Overall, a pleasant experience despite some pacing issues and underutilized mechanics. Jusant basically fits every trope of the Journey-like (a solo pilgrimage from point A to B to C, heavy focus on atmospheric exploration with some environmental puzzles, rediscovering an abandoned/forgotten civilization, etc), but what separates it from most typical copycats is that the main moment-to-moment gameplay is actually pretty engaging this time around! The obvious example here is how the game forces you to tightly grip your controller’s triggers to climb and hang onto ledges for dear life, but most actions in-between such as placing pinons/swinging back and forth with your grapple/jumping across and between ledges keep the interaction flowing smoothly. Interestingly, I would say Jusant’s problem is also opposite to that of most Journey-likes, because it handles its micro well enough, but falters a bit in its execution of the macro. If I were to compare the climbing to say, that of Shadow of the Colossus, then the difference in sense of scale becomes more readily apparent. Shadow of the Colossus takes places in mostly connected and open environments (with a few in vast caverns), but a good chunk of Jusant’s climbing takes place indoors in often cramped spaces that left me wishing there was an FOV slider to compensate for the often uncomfortably close camera getting stuck on walls. I do think it’s a bit of a missed opportunity that Jusant didn’t get any opportunities to showcase its world in its entirety and instead cut off each area into its own isolated level. A part of me was hoping that it would execute this as a sort of mirror to Journey; whereas Journey tries to keep the final shining summit in view at all times outside to remind the player of their final destination, I think Jusant could have combined all the outside areas and given the player the opportunity to look back from increasing heights to remind themselves of just how far they’ve come.

Getting back to macro vs micro, I have a few quibbles and suggestions in regards to improving the overall pacing, as there were some elements that felt like occasional stumbling blocks. The environments are sometimes difficult to read (especially in indoor settings) because climbable rocks/edges often look similarly shaded to their non-interactable surroundings, which resulted in me getting lost a few times. The in-game guide (“Listen” via pressing right on the d-pad) could be improved in this aspect, since it gives you a general direction to move towards but doesn’t solve the issue of figuring out what background object is required to ascend. Speaking of background objects, the environments are often littered with so many differently-colored materials, which contributes to the above problem of figuring out the way forward and also makes the task of searching for collectibles more annoying unless you’re just focusing on the context-sensitive prompts. I sadly also have to agree with others here that the lore dumps via the letters/diary entries didn’t do much for me (resulting in a narrative that I mostly ignored), and I would have preferred emptying the surroundings somewhat to better establish a feeling of presence with a heavier emphasis on environmental storytelling. In addition, removing these excess objects would reduce the amount of 3D polygonal jank present in the game: I often found myself suddenly stagnating and getting stuck on the floor from bumpy geometry, and the same rung true while climbing because I once had to restart from the last checkpoint after getting trapped by some nearby vines.

I’m going to nitpick the climbing as well and concur regarding the lack of tension, as the game never forced me to fully leverage my capabilities: again, this is a key detail that separates this game’s climbing from the heights reached by Shadow of the Colossus. The game could have leaned more into tight timing segments that forced the player to quickly scale ledges before they crumbled; this is briefly explored in Chapter 3 with the sunlight burning off plant roots, but then gets replaced with more calculated climbing for the rest of the game. Similarly, the pinons feel underutilized: I can’t recall any instance where I felt obligated to place down more than one pinon at a time while climbing, and that was often due to needing the ability to swing back and forth rather than using it as a safety net. A possible solution here is reworking the resting mechanic so that it could only be used at a pinon: this would also solve the pacing issue of having to constantly pause to regain stamina, and force the player to more carefully place pinons to make the most out of the stamina gauge's capacity. Finally, I was surprised that I couldn’t alter the amount of slack/tension in the rope while climbing and hanging onto ledges. This ability would allow the player additional control over jumps and climbing capacity without needing to expend a pinon (since I rarely ever reached the full rope length as is), which in turn would give the player more freedom to create shortcuts by letting them go for riskier maneuvers that the restrictive mechanics would prohibit otherwise.

There’s a lot of room for improvement, but I nevertheless appreciate that Jusant doesn’t overstay its welcome. Despite being a bit rough around the edges, the core gameplay is a nice change of pace from its peers, and it further distinguishes itself from its competition with its restrained ending. Instead of going for a bombastic “victory-lap” finale, Jusant has the modesty to bring itself back to earth with a no frills back-to-basics climbing segment devoid of the previous level gimmicks and clutter. That's the game in a nutshell: it might not push the envelope of the medium, but it accomplishes its premise in the time given with solid peaks despite some shaky consistency. In a genre full of misguided and uncompelling carbon copies, I’ll gladly take it.

I should have known something wasn't right about Memories of Celceta by the one-hour mark. Looking back, I’ve now repeatedly picked up and shelved this game a grand total of five times over the past year, with my feelings upon the game becoming more mixed every time. In fact, it actually made me question whether or not I liked Ys Seven to begin with. Upon a quick replay though, I can confirm that the issue was not so much Ys Seven’s baseline mechanics but rather Celceta’s interpretation of said mechanics. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll refrain from poring over Celceta’s general background (since the core ideas have carried over from Ys Seven and have been thoroughly explained here) and treat this write-up more as a compare & contrast.

The first thing that comes to mind is that despite carrying over the baseline combat mechanics from Ys Seven, Celceta’s pacing feels far more sluggish than Ys Seven. This struck me as quite odd at first, because there’s no immediate culprit that would draw my ire as anything that was excessively grindy (as compared to Ys Seven, which really suffers from an end-game resource grind for the best weapons in the game). Upon further reflection, I came to realize that it was actually a mix of smaller factors that kept intrusively interrupting the flow of Ys’s traditionally frenetic bread-and-butter gameplay over the course of the entire run. For example:

- Celceta has tons of slow swimming thanks to all the different water bodies and water elevation puzzles scattered throughout the overworld and the dungeons. This gets even more obnoxious because there are tons of enemies present in the water that Adol and company have to fend off with a very committal thrust (since you can’t dodge or flash guard while swimming).

- The first half of the game doesn’t let you freely teleport between differently colored monuments, which becomes very tedious when backtracking for resources/side quests/healing. It’s not until the Primeval Lands are unlocked and you obtain the Gold Wing that backtracking becomes much more efficient.

- There’s some coding/binding oversight that doesn’t let you use your special attack bound to the Y button without expending your EXTRA attack/gauge if it’s completely filled up. The result is that I felt pretty reluctant to use the Y special attack most of the time, and accidentally threw away my EXTRA attack plenty of times, forcing me to engage in additional grinding to enter every boss fight with a full EXTRA gauge.

- There are some high-level enemies near the beginning of the game with tons of health that you’d think would be a good idea to avoid; however, it’s actually pretty easy to defeat them by flash guarding the telegraphed attacks and they're worth boat-loads of experience. The Golden Pikkard near the middle of the game functions similarly to this, in that it can grant multiple level-ups at a time and is otherwise a somewhat unengaging fight since it will just run away from you while tanking attacks. These opportunities feel too good to pass up since it’s often very little risk for significant reward, resulting in the player occasionally grinding to become over-leveled for a good chunk of the game.

- The game encourages you to go for “aerial combos” juggling enemies for extra damage, but most characters are incapable of using standard attacks to hit launched foes because there’s no jump and most standard attacks aren’t pointed upwards. This creates this gap in combat where after hitting enemies with launcher special attacks and running out of the SP gauge, you have to wait for enemies to return to earth before resuming your assault.

- Each of the six playable party characters has a “unique” action that requires you to switch to them to activate something in the overworld (ex: Adol is the only one who can access memories, Duren is required to unlock chests, etc). This wasn’t completely absent in Ys Seven, but it’s significantly more intrusive in Celceta because there are many more instances requiring character-specific context-sensitive prompts, so a lot more time is spent menuing to switch party characters on the fly if the ones you’re currently using for combat don’t correspond with those required for overworld actions.

- While there’s no late-game resource grind as previously mentioned, there’s something far more egregious that players may feel incentivized to do. Due to some developer oversight, Falcom misaligned the world map, which means that to achieve 100% map completion, you have to unintuitively “hug” walls of certain areas to register them as part of the percentage. This gets particularly grating because the game is very picky as to what has/has not been registered, to where unregistered parts of the map may not even appear to be visibly faded while looking at the map display. You don’t have to 100% the map to beat the game of course, but since the item you receive as a reward for doing so is extremely valuable (a sub-item that accelerates the accrual of your EXTRA gauge), most players will probably end up going through this laborious and unclear clean-up that was fortunately addressed in Ys VIII with far more generous guidelines.

Looking past these pacing issues, Celceta does at least expand and often improve upon the toolkit from Ys Seven. For instance, dodge-rolling right when enemies attack performs a “Flash Move” that grants you temporary invincibility and temporarily slows the enemy down (as opposed to the Flash Guard, which is more of a “parry” that builds up your SP/EXTRA gauge), which should theoretically open up more avenues of combat. In addition, new special attacks for characters are naturally unlocked as the player progresses through the game’s fights; while Ys Seven ran the risk of players potentially not gaining permanent access to new special attacks if not used enough with new weapons, Celceta’s unlocks operate independently of purchasing new weapons to avoid this issue. Lastly, Celceta provides a stronger incentive for utilizing special attacks by allowing players to regain half of the expended SP if the special attack is used as a finisher, rewarding players for wisely timing special attacks to improve the flow of combat.

The more pressing issue then, is that the enemies and bosses are not scaled appropriately to match the player’s buffed toolkit, resulting in what is probably the easiest Ys game to date. Ys Seven at least ran the risk of punishing the player for mistiming the Flash Guard: if the player is hit during the end-lag after the active parrying frames, they would receive critical damage, thus balancing the risk vs reward. Meanwhile, Celceta not only removes this risk altogether, but in fact allows the player to mash the Flash Guard with no delay between inputs to quickly build up the SP/EXTRA gauge in practical invincibility, trivializing fights. Similarly, the charged attack is streamlined from Ys Seven to Celceta: Ys Seven forced the player to commit by holding down the attack button, while Celceta instead links the charged attack to a built-in timer (wait long enough without attacking and the next attack you launch will be charged). While this doesn’t appear to be a drastic change, there’s a lot less decision-making that goes into the latter compared to the former; the player is consciously making the decision to charge up an attack in Ys Seven, but in Celceta, it’ll naturally charge while dodge-rolling around anyways. Finally, remembered when I mentioned that most characters are incapable of hitting launched enemies with standard attacks for aerial combos? There’s one exception to this, and she’s the most busted character in the game: Karna can often infinitely juggle enemies with her ranged standard attack, and can in fact out-space the vast majority of mobs in the game. Couple all of these things with the activated flash-moves from rolling through enemy attacks, and Celceta’s combat often devolves into mindless hit-and-run strategies where you can dodge-roll/flash-guard through every attack in the game with little risk to the player.

As a result, Memories of Celceta lacks an engaging difficulty/learning curve compared to other games in the series; the same broken strategies that work at the very beginning are just as effective at running through late-game bosses, and there’s not much incentive for the player to experiment outside of their comfort zone considering how easy it is to fall back upon hit-and-run. I imagine that Falcom caught wind of complaints regarding spongey bosses in Ys Seven and thus toned down their health bars accordingly, but it feels like they went in the complete opposite direction because even the final couple of bosses absolutely melted in a couple of minutes from abusing flash guard critical-boosted EXTRA attacks. The game also lacks a satisfying payoff to justify the tedium: Memories of Celceta tries to place more emphasis upon the individual party members as opposed to the overarching lore (which is why Ys Seven’s limited storytelling feels more acceptable), but so much more time is spent mindlessly backtracking for side-quests that fail to provide interesting lore/character development, and the game abruptly grinds to a halt after an anti-climatic final boss fight that fails to provide any resolution or catharsis to any of the game’s party members. It really feels like Falcom phoned in Celceta's ending in comparison to the simple yet impactful narrative that Ys Seven provided, thanks to Ys Seven’s well-developed tragic villain and emotional climax.

Many have described Ys Seven and Memories of Celceta as a sort of “transition period” between the Ark-era isometric 2D-3D games and the “modern-era” party-based fully-3D games with broader scopes and longer runtimes, but I will go a step further: Memories of Celceta is the stepping-stone of the Ys stepping-stones. The short and thick of it is that while there is no single abhorrent quality or moment that makes the game unbearable, it's also the first Ys game that's struggled to hold my attention and I can’t think of any reasons to recommend it as opposed to its peers. If you want a tougher game with less developed mechanics but a tighter execution to fit its rougher toolkit, then Ys Seven is the way to go. If you want a more expansive and polished toolkit with a more engaging difficulty and learning curve to justify said toolkit, then Ys VIII is your weapon of choice. Finally, if you just want the tale of Celceta told to you in a more succinct and colorful manner, then I’d suggest playing through the original Ys IV via Dawn of Ys. Memories of Celceta loves to emphasize the importance of treasuring the past… but I sure as hell wouldn’t be surprised if this was the first Ys game that I ended up forgetting.

For the longest time, I thought that the prevalent issue weighing down roguelites/likes was excessive RNG. Later on, I slightly adjusted my stance: RNG was okay, but a lack of player control to combat any unexpected changes as a result of RNG was not. In one fell swoop, Mosa Lina has neatly proven both of those issues to be mere symptoms of the root cause: modern roguelites/likes overemphasize the macro over the micro.

This problem I think, stems from the genre's overreliance upon meta-progression and run investment. While these would at first appear to be opposite ends of the spectrum (after all, meta-progression often relies upon you throwing away successive runs to gain some kind of advantage/pass certain checks), they both point to the same core issue of ultimately not respecting the player's time. In the former case, the moment-to-moment gameplay often isn't interesting enough to sustain a run. In the latter, the player either succeeds with the "god-run" and has to chase the high through more grinding all over again, or throws it all away due to mistakes/RNG and feels like absolute shit, lamenting what could have been with their hours spent, just inches away from the finish line.

Mosa Lina doesn't fall victim to this, because it was never about winning in the first place. There's no end to the game: the core concept infinitely loops and you'll never hit the credits roll unless you decide to manually mash through them in the pause menu. There's a scoring system in place, but the descriptions themselves often mock how points are handed out arbitrarily. On top of this, there's no meta-progression whatsoever because practically everything is unlocked and randomized from the start: you've got three randomized toys to play with out of a pool of nine randomly selected for the particular loop out of 21 possible toys, and if nothing works (which the game outright warns you will happen), just reroll until something sticks.

As a result, the game solves two problems at once: the aforementioned issue of filling up a player's time with weak moment-to-moment gameplay, and the classic issue of "lock-and-key" solutions creating linear puzzles that lack replayability. Although the game characterizes itself as "a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim," I find it to be more indifferent if anything. It doesn't guide you towards solutions, it never provides any incentives for finding solutions, and it never even bothers to explain its underlying mechanics aside from listing the control scheme and being forthright with its unpredictability. Yet by doing so, it sets itself up as the perfect player-driven sandbox. The difficulty and learning curve is entirely up to you; sure the types of tools are randomized, but half of the battle is figuring out what to do with the tool combinations given and exploiting the game's floaty gravity and set pieces with your heavy character and tight jump. If you can't succeed, a refresh is just seconds away!

I don't think I've yelled so much at a video game since my high school days of grinding Dota 2 (a very dark period in my life, I'm aware). However, these were not yells of frustration or exasperation in the slightest. No, this was me shouting in excitement every time something batshit crazy happened on screen (read: pretty damn often). Sometimes the game really does ask for the seemingly impossible with huge gaps to cross/jump and absolutely garbage or ill-fitting tools that I can't even say feel balanced at times; I swear the fish have been useless in 80% of their appearances. That's what makes it so damn enthralling though: savoring the thrill of discovery when I learned how to bomb-jump in mid-air by properly timing my placements, or somehow finagling a solution by pushing and juggling around some crazy contraptions made of dead frogs, some wire, and a ladder. The possibilities felt endless, and while I do have some critique for the initially unintuitive aiming (you shoot upwards/downwards at a 75 degree angle from the horizontal and can't fine-tune your trajectory any further), this game really is the full and realized package it claims to be despite (or perhaps as a result of!) its lack of excessive streamlining. With Level Editor updates on the way, I can 100% see myself returning to mess around more in the future. I'm nothing but pleased as punch that a game which wasn't even on my radar has sufficiently blown me away: in a year of flashy major releases and tired conventions, Mosa Lina pulls back the curtain to reveal that the basics are all you need for a good show after all.

My spooky season wouldn’t be complete without some Wii jank thrown into the mix. Granted, Deadly Creatures is by no means a straight horror title, but my first two Wii picks in Escape from Bug Island and Calling were unfortunately a bit painful to play through, so my third pick will have to do! In this game, you alternate between controlling a tarantula and a scorpion, navigating the Sonoran Desert while fighting off local wildlife such as rats, gila monsters, an angry rattlesnake, and of course, one another. The majority of these levels are linear romps through dark tunnels and buried human garbage, and as the player progresses, they’ll also unlock additional abilities such as a silk-web grapple for the tarantula and a slash for the scorpion that lets you cut down tall grass barriers. Most distinct to Deadly Creatures, however, is the ability to creep up walls (and in the case of the tarantula, eventually walk and cling onto ceilings), which allows the player to more easily weave through the chaotic obstacle courses as well as better convey the intricate and vast micro-environments scattered throughout the Sonoran Desert.

That said, Deadly Creatures' biggest draw is its combat. Throughout the game, local fauna relentlessly assault the player as they intrude upon their territory. These scores of gritty and grueling close-quarters encounters remind me heavily of Cubivore’s combat; the player is often forced to contend with multiple foes at a time in claustrophobic settings, and while it’s not particularly complex (classic bait-and-punish using the scorpion’s dash/block and the tarantula’s jump defensively before striking back), enemies can punish complacent players quite heavily with stun-locking thrusts while surrounding the player to corner them into unfavorable situations. The obligatory waggle controls for several of the stronger/better-ranged attacks further accentuate the tense fights, and are a rare case where I can at least appreciate the implementation of Wii motion control QTEs considering how much fun it is to slam rats and beetles into the dirt as part of the scorpion's "execution moves."

The downside then, is that the game wears out its novelty fairly quickly, and concurrently, the external circumstances fail to necessitate any additional player experimentation that could otherwise provide significant changes in gameplay. Enemy differentiation and AI are huge culprits: while there are a variety of different hostile creatures thrown at the player, the fairly barebones AI and general lack of different enemy attacks means that the same bread-and-butter strategies can be abused regardless of the exact situation. In particular, the tarantula can spam the quick jump attack while the scorpion can simply block single attacks before stabbing every vulnerable foe to death. Alternatively, the player can abuse the standard attack combo to trap foes in eternal hitstun, which by itself can trivialize the majority of the game’s encounters. Even though the player creatures unlock more attacks over time, there’s never any incentive to try them out because button mashing is all that the player needs even at the highest difficulty to win almost every encounter. As a result, the game’s fights never really get harder, but instead become longer by throwing more enemies in a row during single encounters or relying upon spongier foes that now take a half-minute of mashing to finish off. The sole exceptions here are the enemy horned lizards, but they are even more laborious to fight because they spend so much time blocking hits rather than proactively endangering the player with their own attacks. The optimal method is to bait the lizard to charge at you and immediately strike them after dodging (or if using the scorpion, try and get close enough for a Burrow Strike), but this can take a solid minute or so if the enemy AI does not cooperate and instead spends its time meandering about and defending whenever you approach instead.

This eventual slog of enemy encounters is all on top of the slew of strange technical issues and design decisions that slowly but surely bleed the game to death by a thousand cuts. The most intrusive problem is the persistent stuttering and mid-level loading throughout the game’s runtime that slow exploration and combat to a literal crawl. The disorienting camera also becomes a liability, thanks to the very narrow FOV that doesn’t automatically rotate around if the player character turns and walks towards the camera’s source. In a mostly flat 3D game like Cubivore, a lack of full camera control is not as problematic when only one vertical angle for an isometric perspective is really required. However, in a fully 3D action-adventure game like Deadly Creatures where the player needs to see how the world warps around them while walking up/down walls, the lack of camera control is far more egregious, especially when the camera constantly gets uncomfortably close to the player model (often pointing down towards the ground so you can’t see approaching enemies) and at times, gets caught or stuck on walls. Then, there’s the usual layer of 2000s era jank surrounding this with strange object geometry collision, enemy/player models getting stuck on edges and vertices, seemingly random invisible walls, indistinguishable unclimbable surfaces, and so much more. I can certainly tolerate any of these issues in isolation, but together, they form this onslaught of sheer struggle that absolutely wore me out. If the game's length was cut in half, then it’d be a much easier recommendation: after all, the game stops giving you new traversal toys to play with by the halfway point and the actual level design itself never noticeably branches out. As it stands though, you’ll need more than just a penchant for stretched-out textures and 3D polygonal jank to really get something out of this distinct yet sadly tedious experiment forever stuck in its time.

Gregory Horror Show is basically the best budget cartoon Resident Evil to ever exist. I say this out of admiration more than anything else: in a year where Capcom Production Studio 3 appeared to have mixed success with the ambitious but ultimately hollow Glass Rose and the infamous Mega Man X7, it was this overlooked horror-mystery title based on a Japanese CGI anime that thoroughly proved that they still had the sauce. Not only was it a solid return to their roots, it logically expanded off of Resident Evil’s base model in ways that are seldom realized even to this day.

The story goes like this: you’re a kid lost in a foggy forest, finally finding shelter at Gregory House, only to realize in a dream with Death that you’ve ended up in videogame purgatory along with a slew of other troubled inhabitants. Death proceeds to strike you a bargain; if you can bring him the twelve lost souls carried by the various inhabitants, he’ll show you the way out. To do so, you must discover every inhabitant’s weak point and expose them, taking their souls when vulnerable while staving off insanity during the endlessly looped day.

However, there’s a catch. Gregory Horror Show intentionally disempowers the player: there’s no combat to be found, and every guest is capable of running faster than you. They don’t particularly appreciate being spied on, and will immediately take notice if they’re alerted to your presence and skedaddle. As such, the player must rely upon sneakily gathering information by chatting up non-hostile helpers, and spying upon cagey guests by peeping through door keyholes, hiding around furniture/corners, and carefully creeping behind them as they roam around the hotel. This results in a surprisingly intimate experience despite Gregory Horror Show’s brevity: you really get to know the habits and quirks of each guest, carefully marking down your observations in a journal, before finally going in for the kill.

This is where the game really starts to come into its own: after robbing a guest of their soul, they immediately become hostile and if they catch you, will subject you to a “Horror Show” that significantly cuts into your health. It’s no simple task to evade capture once spotted by a hostile, because the player has to duck into other rooms unspotted and take cover in safe rooms or hide in closets/under tables to escape detection. Furthermore, as your cache of purloined souls builds up, more and more guests check into the hotel, further complicating traversal and observation. Thus, while most horror games become safer and easier to manage due to mastery of environments and clearing out enemies along the way, Gregory Horror Show instead organically escalates its difficulty by enforcing tighter timeframes and more meticulous planning to evade angered inhabitants while still gathering information upon new guests, resulting in an increasingly tense and unsettling experience. This is all while the player must also manage their constantly depleting mental health gauge from the simple act of staying awake and scour for items around the mansion in order to trade for necessary health and key items in Gregory’s Horror Shop. All these systems work together to hold the player accountable for plotting out constantly evolving routes throughout the hotel as more rooms/passages and guests are thrown into the mix, alongside the need to keep track of how these guest schedules interact, with their positions constantly shifting over the course of the 24-hour cycle. In particular, it becomes crucial to ensure that the player can safely make it to fortune-telling rooms (only two of which exist in the mansion) to save the game and sporadically return to the player’s guest room to swap/store items, check the player’s journal for recorded guest actions, and take naps to progress time, cure exhaustion, and secure the capture of lost souls. The latter presents a risk-vs-reward exercise in-itself: the player can temporarily keep captured souls on them in any given day to reduce the rate of mental health deterioration, but if the original owner should find them, they’ll lose the lost soul and will have to repeat the process anew.

The result of this intersection between stealth, observation, and horror is perhaps one of the most intricate exercises of sheer patience and planning in any video game I’ve ever played. Granted, Gregory Horror Show is not a masochistic game by any means, but it nevertheless forces players to consider the totality of their actions at any given time while paying dividends if they're willing to do their homework by nailing down the who, where, and when. In this sense, it’s one of the best evolutions of survival-horror, because despite how much it differs from its influences, it understands that time itself is the most important resource to conserve. Failing to perceive exactly how the different elements of the haunted mansion interact can feel quite punishing, not just due to drastic drops in stamina but also likely resulting in significant time losses that can cause the player to miss their striking window of opportunity. The player must then find alternative methods to effectively waste time through costly "Fruits of Time" (that damage your Mental Gauge)/occasionally sleeping and potentially encountering more hostiles until the events of the time loop roll around for another try.

I’ll concede that Gregory Horror Show isn’t an obvious contender for the greatest horror game of all time. There are a couple elements that could be construed as superfluous since they don’t add anything to the stealth-observation premise, such as a Mario Party-esque board game that the player must win for a lost soul, as well as a “boss-battle” amongst many other scripted events during the final night. That said, they’re mere blemishes in the overall scope of things, and are easily forgiven considering the game can be beat in about five to seven hours. Although Gregory Horror Show doesn’t quite rise to REmake's level of resource management mastery, it remains one of the most distinctly charming and succinct takes on the survival-horror genre that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do in its brief runtime, while daring to innovate upon an already revolutionary and tightly packaged standard. I’ve never seen or heard of its source-material prior to this game, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t one of the most effective ways to spark my curiosity. Perhaps that speaks for itself more than anything: even if you’re not a fan of the franchise, you owe it to yourself to check out what I’d say is outright one of the best titles on the PS2 in an already stacked era of exciting and wildly creative works.

I’m starting to realize that I might have an obsession with possession games, and for good reason. They’re convenient mechanics that developers can slip into practically any genre, because they’re extremely simple and consistent to implement but also allow developers to naturally iterate off the environments presented to construct a variety of scenarios despite using the same base structure. Not only that, they allow the developers to quickly pump out a variety of different characters/objects for players to possess that don’t need to be completely fleshed-out with backstories and a full toolkit. Simply put, possession mechanics are a super easy way to utilize heavy context-sensitivity but with the added benefit of feeling more grounded thanks to consistent execution, while providing an easy in-narrative explanation for why the mechanics exist within the lore.

Case in point, let’s consider Geist. Here’s the pitch: the game combines elements of several of my favorite possession games in Ghost Trick, Haunt the House, and a touch of Why Am I Dead at Sea (predating all of these titles by several years!), and it has guns to boot. How could this game possibly be bad!? You play as the ghost of John Raimi, separated from his physical body after being captured in a raid gone wrong, and it’s up to you to foil Volks Corporation’s schemes while saving himself and his pals from a score of supernatural projects. To do so, Raimi must possess objects to scare staff and animals around the facility, and then possess those living creatures in turn to progress deeper with their different abilities. Oh, and sometimes there are gunfights too.

Like most games fixated on possession mechanics, you can think of Geist as having two distinct modes: ghost mode and possession mode. As an ethereal being, Raimi can pass through thin walls like chain-link fences and glowing wall-cracks (referred to as “Slips”) while time is slowed around him. However, he cannot physically interact with most objects (including solid doors) outside of possession, and is constantly racing against the clock because his spirit remains untethered to the world without his body. Consequently, Raimi must possess hosts to reset the timer while utilizing their functionalities to progress. Humans and animals provide more resistance, and as such must be scared by possessing inanimate objects to thoroughly terrify them into submission. Thus, the game provides a plethora of different situations to tackle through the intersection of these two different modes while keeping the controls and baseline mechanics the same. One minute you’re possessing a dog to bark at rats, then the next minute you’re possessing a rat you just frightened to utilize crawlspaces, then the minute after that you’re possessing furniture accessed from the crawlspace to scare the living daylights out of a scientist so you can access his credentials for the lab. Not every element is fully realized (for example, I would have loved if there were more dogs present to serve as hazards that could alert guards to the presence of ghosts to enforce stealth while simultaneously providing possessable vessels that could trick those same guards into opening doors for me), and some of the levels are fairly linear in approach as a result with only one clear solution, but I can’t fault Geist too much; after all, the concept never wore out its welcome in the first place when I was constantly thrown new objectives and new hosts to mess around with.

That said, Geist starts to stray a bit from the light when they pull out the guns. Just judging it as a strict FPS compared to its contemporaries, the flaws are extremely pronounced. For example, aiming feels very stiff due to the sluggish camera scrolling speed (with no way to adjust camera sensitivity in the options menu) as well as constant frame drops further complicating precise aim. There’s also slight but very noticeable aim assist that often snaps the reticle to nearby targets, which gets obnoxious when you’re trying to scroll the camera over to focus on higher-priority enemies but the reticle gets stuck along the way. Having said that, weapon hitboxes are greatly exaggerated, so the reticle often glows red while hovering an inch off the enemy model and landing shots can feel very undeserved. Firefights are ridiculously free even while discounting this, however: much of this is due to the poor AI, as enemies have practically no self-preservation instincts and will often fail to react to faraway shots or run straight into live gunfire from the player. Additionally, most enemies go down in a few shots regardless of where they’re shot (so you don’t even need to go for the head) and the player has infinite ammo/grenades once a soldier is possessed, so as long as the player remembers to reload clips during downtime, the player can just fire at abandon mowing down everything in their way.

The result is that the vast majority of combat ranges from forgettable to disappointing, but even while criticizing the poor base gunplay mechanics, I can acknowledge the potential that the combat had when combined with the possession mechanics. In my mind, the best encounters should focus on emphasizing the interplay between ghost mode and possession mode, through coaxing the player to jump out of hosts to exploit arena set-pieces and then immediately jumping back into hosts to continue assaults. Geist does manage to rise to the occasion a few times, starting with a mid-game sequence where Raimi must jump in and out of explosive objects scattered around a corridor to clear a path for his friend. The developers then immediately variate upon this with a succinct chase sequence. Perhaps the most ambitious segment of the game, the player has to juggle possessing a motorcycle to steer past traps, possessing a mounted truck turret to lay down gunfire, and jumping back onto the road to temporarily possess explosive crates to detonate upon nearby foes. Admittingly these moments are rare in the overall scope of Geist’s many combat scenarios, but it's these welcome glimpses of promise that really incentivized me to push forward.

It is a shame then, that the later levels of the game lean heavily into straight action sequences which don't build upon the core possession premise very well. For instance, the first half of Chapter 7 involves various combat simulations where the player generally possesses one host per exercise and must eliminate all enemies in the arena while staying contained within the host. There’s nothing offensively bad about most of these exercises (except for the opening sniping sequence, which I found to be extremely tedious due to the slow and forced zoom-in of the scope every time I had to aim another shot), but I have to wonder what compelled the devs to shoehorn these straight gunplay sequences in when Chapter 5’s highs more than demonstrate their prowess. The real kicker however, comes in during the last couple of chapters, where you’re given access to characters that can enter rechargeable “boost-mode” to take out enemies in slow-mo. While this sounds great in theory, the game is more than happy to swarm you with bulkier enemies in the last couple of hours, meaning that the optimal strategy is to camp by activating boost mode, safely walking out of cover to take potshots, and then retreating back to cover before boost mode expires and waiting for the gauge to refresh so the process begins anew. Think of this as a budget version of F.E.A.R.’s bullet-time mechanics, though missing the dynamic AI to pressure players into experimentation and also lacking the flashy particle physics and satisfying weapon impact. The annoying hostile ghosts exclusive to these chapters also reinforce this behavior, because trying to approach said ghosts will result in them grabbing the player and dragging them off-stage or into hazards, giving the player insufficient time to mash out of the hold. As such, Geist ironically slogs its way to a conclusion due to betting it all on extravagant combat in exchange for its clever possession puzzles.

Surprisingly, despite all my criticism, I found myself really enjoying the whole experience. It’s a heavily flawed game that has plenty of room for improvement, but at the same time, no flawed game has left me quite as excited for what the medium is capable of as this game has. I find it hard to be overly derogatory towards Geist; N-Space feels like it was trying to accomplish so much with surprisingly little, and I have nothing but respect for such an enthusiastic team that approached the game’s development like a puppy excited to play with a new chew toy. It may not be a very polished game, but it’s a game that dares to try and break new ground and was one of the first major titles that dared to tinker with possession mechanics. Geist paved the way for many more experimental yet realized possession adventure games that have since become mainstays of my personal recommendations, and I couldn’t ask for anything more than that from my favorite era of gaming.

Glass Rose is weird. There’s very little documentation for this PS2 exclusive that never released in the US, and I’m honestly left with more questions upon finishing it than when I first started a week ago. The only definite conclusion I can come to is that this is a sad example of an ambitious title that ultimately misses the forest for the trees.

On the surface, Glass Rose is described as a point-and-click psychological horror game with detective/investigation elements. It’s the first title ever developed by Cing (in conjunction with Capcom’s Production Studio 3), who you might know for DS titles such as Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk that cleverly utilized every feature of the DS as part of their adventure game puzzles. Meanwhile, Glass Rose is a standard point-and-click adventure game… on the PS2 (which you can play with a plugged-in USB mouse) and thus seems like a bit of an anomaly in the library, considering that it doesn’t really push the PS2’s controller functionality or hardware limitations whatsoever. You play as Takashi Kagetani, a newspaper reporter who is suddenly transported back in time to 1929 while exploring an abandoned mansion with his girlfriend, Emi Katagiri, finding himself in the midst of the “Cinema Mansion Serial Murders.” In order to free his girlfriend and get back to his own time, Takashi must get to the bottom of the mansion’s many mysteries while being mistaken as Kazuya Nanase, the long-lost son of the recently deceased Denemon Yoshinodou, constantly conversing with the many denizens of Denemon’s family and staff.

At the core of Glass Rose is its dialogue system, which the game’s back cover boasts of as follows: “Dynamic pacing, innovative clue and free-speech systems make Glass Rose an adventure game like no other.” This essentially boils down to Cing’s spin on constructing dialogue trees: when conversing with others, the player is taken to a screen of the last relevant NPC blurb where they must highlight specific words/phrases to follow up on key tidbits and cause NPCs to react differently in response to the intended question. By correctly highlighting the right words and phrases, Takashi can progress through conversations to learn more about the subjects at hand. While it sounds like a great idea in theory, the execution ends up being a bit shallow and clunky. The game is very picky about exactly what must be highlighted to provoke a response, even if the highlighted subject(s) are practically identical in meaning (i.e. highlighting “Denemon” will often do nothing, but highlighting “Denemon Yoshinodou” will almost always work) and accidentally highlighting punctuation or spaces will also confuse NPCs. Additionally, the intuition of what may sound interesting to highlight often does not overlap with exactly what has to be highlighted to progress (so not every distinct noun or verb will do the trick), and sometimes highlighting longer phrases will just create flavor text while highlighting a specific word within that phrase results in the actual trigger (i.e. highlighting “such a racket” will create flavor text, while highlighting just "racket" will allow you to progress). This means that navigating the dialogue generally devolves into trial and error (especially since many of the things that can be highlighted will only result in single-sentence flavor text/confirmations of the subject at hand), which I’d say detracts from the game’s premise of translating natural conversation flow into gameplay mechanics.

This dialogue system ends up becoming a sort of window-dressing for the rest of the game’s elements due to its linearity: most conversations only have one ending trigger to progress, and in the rare circumstances where more than one trigger exists, it still does not matter which is picked because they have no impact upon how the rest of the game plays out. Unfortunately, the moment-to-moment gameplay surrounding the dialogue is even more underwhelming. Between talking to characters, Takashi must walk around the mansion to examine other objects and stumble upon other rooms where he can progress the plot by talking to more characters. Sometimes it’s made fairly obvious where Takashi must go next with inserted cutscenes or relevant tidbits from the previous character’s dialogue, but a good chunk of the time, this necessary information is never presented to the player. Occasionally, the information is conveyed via a series of quick flashbacks as images/locations of interest, but this also isn’t very helpful because the player generally will not have the context of the image/location in the flashback to find their way forward. In addition, many of the hallways look very similar and objects of interest are often in new rooms (so not already present on the map) or are not distinctly outlined/colored to stand out. Thus, much of the player’s time is spent bumbling about the mansion, which is already extremely inconvenient, but made far more punishing due to the built-in time limit that will sap your strength and send you back to the beginning of a given hour to repeat all of the hour’s tasks if you fail to progress far enough during that time.

Glass Rose’s gameplay feels very undercooked as a result, made even more flagrant due to all the other mechanics that seem barely explored and rarely intersect with one another in any meaningful way. For example, the game’s built-in health is referred to as “Mind Points,” which serve as a safety check against game-overs when failing to complete enough tasks in a given hour or missing a QTE. Mind Points are also utilized when performing “Divine Judgement” (a mind-reading technique that must be used to progress certain conversations when NPCs become reluctant to elaborate, but only sometimes and again not always aligning with intuition), which in-itself becomes a liability since using it outside of dialogue just provides flavor text at the expense of health and using it on the wrong highlighted word/phrase in conversation will still sap health. The only way to restore Mind Points is to click on magical butterflies randomly flying around the mansion (a tougher task than you’d expect, if you’re playing on a gamepad and accidentally double click on a door/camera angle shift and lose the butterfly altogether), complete an optional tangram, or make it to the start of the next chapter. Also rarely inserted throughout the game are QTEs in the form of “Suspense Events,” where sometimes during cutscenes, Takashi will find himself in danger and the player must scroll and click on the correct response to avoid taking damage. Again, they’re not exactly difficult, but the process is made more annoying because scrolling over with a joystick is considerably slower than just scrolling over with a mouse, and later QTEs feature more than one possible (and often ambiguous) response, which can again result in more trial-and-error and excess damage. Finally, Glass Rose features collectibles in the form of “Heart Fragments,” of which a certain threshold must be met in order to potentially unlock the best ending. This system is extremely vague however: there’s no exact counter to show how many you’ve collected (only a picture of Emi used as a visualization of how many you’ve collected; the more fragments you’ve collected, the less her hands are visible in the picture), and no one is certain of the exact threshold for how many are required to achieve the best ending. There are apparently “tainted fragments” that can be collected as well which can skew your ending, but for what it’s worth, I never appeared to collect any and it’s once again unclear under what circumstances it would be “safe” and “unsafe” to collect fragments. Regardless, the best way to collect heart fragments is to solve optional riddles from Denemon’s Notes (read: probably necessary for the best ending) in each chapter, which are pretty simple affairs that require you to travel between some more rooms clicking on furnishings, but are often far more tedious in execution because there are no hints given on where the notes will spawn each chapter to even start the quest.

What is particularly damning, even looking past my gripes with gameplay, is that the game lacks any sort of glue to hold everything together. While my first impression was that this is a classic murder mystery, you’re not so much solving mysteries or deducing clues so much as you are following the obvious signal dropped by the last flashback/piece of dialogue to progress the plot, and clicking wildly around the mansion as a fallback when you’re given nothing to work with. Not once did I have to make any meaningful decisions that would have any impact upon the plot. The result is that the player feels like an observer whom has things happen to them rather than actively making things happen, and I couldn’t help but feel emotionally disconnected throughout the entire runtime. The narrative itself is extremely convoluted thanks to the various flashbacks further obfuscating any meaning, and having to dig through layers of flavor text and non-sequiturs to get to any key plot points while also switching between multiple character dialogues one right after another was exhausting. There is a player journal of Takashi’s notes that can be accessed at any time, but there’s no incentive to ever refer to it because the game refuses to hold the player accountable for any knowledge regarding the plot, as there are no knowledge checks that would ever preclude the player from progressing future character dialogues. I’m at least aware that Cing did learn their lesson here, since Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk contain end-of-chapter quizzes that force the player to recall recent highlights and thus adequately prepare the player for the next segment.

Glass Rose is a conundrum. At no point did I think the game was so horrid as to where I felt compelled to put it down, but not a single quality stands out as particularly noteworthy or even structurally solid. It fails as a detective/investigation game because you never have to rely upon inference/deduction, it fails as a psychological horror game because it never lets the player linger in its space undistracted to become truly unnerved, it falls flat as an adventure game because it never strikes the perfect difficulty with its clues (instead alternating between blatant telegraphs and vague/lack of messaging), and it even pales as a simple point-and-click because the basic act of clicking on objects is often frustrating due to unclear overlap between the cursor hitbox and background object hurtboxes. I so desperately wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, but it really dropped the ball in the last couple of hours, when the game decided to abruptly rush every underdeveloped character arc to a conclusion (as opposed to Hotel Dusk, which has the restraint to focus and more thoroughly develop one or two characters per chapter), and finish the tale off with a last-minute introduction to a comic book villain. As such, I cannot recommend this to anyone but the most fervent of Cing fans looking to scan their library as a historical relic. I should feel more disappointed that so much of the game was left on an unsatisfying note, but frankly, I’m just glad it’s finally over. Glass Rose may not be bad, but I’d argue that it’s worse as it is certainly boring. Cing absolutely deserved better considering the quality of their later work; still, maybe some games were meant to be forgotten after all.

Context is everything.

Without its layer of fictitious languages, Chants of Sennaar would just be another traditional point-and-click adventure game: talk to NPCs, collect and utilize items to solve inventory puzzles, and explore varied landscapes to discover secrets. Yet, that added layer is all Chants of Sennaar needs to stand out, because it fundamentally understands that the act of learning is in itself a puzzle. None of the classic adventure game puzzles are actually that difficult, but conjoined with the underlying problem of deciphering the presented languages at the same time, worldly interactions feel much more engaging and cohesive in the grand scope as learning opportunities, constantly giving you chances to piece together bits of understanding throughout the journey as part of its world-building. It's a fairly simple framework that allows the developers to easily throw new curveballs by simply altering the context to adapt to new surroundings; the underlying objective (learning a new language) never changes, but how other characters/objects interact with the environment around them will differ, so the path to achieve mastery of a new language never feels exactly the same.

It's easy to fault Chants of Sennaar for its limitations. For example, there's only about thirty characters used in each language, and they're all conveniently referring to the same nouns and verbs. However, I'm more than willing to overlook these contrivances, because none of them actually detracted from the game's constructed reality: after all, the game always felt more about the process of learning new languages than the robustness of the languages themselves. Even so, I find that it strikes a healthy medium because of the nuances here and there: for instance, you might find that glyphs often visually resemble the ideas that they represent, or that there are also visual similarities between nouns versus verbs. Still, languages also have enough surface differences to avoid complete analogues (such as how each language implements plural values), even altering structure at times so translation between languages isn't free. You'd think that this would lead to some degree of ambiguity interfering with the game's structure, especially since there's already a processing layer between the player and the game regarding the exact meaning of words (ex: what if you submitted a glyph as "potions" but the game insisted on the term "medicine?"). However, the game assuages this concern by having the player submit glyphs as definitions for sketched ideas (or direct analogous nouns/verbs for some glyphs), so even if players have slightly different interpretations, they'll most likely end up arriving at the same conclusion anyways. As such, the game utilizes sound compromises that lessen overall frustration but still retain the spirit of deciphering and implementing knowledge of foreign languages.

While these contrivances didn't impact my overall enjoyment, there were some external gameplay mechanics such as the forced stealth sections that generally contributed nothing to the premise and interfered with the game's pacing. I can somewhat justify a select few for making sense in-universe (i.e. eavesdropping on others' conversation while they're working to figure out what actions/objects they're referring to), but the vast majority of these forced stealth sections involved no interaction with the fictitious languages and seemed shoehorned-in to just pad out the runtime. It also doesn't help that they're not evenly spaced apart (most of the forced stealth takes place in the 2nd world and during the endgame if you're going for the true ending) and that these sections + a few chase sequences will force the player to restart if caught, with fail-states a rare occurrence throughout the rest of the game. Still, these mostly superfluous elements are but a mere blemish upon the final product, and though the ending feels slightly rushed, the silver lining is that Chants of Sennaar certainly does not wear out its welcome. It's one of the best takes upon the detective/investigation genre with no murder or theft required, and the highest praise I can give this surprise hit is that it made me even more excited for video games in a year already stacked with memorable releases.

It's immediately obvious that Shadow of the Colossus influenced Titan Souls: a mostly empty overworld, restrained and simplified controls (two buttons, used for a roll and shooting/recalling your single spirit arrow), and gameplay centralization around the thirteen boss fights are all reminiscent of Team ICO's most acclaimed work. Unfortunately, Titan Souls is nothing more than a poor man's carbon copy, because its boss designs leave something to be desired. Bosses go down in one hit, and so does the player: there's no room to learn on the fly when any hit will end the fight and respawn you outside of the arena, forcing yet another trek back. This devolves into spamming "all or nothing" attempts via trial and error: dodge through attack patterns until the boss displays its pink weak point, taking your shot when the moment presents itself and ending most fights in a minute or less. As a result, the game fails to create an engaging difficulty curve and never hits that sweet-spot, because there's just a sudden jump between struggling and breaking through, replacing the journey in-between with sheer tedium. It's the classic mistake of conflating difficulty with punishment, made even more flagrant in hard mode by simply accelerating enemy attacks/throwing out more projectiles instead of utilizing trickier and unique patterns to stratify different playthroughs.

Most importantly, Titan Souls lacks Shadow of the Colossus's ability to create a realistic feeling of presence. There's no intimacy to be found due to the brevity of fights and the absence of any other significant NPCs, and the game fails to build up any anticipation due to how condensed the overworld is (resulting in little travel time), failing to provide any cooldown or catharsis for similar reasons. After all, volume swells cannot exist if there are no punctuated moments of stillness to break up the action (something that this game desperately needs, considering how background tracks are constantly playing throughout the overworld). Ultimately, Titan Souls is yet another indie imitator that will forever live in the shadows of its influences: it appears to capture the surface appeal well enough, but fails to emulate any underlying details that would elevate it beyond a homage to something greater.

I ultimately like Super Sami Roll, but I wish I liked it more. Its concept sounds fantastic on paper (master a simple toolkit to handle weighty rolling-heavy movement), but its execution left a bit to be desired on my end. It certainly didn't help that some perceived inconsistencies regarding its mechanics made the learning curve that much more frustrating.

The simplest way I can put this is that Super Sami Roll is essentially a modern take on the classic speedrunning platformer (think: momentum-based platformers where speed is not so much a given as it is a reward for mastery) that also has a lot of nuance to its toolkit. The key is figuring exactly how to link your moves together to retain speed while never falling into the abyss: for example, you can use your tongue-grapple to latch onto distant platforms/walls, chain that into an instant jump off the grapple to retain aerial momentum and gain height, then immediately ground-pound right over a platform for a quick dash of speed and bounce even higher, etc. It's a really satisfying feeling when pulled off, and allows for some crazy player-discovered shortcuts that are heavily encouraged via the secret "Maestro" ranks.

The problem here is that for me, these highest-level challenges feel too inaccessible because of the game's inconsistencies. Certain key mechanics feel "off" and are utilized often enough to where they actively marred my experience:

- Sami's tongue-grapple is somewhat context-sensitive: to aid players, there's a white-line prompt displayed in front of Sami to show where Sami's tongue would latch onto when activated. However, if Sami is going at too quick of a speed in relation to the object that the player is trying to latch on, the tongue will often outright fail to latch onto the object and miss entirely, causing Sami to fall into the abyss.

- Trapezes stumped me for some time, because they don't function off of stored momentum much like most of the game's movement. Here is a MS paint diagram to try and illustrate my point. Fundamentally, every 3D platformer I've played with a swing/trapeze wants you to jump halfway between the bottom and the apex of the swing while rising for maximum height: this gets you the most speed for your jump while still retaining a velocity pointed upwards. However, Super Sami Roll's trapezes apparently ignore gravity, because Sami will swing in a complete circle around the trapeze losing no speed at all, and the direction you jump off of the trapeze is independent from your prior swing velocity. As a result, it's more favorable to jump at the exact apex of the swing or slightly beyond that, which really fucked with my intuition until I learned exactly how it operated in contrast to traditional physics.

- Sami's ledge-grab window feels way too tight, and if you contact a wall right before the ledge-grab margin, Sami will simply bonk his head against the wall instead of grabbing the ledge or immediately wall-sliding. I find that traditional 3D platformers tackle this issue by either giving a generous ledge-grab area of impact, or giving a slight wall-slide velocity upwards upon wall contact to allow players to hit the window, but because Super Sami Roll does neither, it's way too easy to just slightly miss the ledge-grab and fall too far into the abyss to recover. As a result sequence-breaking with the tongue-grapple + wall jump often feels too risky and inconsistent, even though the game really wants you to do so in order to snag those Maestro ranks.

In addition to all of these issues, I unfortunately found Super Sami Roll a bit tedious. Most of the mechanics are introduced fairly early on, but levels don't just get harder, but also get longer. This isn't a huge deal if you're playing on Normal mode with checkpoints, but on Advanced mode with no checkpoints (and only no checkpoints as the only difference... it certainly would have been appreciated to add in stricter time limits or more obstacles to spice things up), it often feels like banging your head against a wall over and over again. It's a tough learning curve to swallow, worsened because sometimes your tongue simply won't grapple as planned or Sami will bonk his head against the wall while wall-climbing, so consider this my warning that a lot of patience is necessary.

Oddly enough, I think this functioned better in my mind as a casual platforming experience than a hardcore speedrunning platformer. Once I accepted that the tighter Maestro ranks were not within my visible reach (and turned off Advanced mode in World 4 due to how punishing the game became), the rest of the game became much easier to swallow. That does make me wonder though: what audience does Super Sami Roll really appeal to? Casual players who dabble with the occasional 3D platformer might find it overly frustrating even with accessibility options if they're not used to the weighty toolkit (there's only so much you can accommodate for if you're falling off all the time!), but more hardcore players might find the advanced mode rather tedious due to level length and a lack of general level design variability (they're mostly long-winding curvy corridors with no differences in rollable surfaces whatsoever). There are some other minor nitpicks like the shoehorned-in boss fights (boring three-hit dodge-and-punish fights with tons of waiting around), but even if Super Sami Roll isn't completely my cup of tea, I can at least appreciate what it brings to the table. I need a break from 3D platformers in the meantime, but there's still content left with the many hidden exits to be discovered + the unlockable 5th world, so who knows? My mind can be changed.

Pseudoregalia strikes me as a short and satisfying 3D platformer, though I hesitate to call it succinct. Its core strength is its simple yet nuanced toolkit, as its multi-faceted movement options provide great depth. For example, the wall-kick serves an obvious purpose as a wall jump by kicking between two opposite walls, but you can also use the wall kick to alter your trajectory and gain more air-time. This can lead to exploits such as wall-kicking up corners to scale previously unreachable platforms, or wall-kicking just below ledges and immediately reversing your trajectory with another wall-kick to grab the ledge. As a result, the game's many obstacle courses never feel prohibitive and are not so much tied to specific upgrades as they are to the player's ability to execute movement tech, making exploration feel much more open-ended. Unfortunately, Pseudoregalia's exploration is stunted somewhat because it's super easy to get lost without any maps or checklists showing the player where to go/what's left to collect. The room layouts further exacerbate this confusion, because the overworld consists of many long branching tunnels instead of focusing on larger, more open areas that allow for hidden shortcuts. If all of the six main sectors had shortcuts to one another so I could access any section from any main hub (as opposed to wasting time mindlessly backtracking through the same central hubs), I think that my overall playtime would have been shortened by a solid hour or more.

Similarly, combat simply exists in Pseudoregalia, and could have been removed altogether with little consequence. Aside from two isolated bosses (one tutorial boss and one final boss), combat is usually unnecessary since most enemies can be easily avoided by constantly moving about. There's generally no tangible benefit to attacking enemies outside of restoring energy for healing. While there is an unlockable ability that lets you gain height while attacking enemies mid-air, I can't recall any real need to utilize this ability against moving foes outside of the collectible's immediate vicinity. The combat's superfluity becomes even more flagrant thanks to a few forced encounters: these tedious affairs require players to exterminate various spongey enemies to unlock a room's exits. As such, I think combat should be taken out while keeping invulnerable enemies around as a threat, and health restoration could be entirely tied to save crystals instead. I'd also be okay replacing the final boss with a final obstacle gauntlet forcing me to put all my movement tech to the test: while not a terrible fight, it felt a bit out of place relying on fairly restrained bait-and-punish + heal to defeat a final boss when I'd much rather be zipping about. Regardless, Pseudoregalia is a solid Steam debut for rittzler that's well worth the price of entry despite its lack of polish, and it's a game that I could see myself warming up to further with additional runs. I can't wait to see what they've got in mind for Electrokinetic.

In his video last year regarding context sensitivity, Matthewmatosis opens by describing Ghost Trick as entirely context-sensitive: the main action button ("trick") always performs a different action depending on the item possessed. However, he points this out as an exception to the trend of heavy context-sensitivity weighing down modern titles, because simply put, Ghost Trick uses context-sensitivity not as a crutch, but as its core. It never seems to suffer from fuzzy context: the game not only gives you plenty of safe time to experiment with set-pieces leading up to timed sequences (since untimed traversal to the victim is every bit a puzzle in itself), but also briefly describes the single "trick" of each object possessed to give players an idea of how to progress. Furthermore, Ghost Trick's difficulty hits a perfect sweet-spot: it doesn't feel free because traversal and manipulating objects to your advantage require a good degree of planning and experimentation, but failure also never feels too punishing because other characters and the environment are great at providing thoughtful feedback upon failure, so the player isn't just banging their head against a wall via quick restarts at built-in checkpoints.

Essentially, it's like playing the ancestor of Return of the Obra Dinn but with a time loop mechanic attached. The objective remains simple (travel back to four minutes before death to avert fate), but how to achieve said objective is always completely dictated by your surroundings. As a result, it naturally iterates upon its basic structure to create more unconventional scenarios: soon you're not just manipulating objects for traversal and foiling assassins, you're also solving locked room mysteries, or traveling to different environments to save victims from elsewhere, or diving into deaths within deaths to avert multiple fates at a time. Through all of this, Ghost Trick understands one of the key strengths of video games: creating virtual playgrounds of experimentation unsaddled by the limitations of time to reward players through the joy of discovery. The player is constantly surprised time and time again not only from unexpected object interactions, but also from how the narrative weaves in and out of death sequences to create suspenseful moments. It's a minor miracle in itself that the story never jumps the shark: the gameplay mechanics remain firmly consistent alongside its lore, and every plot thread is neatly wrapped up by the end of the game after a series of subtly foreshadowed twists. Combine this marrying of storytelling and gameplay with expressive animations, a colorful and very personable cast, an understated yet powerful soundtrack, and a great mix of humor and emotional moments, and you get what is perhaps the most cohesive title in the DS library.

It's rather poetic that a game which looked simple on the outside provided such an intricate exercise for Shu Takumi to prove that he was no one-trick pony. I'm grateful that Ghost Trick has finally been ported to modern systems for a whole new audience to lose their minds over this, for it's a masterpiece that everyone owes to themselves to check out. At the end of the day, nothing feels quite as cathartic as miraculously changing destiny in the face of inevitable death.

My first thought was that Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was just going to be a straight spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future (which would have been a letdown considering my three weeks of original Jet Set Radio prep), but I'm pleasantly surprised by the blend of mechanics presented! In reality, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk takes the overall structure and aesthetic from Future while borrowing more heavily from original Jet Set Radio's tight level design and intricate scoring mechanics, and dare I say, actually improves upon certain aspects. It does have a few underdeveloped features as a result of its experimentation, but overall, not a bad first attempt by Team Reptile!

One issue that apparently escaped my notice the first time around (I replayed Future recently just to confirm this) was that Future's extremely linear and stretched-out levels resulted in tons of backtracking upon missing objectives/falling off the stage, and led to fairly rigid approaches that really tried my patience upon additional loops. This is fortunately not the case with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: levels are generally a lot more open with many more shortcuts and are spaced apart carefully to where traversal feels much more free-form. It more closely resembles original Jet Set Radio, especially when you consider how its momentum mechanics complement this design. Future made the speed fairly easy to obtain: jump onto a rail regardless of your momentum, then keep mashing trick to accelerate and never slow down. On the other hand, original Jet Set Radio became well-known for how slow your character would move about unless you actively utilized rails and grindable walls to speed up, and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk takes a modern twist: you need to maintain momentum by either rail grinding and leaning into corners for speed boosts, or by using grounded manuals combined with boost (refreshed from performing tricks) to retain speed.

The momentum mechanics go hand-in-hand with the game's combo system. After thoroughly exploring levels to spray graffiti spots for "rep" and completing subsequent score and movement-tech challenges from opposing crew members, your crew must finally confront opposing crews in a crew battle, outscoring them with trick combos in their own territory. The scoring and trick system improvises upon both original Jet Set Radio and Future: in both games, the safest way to score trick points was abusing infinite grind loops and repeating the same tricks/movement over and over. However, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk turns this on its head: you don't get tons of points for doing the same tricks ad-nauseam (since trick value decreases and eventually levels off when used more and more). Instead, the main key to getting points is increasing the multiplier by utilizing unique features of the stage: that is, leaning into tight corners on grindable rails, wall-riding billboards, and going up half-pipe ramps (which are improved over the original game since you can manual up ramps and then air boost off into manuals/rail and wall-grinds, so they can function as part of a combo). The key word is "unique," since utilizing the same set-piece in a held combo will not give additional multipliers, and the same goes for graffiti spots that can now also be resprayed as one-time trick bonuses during continuous combos. As a result, the trick and multiplier staling incentivizes players to fully explore and utilize every set-piece present upon the open stages to create massive combos, made easier thanks to the mid-air dash (which also lets you alter airborne momentum once) and the manual. The only downside here is that the game's circumstances never become difficult enough to necessitate this trick optimization; the story crew battles are pretty easy and I was leapfrogging them using the above strategy (i.e. while other crews were floundering around several hundred thousand, I was well beyond a couple million in score), so unless players are trying to crack the tougher post-game score barriers for optional characters/achievements, they may never need to lean on these strategies at all.

The lack of difficulty serves as a microcosm of this game's unfortunate trend: Bomb Rush Cyberfunk certainly innovates upon many features from the Jet Set Radio games, but I find a few to be undercooked or lacking in execution. The combat's one example: it's not a bad idea in theory (using tricks to both deal damage and maintain score/momentum) and in fact has been proposed before, but its implementation leaves something to be desired. Attacking enemies feels like it has little impact because of the muffled sound-effects, akin to slapping a wet sock on a table. Also, most enemies can be defeated with a single grounded attack into an immediate "corkscrew" jump and then spray-painted in the air. While this graffiti coup de grâce never gets old, it does feel quite difficult in practice comboing in and out of this linearizing technique (since you need to be standing and off your skates to execute, breaking any combo potential), so combat never really flows and the mandatory combat sections in-story feel somewhat superfluous.

Adjacent to this is the heat system, a spin on original Jet Set Radio's enemy escalation during story stages. As your character goes about spraying graffiti, police forces begin to spawn in tougher waves: for example, wave one consists of simple grounded officers with batons and pistols, wave two activates turrets that home-in on the player with chains and slow their movement, and wave three brings in armored forces that can block attacks. I found most of these enemies to be mere nuisances: you can easily skate around and dodge most attacks (except for the turrets, which can be easily disabled with a single attack + spray), and since enemies can't be easily comboed for points and will respawn continuously upon defeat anyways, it's best to just ignore them as is. Again, this is fairly similar to original Jet Set Radio's strategy of outmanuevering enemies since foes there were active time sinks, so this doesn't bother me greatly. Unfortunately, this creates friction with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk's exploration, and not just in the sense that enemies will impede progress. The game requires you to swap between the three different types of movestyle for their different abilities: skateboards can ride on extendable fire hydrants to extend them vertically and reach heights, inline skates can skid on glass to shatter specific ceilings, and bikes can open special garage doors. The only way to switch between characters/movestyles is to go to checkerboard tiles and dance, but the game prohibits switching when there's "too much heat." Thus, you have to de-escalate the heat gauge by entering orange porta-potties (unmarked on the map, so hopefully you remember their locations!). However, they also lock up after a single use, so players have to either outright leave the stages or find a different porta-potty elsewhere to reopen old porta-potties for enemy despawning. I think this could have easily been improved if the heat gauge slowly decreased over time from successful enemy evasion.

Even with my criticisms, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was definitely worth the three year wait. The story isn't anything mindblowing, but it's got some nice twists that are conveyed via these surreal platforming sequences that are a cross between the time rifts from A Hat in Time and a Psychonauts fever dream. I'm pleasantly surprised by a good chunk of the soundtrack too: Hideki Naganuma's three contributions are the obvious highlights, but other tracks like 2Mello's I Wanna Kno and Sebastian Knight's Feel the Funk more than hold their own weight. It's a good mix of upbeat sampledelia hip-hop and chill ambient tunes, with my only real complaint being the lack of guitar-heavy rock tracks like Magical Girl or Statement of Intent... RIP Guitar Vader. Finally, I more than got my playtime's worth out of 100%ing the game, considering all the hidden areas and collectibles to find and just how much fun I had figuring out new ways to string together ridiculous combos. Despite the game's various areas of improvement, I find Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to be a fantastic fresh take upon a beloved franchise that isn't just a homage to Jet Set Radio, but a love letter to classic Y2K counter-culture and skating games as a whole. If you're not a prior fan of the franchise, this might not be the game to change your mind, but if you are, then I see no reason why you wouldn't find some enjoyment out of it. It's no surprise that fans absolutely ate this up, with excitement for the franchise reaching a new fever pitch. Your move, SEGA. Let's see if you guys still understand the concept of love.

Thanks again to Pangburn for convincing me to give this another chance and thoroughly looking over my resulting thoughts.

Here’s a fun little drinking game: open up a video of Jet Set Radio’s tutorial, and take a sip for every comment complaining or memeing about the difficulty. As silly as this sounds, there appears to be some veneer of truth to Jet Set Radio’s reputation as a game where you need a “tutorial for the tutorial,” considering that more people have beaten the full story mode on Steam than have actually cleared the tutorial. As a result, the tutorial has become a microcosm of Jet Set Radio’s critical reputation nowadays when judging its gameplay: take a scan around popular circles, and you’ll find that some of the most frequently used descriptors include “jank,” “frustrating,” and “outdated.” I, on the other hand, would like to reintroduce a different descriptor to the conversation: “misunderstood.”

Back in 2017, I was similarly convinced that the game suffered from flimsy controls and level design, but the more I tinkered with it in the last three weeks, the more I came to realize its consistency regarding its mechanical intersections. Jet Set Radio eschews complex input potential in exchange for simple inputs (skating with the left joystick, jumping, and boosting) and context-sensitive movement using rails and walls for grinding. This works in its favor because the game never plants the player into situations of fuzzy context: all grindable walls and rails behave the exact same way throughout the game and are carefully spaced apart in each sub-area to allow players to naturally jump between setpieces as long as they maintain momentum. Additionally, Jet Set Radio has fairly little RNG, and what little there is can usually be mitigated. Enemy patterns and waves (the latter of which can be directly controlled via keeping an eye on the number of sprayed graffitis) play out exactly the same every time, allowing for players to minimize enemy impact. Similarly, stages have practically no moving physical setpieces outside of easily avoidable cars and trains; they are set to a consistent timer, and even if players are unaware of the exact timing, they give enough advance warning via honks upon approaching so players can jump out of the way. Again, some enemies are tougher to pin down, such as the jetpack enemies in “Fight or Flight” with their aerial pathing/tracking or the burly bodyguard enemies sometimes despawning and respawning upon aggroing them, but these are rare exceptions when considering the game’s enemy roster as a whole.

As a result of this general mechanical consistency, the game’s robust level design allows for a great degree of freedom regarding level approaches. This is where the adjacent topic of character selection becomes particularly relevant. Pangburn has brought up that this system acts as a pseudo-difficulty slider, though I would like to expand upon his point regarding graffiti. Characters with less graffiti skills will not gain as many points via completing graffiti QTE chains, but come with the advantage of requiring less sprays. This can be further exploited due to QTE consistency: spray inputs are graffiti-skill dependent and will remain the same for every graffiti in the game. As a result, players can repeat the cycle of spraying the first single input and immediately disengaging the QTE with LT. By doing so, they can “reset” the graffiti QTE and tap LT again to reenter the QTE sequence and bring up the exact same opening prompt. Essentially, you can “speedrun” graffiti by abusing the simple opening inputs of graffiti-weak characters. That said, it is every bit as feasible to use graffiti-type characters like Gum to maximize points by taking more time for full sprays, or disengaging sprays partly through and fleeing to safety once roaming enemies get close, later returning to finish the job once the vicinity is cleared.

Let’s put everything we’ve discussed to the test in the context of an example, comparing two drastically different yet equally viable strategies. Consider the Chapter 3 Kogane-cho level “Fight or Flight,” which is regarded by many to be the toughest “Jet” rank due to flying jetpack enemies that spawn at the halfway mark. Pangburn’s strategy is to commit to spraying down graffitis as quickly as possible with Mew, a technique character that is considered “graffiti-weak” (and thus has a single opening spray input). He starts by entering the sewer sub-area from the opening rooftops, which also lets him abuse an infinite grind loop within the sewers early on to rapidly build up a point buffer as a back-up. Once he’s gained enough points, he then exits the sewers into the construction area, thoroughly sprays through the graffiti there, and then makes his way downhill (spraying all the rooftop graffiti along the way) until he ends up in the residential area for the final graffiti. My game plan, on the other hand, is more committal, and involves direct enemy manipulation alongside spraying back-up graffiti as a buffer (instead of abusing an infinite grind chain) by using Gum to maximize QTE points. The pathing can be thought of as a giant loop: I start by spraying the large street-level graffiti in the rooftops area and then head to the construction site and despawn a sniper to free-up the set of two large graffiti on top of an entrance. From there, I scrounge up some more paint cans around the construction site before descending into the sewers and carefully jumping in-between two groups of enemies with their backs turned, allowing me to spray the set of two graffiti points several feet away from the crowds without them ever noticing. Finally, I enter the residential area and thoroughly spray all the graffiti there, reversing my course from that point on. All that remains are small graffiti, which makes it much easier to avoid the newly spawned jetpack enemies. Looking at our mapped routes, Pangburn and I took almost completely reversed paths, and yet both of us obtained Jet rankings. That, I believe, is the persisting strength of Jet Set Radio: its intricate yet consistent mechanical overlap allows for great depth that makes itself evident via fairly customizable routing.

While I’m confident that Jet Set Radio has great longevity stemming from its potential for creative planning, I’m unsure if every single level in the game contributes to this longevity. The Jet missions unlocked in the post-game present great opportunities for further mastery, but I do find that there’s a degree of overlap involved. For example, the Jet Crush missions are essentially replayable versions of the rival races encountered in-game. They’re justified during the first playthrough as ventures that give the player an idea of how separate sections in a level connect, but in their Jet Crush form, I find that they’re a bit redundant since nothing is changed outside of the raced character. Still, it’s certainly appreciated that the Jet Crush levels bring new content to Bantam Street and Grind Square, two levels that were without rival races in the main game. The other two Jet mission types attempt to stratify further: Jet Graffiti focuses on spraying required graffitis for points, while Jet Technique only has small optional graffiti to spray and prioritizes trick loops instead. Unfortunately, I find that they’re functionally too similar, because it is far too easy to rely on the infinite loop as a crutch in Jet Graffiti (while it is more or less the intended strategy in Jet Technique). This could have been patched up if the Jet Graffiti levels had tighter time limits to discourage infinite loop grinding. Finally, I’d like to highlight the final boss, which sticks out like a sore thumb since it relies so heavily on straight platforming over rotating gears and doesn’t present much room for planning outside of relying upon tanking damage or abusing the aforementioned single spray spam. At least the fight is over in a few minutes, but it is a pity that Jet Set Radio stumbles rather than glides at the end of each playthrough.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Jet Set Radio’s lasting significance upon the gaming community. How for every player like me, who eventually embraced the once alienating mechanics, there exists another new player who slogs through the tutorial and never picks up the game again, or an opposing retrospective that finds only disappointment upon a replay and describes the moment-to-moment gameplay as “archaic.” I can’t help but feel that most of us saw what Jet Set Radio was on the surface: a “style-over-substance” platformer & extreme sports hybrid that revolutionized cel-shading in video games and turned video game OSTs on their head. Many of the game’s future successors (including its immediate follow-up in Future) seem to have fixated upon these qualities, and while I love Jet Set Radio Future for its own reasons, I nevertheless think that it’s a shame that part of Jet Set Radio’s identity was lost somewhere along the way, becoming further embedded and absorbed into mainstream culture despite its original status as a counter-culture icon. No successor has quite captured that imperfect yet intriguing blend of arcade-style skating and robust level and setpiece design, and they’ve instead zoned in on the personality every time. I suppose at the end of the day, the best we can do to honor its influence is to look beyond the surface and highlight exactly what Jet Set Radio means to us. For me, I still can’t believe I squandered this game for half a decade, but at the very least, I’m proud to put the original alongside its successor as one of my favorite games and firmly establish Jet Set Radio as my favorite SEGA franchise. I remain cautiously curious regarding any potential future, but this time, I can look forward without any regrets concerning legacy.

I actually beat Rollerdrome back in March and was quite enamored at first, but I've since cooled down on it somewhat. A quick replay today has only confirmed my suspicions that there's unfortunately a lot left to be desired. Feel free to take my word here with a grain of salt: I'm not a particularly huge Tony Hawk fan and was more or less playing this as part of a warm-up via Jet Set Radio-likes (since Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is coming out in less than a week, and I replayed the original Jet Set Radio right before this). Still, if I had to put my finger on why this didn't hit the mark the second time around, my best guess would be that Rollerdrome doesn't understand how to create an engaging difficulty curve, and here are some of my theories as to why:

- Progression: Rollerdrome locks its stages behind completing challenges (collect all the tokens, do a certain trick while killing a certain enemy, rack up enough points, etc), with ten challenges per stage and sixty completed challenges required to unlock the finals. This is supposed to incentivize players to tackle as many challenges as possible while going through stages, but in reality what I found myself doing was farming the earlier stages for the easiest challenges to get the base completion requirement out of the way, and throwing away dry runs to farm the more manageable challenges at the beginning before resetting and running through the stages proper. This unfortunately feels like an artificial implementation of coercing me to explore its mechanics when I was usually more concerned with straight efficiency regarding combat.

- Tricks: You need to perform tricks constantly in Rollerdrome to restore your ammo, and tricks are also a way to quickly rack up points in-between shooting to exploit your current combo multiplier. Again though, I found tricks to be unnecessarily complicated and superfluous outside of doing the required tricks to complete necessary challenges: if you don't care about your score, then all you have to do for quick ammo restoration is to just hold the stick forward and perform the same grab/flip/spin while not in combat, or just spend your time grinding on rails/edges and firing since you'll automatically regain ammo for grinding up to a certain point. It also doesn't help that I found the inputs for more complex tricks a bit fiddly and perfect dodges refresh some of your ammo anyway, reducing the reliance upon tricks. Speaking of which...

- Dodge/Super Reflex: The dodge is a little too good in Rollerdrome. You can basically invincible frame roll at any time in the game (including in mid-air and while grinding), outside of a few frames right after the roll animation ends as far as I can tell. This not only provides a reliable method for quickly getting out of danger, but also you can roll in any direction to quickly alter your momentum and enter Super Reflex if you activate bullet-time right as you perfect dodge (that is, dodging in the first few frames of an active enemy attack). To summarize, this strategy easily gets you ammo refills, allows for relative invincibility when confronted by a barrage of attacks, and powers up your shots while in Super Reflex, which as a result makes Rollerdrome almost feel too reactive as opposed to proactive since it's far too advantageous to not abuse this to safely and quickly wipe out waves.

- Stages: Rollerdrome only has 11 stages, and quite a few of these stages are just repeated locales with few hazards outside of the enemies and a lot of empty, open space outside of a few trick ramps and grind rails/edges. A bit more variety in the set design (and more walls to wall-ride, which I thought was a little underutilized) would have been appreciated since by halfway through, some of the arenas started to bleed into one another for me.

- Laser: I'm fine with most of the weapon balance in Rollerdrome, but the Z-11 (the in-game laser gun) is an exception. The main caveat to using the Z-11, aside from the three shot capacity (still more than the grenade launcher though), is that you can't use aim assist to automatically lock on to foes with it and thus must manually point your reticle at them. Not a very difficult task though, since Reflex gives you more than enough reaction time and the reticle turns red as soon as you hover over a target. Because the shotgun and pistol are limited somewhat by range for aim assist (especially the shotgun due to perfect slug shots), the laser is a godsend: it bypasses this system entirely and lets you snipe foes from across the arena, taking out most enemies after a double charge and can also pierce through multiple enemies at a time. It further disrupts this balance because the Z-11 is unlocked halfway through, meaning the game's earlier combat/combo challenges are a lot more difficult without it at first but often rather trivial once you've unlocked it.

- Boss fights: I've already mentioned that Rollerdrome's dodge roll is a bit overcentralizing, but nowhere does this become more evident than during the two boss fights, shifting the prevailing strategy from any semblance of ammo management/route planning to just basic bait and punish. Simply wait for enemy attacks, dodge to regain ammo/enter Super Reflex to finish off goons, and then approach the big robot to deal damage and enter the next phase. There's no scoring optimization or crazy tricks/maneuvering involved, and as a result, these tend to be pretty dry affairs that could have been removed from the game entirely with little value lost.

I certainly get the appeal of Rollerdrome, given its potential for optimization to maximize the combo meter and quickly speedrun stages, but unfortunately I find that the game doesn't get harder, but rather gets longer with more enemies that take more hits and throw out more attacks. Even so, I had enough fun constantly filling foes with lead in slow-mo, but even this thrill began to wear itself thin an hour in. I can't help but feel that the separate movement and combat mechanics are undercooked despite how promising "Tony Hawk with bullet-time gunplay" sounds on paper. More power to those who find the core gameplay engaging enough to try and complete all the challenges + the "Out for Blood" post-game replay with stricter margins: as for me, I'm content with putting this down after a few hours and completing Finals with a C rank. Rollerdrome is by no means a bad game, but I know Roll7 is capable of so much more.