Bitter Companion

It's surprisingly less perverted than the title would lead you to believe. Basically its a short story about a cisgirl falling for a stealth transgirl on the bus after finding out shes a huge fan of her NSFW social media drawings. Eventually she is led back to her home and lewdness ensues. There's a lot of games that play into this more simple queer sexual romance, for instance Demon Dash (2022), Housewarming Gift (2018) both by Nadia Nova. Along with a lot of the releases by Aria such as Ignored and Humiliated by Gamer Girls (2022). The fundamental interaction here is where desire meets respect of the other.

I like to think of these types of games as fairly wholesome LGBT power fantasies, because everything is simplified down to just the erotic desire. Power fantasies are fine and compelling, and I think there can be a bit too much moralizing when it comes to this stuff. If it's not appealing to you specifically or making some shortcuts to keep the story simple and focused, suddenly its wildly offensive, perverted, or otherwise needlessly fetishistic. I condemn this way of thinking and would draw a direct line between this criticism and the conservatives that try to outlaw library books. We need wholesome desire for our bodies out in the world, and I don't think taking undue scrutiny to already obscure texts is that fair. Imagine if you went and wrote some smutty fanfiction, uploaded it, and then found out a lot of people were poking fun at it one day. In a lot of these cases people are not being mindful that teams dont make art like this, but a single person does. At some point so called constructive criticism runs closer to bullying than it does to being anything helpful. I think the difference here is that I've actually had some of the people's works I criticized reach out and thank me or give feedback to what I said and it grounded me to realizing that at the end of the day I'm paroling somebodies creative drive. Like sure, death of the author and all, but it's only fair that people are going to feel hurt. I've had some of my posts on here get reposted to twitter before by big accounts to be mocked (particularly the Vampire Suvivor post) and I have to be honest it kind of stings to just see a bunch of people tell you you're wasting your time and doing nothing.

With that all said though, this doesn't mean I or you have to force ourselves to enjoy these works. Whether it be because the prose isnt effective or it cut a corner you're not fond of (in this case talking smut on the bus is not something im into as I like to keep my bus travel quiet, and the power fantasy of the 1 date girlfriend is something thats a little too fast for my tastes). You can even express that if you want. You can say a work is a bit too fetishistic or plain etc, but at the end of the day its just a preference. You don't get any points for gloating over how bad it is and in general doing so for works this small makes one come off meanspirited and demotivating people from making games you might enjoy in the future. This is a pervasive way of speaking about works that I've seen on RYM and is slowly creeping its way onto here. Almost none of these games were constructed to sustain this kind of mockery. It's likely you could be contributing quite directly to somebodies despair.

There's one other sentiment I want to demystify because it frustrates me deeply. Many people that are trans and most that aren't are way too open with their use of the word chaser to describe something or someones behavior. Again, we trans people like to be desired, and this relegation of everyone wanting for us or writing about our bodies as chasers is harmful. A chaser is somebody who usually wants to meet us on the downlow away from a crowd, that see us mainly as a porn fetish (a ladyboy or a shemale), that are only interested in hitting and quitting. Chasers tend to have no interests in our kinks or getting to know us or seeing us as people. Alex Jones, who was found to be looking at trans porn is a chaser. The person who wrote this story is almost definitively not a chaser. On top of that, while trans people can be uncomfortably perverted they can't be chasers. Chasers are only a term that apply (for the most part) only to cis people, and so saying that a trans person for one reason or another is being a chaser is transphobic rhetoric and should not be done so wantonly. We have other terms to describe perverted behaviour we dont like: Leering, objectifying, etc. Accusing everyone and everything of being a chaser robs that notion of its actual meaning and function. Which if you don't know, is to keep us personally safe since chasers don't respect us and thus can't be trusted to have good motivations.

There's lots of art like this running around, and every time people crowd together to make fun of it, it creates a quicksand pit of resentment and discontent. Every time people do that for art like this, it makes the people that even brought it to attention not want to anymore. It hits our morale a bit. God forbid the people just want to make games to practice and have fun with their desires in the process. It's exactly this attitude why I have my comments turned off. I don't want to argue with the types of prudes that would've tried to hang DeSade.

Maudlin Clown Companion

Edit: After playing the game for about a week or two up to gold stake difficulty and unlocking all the cards and vouchers, I have decided it's mediocre and underwhelming. Most of the problem is found in a lack of options in the shop. The demo had us go to ante 5 with 2 options and this worked. The full release has us go to ante 10 with still only 2 options. It feels in retrospect outclassed even by it's biggest inspiration luck be a landlord. It also only has 1 song which gets extremely repetitive. Uncomfortably top close to the appeal of casino flow states in that sense. On top of this the alternative decks force play styles like flush builds or going for chips, unlike the first 2 decks, this makes most of the game a novelty. Longer thoughts from earlier on below but can't in good conscious reccomend this.


I've won 8 different times now over the course of about 25 hours with a few different starter decks. For a roguelite thats not too often but that on its own is not a knock. People will play Nethack for 100 hours without a single win. It's about what you do in a game that matters. The decision making and that overall goal. In a game like Astrea or Nethack these goals are discreet yet ambitious, killing a big heart after going through complicated dice or ascending after dealing with a litany of confusing combat engagements.

Balatro is about taking a 52 card poker deck and using the hands you're given to make points off a sheet to eventually win. When you do win the celebration is mild and unsatifying and it asks you if you want to play endless mode immediately. In one of the early dev builds there was a simple story where the joker that sets the game up and jeers you in the meantime, setting up some fairly simple motivational stakes to beat the asshole joker. That was removed from the finished build, leaving no core motivation to play besides winning for its own sake.

The game is a simple maths strategy game, after you beat a round you are entered into a shop with an option to choose between 2 different cards to buy in the shop and a few 'booster packs' below. All the sounds are satisfying but this is where the game runs into its main issue. The main cards, the jokers, only have 2 options to buy between and especially as you unlock more of the pool that pool becomes flooded with useless stuff. Tarot cards you cant use, planet cards that dont help, jokers with no multipliers, etc. This leads to the fundamental problem of the game: None of the runs feel special unless you have really curated your deck somehow or you have 'won' that particular round. You're just walking into a shop hoping it feeds you what you want (usually early on its mult jokers). If you can get out of the early game then you have plenty of time to decide in the midgame but often, you wont. I've often lost before the end of the first 'boss blind' or in other words the third 'fight'. You only have 2 options, buy from shop or skip a blind. Even if you skip a blind you have to play the next round which expects more points so it isnt usually reccomended. So the meta usually ends up being playing rounds and hoping the shop has useful things. There's a 5$ reroll button but usually it only makes sense to use that when you're desperate. Leaving you with only making a few choices until the mid to end game.

So eventually the game turns into an issue of restarting for a good opener, whether or not you restart you play the opener through. Because the combat engagements are so abstracted there's no feeling like in an ascii roguelike that an early failure is amusing in its own right. You don't fall off a horse and instantly die, or get consumed by a random slime because you forgot to equip your weapon, you just lose to a poker table screen. In my view the input variance was just made too high with a lack of stakes and a fairly simple opening meta to follow (play the first three rounds clean unless you see a multiplier joker).

Finally, the metaprogression unlocks just end up sullying the shop pool, so the game on a base level gets more difficult to play than you started only as a result of input varience increasing. In a world where games like Astrea, Wildfrost, Desktop Dungeons, Griftlands, and Cobalt Core exists, Balatro ends up feeling too simple and yet too high varience to be reccomendable. It's a time sink roguelite, something to toy around with in the background in hopes of a next win. The early game is very satisfying to play but as the shop pool clogs up and the hedonic treadmill hits in you can't help but think you should probably be doing something else. This focus on refining difficulty to this point along with high varience reminds me of how Binding of Isaac played out. At first it was narratively focused, a story of a traumatized kid running through the basement in tears, playing pretend. Eventually that game was turned into an RNG fiesta and made so difficult and took away most of the scaling options through variance that even for most players the ability to win became way too difficult. I feel like Balatro is learning the wrong lessons from late Isaac in this sense. Not every player needs a perfect narrative to anchor their play experience, but the difficulty spike with a lack of early game options just turns the whole game into a grinding treadmill. Mind you this is a criticism coming from somebody who has some of the rarest achievements in the game at the moment, including finding a legendary Joker, so I have actually played the game I'm not just trying to be difficult for no reason.

It's a shame because I was looking forward to balatro but I think while it will be a flash in the pan for a while it won't ultimately stand up to the test of time. Unlike something like Vampire Survivors its not egregious, because runs arent strictly stuck to a time limit you have to sit through, nor is it an eye sore, nor is it entirely without decision making. Yet, the difficulty being as high as it is, without any narrative amusement for failed runs, means that it becomes mind numbing repetition to play. You end up playing just to win to unlock the next meta progression unlock (which can all be unlocked from the menu anyway if you don't care about achievements thus nullifying any goal other than 'win'). The appeal of the game only lasts for the first dozen unlocks and first win and becomes more or less busywork after that point. I will probably get 100% but I'll remember my experiences with it in a year far less fondly than Colbalt Core and I think on some level a game you can feel happy reminiscing about matters a lot more.

This review contains spoilers

Unraveled Companion

CW: Discussions of Child Abuse, CSA, and Rape

This is an interesting instance, to a certain extent, of how the functions of what a 'game' should do get in the way. For instance even the set up here wants to have its cake and eat it to. The warning at the beginning of the work is a bland and vague warning that the 'topics in the game' may be 'sensitive to some players' but then when you're actually playing it, its pretty clear its about extreme parental abuse and child rape. This is not rape as in 'allusions to extreme creepiness', this directly and bluntly a fiction about CSA and rape. The kid gets impregnated in the route towards one ending or theres a drugging and belt unbuckling sound reveal in the other. You have to signpost this stuff or at least put it in a strongly recommended readme you can't mess around with depictions like this. That's the literary approach. The game developer approach is to hold onto some cards and not 'give away' the impact you're setting up.

Then there's the smaller details: There's a leapfrog leapster clone in the work, but the game there is just a bland minimalist minigame rather than anything a child would actually want to play. The goal marker in the corner is both extraneous and a little odd from a UI standpoint as it always has this little dash marker next to it despite only showing one task on screen at a time. The dots hovering over the items you can interact with and the wait function also feels like a very basic UI element. These are once again game design tricks that impair a more serious narrative.

It may seem incredibly anally retentive to bring this up, but I do so for a very specific reason: Most of the problems for why the game are bad is because the creator has decided to make their very first public project this heavy and is thus borrowing assets and plotlines from other horror games they like. Most clearly the work is borrowing from Presentable Liberty (2014) with the limited 1 room environment, minigame that marks itself as completed and unreplayable after you beat it, and the dual endings with one being a desecration into further abuse and the other being escaping the confines of your imprisonment. The issue here is that Presentable Liberty's tone is way more of a zany scenegirl approach (ala Invader Zim or Llamas with Hats) which allows the mechanics to function fine in line with the tone. These mechanics don't work with this more sombre tone at all and actually impairs it immensely. If this work wanted to do this subject matter effectively it should have been borrowing from the more muted interface of a chrstphfr work like The Space Between (2019). Thereby removing the hackneyed music, the UI overlays, removing button prompts, simplifying dialogue text to silent hanging statements, relegating to a single ending, probably focusing more on sound design, etc. This approach, along with more general refinement, would have garnered the game a lot more staying power and success at what its trying to depict, whereas in its current state it became an amateur youtube flash in the pan horror game of the week.

Obviously I feel we need to bring back trigger warnings as a serious notation to the public in a big way. However, I am also concerned this game is gonna open up a giant 'sexual assault storytelling' commercial portal in the middle of what is generally considered to be videogames indie creepypasta scene. Imagine something like this with this level of attention dropped back during the early days of the SCP, and then you had a bunch of sombre rape stories floating around in there. It would be a mess and it would taint the whole joy of that niche when recommending it to your buddies. 'Oh dont read SCP-1030 that one is a forced impregnation story where the person gets gangraped by the subject'. Like I'm not trying to be histrionic I'm just giving a comparison point for why this reaks.

I'm glad to see the game has gone mostly ignored by this point, but if any more games like this come down the line I'm gonna chew them out to.

"As for military or state violence, I feel like that’s the purest crystallization of a type of legalized murderlust. It’s so completely farcical in the way the stated purposes (defense, security, etc.) differ from the actual outcomes. It’s a libidinal death cult with a serious bureaucratic veneer. The scene that it sets for our everyday life interests me. It’s like an ever-present background radiation of evil." - Ville Kallio in an interview you can read Here

I wrote a sort of strange poem about this game Here you can read. This was during that period of time when a lot of people were doing reviews as poems and I thought they were mostly lyrical and quite bad because it was all based on rhyming or strict meters, which is totally fine. I've created a controversy around myself of being judgemental of other peoples writing, but if you're going to practice and even do it poorly, you might as well do it here. Especially with comments off so people don't bug you. The reason I was only ever annoyed with it to begin with was anger management issues as a result of binge drinking and also overusing the site too much at the time, both things I've gotten a lot better about. Recently about a week ago I finally came to terms to myself as somebody who has in a very real sense been battling alcohol addiction for a long time, admitted to myself and to my real life community I actually struggle with alcoholism, and slowly taking steps towards self betterment and eventual sobriety there. So I want to somberly apologize for the hostile and standoffish precedent I created around me in relationship to that here, even though we are a while out from the last time I stepped on anybodies toes here.

This may be a strange note to start a review of Cruelty Squad (2021) on, but its a necessary one for a few reasons. The first is that to give off the impression I'm a detached observer merely 'peering into' the text from above, as some figure of authority goes against one of the main things the text is actually 'about'. Several times the established person running an organization of authority in cruelty squad blurb at you, in funny memetic ways that illustrate to you that they do not actually have their shit together, and are using their social authority to disguise that fact.

"I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for in an organisational sense."

"I'm the most powerful person in this room. I control this situation. Everyone's dancing to my tune..."

"I have thousands of followers. They say im blacksuppositoried and debased."

Some of us that are in charge of something think exactly like this. Anybody who has run their own discord or had a 'social media presence' definitely has this 'toying' psychology baked in deep. Occasionally this 'decisionality' is thrust onto you, for instance by making a semi successful game, the creator of Cruelty Squad, Ville Kallio, has opened a portal for themselves they cant close. They are now the 'center' of something, and probably had some of these same issues in the physical art community of being a 'worship statue'. They even admitted to this in the interview I quoted at the beginning.

"Sacrificing your friends to develop your CEO mindset so you can finally ascend to primordial-financial godhood. I feel like these things have sort of leaked into my own life, as I had to start a business due to the success of the game. I was reading Goethe’s Faust and it made me feel like I’ve accidentally made some sort of infernal pact at some point during development, which resulted in all of this. "

Problem is, if you identify with this feeling too much, you start thinking of yourself as a 'moderator of thought' and begin to think in ways the prior quotes from the game show. We have to ask ourselves, how is this way of thinking any different from the weird misogynist Pick Up Artistry thinking that these people don't 'deserve' your glory and should actually bow down to you? How easily can we divorce the world of middle management from larger systems of violence? Rather than using this power as a pure commercial toolset, Ville in the discord server for the game made it incredibly clear that transphobia will not be tolerated. You have to frontload yourself like that or you do completely self isolate and go CEO mindset. I could theoretically ditch all my friends tomorrow into a toxic sludge pit, alienate myself and start working on my Grindset and get a bunch of people to worship my every word. Make one of those stupid fucking paid to use discords. Pimp my patreon out constantly. Treat my connections with people in terms of a career path and not just people I like. Sometimes people say I'm one of the best writers on here and it freaks me the fuck out. It freaks me out that I self gloating something to that effect a few times to. The internet normalized all of these more primal urges to Control the world of violence around you. It's fucked. I mean for instance if you use the internet long enough you stop referring to other people as people, you start calling them 'randoms'. It's ok to be mad at commenters and guess their IQ levels when they even slightly annoy you or get on your nerves. It's ok to get so angry with people for doing something you don't like and letting your friends hang them out to dry for it publicly. It's ok to antagonize people with kindness just because they were mean to you once. Look I got the damn comments off in here. That's not because I'm afraid of you, its because I'm afraid of myself dude. I've done all of this stuff before and seen others do it on here. It's embarrassing.

There's this frustrating issue in videogame discourse in which, in order to try and self justify our time to ourselves, we talk about games as 'cultural objects' rather than effective experiences that change our way of viewing things. Most of this is the result of the 'video essay' style catching off like commercial wildfire, and thus imparting some sense of commercial value to the idea that you can 'speak around' videogames as literary texts. I believe the other big result of that is that we all sort of learned from having to undo the 'videogames as vehicles to violence' argument for a long time (and sometimes still do) that, crucially the connection between play and real life behaviors is thin. Gamers went through this moment where they had to learn about cultivation theory as much as they could to ward this stuff off but the problem is that by doing that we sort of nullified ourselves from getting into any sort of public political wanting. This desire to absolutely affirm that a game cant cause real life violence caused us to neuter our own discourse before it could really grow. We are just passive soyjacks playing with blocks in the cornor. We fucking infantalized ourselves through self domestication.

So that's part of the problem. The other part then is to try and get away from this we dont talk about this art form as 'things we learned' partially because learning from art is cringe, learn from academic Journals you room temp IQ having freak. When we do interpret a game text, we will interpret both the front and the back to the point it spoils the magic for others. For instance every video I've seen on Cruelty Squad that takes the work seriously can't help themselves but 'compare' the endings and try to analyze a discreet meaning from them. The game is set up like an ARG where the further you slip in the weirder you learn the world is (for instance a creation myth people believe in that own homes is literally about owning a home). It makes sense, because we were all taught to do this as a book report in school and shit, but it doesn't always translate cleanly to games. Videogames are a continuous act function you experience and push through. It's not like a movie where you merely just 'watch'. There's a reason why one of the most enjoyed novels in game enthusiast (watch out with that term buddy, Gamergate will start knocking on your door) peoples favourite book is House of Leaves, its because its a book you physically travel through, have you fight with to keep reading. You have to hold it sideways, sometimes you have to warp a few pages backwards for a bit. Videogames as narratives, even continuous ones and simple, are more like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and you so don't see people asking you to analyze those right.

So it ends up putting Cruelty Squad in this awkward and frusterating temporal space, where on the one hand you really want to dig into the niche leftism that Cruelty Squad is existing. Where it pokes fun at stuff like veganism being connected to purity culture issues for instance. But you can't do that without everyone being on the 'same page' about it first and so now you have to back up and address that problem first. The lore of Cruelty Squad being so dense that you want to see somebody break into the mechanics of the story and figure out who the 'real villian' of the mystery is. But since we cant really get into all that without looking psychotic and freaky we just gleefully poke at each other to make the first move. Yet, art isn't about a 'really good conversation' or solving the damn mystery for everyone though. Art is an experience that usually wants to tell you stuff and make you reshape your world a little. I didn't get the other endings of cruelty squad because I'm not that obsessed with the game in that way. The internet can slowly teach you that people like me are normies and shouldn't open their mouths until they 'really beat it'. I know about the fucking Nick Land and Bataille references ok, I read a bit of these people but we dont need to pose as philosophers or completionists to talk about art and the world.

Cruelty Squads level Androgen Assault made me rethink the way I consider the police and the fascism associated with it. None of the police talk to you, they instantly fight you, but you learn throughout that level that the place is a horrifying cult with people testing on each other and the prisoners to Absurd limits. This is blunt and flagrant, your briefing even says that Magnus, head of the narcotics department, is testing on people and making shit difficult for everyone. It's a hard and uncomfortable level. The hallways are way too long. Everyone is running in slow motion. It made me rethink about the police as basically a grooming organization for people lost in their early life. They slowly teach people to repress everything, be violent, and fuck peoples lives up. That doesn't happen overnight, and its only upheld by baking people in the culture of fear and adult bullying. I hate these macho pricks, but they aren't some 'visceral' decision, they are a chemical nightmare scenario. The building for a precinct in the town I live has a few different things.

1. A viewable office from the street: So I saw what the inside of one of these guys offices looks like and its very drab and depressing

2. A plaque on the side dedicated to a confederate doctor

3. A giant fucking face construction on the side of the building, very similar to The headquarters of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party (1934)

I thought about that stuff as I was working with a fucking horrible hangover today. I saw a bald pig on my way home from work near the bus starting some scene. I know now that this is a lifestyle the mother fucker was tricked into, and I learned it from a game, non verbally. I still hate the dude and would resist him but he was 'constructed', he doesn't have some sort of primal genetic code that made him join the Cop Cult. He's not some sort of low T brainlet normie NPC like the internet tries to convince me of. Just as much as women aren't fucking 'femoids' or any of this greasy internet dungeon speak. A lot of the internet sort of teaches you to dehumanize people like this, and not see where the violence is coming from. It's something you have to sort of unlearn one day at a time. Cruelty Squad is willing to meet you there. Today I this all hit me and I realized I don't want to moderate my fucking friends and stepped down from running a discord as a big attention seeking thing. I can't run around with a chip on my shoulder like that. There's a lot of great levels in Cruelty Squad that reillustrate facts like this, home ownership, office culture, reconstructing a scene of violence and blithe anxiety in a new way. That's art. Thats life. That's why I reccomend this fucking game.

Everyday is actually a battle, but until I die I will actually wake up and fight that battle till I'm snuffed out for good.

Control Valve Companion

CW: Transphobic Discourse, Bad Relationships, Alcoholism, Brief Mention of Suicidal Ideation

Venus Meets Venus (2014) is interesting in the fact that it feels like such a specific cultural object from 10 years ago. It's interfacing with a greasy and failed relationship of a cis lesbian dating a transwoman, 10 years ago. Basically in a time period where talking about that stuff was still out of bounds. Shockingly its hard to believe this, but for transwomen being spoken of in a large cultural group as these 'objects to have strong opinions on' didn't really catalyze until about 3 years ago with J.K. Rowling posting her (J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues) [https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/] (2020) essay.

So this whole discussion is a major sidebar but hear me out before you skip this paragraph. The important thing you have to know here is that even me interfacing with this post now would be dumb if we are just talking about Rowling and what shes doing. Sadly¹ the best reference point to make that point is that of a youtube video by detailed independent journalist Shaun over in the video "JK Rowling's New Friends" (2023) in which among lots of other things he points out that Rowling has some fairly extreme ties to the gender critical movement and the ways in which shes shaking hands with ultra conservative figures and supporting their desires to see shelters for trans people actively closed down. In most ways this concern trolling about Rowling being 'maybe not the worst for saying what she said' is completely out of date by design, and Shauns coverage in general points that out. Most news coverage is not like 'hey its no longer about what these people are saying, but what they are doing' because transphobia gets more clicks. This is not just Rowling specific by the way, there was a similar issue going on with the treatment of Dave Chappelle actually. Chappelle has been getting that similar concern trolling treatment all throughout the bookending of his own transphobic specials, which as you know pulled the Netflix development team into striking for a while, all the up to his most recent special. I don't even think its worth either of our time for me to go and find the name of those specials and talk that stuff out, because Chappelle being bad about trans people is literally not that important (and I'm saying this as a transfemme). You know what is important? When the dude threatened to block a housing proposal at a local commitee by pulling out a lot of money. That's actual horrifying news but that doesn't get clicks! It's the biggest deal about Chappelle to me, and a blip on most peoples radar. This is the problem, for most people everything exists on the level of a few words said wrong and not on the level of actually bad stuff happening.

This is what I mean, most of this stuff I just mentioned is literally out of date in the sense that a metric fuckton of cultural movement and politics has been happening even since then. It's only been Three Years since that particular event, and if your trans like me this probably comes as a shock, for us with all the stuff going on it feels like 10. So I can't sit here and show you all the awful shit going on in the world with that. That has to be something you learn about somewhere else, not from a random post on a wimpering social media website like this. But importantly, it puts into context why Venus Meets Venus is as culturally important as it is, its from 2014. The dynamics were more innocent, and most people thought that the only 2 things trans people were worried about was the trans panic defense and online TERFs. Even here Venus Meets Venus functions as a fracturing point actually and a rather important one, it illustrates through being so well written that relationship issues are a huge problem to. Even then we had a lot of terrible stuff we were dealing with, but we didn't really know about it like, statistically or whatever.

See the more 'economic' side of this was uncovered in "He Fucked the Girl Out of Me" (2022, Talyor McCue) which needed a bunch of statistics about how transfemmes have the harshest wage gap of any gender group we have census data on, and the trans panic defense needed to wear off a bit. Back in 2014 we just had 'feelings', really sapphic and confusing feelings about 'others'. If Venus Meets Venus shows anything then, its that through the thoroughness of its prose and broken bar relationship that being a 'good ally' is not being a good person in a relationship. There's a very profound passage where the main character asks her partner if she wants to go to the trans march, and she politely declines. It immediately becomes this prodding 'why' moment, you went to the dyke march after all and frusteratingly as a reader you're never given a 'good' reason as to why not. What would it have been? She passes, does she not want other trans people to see her as clocky? Does she not want to be 'seen'? Is she worried that she might be murdered by police or something? You're not really given an answer, nowadays she might have had one, but in that time period, in 2014, no was just all there was unless you were especially educated about the windows being broken and I mean come on, I was out in 2014 and the main thing I was thinking about with my crush on a homeless transfemme. Coercing your girlfriend into doing stuff they doing want to do, and pecking them into activism for their minority group more is not ok, and through the main narrator you learn that. It hits like a truck.

Thus in a beautifully put way you learn one of the most important struggles that LGBT people face: we are made the victim fairly often of other peoples maladaptive enthusiasm and have to watch ourselves about falling into it with each other. Maladaptive enthusiasm is the main theme of the work, and it hits like a truck. For me if I had to describe it, its basically the concept of loving somebody through your desire to 'help them out' and get them out of a rough spot. You other them as an object of political desire rather than romantic thoroughness. A desire for active and continuous solidarity that can rather franticly overwrite your other emotions and desires. For instance I had an extreme crush on my now transmother who was going through a housing crises at one point. I get her some basic nessecities from CVS once and shipped it to her, and obviously it put me in an emotional spot where my crush on her was getting toxic and out of hand. I was messaging her constantly to make sure she was ok, would actively tell her my worst intrusive thoughts, etc. which catalyzed into an event where I upset her by saying I was thinking about offing myself (this is years ago, I'm fine now). Demanding an intense emotional care from somebody who was in no place to give that. Soon after that happened, I realized I was trans myself and thats how I came out. This is actually the most chill version of this I can publicly talk about, in part because we have such a powerful and loving relationship now without the need for active check ups. This didn't happen immediately. I had to go take a year smoke break with myself and take a really long look in the mirror.

This acts then as the ultimate criticism of the piece. You can hurt people and have a point of healing happen with them later on, but the way this work frames that is as something that happens over a single night with a wine bottle and some tears. But especially once you do something outrageously hurtful (as is revealed in this text) you can't just cry it away. You need to take inventory of yourself and walk it off for a year or two. It's on this same note that I want to say that I'm not that far from becoming other peoples political projects rather than just as a person with some demons I'm fighting. For instance I tell most when I first meet them that I'm a transwoman, but I keep the fact that I'm plural and an alcoholic behind the teeth. Especially that second one. Because the moment people hear stuff like that they feel catalyzed to make a decision 'about me'.

Do I make this person my 'project' or do I discard this person as a result of these factors being 'too demanding' to put up with. Yet, I do everything in my power when these facts come up not to make it other peoples issues. This work operates as a tragic example of how barrelling into this way of thinking about us does us a disservice and dehumanizes us and allows you to act more vile. I would say this is a very necessary warning story, with an albeit awkward reunion note I don't agree with, and since it depicts a time in which trans people weren't a constant fox news paranoia, its actually worth playing through at some point despite this blunder.

Recently I've been opening up to people in the city I live about these other facts, and they still proceed with love in their hearts towards me with adjacency and not active doting. This powerful form of love, a love via adjacency, is likely necessary in order to build healthy relationships with people. I think we should help each other, but the political projects should happen on the street level, and not through courting. Highly recommended work of fiction, and extremely empowering to the concept that relationships for LGBT people can start out normal, but if you can overcome the occasional edginess of this text (for instance the 'counting chapter narration openers' for each section) there's a powerful few things to gauge from underneath. In a way, I think this text is a lot less about queer mistreatment, and a lot more about how bar romance seem to be the mecca for maladaptive enthusiasm, and even if you don't find time to play it (its only about a half hour read), it's best to try and actively keep suspicion of that pronged understanding of others in your life. Communicate your barriers and take inventory of your emotions when you can. Don't toss people away just because they have 'problems' c:

Played for a half hour and the store tried to cram a bunch of cosmetic items down my face like its news and I played the most braindead tutorial in a while. I queue into a casual game and its all bots except for like 1 other person, one of the bots is clearly cheating on the enemy team so there's no point. Somebody tries to kick me for scamming but I can't even talk in the chat to defend myself, 'Voice Chat not activated on this account' or something but at least theres no players there to vote it through. As the game continues the bots dwindle away to just me and this one other person who seems especially bad at the game so I get a few kills on them. Round ends, bots refill in the lobby, one of them is also blasting a really loud Cocteau Twins song for some reason. This is what I have to play until I win at least 10 games and then maybe possibly competitive is better.

Look usually I don't write these sort of short off the cuff sarcastic reviews but somebody is going to look through and see I hated TF2 and wonder why, this is why. Why would I put up with any of this shit when TF2 Classic is right there? It's insane I'm sitting here and reading the high praise on this game from people I respect a lot (DoctorQuark, Bojangles, etc.) and just feel totally disconnected from it. I think Valve through pure disinterest basically lobotomized the game and left a husk for at least the new player experience. If anybody wants to play TF2 Classic hmu, if anybody wants to play TF2 get your eyeballs checked cause holy shit depressing doesnt even begin to convey the buzzard picked corpse I just had to experience. Genuinely distressing, but at least TF2 Classic functions as a nice time capsule.

Soundbox Companion

Ok you can so what you want about this being another dumb Nintendo game or just a shitty outdated platformer or a childrens game or whatever but let me speak my truth here.

Teaching somebody the 16 star speedrun at my dingy home would unironically be more intimate than the most depraved sexual fantasies I could think of. Teaching somebody how to BLJ would be so hot, I would kiss their feet after they succeeded at it.

This is not a joke, if you haven't tasted the speedrunning world of this game you're missing out on a huge part of its appeal. If you're a really close lady friend of mine I would show you how to do it no questions asked. I been thinking this in the back of my head for over a month now. It will probably be a genuine part of my dating life going forward and I'm not sorry for that in fact the reason I'm even saying this is to make room for the fact other people might also feel like that. It also has the best sound design I've ever heard in my entire life. They gave the pirahna plant a lullaby theme song that you activate by stepping into its aura. This is an incredibly experimental sound design decision that you dont see in contemporary gaming. They would try to imitate this lullaby effect 10 years later with Galaxy via a cutscene transition into Rosalina reading a book for to the lunas but because of the diversion in interactivity, it left Rosalina feeling like a maternalistic overlord. In this way I would argue a lot of contemporary game design is extremely parental, its having an event happen towards you that you have to accept. The pirahna plant lullaby is spontaneous and you only have to accept it as long as you are within the boundaries of that space, you can leave it whenever you're tired of it. I think there's a genuine romance in the design of SM64 that's worth exploring, but it cant be done by me alone.

Delirium Companion

If there was any game that would represent the ethos of what I've been 'trying to do' recently, it would be the indie super hit Among Us, which recently has been far less about reccomending a work, and far more about an attempt at an experimental knowing with games. Among Us is an assymetrical deduction game in which the killers try to pull off a murder plot on a group on people, and those people have to work together to deduce who within them is the killer. Among Us as a concept is not new, and is in actual fact quite late to the 'deduction game' party. For instance games like SS13, the 'open world sandbox MMORPG' of open deduction games have been around since 2003, 15 years before development, and also games like GMod's Trouble in Terrorist Town (2009) was not only out almost a full decade before Among Us but had a very similar level of 'voyeuristic entertainment value' (Twitch streams, Youtube content, etc.) . Even games that would even compete in a more 'closed loop' sceneraio, wherein all the suspects you've seen and known at the start, prove that Among Us is not particularly unique on a base level either here. The similarly well loved Town of Salem released 4 years prior. More to the point, Among Us trades the role complexity of other games with a vision cone, top down action character, and mobile game styled task management (brushing a bunch of leaves out of the way)....Or at least, it did. This is the first spot in which Among Us actually exists to perturb the public conciousness, what its like now vs. how it was in its haymaker era is very different. While I was away for the past couple years that game has had several updates, new maps, roles, and so on. It's not a totally different game when you phase into it now, but especially if you're playing with randoms you'd be blindsided by the amount of new stuff to keep track of. This experience is not even universal, some people are probably aware of the complexities of contemporary Among Us and can speak to that surely, but its the fact that there is a contemporary Among Us grafted onto the previous version at all that should give us pause.

The designers instead of making a new game with the knowledge they have, threw a bunch of modded content that is optional (but that random lobbies will naturally choose) into a game that they already made, rather than trying to risk on a new IP under their indie company. I bring this up because I believe it reveals a peculiar ennui of indie game design, a feeling that you have to buckle down and continue with what is already there and successful because the physics and assets are already distinctive to your ideas. This makes it so that rather than any successful game being able to be an 'independent success with indentifiable characteristics' with a timelessness of its representation. Instead its constantly being tweaked everforwards to cater to either a live service audience (which among us has via cosmetics) or just mass appeal. We only need to look at a 'success story' like Minecraft to see this. Minecraft in 2011 functions nothing like Minecraft 2023, and in a way we've taught ourselves this is acceptable but theres almost something kind of, tragic about it? Like rather than letting a success story reap rewards, an IP becomes a modder's business, and you update the IP constantly to reproduce more sales until you absolutely definitively can't anymore. Even if we choose not to be so cynical, then just on a base level a successful development team with a vision will feel an urge to endlessly tweak their own project up to a state of perfectionhood. If you graft a holistically new experience onto the name and face of what already exists, its not a robbery, but a painful 'postmodernity'. Mark Fisher questioned our own hauntological relationship with art as a startiling artifact beyond ourselves with the opening question to his thoughts on The Caretakers Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, in which he bluntly asks us "Could it be said that we all now suffer from a form of theoretically pure anterograde amnesia?". The rest of that essay winds itself in a direction of hopeless confusion and a sense of loss from a placehood in the present, in a way that is actually not very typical of philosophers or theorists. Philosophers are not supposed to appear as upset or 'lost' people to us, so when you're hit with a noire-esque delirium of confusion, its an upsetting read no doubt, self questioning.
"You find yourself in a grey black drizzle of static, a haze of crackle. Why is it always raining here? Or is that just the sound of the television, tuned to a dead channel?".

This 'acid trip' with the present is becoming more and more delirious not just with age, but with the temporal movement of object meanings themselves. Among Us in 2018 to 2021, represents a covid time capsule of what we think it was, the memetic cozy humorousness against isolation. The desire to 'be' with others and have comical hijinks around them. Yet the game and the designers on top of that are only optimistic towards the next update and release, Among Us is just a congress for suspecting in, its indifferent to your feelings.

Which is what makes this weird, Among Us represents a type of fun I was trying to have, I spent a good 50 hours hunting for this fun but the whole time I was miserable and there never 'was' a holiness of the game, in its primal state of enjoyment. If that state existed it was as a publicly voyeuristic second hand enjoyment which was likely a farce as well from the production side (ie a bunch of streamers admitted to 'knowing' who the killer is but pretending not to for the camera). I needed the game to prove to me that I could function and enjoy 15 minutes of deduction with my friends guilt free...Just as I mentioned in my League of Legends post, on the topic, I think some games take to form of slightly invisible 'misery simulators'. Contemptous impulses of man refracted back at themselves. League of Legends did this with its constant information milling via how the complexity and volume of challengers would mean even the smallest update to the game would shift the meta and how people thought about it. Among Us did this by showing us a halcyonic improbability of maintained friendship joy, how any one moment of positive memory declines towards a rote 'method' of being known. Spontaneity and erratic play was not appreciated to much in my games with it at least.

So then why did most of us end up watching others play it more than play it ourselves? Well in our network of the same 8 people playing it over and over, the game quickly becomes more about deducing the habits of your friends and their social weak points more than it was about the thrill of hanging out together and having a good time. Even right from the beginning, communication within a group would create uncomfortable 'deductive power dynamics'. Wherein a few people would end up dictating the flow of the game at the supression of everyone else. For us at least, that made it a misery simulator. Any strange strategy or goofy remark was outcasted for instead this methodological checksheet for 'solving' the game. The 'fun' of the game never existed, it was always an unserved need because the game itself was a paradox of its own nessecity. In order to bond with my friends, I have to have my habits scrutinized and try to lie to them? And then what then, glorious woman, do you think it just ended at the game? Now you live your life even more at edge with deduction in general, keep to yourself, try to look out from a black tower nobody else can see. Among Us is a time capsule of the hopelessness in group dynamics running towards a win state. We had to watch it instead to pretend the illusion still had a value. The game unquestionably has a memetic quality, the sound design and use of stock effect noises sculpted into the memetic framework of our public conciousness. Among Us because a strange religious ritual towards large friendships and searching for weird habits in others. I think the effect the game has had on how people interact with their real life is misery inducing for me to. Yet I know even as I dig further down into the heart of this visicious memory, a strange futility.

Were they my friends? Is it friendship, to merely play with each other? Does friendship mean anything really, blimp filled haughty? Do we graft belonging onto this airship there? So, is it validation that called me to the party? No, more more, something in the experience. Finding what you wanted and wished you could have. The desires unfulfillable, a wreckage piece of impossible want in the various fragments, a recognition that your experiences are your own, they may apply to somebody else to some extent, but the misery is you only have the ones you had. Loud drunk girls, proudly claiming who the imposter was, the joy of being around a bawdy bunch, the embarassment right after you attempted to impress yourself to them. Although you were only really doing it for some and the expense of the others comfort, chilvaric impression. Creaked femme: 'Milady look how funny I can be'. Quixotic girl you are, me.

You see new party games come out now, and you treat them with suspicion, 'Ive been burned and hurt once before by these toys, the wreckage of private impulse it pulls out of me'. This to is a meaningful gesture, a gesture of healing in caution. The past is not just hard to escape, its also a misery on the present. Misery simulators are simulators of the past. You can't ever escape them entirely, unless you know how to bash your head on a rock incredibly well, but at least you can make peace with your own azure vomity tears...

"I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can
discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of
uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself;
when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region
through which it must go seeking and where all its
equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that:
create. It is face to face with something which does not yet
exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can
bring into the light of day. " - Swanns Way, Marcel Proust



Orbital Companion

The perfect game to play right before moving, this nonverbal rumbly treat is all about using unique orbs as portals to transport between spaces to unlock doors and find more orbs. Most of the game is spent doing albeit simple puzzles involving the diferrent colored orbs and the worlds they are attached to. For instance the first orb is orange which you use to activate switches and walk across invisible bridges. Much of the mid game is spent trying to juggle these various orbs and the portals you activate with them in order to make progress and while only a few moments will have you truly stuck, the moment of realization of what to do is always pleasing and satisfying.

The lead level designer behind Cocoon, Jeppe Carlsen, has also worked on Limbo and Inside. Two other nonverbal puzzling oddities, that focus on visual spendlor and the satisfaction of solving a puzzle towards the ominous unknown with far less focus on complexity. This makes sense because in some ways a difficult puzzle can actually halt the entire momentum of the aciton and the world. I would refer to most the puzzles in Cocoon more as 'fidget puzzles' than full fledged head scratchers, wherein a lot of it is backtracking for the item that you need. You play as this cute little bug creature so you can only carry one orb at a time and for whatever reason you're forced to place them down in specific sockets. Dont want to lose them by accident! So a lot of it ends up being pick up ball A move it to the new location, go back, and do the same with ball B. Again, this can be tedious but it's also meditative, helped by the soothing electric ambient score that unlike in other games in this genre (Gris etc) compliment the visuals rather than call out to themselves.

The real bite here is the visuals, unfortunately, the website I'm posting through doesnt have image/gif support, but it must be said how vitally well done this is. There is no other game where opening a door has felt this good. This is due in part to the immaculate sound design, the clinking and clattering of mechanical parts whirling help set the atmosphere and, while often mixed a little too loudly for my tastes, are almost always densely developed and done well. It's hard to talk about the visuals and my hesitations, I think that the plasticene world aesthetic looks nice, but is a bit too 'silicone valley sci fi' in its approach to the cleanliness of everything. For instance the staircases work in the context of the spidery bug world we are in, but you can see stairs that have a similar spindliness in a few gaudy megamansions from time to time. More importantly, the world of Cocoon lacks ecological 'dirt'. The world is in many ways too clean, theres no grime over anything so it ends up having the same textureless shine to the objects. On the other hand, monumental changes in environment or large objects look gorgeous.

I think the biggest problem with Cocoon is that there's no dash button. The way the game is set up, you have a radial walk and a single input button, sometimes you hold that input. The issue is, your bug buddy walks a bit on the slower side so you find yourself sauntering wishes you could make a rumble/dash happen. On the other hand maybe that would make the experience too fidgety, but since the puzzles lack difficulty or depth, it does end up being a lot of monotonous gliding from space to space. It can feel hollow sometimes but, in my case at least, this actually helped the experience. I am moving, and I couldn't help but think of how equally hollow preparing and carry stuff from one location to another is. I'm as meager as this bug is, and while my own 'orbs' are just as meaningful as its, there's this quiet solemness that this isn't quite fun or boring. You can't dash in real life either, transport and movement...it just has this quality of ennui and melancholy attached to it, and I think Cocoon is at its best when it does have this sense of monotony. You know how to solve the puzzle, you figured it out a minute ago but now you have to go through the portal animation and pick the orb up and go place it somewhere.

There are also, strangely enough, puzzle bosses! They are functional! Most of them focusing on positioning over anything else. If you get hit it just resets the fight, no harm done. Most of them are spectacle boss fights so you dont have to worry about getting skill tested. With that said, I do feel weird killing them! It gives me a very shadow of the collusus conundrum to be killing giant monsters in this barren wasteland for my own gain. This sort of reflects the ultimate shallowness of Cocoon wherein the focus is so spent on you feeling like you 'have something to do' that there's no taking anything in or just feeling out an ecological space. Like, I'm almost sad this is a puzzle game because this aesthetic would be amazing for a walking simulator and even teases at that idea towards the end. The world lacks life and you end up robbing it anyways for your opaque goals.

Due to the non verbalness and lack of dialogue plot, this goal stays opaque until the very end, but it just ends up giving the experience a sort of moral numbness. I don't feel like I was even supposed to think about the giant spider I killed so much as that I bested it and now I get the nice orb. Time is not even spent on dwelling on its death. If we flash back to Limbo...this is sort of a disappointment by comparison! In that game we had this big gnarly spider chase us down and slaughter us dozens of times, but then when we amputate and kill it, its not 'well done' its gorey and gross, you feel uncomfortable and even a little lost. By comparison Cocoon doesnt stray into this territory, but because of how cosmicly indulgent the world is, and how everything is a puzzle room, you end up just thinking about whats beyond what you're seeing in a remorseful 'I wish the game went there' sort of way.

It's weird though, I'm not sure I can reccomend whether other people would get anything out of it. It's one of those games that looks good and knows how to plot a beat and keep puzzle momentum, but at the same time its a whole game of just very beautiful busywork with little to offer underneath. I think maybe the best way to tell would be to consider how you feel about school animation short films. For instance MILK DUST is a visual treat focusing on a grand inspirational world, but the moment its over it sort of hums to the back of your mind, buzzing there only to be pulled out randomly as a humored annoyance or 'oh yeah I remember'. Much like moving itself, I think this business but shallowness when you're not is sort of core to the feeling of moving and transportation generally. Like as an experience, Cocoon handles the core aspects of moving, that being the transportational tedium, effectively. Contrast that with the approach of say Unpacking which focuses on organizational coping as a form of zen. That being said, I can only say this from the perspective of extreme bias. I think its neat enough to give a try if you're in the mood for a more light and breezy eye candy take on the mechanics found in Inside or if you liked the scale of the similarly non verbal Tunic or Hyper Light Drifter. Regardless of how much it appeals to you, I certainly wouldn't say its something you need to get to right away.

Vibe Check Companion

My current GotY cause you can watch the whole episode as a link for the frame information and context, and you can try to look up the answer via synopsis information, which is much better than doing it through title names.

God I love this show.

Utopian Companion

Beecarbonized (2023) is interesting because it plays into modular policy/ecology simulator what ifs that are in its own way a genre on the margins. The genre of ecosimulator is not given much attention, in part because ecological devestation is something people are very desperate not to think about as much as possible at this stage of anthropogenic climate decay, and because its just a genre most people don't know the roots of. The productive forces that prevent this awareness of influences is such that talking about video games in reference to each other is almost impossible without seeming like an academic obscarantist.

The roots of this style of simplistic ecology simulator that focuses on educational reference arguably go back to early computer dos management simulator games like SimEarth: The Living Planet (1990) or President Elect (1981) but the main explosion point of this whole approach comes from the early Crawford games Balance of the Planet (1990) and Balance of Power (1985). Heather has a really good video on the subject called Balance of the Planet | PC Gaming's Forgotten Masterpiece, in which she identifies Crawford as an early pioneer in the medium of games as minimalist information landscapes rather than just game spaces with pieces and a win state. The interesting point to note here is that Balance of the Planet is in fact a forgotten or at least underdiscussed game to the point that her video on the subject is almost required to make sense of what I'm saying here at all. To whatever point that this game has an identifable legacy, Backloggd doesnt really care, as she was (before the account was deleted anyway) the only person with a review of the game on this website. You can check the page for proof of emptiness here.

I've been vocal about how I don't really care about Backloggd as a social space anymore, in part because even with the nodding of importance towards forgotten and underdiscussed art, no posts on here tend to impact anybody else to go try the game out to and talk about it. You are more likely to get people to try a game by starting 'club event' around playing small games rather than by writing about your experiences or thoughts on here. However this is not a criticism of that being the case, contrary to the performative bitterness you might have seen from me in the past, this is not actually in itself an issue or something that the reader in indebted to try and fix. Video games are by design longer and more opaque in inspiration than any other medium, and there's always this arms race on if you 'really' understand the game anyway. It's fine to just read an interesting piece and move on. We all got shit to do really. Yet it does provide certain complications when you try to dig into the weeds.

To illustrate, I can easily argue for instance the Democracy series, Democratic Socialism Simulator (2020), Half-Earth Socialism (2022), and Beecarbonize (2023) are having a conversation and iterating on the specific ideas and approaches harbored in Crawford's ecology cult classic (specifically in how it uses card game design as a modular reference point for which to display how information webs work and uncomplicate them), but the existential issue is that this would be a connection of gibberish for people that havent played this genre in depth, which is functionally almost everyone but me. All I would be doing by not admitting this fact is throwing my intellectual weight around to convince you that I care more than you or that you should respect me because I thought about something you didn't. This is an easy conman's trick and I want to distance from that through admitting you're going to be scrambling to keep up with what I'm saying, and I'm sorry for that. Besides, even if these games have links I can make, I can't actually prove that any of these developers are concious of the discussion going on with this 35 year old unplayed computer game, and the reality is they probably haven't. Most game developers do not openly speak about how they are inspired by other videogames in their work, as its both something seen as too obscure to most people to be noteworthy and brings with it particular copyright concerns. It's goes one rung deeper than that though, developers just play games like you and me, and just like for everyone else this hobby is not given the ability to be understood and critiqued as art.

'Video games as art' is not a serious discussion, but one that I do consider serious is that they are not treated as art and preserved as such by the state. This may seem obvious at first glance, but videogames can't be checked out from the library, despite its obviously cultural import at this stage. There's no state preservation institutions helping make the medium more accessible, and so videogames are trapped in a state of cultural amnesia It doesn't mean that Crawfords work doesnt have impact or influence, but that its a conversation lost in the sands. The other interesting point here is that to assume that videogames as an art form is independent from Board Games is another misunderstanding in terms. All of Video Gaming lends most of its inspirations to board game design. There's a place for which the discussion of say Hearts of Iron 4 (2016) shouldn't be other grand strategy games but how it compares to Axis and Allies (1981). Yes you do have to run the calculations of the game by hand, but functionally this is the only real distinction to playing itself. There is no distinction in how the board game version of Dominion and the card game version of Dominion play besides the former requires the players to all be at the same table and the players have to check how move compute on together (and thus there is room for errors where a computer wouldn't have them). Then you have to take into the fact here that the only board games various state apparatus respects is games over 100 years old like Go, Majohng, Chess, etc. There's many factors to why this is, but one I feel is particularly worth highlighting is that we live in a global gerontocracy. America has a limit to how young you can be to run for president at 35. Even when other countries dont have these minimums, liberal democracies typically bias to electing older people anyway. This is contrary to the fact that people who grew up with the internet have a better ability to map information together more than people who grew up without it. As far as policies go, we are living in the shadow of other peoples historical nightmares, only allowed to express ourselves when its too late.

Our reality in this respect is uncomfortably dystopian then, but it speaks to the power that these games actually hold. Eco simulators as mentioned show that if given room to do on our own terms, we can consider and engage with ecological crises and see the prevantative measures of doomsday clocks related to them. Half Earth Socialism and Balance of the Planet are certainly worth playing in this respect. Balance of the Planet comes at it from the angle of state subsidies and taxation plans, which is ultimately a liberal framework, whereas Half Earth Socialism comes at it from a vegetarian socialist utopian one. Beecarbonize is interesting in the sense that its arguably a degrowth one or a eugenical one, depending on how you approach it.

A common factor in all three of these games is the wincon and main objective: Mitigate emissions by investing into alternatives before climate change destroys the planet and kills millions. The thing is that Balance of the Planet gives you all the information up front and lets you try and discover what the right dials to tweak are. In contrast these other two work act as card games with a speculative aspect, they have a hidden information aspect you have to discover through multiple run, the only way to see the chain of where something might go is by trying something that seems plausible now. But where Half Earth Socialism utilizes to inspire the ludic imagination into active change, Beecarbonize is more incidental and peculiar.

Very mild mechanical spoiler if you're interested in the game here but let it be known its something you're told at the beginning of the game:

The best way to comfortably win a game of Beecarbonize is to pivot off of emissions entirely as soon as possible. You can destroy industries/cards by unplugging them from the system for a second and...Beecarbonize lets you unplug the main emissions producer at the very start of the game: The 20th century industrial revolution.

Surely this is an oversight or a glitch you might think, but this approach is actually fundamental to a political niche within leftism of the degrowth philosophy:

"Contemporary techno science is reflected in the famous slogan, “if it can be done, it will be done, no matter what the consequences.” This logic is strongly intertwined with the growth doctrine. The essence of this way of thinking is that it does not matter whether we need something or not; a reason will be made for creating it and means found for selling it." - Yavor Tarinski

Degrowth and by design its 'anarcho primitivist' advocates are often mocked within online discourse for being a unique type of unrealistic. 'You cant just unplug the industrial revolution dumbass, what about all the logistic supply lines' is the common reply to these guys (besides the accusations of sympathizing with the Unabomber, or that they are using a phone so they shouldnt complain, which is argumentation par for the course on the internet) but this misses an important nuance. A politics of negation is the first dream towards the future. Just as likely as it is that Beecarbonize comments on Balance of the Planet incidentally, its similarly unlikely that the developers behind this project are aware or care about degrowth. I'm not saying that this is a glitch or design flaw in the game, but just as much as you can do this, you can also scientifically discover designer babies or cull your entire populous on a whim, so the game stakes are the driving force of play with the education implications taking passenger seat. This is reinforced in the fact that you can't read the information about what various cards are and do within the game itself, you have to go to the main menu to check. Along with the fact that there's joke text that this may not really work in real life scattered throughout. Beecarbonize is not ecological advice, its the board game The Forbidden Island if it were a single player ecology game. Yet the fact of the matter is the optimal way to prevent climate collapse as early as possible is to unplug all emissions besides the cleanest ones you have on hand as soon as possible, blackouts be damned.

You might think then that I'm secretly saying that Beecarbonize is a work of unintended brilliance, but I don't think that. Both the issue of overconsumption ideologies and information to explain what mechanism are, are better explored in other eco-simulators I've played, with often more focus on how people think or what the knock on effects of doing certain decisions are. Half Earth Socialism for instance is both less solvable off the bat and more interested in showing you that some things can not continue explicitly. The people behind the development of Half Earth Socialism wrote a book by the same name, and one of the main arguments is that factory farming and car dependent industry needs to go in order to survive climate apocalypse. It gives you a lot of options for what the future can look like and loosely identifies them with concrete policies that relate to it. Whereas Beecarbonize and Balance of the Planet are focused more on just the dials and gears, letting you fill in the blanks yourself. What I do think however is that instead of being better or worse, Beecarbonize comments sideways to other ecosimulators that a politics of negation from both a play perspective and a political one isn't worth ignoring. On the level of design its percieved as amatuer, but just as much as the politics of contraception is a negation of reproductive meaning, there are other forms of negation that we can think through cynically just by leaving in the mechanics to not do it in the game space. These can be uncomfortable or even outright harmful in some instances, for example if you negate food supply lines you'll starve (something Balance points out). Most arent though, for instance because of how polyester as a material degrades so slowly over the course of years, we certainly dont need a massive shirtwaste retail industry of clothes, and theres enough houses for everyone so we could easily negate housing development as a nessecity to keep building in at least the highest GDP nations, instead just focusing on maintaning the houses we already have. Another more out there negation I find interesting is the argument that space exploration is a waste and philosophically unjust.

"The answer to whether or not we should be allowed to explore other worlds is a giant NO! Followed by a painful slap to our faces. Fuck you, mankind." - DON’T LET THEM LEAVE! a treatise against space

We only think about these in the first moment as rude impossibilities. Disagreeing with the status quo is rude and 'dumb'. Yet, for those friendly to it, socialism itself is ultimately the negation of capitalism.

Beecarbonize has some nice art and makes you feel comfortable losing in its world, there's a charm to watching ecology managers be so openly gamified like that and it's a quaint hour or 2 of your time, but ultimately it pales in comparison to the complexity of these other titans. While that is ultimately ok, I get wistful thinking about how I'm isolated in my own world with this. I wish for a future in which games are free to borrow without shame and treated as an evolving learning environment with a history and conversation, in which games can be treated as a critical course in the same way literature is now. This document I sculpted is not for our own hands but are simply footnotes for the university of videogames generations down the line. Critical appreciation of games is my utopia.

Labryinth Companion

Bear with me, because this is going to sound unusually disrespectful and pretentious.

So C.H.A.I.N. is a compilation of small indie/alternative games made under the premises laid out, as a way to display the creative abilities within this indie margin. I have friends who I've met from this general itchio punk space, so I have no issue with that. The issue I have is with the premise itself. As put on the page for the download:

"The developers couldn't communicate with
each other during development. Each
developer would send their game to the next
person in line, who would make a follow-up.

Together they form a complete narrative."

While on the surface this seems novel and a great way to display the artistic talents of many people from this fuzzy grouping of an indie horror scene, I think in most ways its to the contrary of the goals of displaying a good vision. For one its, worth keeping in mind that this process of 'compendiums of a variety of talent with one conciet keeping it going is not new: In particular, film has been doing this for quite a few decades now.

See, before they were almost entirely fazed out and before the internet became the congealed pastry factory of retention exploitation and algorithms of appeal, the only way you could find out about indie directors was either talking to the VHS rental store clerk, browsing the back catalogue and winging it, or watching one of these. You have probably heard some of these in passing, ABC's of Death (2012) is a fairly popular one, and came at the tail end of the time of its productive nessecity. Hell famous directors you probably love like David Lynch has engaged in a couple of these. Almost every famous director that isn't a complete sellout has at least one of these credits way down on the listing of their directorial credits pages, 'cause nobody watches them. Just to name his inclusions: Lumière and Company (1995) which is an attempt by various directors to make a film with the contraints of the original Lumiere brothers, To Each His Own Cinema showing each directors feelings on cinema, and 42 One Dream Rush (2010) which shows a dream vision by each director. C.H.A.I.N. mostly resembles the approach of that last one, but only in that both are incredibly nauseating and innaccurate facsimiles of the dream experience as a scaffolding.

Yup, what I'm getting at is not that these films are hidden gems, on the contrary these bundle compliation films are delirious and unwatchable. Not a swanky, barbaric, Godard way but in a watching somebody flip through the channels endlessly when you dont have the remote way. These films are frusterating, trite, and ultimately stooped in pretentions to the point that the whole project becomes this sludge. Yes you can watch these, identify a short you like, and possibly even find a filmmaker you like through that process but its far from the optimal heuristic. If you dont believe me you're free to watch them and find out this reality for yourself. These are the discounted films in the back of the rental store for a reason: Nobody likes them.

And yet how prolific they are especially in the horror genre goes almost without need to mention. Horror comes in various forms, but for the most part they work well for the short format because they take on a similar quality to suspense that a roller coaster does, theres this edging of suspense on what's going to happen followed by an adrenaline rush of emotions to do the tasks that get you off the ride. Horror is also popular and easy to make for this same reason: You don't need that many mechanics to scare people, you just need a well timed scare. In Slenderman you just need to collect 8 pages, in Five Nights at Freddies you just have to watch screens and close doors. So it makes sense considering all the productive forces that horror, regardless of medium. would be subject to this splicing format. The issue is that eventually this sewer flood gets in the way of actually finding the niche works, it becomes a common heuristic and production model that even your VHS clerk has to now watch this to make headway.

That brings us to the point I'm trying to get at here, the VHS stores are no more. Technology has moved on. Databases and curators have come by to try and organize this art. Game Jams exist as a portal through which people can peer into separated creative approaches to a theme. This makes this specific approach a little outdated now which is not a problem in itself beyond the fact that the 'sludginess' of its lack of effectiveness remains. That being said, there is one way in which I do worry that this authorial splicing is causing problems: AI.

AI is a fairly hefty political topic at the moment. It has sent some people into a technophobic spiral, given others a reference point to dust off the Grundisse and tweeX about it, mobilized labor movements, caused copyright debates, etc. My favourite 2 reference points for thinking about AI in relation to the arts is in the videos a lukewarm defense of that stupid ai video by N0thanky0u where he says 'none of this is actually about AI, this is about art as property' and the massive critique into the subject by Jimmy McGee called The AI Revolution is Rotten to the Core in which he busts through the many myths of AI in relationship to labor, promoting the latter over the former. The reason I'm bringing this up is that I believe this sort of splicing approach is deadly similar to AI art, whether it be the hackneyed boring gimmick that is AI Dungeon, or AI art models, or that AI shitpost account etc. While they do have some niche uses on a technical angle, AI art on its own terms lacks both a sense of overall meaning, intention, and voice. This is also true here, you have a multiplicity of voice as trying to guide the next one, similar to how an AI script functions, but because they dont know the entirety of the project they can't keep a cohesive narrative. There's an argument to be made that somber surreal horror is more effective by not having this, that the kaleidoscopic effect is worth it. I would gently nudge at the well thought out art of Pablo Picasso and the animations of David Firth's Sock series as a counter argument. A defense of surrealism doesn't work for me here. Instead I find this specific approach to be spreading a germ that merely splicing the work of other people and following some nonsense narrative is enjoyable entertainment in itself. One that allows for an endless demiurge of indecipherable sludge. It's not the intellectual property that matters here, any form of property that isnt personal shouldn't exist in the first place, its more so that eventually so much of stuff like this will flood out the independent voices we are trying to seek.

Towards the end of the collection, a specific repetition started to emerge, where instead of building a journey from one world to the next, the process would repeat a series of games that were 'find pages in area and run away from monsters' several times in a row. This doesn't amuse me, it just makes me think of how many people find the AI Dungeon looping words funny and not being bothered by it. These AI programs don't know how to keep track of previous data and build on it in a satisfying way, they just spit out a highly aggregated collection of data of other peoples work. I find the fact that the authors of each game werent allowed to know any game but the one prior to imitating that same productive lack of memory to build an understandable story. Just as AI algorithms also include amateur or 'bad' art, here to we run into that same problem: hThere are some entries of the series I think work perfectly fine, but taken as a whole I can't look at the project in any way other than as a hideous slop sullying and constraining the talents of others from properly emitting a voice. While the intentions to display the work of others is ultimately good, I think this approach does anything but at this stage. This is an absolute blight on this medium in a way that is best to exist but nonetheless should not be repeated. Luckily the PS1 Demo Disc collection, being an interactable museum of Demos with no expectations or restrictions counteracts this approach.

I want to end this on a positive note though so I'll share some cautiously optimistic thoughts. Recently a very famous writers union strike succeeded in america, people may not know the exact details going on there, but basically the writers succeeded not only in protecting their jobs against AI dominion, they also protected the Writers room in the process. The Writer's room is where a lot of writers come together and hash out the script of the TV show or movie instead of forcing the whole process on 1 guy and an AI like Igor and his sycophantic zombies were inching towards. Writers rooms help everyone contribute to and understand a larger vision of the project, and while I would hardly call the analysis I've edited and discussed with others to be a 'writers room'. However, the experiences of reaching out to people to help hash out the deal of my infamous Vampire Survivors post the titan that it was. As a result, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the best way to realize a vision is to talk it through and get ideas from your peers, and while I think I do have enough of a knowledge base to still contribute individually, the persistent and targeted alienation, harassment, and ostracization from this writing community lowered my desire to contribute actively, it made me understand that struggle of atomization all the more. I'm building those bridges up again in spite of that, and I think unless people want to isolate their personalities, it's worth doing so as well. By the same token, I'd love to see games made in writers rooms in the indie space, which are actually proud to admit that. I would love to see a collective vision that is well realized or at least one that is able to stand on its own and speak its own fantasies and worries into the world with a narrative where everyone understood what was roughly happening from beginning to end. That aside, I think fans should try and dodge these loosely entertaining forms of authorial splicing as advertisement. Nobody bought into them in the film era, we certainly shouldn't now. For my part, I'm not planning on playing C.H.A.I.N.E.D. or whatever series of games in this 'theme' follows.

Campfire Companion

When I first put together this list on games made by notable figures that reflect on games on this website, I had done it with the intentions of highlighting how creative and brilliant our next door neighbors could be. More illustratively it was a list of games that I intended to personally review for the purposes of creating a sort of internal diagesis. We often laud and discuss games that are popular or part of a series, and often leave our more trite one off thoughts for shorter smaller experiences. The intention of the project was to illustrate how the 'alternative' no budget indie scene is not only coupled with what your favourite writers are saying but how they express their values and perspectives through art itself. Reflecting on interactive fictions and writing them are potentially not as seperate processes as we thought.

This project, which the intention of reviewing the works thereof mentioned being a more implicit goal of mine, was ultimately a failure and rather intense misstep. That's for an important reason: There is no coherent diagesis between a work like Magenta Horizon and Another Pokémon Game, they are just games 2 people that happened to be on here made, thus the 'dialogue' is not really as robust as I anticipated across the board. Besides, even if you have a small amount of internet clout sometimes, you probably don't want it to infect literally everything you try to do. I found myself in an attempt to stay fair and help usher thoughts towards improvement often focusing on weak editing and proofreading etc. Which given how niche and ultimately unplayed these works are anyway becomes less a form of friendly criticism and more a form of personal backseating and jeering through social media. Even if I dont like a creative work some writer on here made, going out of my way to cover it was missing the point that there is underlying beneath all of these more important things to be concerned about ie survival under capitalism or keeping your friends close in the wake of disaster. Improvements dont happen overnight, and of course most peoples first work is going to be rough and trying to give every single one of them the same level of serious attention can be discouraging in the face of these wider issues. I keep the list intact today hoping it remains a useful yellow page to some, but otherwise have shelved the underlying bitterness of the surrounding project only focusing on works I feel like actually speaking about.

I bring up this folly because its the sort of concern that A Phone Found in Tall Grass (2023) wants us to dwell in. It wants us to consider what we might be taking for granted. It's a work about relaxing and scrolling through your timeline consorting and joking with others while apocalypse unfolds all around you. The protagonist of the story is the recently unemployed twibber user Lia, who is immediately greeted by her partner Luna and their irl friend Alex as they meme towards and into the brink of an apocalypse. One of the most effective bits of the worldbuilding here is showing how irreverance and venting go hand in hand. Of course, in keeping with the times and adding drama to the story Lia has a private account with presumably no followers on it but for the most part people are brazenly comfortable with finding funny ways to say things are a bit fucked whether it be Alex commiserating about his conspiracy boomer dad or others pointing out how inane the government is being. Even being so smart as to show how that irreverance can lead into a distancing callousness of overly joking about disasters that are currently happening. Throughout this, we are often treated to a helping fake annoying ads as well. This shows not only how social media sites can function as networks of solidarity and connection, but also how they do to some extent neutralize the social playing field. Top executives are shown to be immature and get ratioed by randoms. Memes about a conference have more staying power than the official account bragging about the numbers etc.

Perhaps my favourite bit of writing in this is when Luna vents about Lia just arguing with people online but then realizes the uncomfortable hypocrisy of how dangerous the relevent activism is. We often find ourselves getting annoyed with loved ones in this way, operating too slowly or getting in feuds instead of 'logging off'. It becomes such a concern that it bakes itself as an ironic insult, one I've even recieved on here, that you should just log off and touch grass. Yet often we end up finding out that doesn't always meet people where they are at. Sometimes this frusteration doesn't agknowledge the fact that doing so has coupled with it a serious set of risks. Even in the case of 'just going outside' with decaying air quality in cities, wildfires, urbanist sprawl development, and queerphobia the most insightful people you meet online are probably agoraphobic for a good reason. The moment in this story shows that to great effect. More broadly the other great piece of writing is how, instead of focusing on some personal growth Lia has, the focus instead turns to a collective recognition that we often take the serenity of a space for granted. People noticed this irl with the borderline apocalyptic overtaking and dismantling of twitter by everyones least favourite billionaire comedian. On the one hand we know that these places suck, which is why we spend so much time joking around, but on the other hand the ability to connect and show ourselves through the web represents a space between the cracks of reality. There is a sense in which there's something to mourn when the infrastructure flails and breaks down completely. In order to illustrate allow me to point out something bold here: The recent dismantling of twitter hasn't been stopped by other rich people or the governments because of a combination of ineptitude, apathy, and a recognition that the people that use these spaces to do important activism are people that work. Your manager will almost always ask you to come in regardless of if the wheather is about to crash the windows apart because they have your number, but the people in your area trying to help you live? They need these spaces to get to you (though of course this can be a double edged sword to see: the fact people use the app in this story to meet up doxes them).

More to the point if you share the politics of solidarity and worker struggle I tend to display on here, A Phone Found in Tall Grass has you covered. All you have to show is a couple queer people trying to live their lives in moment of disaster to represent why junevile actions of the powers that be cant be trusted. Short term gain with long term consequences is a constant theme throughout the story, showing how silicon AI industries will only think about shipping product and demonstration advertisement. The mismangement of resources and instensifying of collapse in this case is clearly touching on concerns of AI recently, be it self driving cars or industry wide diminishment of labor. Yet it also reminds me of how this seeming inevitable collapses connects to the synergisms between corporate and government incompetence to. For instance the energy crises connected to global politics, wherein petrol is still made nessecary as a continuous short term decision at the expense of long term climate issues, creating a nasty feedback loop of having to reinvest in the industry that's hurting us. In this sense this is one last effort I have to commend the story and its worldbuilding for: Portraying Empire as fallible. Disaster strikes first in America and Britain, contrary to what people expect. For those of us still slumbering through this recognition, we were shaken awake during covid to just how broken these systems are. Apocalypse maintained itself in the form of the pandemic in these two Empires and here the same is shown. In spite of the GDP, both of these countries have particularly weak logistical infrastructures and not a serious form of internal defense preperation, so the hubris is met in change.

I recognize how intense what I've covered is, but it really goes to show just how well the worldbuilding in A Phone Found in Tall Grass works. One of the best ways this is achived is via the use of images. The memes and photography from our central cast gives humor and presence to their voices, and allows their agency to shine through. This is an aspect that this sites lack creates a more stuffy and cynical atmosphere, despite our best intentions it can make us all come off more humorless and petty having to link in image attachments from off site (Risking a tangent here, this is one of the other reasons I dropped the beforementioned project, it starts to feel like empty air when you don't have any integrated visual medium to work with. Which is also why I've tapered off how many of these I write in the past year and why among other reasons I struggle to value this website as a platform for meaningful discourse and connection. Instead I use this place to push urgent recommendations to peoples feed while I construct a blogging space elsewhere.). This is all been represented by a more discreet member of this site. While I don't want to focus on this too much out of a passing respect to the artist's privacy, part of the benign accuracy of the story comes from a deep and personal understanding of both how people can exist on the margins of joy within popular culture, but also how the often juttering multiplicity of 'internet clout' affects somebodies relative experiences. In some ways its spontaneous but in others its pure numbers. Being in different spaces by design makes you aware of different forms of popularity and how they can effect you. One aspect that suprised me that shows this is that this isn't even Niandra's first interactive work because of how little they bring attention to it.

Despite this humbleness I have to be honest and say that on the level of writing, this is probably my favourite work I've played that has come out this year. It's deft and graceful in avoiding the traps of allegory or mere imitation, A Phone Found in Tall Grass operates as a salve to remember what we have and what we use the internet for, to relax, laugh, and share our struggles somewhere for the world to see.

I also reccomend the much more short thought piece about internet solidarity and its potential historical uniservalism in Vanitas (2023) and if you're interested in what I was musing about energy politics, the game Half-Earth Socialism (2022) which imagines an escape from this cycle towards collapse.

Castle Companion

I'm really glad this is on here and that somebody made this. It's a triumphant semi-autobiography that uses all of the tools of twine engine at its disposal to impact the reader. Particularly I think the use of pop-up text to guide the reader and the low res image backgrounds to guide the physical space of each moment in the autobiography is very effective and I haven't seen done before. That being said the tone carried throughout is at least for me almost unbearable. The whole piece is a series of frantic excitable self realizations and then monologuing them to the reader in a form that might be able to grasp. It's not that I'm trying to tonepolice a semi-autobiography, I think it 'works' in a certain sense of it accurately portraying how people who are repressing or unaware of their plurality are. There's a deep insecurity that you are a stereotype or you are fighting with your own urges when you are plural but can't express it. People begin to expect a set of behaviours out of you and you often feel like you're stressing to meet them. It threads the needle for how this feels really well but can make reading through most of it feel uncomfortable since by design finding your sense of self is spasmodic process.

The most awkward bit here is the lack of external reference points you can latch onto. Contrast this with madotsuki's closet (2021) or Me And The Matrix (2021) which have familiar pop culture metaphors that help anchor the reader. The only cultural anchor that exists here is Discord application, in all its frantic cramped glory. It's not so much to say this work is 'bad' or 'unacceptable'. It moreso gives me an appreciation for why when I was doing my english degree in college the ciriculum would be framed in a certain way. There's a certain 'ramping' of information where you need other introductory monikers before going further in, and this would be featured towards the end of the class, not as much the beginning. I emphasize this point because I think the tangential reader-response 'reflection' posts do not fit with a work like this. I feel it would be ultimately disrespectful in the sense that it displaces the voice of somebody who did a lot to present their story. For instance as seductive as it is, if you tried to utilize a piece like this to talk about what it means to be 'terminally online' you would be doing a great disservice I feel.

The only formal aspect I am critical of is the use of all caps without warning about it early on. There's a good ground on the content in more other cases but missing the specificity of this one is a huge whiff as emphatic caps causes a real and felt fatigue to the point I've actively had to tell people close to me to knock it off because it upsets me. So just know there is that one section right after she gets her ear rubbed by her friend where that happens. Other than that I think it's ultimately effective and self aware. This is probably twine used at its best because while the tone of the piece is quite loud, you the reader can move at your own pace. Text adventures are assisted in large part by their lack of self locomotion. Whereas in most games you have to pause to stop, twine and text adventures generally are always on pause, you have to crank the wheel yourself.

Even if you aren't that interested in the subject matter it's very brief and the formal use of twine as an engine and its upper bounds is so strong that I think its worth checking out when you're in the proper mood. Just, make sure you are in actually in that mood first.

Lily Accompaniment

Neat boss rush bullet hell game made during a game jam where have to aim and catch your projectile, breakout style, while avoiding enemy bullets. While it's possible that you could point to whatever game did this style first, the dual projectile options, specific hold and shoot input, and deep south style twang all culminate in a unique package worth trying out.

That's exactly the point I want to stress, this texturally detailed aqua imbued gameboy style sendback is worth trying. The specific dodge and weave is a style of combat I really respect and crave, one where you have to be mindful as much about your attacks as you are your evasiveness. You rarely see game design like that outside of your Punchouts and such. Most of the 'SHMUP's I play treat bullets as an infinite or simple 'cooldown' resource which just means lining yourself up with your assailtant and holding a button. This more angular fished approach and limited horizontal movment opportunity gives a real alternative worth appreciating.

That being said I have tapped the glorious red "Abandoned" button on here, indicating that I have no interest in beating it. That's being the 3rd (and probably final) crocodile fight, while may be doable, I cant and wont be able to surpass. Closest I can get is about half way before being overwhelmed by the shotgun bullet patterns. The idea of the fight is obvious to me and in theory I like it as a (probable) send off to the game. You have to tactically keep his appendages down (hands and tail), thus engaging in crowd control. The issue is they spawn back too quickly after being removed and his main shotgun attack is too sporadic and close to the players hitbox to be able to manuveur safely from. On top of this, there is also no I-frames for getting hit, or at least the window is so small you cant rely on it. So a single wave of bullets could clear you out regardless. While the first 2 bosses are a treat, the third is an exercise in trial and error at best, one that I think could have been avoided by pulling the boss further back from the player so the bullet patterns are more readable along with increasing IFrames. As it is, I wouldn't be suprised if almost nobody defeats this.

...I would usually just look up what to do for the part I'm stuck on but as far I can find no video evidence of this work exists. I think this is probably comparable to if you tried to play through something like Punchout before there were internet guides on the game. In that sense, it fits rather appropriately into the albeit thin narrative of Blue Bayou. Your protagonist in is being shook down by these massive aquatic mafiosos for their debts they owe, so you could read the immense difficulty spike as a tragedy in form. In the world of sharks and minnows, the minnows can only do but so much not to get swallowed whole. That is to say this is one of those games where you feel pretty okay not finishing it out. In this sense I think designers should give good thought to their failure states as a ludonarrative force: Some players may just never beat it, how do we invoke that in a way that feels appropriate? Blue Bayou indirectly reminds me that a special losing screen splash may be all the difference in imprinting this narrative of failure. In Fallout if you die, the narrator will comment on how you failed in a way that's poignant, almost as if to say 'this place is gnarly, theres no shame to be had that you didnt make it'. Similarly, in Punchout your character losing is the expected output. Asking if you want to retire or not. Boxer's retire all the time due to being outbested or no longer able to keep up. However these examples are far and few between. Most action games, including this one, both try to advise you and rope you back in as an infinite loop of play. Death is merely a setback that you should feel bad about. Even Dark Souls is guilty of this, throwing a "YOU DIED" text on screen which the player recieves only in embarrassment.

This is why I have felt the urge to warn yall about how the game is good, but you dont have to complete it. Having players offset the cost of giving each other this caution is a sore point not found merely in Blue Bayou but is an industry wide regression from throwing set backs at the player (life systems, limited save points, etc.). I think its no suprise most people get upset that they lose now in games, they have been trained to see it as a shameful loss of progress rather than a story of understandable limitations. I'm not trying to dig a heel into Blue Bayou here, moreso I am trying to illustrate that if you find yourself warning other players about a games difficulty then that may be a genuine ludonarrative dissonance worth unmasking in more depth. May that be the only weakness of this twangy pond, and let the crocodile king reign in the watery kingdom in the meantime, taking shade under the dock.