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Welcome, here you can see all the insights I've produced. Each have a quotation of something I said in the post that if you click on will take you to that post. Feel free to swap it to Grid mode if you'd prefer a more clear overview or use the filters to organize any other way that makes sense.

Other points to note: I have comments permanently off so don't worry about personal commentary or that you are blocked or anything like that.

59 Games

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Mil Rosas

Mil Rosas

My favorite factor that the narrative so excellently teases at is the idea that handheld consoles have a specific unique quality in their focal experience that elevates them as anxiety suppression devices.

Cruelty Squad

Cruelty Squad

Loadout

Platformer Toolkit

Platformer Toolkit

You can't make the character feel good to play when you have a horrible non-progressing mallsoft B-Side trumpet song playing in the background and with the visuals all looking like Paper Mario: Sticker Star put through a smoothie blender.

Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed

Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed

It makes sense that if you're going to make a game out of boredom as a way to illicit abstract sensations and practice animating doodles, you wouldnt make a tight narratively driven title, you'd make a labyrinth.

Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County

Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County

What we apply as nostalgia is instead just having a comfort memory where we want to grab that pattern again and explore a tale through it.

Liar Liar 2

Liar Liar 2

Since there's no action inputs and thus its incredibly easy to get all the endings VNs are not burdened by this design limitation although it can still cause the player to focus less on the journey and more on a fixed destination.

No One Can Ever Know

No One Can Ever Know

No One Can Ever Know intervenes in reminding us that there's nothing spoiled in having bad thoughts.

Blasphemous

Blasphemous

Nobody is consciously thinking about the Loading screen or fetch quests, we 'fast forward' our minds to these cool moments and as we age and our time becomes more precious we want games themselves to 'fast forwards' as well.'

Pokémon Black & Blue

Pokémon Black & Blue

These satires are completely lame and disposable, they are frictionless and don't test the player at all.

Good Morning Is A Social Construct

Good Morning Is A Social Construct

Young Adult oriented fiction imagines a more fluid world of double meanings where there is not some clean easy ideology to satisfy a sensibility for desires and intent. Not only does Good Morning agree, but it also sees a case to be made that sometimes the best way forward is to sacrifice on the altar seemingly poor intentions and to forgive them after the fact.

League of Legends

League of Legends

With that said, people still will concede to League's addictiveness and its shittiness. Even the more reactionary and hateful people on the planet will concede this fact. It's compulsory, accepted without question.

Another Pokémon Game

Another Pokémon Game

The question for me is ultimately not 'is Another Pokemon Game saying the right things' or 'why are we grieving over our own fictions in the form of jokes'. The issue is moreso why we seem unable to vault over our own sarcasm and laughter to say what's really bugging us.

Vampire Survivors: Chaos Update

Vampire Survivors: Chaos Update

That 'tradeoff' is a literal one of sensory deterioration to your eyes and ears, that's what you were exchanging as a worth function, it was never merely your leisure time.

Doom

Doom

DOOM solved the Door Problem of combat design before the genre was even the cashcow we know it as today.

Quest for Moomoo

Quest for Moomoo

I think its better to not see yourself as being 'tricked' or 'disappointed' by such small experiences. Nor should be any shame in conveying a world in 30 minutes or less.

Doomsday Dreamgirl

Doomsday Dreamgirl

A lot of the game cycles through constant put downs and sexual experiences at the end of the world. My usual complaints about Visual Novel objectification is wavered here on account of it being a kinetic novel and therefore not giving the player and option to input their level of sleeziness.

Video Game Feminization Hypnosis

Video Game Feminization Hypnosis

That's because transfemme gamedevs more often have to make their corpus free just to get eyes. So what are gaming spaces assessing the 'worth' of a completely no strings attached free simulated experiences?

Undertale

Undertale

Undertale itself stands tall to the hype and acclaim garnered towards it, showing nary a crack in its pristine presentation.

Duelyst II

Duelyst II

Trying to play stall or control archetypes in a game that gives you 2 draw a turn becomes impossible. Trying to 'out value' the opponent becomes functionally meaningless and agressive builds are even more consistent than it otherwise would be.

Queers in Love at the End of the World

Queers in Love at the End of the World

It's all the same in the manic compression of the apocalypse, all action drowns into 1 and speed reading is the name of the game.

I Die a Lovely Life

I Die a Lovely Life

That's why I believe it's vital to read these sorts of stories then, demoralizing the critical reference or at least seeing where that construction fails allows us to open the doors to other non allegorical or non moral readings of a works movement and meaning.

Shrine

Shrine

I think Shrine in its moody dark ambience and fields of biege and greens is trying to give weight to that alternative of the action FPS as a great vessel for imagining Insect Demonology.

Air Pressure

Air Pressure

Product of a time in the indie game dev scene where making women blunt metaphors for personal demons was not seen as hackneyed yet...

Pony Town

Pony Town

Pony Town is more a proximity chatroom for ponies to linger and socialize. On the main servers there's thousands of people on at a time which is a truely astonishing feat, makes it feel like a Bosch painting with ponies instead.

One Night, Hot Springs

One Night, Hot Springs

Nobody in one night, hot springs gets violent or angry.

Presentable Liberty Remake

Presentable Liberty Remake

This game is never coming out, at least not by Wertpol. That said I think there's something almost painfully important about a game that will never come out to remain on here.

Calliope Mori's Underworld Tour 2022

Calliope Mori's Underworld Tour 2022

People just hate VTubers. I don't know anything hololive so I'm immune.

Holy Ghost Story

Holy Ghost Story

Holy Ghost Story instead glides for a more tonally mundane relationship to such insecurities, giving a possible tonal alternative to the ideas of such suffering as this usually climactic limit-experience that breaks through to some comfort.

Marvel Snap

Marvel Snap

The issue though is that the ladder fundamentally doesnt matter at all, due to the fact the extrinsic rewards for doing well are so trivial as to be irrelevant.

Lucah: Born of a Dream

Lucah: Born of a Dream

Lucah deeply roots for you not to die, you can't spend 10 attempts on a boss because each failure is not a learning moment in itself but a threat of losing entirely.

Unsighted

Unsighted

So if you walk into Unsighted and lose half the NPCs because you're simply bad at puzzle mechanics, that's not good. Sure the game is supposed to be stressful and give you a reason to persevere, but if its a matter of unknown limitations from the outset then you're fumbling around and not persevering much at all.

Curtain

Curtain

Curtain spends its duration going over a story of intimate domestic abuse, by bringing us into the shared apartment of the abuser and making us victim to Kaci's constant put downs and destructive criticisms narrated at us when we interact with objects.

Undercards

Undercards

The fact that people instead see the ladder system as it is as a bad thing reflects the culture surrounding the game. Which really sucks because this is probably the best card game I've ever played in terms of allowing for player creativity.

Eco

Eco

There is no RP scene in Eco, and the result is that you become a clown for trying to engage in RP when everyone else is just trying to mine rocks. RP is treated with suspicion in this game as its seen pre-emptively as a set of actions and values that by themselves create conflict, its seen as rude.

Soulstone Survivors

Soulstone Survivors

If I was to speculate why these games in this genre seem to do this anyway is that, it just leads better for a ratrace and feeling of growth and attainment over the system, but unlike in just adding more skills to the pool, the addition is completely artificial.

Dead Estate

Dead Estate

The one neat factor Dead Estate has over Gungeon and other rougelite games is the velocity. Sometimes you have to jump in the air in order to shoot enemies and you can vary this to different hop intervals as you would in a platformer.

Vampire Survivors

Vampire Survivors

Now that's perfectly fine, but I don't just think this is a bad game: I think it's a malicious psychic vampire of a game, and that calling it out from this perspective is seen as weird and histrionic.

Receiver 2

Receiver 2

The gun preparation and tension of leaning around walls leads up to moments where you can shoot as if you're playing 1 of those carnival shooting games. Still the pace is also methodical, theres more fear here than in most horror games.

Super Mario Flashback

Super Mario Flashback

This is what I like about Super Mario Flashback, a fangame made with respect to all the bright and light 2D mario games and trying to cultivate on their various strengths while entering in something new.

Kazook

Kazook

Well, KAZooK was released on a console known for its significantly more mature and obscure library, where the incentivization was towards more narrative driven titles. These dorks thought, with all that in mind, that making a party game collection with crude humor was a good idea for collecting market share.

Tess

Tess

The world of Tess is not one of outright hostility, the enemies only are doing their thing or responding as a defensive maneuver, aside from a final boss all the enemies are only at most retaliating, nobody shoots back which weaves well into its melancholic setting.

Shovel Knight: King of Cards

Shovel Knight: King of Cards

Overall King is a spectacular experience that doesn't overstay its welcome but has plenty in its design to search for if you care about extras.

Homestuck

Homestuck

What I find so impressive about this is how it seems to show something that I picked up in what I read and am aware of when it comes to Homestuck itself: This terminally online lingo is culturally accepted and then utilized in order to tell a more immediately accurate story.

Shovel Knight Dig

Shovel Knight Dig

Shovel Knight Dig is a tactile spectacle roguelite with a tedious 'lose more' design.

Princess Trainer

Princess Trainer

For a long while now I've been longing to write about Adult Games, because quite honestly I have a bone to pick with a majority of the people who discuss erotic art.

Inscryption

Inscryption

There are a lot of moving parts that make Inscryption so brilliant, but one of the primary ones is how immaculate and unique the plot structure is in comparison to many other games. Simply put this game juggles quite a lot more threads of conflict and mystery than it lets on.

20 Minutes Till Dawn

20 Minutes Till Dawn

This is not to say that 20 Minutes Till Dawn is a game you should play, it still has a randomness factor in the level ups and permanent upgrades, along with a lack of enemy variety but there's a measurable improvement on all other areas of play. But it's also not one that I can say with any degree of reprehensibility that you shouldnt.

Quantum Bummer Blues

Quantum Bummer Blues

Enter then a game like, Quantum Bummer Blues, which exists within that score abandonment crisis and tries to intervene in some critical ways.

Winter

Winter

The best way to describe why it's probably worth your time is in that it speaks about the small vulnerability shared between girls.

Presentable Liberty

Presentable Liberty

The game also feels less like a 'horror' game even if you might get scared, and more a thriller where the thrill is despondent. Being trapped on a long family drive slightly carsick, or a feeling trapped on a bad slow Disneyland ride.

Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk

Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk

This is a far more sympathetic portrayal of mental illness because it's honestly more pessimistic about how poorly a lot of people like us are actually cared for by a larger oppressive system that can only be called ableist. This really is somebody so constitutionally trapped in loneliness and social disarray.

Euclidea

Euclidea

It's a fascinating experiment in the sense that you really do feel on the edge of actually learning something more tangible, and it did make me realize that mathematics at large is basically an endless puzzle game for the mad.

The Hex

The Hex

Here's the rub with that sort of dichotomy, while there are obviously people who would leave enjoy due to ignorance with the intertextual jokes at play, it also assumes that the reason somebody would stop playing the game is out of ignorance rather than out of unamusement with the game.

No One Can Ever Know

No One Can Ever Know

If Cave Story Sex RPG is a short poem on self forgiveness, No One Can Ever Know is an arduous painful reflection on dysphoria as paranoia, on trying to forgive the present.

Tunic

Tunic

The confusion and general inability to focus because of the twinkling aimless chords is kind of a sinkhole on my patience with the entire game. Other people may like it, but it just left me fatigued.

Painkiller: Black Edition

Painkiller: Black Edition

With all these tiny effects stacked up at once, there's no way to put it other than saying it gives the arena fights a beautiful sense of velocity and simplicity I tend to find lacking in these older shooter titles.

Cave Story Sex RPG 2007

Cave Story Sex RPG 2007

Realizing in the past you didn't really know all that much better and was just trying her best, its so easy for us to cringe at our past selves to the point of it swallowing our current ones.

Yo! Noid 2

Yo! Noid 2

The main melancholia that comes across throughout the memetic nature of the game then, is an overwhelming sense of abandonment.

Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight

The reason I thought to highlight these incredibly small pleasantries is that I quite honestly think it's this, and not how difficult or complex a game is, that matters to me more these days.

3 Comments

Erato_Heti

1 year ago

Check this out! Now you can see everything I've written on here right from this 1 list. Enjoy!

Erato_Heti

10 months ago

I'll update this soon

Erato_Heti

6 months ago

Updating this soon

Last updated:

Dec 15, 2023