's CGI cyberpunk landscapes full of alien architecture and that glorious Y2K technological aesthetic elevate Galerians from a mediocre Resident Evil clone to an absolute standout hidden gem of the survival horror genre.

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?

What's the bare minimum you need for a game? How little do you truly need to be engaging? How much do you really have to put in front of a player? ICO is a 2001 adventure game that is an exercise in minimalist game design: a game designed around weaving a tale of romance and trust whilst having as little as possible interrupt your experience.

It's a tale as old as time immemorial: boy meets girl. Our lead Ico and the girl he's escorting, Yorda, are trapped in a massive citadel, and cannot communicate with each other due to a language barrier. Despite this, the duo must work together to escape the labyrinthine prison they find themselves in. It's a plot we all know the basic beats to, but what makes it unique is the minimalist way the story is told. On the gameplay front, we play as Ico, who handles the heavy lifting: he climbs chains and cliff-faces, pushes blocks, carries items to-and-fro and engages in combat. While Yorda cannot do any of this, she is needed to help open the magically sealed doors that Ico cannot open by his lonesome. Therefore, each puzzle is designed around creating a path as Ico for Yorda to travel and open the next door up ahead. This gameplay loop builds dependence on Yorda for both Ico and by extension, the player. You will often lead Yorda through each room hand-in-hand, and the little moments and stellar animation work, like Ico helping Yorda climb up tall ledges or extending his hand to catch Yorda as she makes leaps of faith builds trust in both Ico and the player. In turn, Yorda will often wander around environments looking for puzzle solutions, or inviting Ico to rest at a save point. In a game with as sparse a story as Ico's, these little moments do most of the heavy lifting for the player's investment in the plight of the duo.

The atmosphere is the other part of why ICO works so well. Very rarely is any actual music heard, and what little of it there is, it's mostly ambient and drone. Your journey is instead backed by the sounds of howling wind, running water, crackling torches, and Ico and Yorda's footsteps. Lacking a HUD or a UI of any kind outside of the save points and the pause menu, the game is all about the vistas: a camera more interested in big panning shots of the citadel and it's walls, where you are a secondary, if not tertiary concern. You exit the citadel momentarily to see an endless ocean, and the far walls of the rest of the citadel, places you have been and places you will go. It's one big connected odyssey, that fully engrosses you in it's world. When I sat down for my first playthrough, I was so invested I completed the entire game in one sitting.

ICO is a beautiful game that thrives in what it lacks rather that what it has. Its striking minimalism and strong aesthetics tell a story stronger than any normal narrative ever could, purely through it's use of in-game actions and mechanics, and it is an experience you won't regret having.