You should not be reading this if you are under the age of 18. Minors please skip this one!!

EXTREME CAUTION CONTENT NOTICE: Discussion of Transphobia and Queerphobia, Criticisms of Feminism, Non-Consensual Fantasies, Bestiality, Child Molestation, Objectification of Women, Exhibitionism, NSFW, Discussion of Autopsies, Critical Literary Theory, Cringey Hypotheticals, Morality Speculations, Also Really Dry

Est. Reading Time: 34 Minutes

I want to hope this is worth reading to somebody, because I feel like I paved a way to talk about porn games that goes beyond just kink shaming or pop feminist argumentation, if that sounds useful to you then good luck to you.

For a long while now I've been longing to write about Adult Games, because quite honestly I have a bone to pick with a majority of the people who discuss erotic art. Even when the targets of the ire seem reasonable, I tend to notice there is quite a lot of kink shaming and puritarianism in this space. For example in the lambasting of Nekopara, a peer I respect ConeCvltist (note I'm not trying to 'call them out', many people including me have been complicit in this behaviour, the fact nobody could articulate what im about to say is more damning of all of us really) goes on to say the following

"What this means is that Nekopara's catgirls are the "idealized woman" for the target audience: a walking fleshlight in the shape of an girl, who has an innate attraction to the self-insert main character and will basically never reject them. A mirage of a character who only exists for pleasure."

This is point blank just kinkshaming, because it implicates that the idea that petplay and catgirl aesthetic is infantilizing to women. I doubt ConeCvltist had any reason to be considerate of this, but a logical conclusion could be drawn that petplay kinks turn people into fleshlights that are only 'idealized women' for men. This echoes the opinion of the radical feminist, which which the feminist reading of a text is usually articulated with. The further implication that radical feminists tend to draw from this is that if this is an 'ideal' archetype for men, then women should strive to be the opposite and avoid playing into male pleasures entirely, thus women must unshackle themselves from kink, and never look back, essentially to put the collars and flogs down. I wouldn't blame you if you were reading what I just said and had all sorts of alarm bells ringing off, in fact I want to dare argue this is exactly part of the problem. While its usually taken as a given that Radical Feminists are transphobic, anybody who makes a criticism of feminism is immediately categorized as a calling card for 'antifeminism' (AKA: meninism, mens rights advocacy, conservatism, sexism, etc.) but let me just show you that this is the case with a short quote:

"Our enemy is the Establishment-its laws and institutions. S/M not only does not share a common enemy with us but longs to be recognized as part of the essence of the power structure that is our enemy." - Ti-Grace Atkinson

The book I pulled this from is an 80s text called 'against sadomasochism' which is a collected manuscript of radical feminists throwing their two cents on why BDSM is oppressive and constraining, and really reflects a desire at the end of the day to reasset liberal power under a slightly changed framework. Thus this ideal of the 'catgirl', one that even billionaire aparthaid sexist Elon Musk has been meming about needing to exist, the stereotype in anime that needs to be seen to life, must just be a reassertion of male fantasies.

The rub, though, is that fantasies and sex based characteristics have very little actually in common, besides the genetalia you are sensually familiar with, and in fact a lot of people who play eroge games or dating games (a similarly maligned genre) could and often are women. The only reason they may not be moreso is due to systemic repression of sexual or romantic preferences. I hope you can see where I'm going with this so that we don't to spend all of our time stunlocked on why its important to go beyond just kinkshaming shit: if trans women are women and they are, then their sexuality does not reflect some 'essential masculine' (ie 'predatorial') urge. If we can admit that most of the population of romance shlock like 50 Shades of Grey is ciswomen, then Trans women having more 'hardcore' versions of BDSM fetishes is if anything more liberatory of repressive valves on sexuality, not less. Or at the very least, you would have to admit that both fantasies are on an equal playing field and not really to blame or repress at all. 50 Shades of Grey at least to me seems like a repressive work that can't fully complete what its trying to articulate, at least to my way of seeing it, I don't know about you.

—--

To be against Sadomasochism and the intensity of it is not to be simply against what's happening inside the San Franciso Armory, its to be against Marquis de Sade, and Sacher-Masoch.

To keep an english lesson short, de Sade was known for using extreme sexual scenes in order to criticize power but also fulfill urges. Most of de Sade's depictions are actually quite metal. For example 120 Days of Sodom, which was written in a prison cell, depicts all of the jailers as fucking hideous and unclean people. It's a nasty text, and some of the degradation certainly was there to titilate but on the meanwhile there were more simple pleasant BDSM threesomes in works like Julliette. De Sade used it to criticize power, but also peer into the degrading pleasure that can come from objectification. This is a tension quite literally at the core of fiction as fiction is in itself the 'mirage of conciousnesses' but mechanically pressed to respond in specific ways to specific inputs. Fiction objectifies humanity itself, and the Sadist sees a continuing immersion to be found from that objectification rather than being taken out by it. The Sadist lives in the paradox.

The masochist lives typically for the pleasure that comes from others seeing them and taking that 'paradox' out on them. That's where sacher masoch comes in, the one that wrote Venus in Furs and desires to be stepped on by his mistress. It'is worth mentioning that eroticization is primarily all found within being desired anyway. Sadomachoism doesn't really work unless the 2 groups get satisfaction from each other. The Sadist isn't getting pleasure from being anonymous or perceiving, thats what the Voyeur is for, those who like seeing things happen in front of them with little personal ability to interface. The Sadist is getting pleasure from being percieved as the dominatrix humiliating the other person. Sacher Masoch and Marquis de Sade did not know each other or have a sexual relationship, so when we talk about this we are talking more about sexual perceptions and the subjectivity of the focalized character. To expand on this point, let's spend a paragraph meditating on the Voyeur.

—-

In all of my years of playing games the only game where I felt so effectively powerless in order to be registered as voyeurous is the game Presentable Liberty, you can read more about that here if you want but the simplified version is that its a game where you are not allowed to do anything but witness as everything falls apart around you, locked in a 4x4 cell with passionate letters from characters you never meet pouring in to console or persuade you. What's important here is that this feeling of voyeurism is actually intended in this particular work. Contrast this to the typical use of Voyueristic as a dismissive or derogatory term, like in dating sims for example. In that the voyeurism usually comes out of literal peeping tom attitudes of the character your piloting, but also a feeling that most of the decisions are happening without your desire or permission. That it's something happening on behalf of a protagonist you typically don't care about. For example if you found out the player character was a peeping tom then its likely that you would have a lot less sympathy for them as anything but an avatar that occasionally acts outside your locus of control for the purposes of continuing the story. This is usually not that big a deal in gaming immersion, for example in the Half Life series there's a player character that handles the action and then a Gordon Freeman who handles the protagonist's motives and the ability to digest information from the right people during those interactive cutscenes. People are able to juggle this cognitive dissonance comfortably until it comes to 'taboo' art like, dating games, eroge, etc.

—--

I think this can be used as a way to understand both kinkshaming and the certain puritanical political censorship its connected to. People feel uncomfortable when the character they are behind does something immoral and so they explain it away by demonizing the supposed demographical ingroup that it belongs to and trying to not see that such art ever sees the light of day. The other reason people act like this is because their own sense of boundaries of what is and isn't fictional start to feel dissolved and they start getting very scared about what is allowed to be depicted.

Originally when I started writing this, I thought my argument was going to be one of obvious blunt Libertineism. Such that, "Lolita, 100 Days of Sodom, etc. should have already solved this moral panic conundrum" that we should know that depictions of rape, pedophilia, necrophilia, beastiality, tourture, and all the other fucked up shit under the sun can happen in fiction because we already had it 100s of years ago and nothing came of it and such gross texts like Lolita were not really intended to be gotten off to anyway. In actuality though there is a shred of truth in this consideration that is actually worth taking pause to think about.

Let's leave aside the obvious hot button version of this for a moment, that of Lolita, and consider a fictional depiction of beastiality. I'm not trying to be edgy but these depictions already exist called the The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, in which an octopus covers itself all over a women, and is meant to be one of the first points of reference for the slow popularization of tentacle rape. Now you have a lot of others, bugs, horses, dogs etc. all drawn taking a person in dojinshi now. But the anxiety, and one that I can almost sort of understand, is that you genuinely dont know if this came out of a dark copy. Which is to say was the Dream of the Fisherman's Wife made from a clear enough insight into what a woman fucking an octopus looks like? Do we know for sure that a living or dead octopus was thrown over a naked women in order to try and get a sense? Nevermind if people getting off to these drawings are really using it as a valve for their real life sexual desires for the creatures, but is the original drawing something that was constructed from the blueprint morally? If the octopus was dead first would that make a difference, it would surely, but would it then be moral? If it was just taking a real octopus fucking another octopus, is that moral. Going off of that idea, is animal planet showing sex moral? Is that not the exploitation of animal sexuality which has supposedly a chance to scar children anyway?

Maybe we can get closer via exaggeration. Is it any more moral if they artist never saw a naked woman, or a real octopus, but saw 2 of them as paintings elsewhere? Is it moral then? Surely thats moral but that drawing of a woman and that octopus have original inspirative reference copies somewhere. But then I can still not guarantee that this art was made within those reasonable moral bounds. I can be fairly sure, but I can't prove it a shadow without a doubt…

This I believe is one way in which the moral heart of censorship probably exists, not so much as a worry of consequence but a worry of origins and their knock-on imitation effects. But I find the standards deeply bullshit, because in order for art to maintain a perfect moral cycle the origin versions would have to have been stopped. If you don't want depictions of mass shootings in art, or animated, etc. You should have seen to it that mass shootings never happened. If you didn't want to worry about animal exploitation then you should have prevented animals from getting hurt. Because none of us individually can change the wounds of the past that caused this stuff we take our anger out on art instead and hold it to this extreme standard. Of course this doesn't prevent art from never being stopped due to obvious immorality, like for example if somebody were to dox a private address in a game, that game should not be allowed to be seen or distributed and should be stopped at all costs, and the origin of such a 'mistake' would be obvious. But for fictional art the attitude is guilty until proven innocent by a moral mob who thinks they are more concerned with potential consequences than actual origin. This matters a lot because we actually don't know if Marquis de Sade engaged in non consentual BDSM or not. Allegedly he took a maid and dripped hot wax on her against her will and that was part of his conviction but we dont know if that actually happened or if it did how much his being able to see and partake in that played into a scene. And the last and perhaps most important reason its bullshit: None of us on earth can be held to concrete morality. We all leak things we shouldn't and do things we shouldn't. For example speaking ill of family members we don't like which could cause them to be traced I think something we shouldn't do but in a world with such low levels of privacy we don't think twice about venting about that on social media half the time.

—--

So now that we have some theory and speculations about censorship and Libertineism, I can actually talk about the fucking game and its problems and use this essay as a launch point for talking about erotic games in general with no compulsion to self defend against charges of particularly 'predatorial' sexual drives. One last thing first: If you thought this was exhausting to read, you've started to understand the issue we are dealing with. This extreme necessity to defend against accusations of fictional sex drives and the objectification of women by Petplay and BDSM is quite literally the power imbalance Transphobia and Queerphobia thrive on. Cis people do not have to explain and defend missionary, 50 shades of Gray, or their exalting literary classics with erotic influence.

—--
Now onto the game proper, do you remember those archetyped terms I brought up earlier, the idea of tying Masochism, Voyeurism, and Sadism to character subjectivities? I can sort of talk about where this game is becomes awkward.

Princess Trainer is part of the "Trainer" genre in which your goal is to basically pimp out a person or group of people into being more slutty by sending them to work increasingly Frivilous jobs and wear skimpier clothing, degrading them from their initial abilities into a public humiliated sex objects. Princess Trainer in particular has you doing this for Jafar from Aladdin, in which you pimp out Jasmine into a reviled whore that Jafar can marry and have as a personal concubine, with you being able to enjoy her plenty as well as she gets corrupted into this other person. Importantly then none of the issues with the game are to do with 'ruining childhoods' or 'objectifying a woman' because within the fantasy this is more or less the goal. To corrupt from the high chair and watch her come to desire you and everyone else on the way down. What better a subject to choose than a disney princess, who is both voiced by and depicted as a 'chaste' yet oddly sexualized adult for family friendly entertainment. If there's any neutral subject for corruption a disney princess is honestly not a bad choice, this is one point that game has in its favor.

Where it begins to lose points, and is honestly why I wanted to talk about this in the first place, is both its game design and distraction away from an effective sadistic fantasy. For one, the course of the game happens over the span of several months and mostly happens through you choosing what job she has to pick and send her to the 'academy' to suppress her will to accept these jobs each day. However, large parts of the games content are locked behind poorly defined Quests. For example I was spending my first run monotonously pressing the same buttons for her to go to the fruit stand until I could buy her more clothes not recognizing that a Quest I had to fulfill would only have the prompt show up if I had 50 gold. Large progression of the game and its content was hidden behind these esoteric questlines and generally bad UI. As a result a lot of the game was spent fiddling around and monotonously pressing the same 3 buttons until I could notice a change somewhere on the map. Just so you understand how bad that is, that town I was fiddling with was 1 screen large with like 6 different single click single use buildings and I was still having these problems constantly.

There's a type of enticement that can be held through this monotony but this is where the immersion started to take a hit. Since there was no clear tutorial, I thought in order to degrade Jasmine I had to build her up into 1 act at a time. Holy mother of Moloch was I wrong XD

What ended up happening was I 'maxed out' total acceptance of an act causing serious tonal whiplash because Jasmine would start giving him flirtatious eyes and swooning during the handjob only to freakout and say 'you disgusting scum' for the first blowjob, she would still do it but the fact was that she hated it and so despite Jasmine having her 'obedience' meter maxed out she was still upset with me, from the standpoint of immersion this makes no sense and these scenes should have been skipped or parceled earlier on. But since there is no active indication that her meter for acceptance of an act was full, I was just getting this weird tsundere treatment the whole damn game. This didn't make me feel either sadistic from the perception of the player character or masochistic from the perspective of fantasizing that what was happening to Jasmine would happen to me, because I knew in both cases these inexplicable tonal variations were just the lulls of the narrative from a poor UI leering its head rather than any consistent explanation in the game of erratic attitude shifts.

To add on this is that there was a complete acceptance of being called and applying to herself any pet name like 'Bimbo' or 'Pet' etc. after a certain point in her training at the academy. In fact, you could put in your own. These inclusions were actually really hot because it allowed me to directly input the niche petnames I like, and allowed me to bring my own kink and roleplay into the confines of the story, but it only went on to striate this surrounding experience with the game when she totally accepted this name and role but out of character got feisty over the next thing she was told to do.

Then we come to the other issue, so Jafar demands 3 things from you that are supposed to happen, make Jasmine personally obedient, humiliate her to the public so everyone hates her, and have enough money to pay for her and Jafar's wedding. Apparently the public humiliation portion of the game unlocks from a tab at your home, which you're unlikely to check or remember much. It's only those bits of UI similar to checking the advanced options menu of a game, so I had to look up to find out about it again. When I did not only was I met with whiplash, but I was also met with a part of the game I no longer wanted to be involved in. The public humiliation, walking somebody on a leash, is hot and a huge exhibitionistic drive in queer communities, no problem there. The issue is that because I had no way to decide how much or little happens in a scene, I had to sit through and read about CHILDREN touching and handling her breasts while my character agreed along to it. Out of the 9 exhibitionist scenes these were 2 of them, and the primary 2 that led to her reputation as a princess being defiled since she was called a child molester. Mind you the kids were not drawn shown touching tits but the scene of it happening with dialogue went on for some 300 words a piece.

This is reallydisappointing. Because in my mind the game didn't even have children in its fantasy to worry about at all to begin with, that was a non-factor to me. On top of this if there were kids in the narrative my player character would probably shake his fist and tell them to fuck off not just limply stand there and go 'yeah go ahead'. And finally, I was not given an option, a warning, anything that would happen. The rest of the exhibitionist portion reflected this problem immensely because it distorted the course of the story from a sadistic pleasure into a supposed voyeuristic one of watching her get degraded without character input, it was awkward and stumbled on its feet. In the sex scenes you had ample dialogue options to choose how the scene would turn out but there were none here. I don't need to make no fine point of it, even without the kids involved this was already a boner killer portion of the game since I was made a voyeur, with the contingent hope being maybe the last few scenes of her being hatefucked by a mob would be hot. But with the kids involved it caused a negative boner, my stomach kinda wanted to hurl and I couldn't trust the text at all anymore because I was thinking of the fictional leering kids in the whole of the fiction now. Just why, why did you have to go there??? You literally didn't have to!!

If I were to speculate, the reason why relates to a larger macro problem with the story which is that the writer couldnt come up with many ways to degrade her from the point of being no longer regal since it would theoretically require writing a bunch of chivalric vows that were being broken. I don't think it would actually be that hard but it would require more legwork than the child molestation shock value way to degrade her, presumably the indie dev thought it wouldn't make a big difference. I was under the expectation she would be degraded to a town fuckdoll, not a fucking child predator like jesus fucking christ! >:C

You might be wondering then why I don't have this game at a 1, on my 4 point scale.

It comes from 2 places, I don't hold a moral resentment with this sort of inclusion in the way others might, it just wasn't the set of fantasies of degradation I was expecting and the UI didn't reflect the ones that were there very well. I also think it just renders and satirical potential of corruption mute. There was a chance here to do glib critiques of the monarchy or chivalric expectations of princesses, but that was just left on the cutting room floor which is just lame because the criticisms of power add a lot to the sexuality. Continuing along that political course of reasoning, obviously you should not involve kids in real life actively into exhibitionist kink as that is child molestation but this has also in a way aged extra poorly since the public displays of kink and the fact children could bear witness is a sore point that would be on everyone's mind anyway. People wont let us wear leashes in public over fear of supposedly 'grooming children' and narratives like this only feed those flames further. That's not to say its not allowed to be depicted regardless but its by design alienating and there was no content notice for its introduction.

On the positives, the cyclical and frugalistic result of currency is criticized, but not more than you would get in almost any management simulation.

I also thought the 1 screen management simulation visual design and simplicity allowed for a serene monotony, the response time for the buttons I had to click for the management portions were fast enough that I could get through the day in about 15 seconds meaning it was easy to appreciate the slow decay while not getting immediate tedium. That immersion was nice, the dialogue box also had a neat tattered parchment look to it that I thought looked really neat..

The customizable attire and pet name options were really hot, and Jasmine's obedience training was hot too. Some of the house sex scenes were hot and had servicable dialogue even though they were typically way too short. Also the game wasn't overtly raceplay oriented or involved in racist descriptions which considering the arabian race of the cast is worth lauding since its unfortunately rare to have a porn game have a black character that isn't racialized. I also just really like corruption as a fetish because it activates a desire in my brain as a trans woman of kind of wanting to be 'corrupted' into a girl and seeing girlhood more as a fetish rather than anything 'actual' so I'm much more forgiving of flubs anyway. There is something here, but its bottom of the barrel and I would just say skip the Town Exploit scenes if you do decide to try it. Don't stick around for more than an hour or 2. Otherwise I would recommend games like Third Crises or Corruption of Champions although both have a more masochistic subjectivity where you play as the characters being corrupted, those both have much more consistent and sexy descents into corruption than this.

Concluding Soapbox

I hope this can serve as an example for how you can criticize porn games without resorting to pedojacketing, kinkshaming, or moral panic. I really am so exhausted with the ways in which porn games are outright derided by stuffy puritarianism. There's always going to be something objectifying about art because all characters in themselves are just a mirage of word clouds we identify to a subject we all agreed to make up for the sake of the story. This is not to say that culture, art, morality shouldn't be criticized. But I just hope that I've provided enough tools to find more tactful and less potentially alienating ways to do so. It's likely I will talk about more porn games as well that I actually like in the near future if I have time, you know since I popped the bottle upon already with posting this.

Policy

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

As you would expect from a Yacht Club title, the visual polish outshines the gameplay polish. I mean that in 2 ways: firstly the hands on feeling of play, jumping, the haptic feedback from a dig, and way your character glides in the air all feel nice. This is accompanied with a great color design and visual spectacle that gives each environment you dig through its own personality and style.

Unfortunately, my issue with previous Yacht titles, most notably the original Shovel Knight, carryover here. For one the immediate screen you see coming down feels more like a timed puzzle than a test of skill and response. This is because they made the smart decision to not punish you with randomly being hurt when free falling through the air. However, that renders the challenge a lot more about if you've seen the layout before. This becomes especially irritating during the boss fights, because all 3 that I got to felt quite a lot like 'puzzle fights' themselves. Once you know the movesets you're almost guaranteed not to take more than 2 chunks of health if you are playing smart. The issue is that you usually have to die at least once to be able to capably read all those moves. This feels terrible especially when you're coming into a boss fight with no health, you know you're going to lose but you're probably not going to really see what the boss does either, its a miserable feeling and the main factor for why I stopped playing, I thought to myself what are the odds that I show up here with more health anytime soon and realized it was slim. In Crypt of the Necrodancer you could practice against any enemy and boss in the game, I really think that addition here would've added a lot.

The main way to heal in the game is through picking up cogs, which requires you to be methodical and focus on your surroundings with a bit more detail, the risk reward is almost always in favor of picking up cogs, although while free falling into enemies is rare, free falling past cogs isnt.

This sucks, because as I mentioned in the clickbait sentence, game has a 'lose more' strategy to its design, if you pick up all three cogs you get to chose between a free pickup which can roll your character stronger with time, or full health. But its only so sustainable to the points of the game and floors you already witness. If you miss 1 cog instead you just get a small heal. If you're low on health, going for cogs actively is almost entirely out of the question. In a way this 'win more by skill' design may seem inviting, but it reveals one reason why more Volatile RNG mechanisms like in BoI are so sweet. Rolling a great build in a game like that is good not just because it rewards players that dont deserve it with an easy mode but because it gives the player more leeway to actually learn attack patterns.

Meanwhile, the only upgrades outside the game come from the overworld shops, but those end up being the same agitating slow timegrind for good items/stat buffs that you would experience in Gungeon or Hades which just teases you further into saying 'you wont even have a chance until you clear all these shops'. It's a grind for grind's sake, and this is enhanced by Shovel Knight's inexplicable wanton desire to dig. There's no real fixed motivation for the player character besides him getting his bad back. While this insatiable greed plays into his character specifically I feel like picking a more interesting and motivated character like plague knight or hell just a merchant from the game proper as the protagonist would have added more motivation to playing.

If it sounds like I'm being unfair so far I wouldn't blame you. But here's the catch: Even as a puzzle action roguelite with the assumption of base endurance and environment analysis it struggles for a few reasons. For one, you have no control over the camera, where free falling isn't an issue, sometimes your camera will go low and not allow you to see whats above you which becomes a pain when the randomly generated floating enemies lurk and hit you over the head. On top of this, the sustainability of your run is almost entirely decided by the shops, which can vary, but the main one I found useful was the health shops. By comparison the rest have upgrades that can be anything from distracting to actively detrimental. But the worst issue is the way carrying items works, you can carry an item behind you but you drop it as you get hit. Usually all it takes is one or 2 hits and you're not going to get that item back, but usually I end up going 2 floors at least before I have a chance to even use them. The 'lose more' design philosophy shows its fangs here to, you might be able to get a relic key all the way to a relic floor, but its unlikely but if you do its game changing in terms of sustainability to get further. The reason I call this 'lose more' instead of win more is because at least in my play you can only sustain maybe a floor or so further, you cant get a 'broken' build or anything like that. Therefore if you play from behind even a little you're almost definitely out of luck, and while the length of a run is only as long as 30 minutes, the verticality ends up being a lot more cognitavely intensive than the fixed screen information models in Isaac or Monolith.

Shovel Knight Dig is that type of game that you know you'll be able to beat in a few hours if you have a base level of persistence and a dash of good luck, but it's designed in such a way where it will take at least a few hours, there's no lucky rolls here and therefore no way to know unless you go and watch others play. I would hazard to say the game is more for Shovel Knight superfans but the fixed megaman type level design and horizontal camera of that game might not carry over to the experience of this. You have to really love Shovel Knight's moveset and unfortunately I just dont.

I think my experience with the more simplistic and twitch based response of Downwell, a very similar game about going downwards plays a lot better for me personally, and I imagine that reality plays into my jadedness here a lot. There's no timed ghost mechanics or overworld market in that game, and so that simplicity is its strength. And while you cant control the camera, there's a lot more vertical clearance to see above and enemies float towards you slowly enough for you to respond. So if you're interested in this I would recommend giving a shot first.

Ancillary Thoughts on Streamer Entertainment

That's the bulk of what I have to say, but I want to take some time to reflect on the 'entertainment' industry that attaches to this stuff. I originally saw this game on a stream and it seemed fun and interesting but I'm slowly starting to realize that whats 'fun for streaming' and fun to personally play can vary quite a bit. I will almost certainly continue watching the guy who played this game and root for their victory but in that entertainment by vicarity mode of play, we as viewers are a lot better at suspending that critical mode or accepting that its just a part of the deal: This person is playing this so whether its fair or not doesnt matter. Which is enhanced by most streamers doing several runs in a row. I feel like while it would be simple to come to the conclusion this how naturally most people play, I think the audience feedback and pressure to continue the performative scene of play actually can create a distinction. Unless you're watching a really quiet streamer for the pure vicarity of their performative abilities like with Valorant or most FPS games, a large part of the entertainment is how one can speak over the gameplay. Downwell is not a streamer friendly game because of how twitch oriented and hyper specific the input response is, turning it slightly closer to the experience of a rhythm game where all of the focus is slotted in on the experience on screen. Whereas Shovel Knight Dig is a 'comfortable' streamer game because it fill time and gives you a waistband (although 'gimmick' games can be fine to but they have to usually be humorous like the recent Trombone Champ in order to cultivate a response that can ignore the 'disturbing' parts of a work). This is weird to think about because I've considered streaming for fun before and the idea that under different conditions I would judge the entirety of the game more positively as a performative product to utilize is a weird idea. I think this is ultimately one of the reasons I like Isaac so much, its one of those rare times where performative and personal entertainment don't antagonize each others perceptions. As a larger point though we should probably be mindful of how this trend has flooded the market and may cause a potential deception in what we see vs. what we play.


That all said the music fucks hard

Policy

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I woke up with this strange craving to play through Homestuck to completion this time after having the jingle of one of the songs pervade my sleep. So I'm making a decision to enter this rabbit hole again.

I read Homestuck about 6 years ago to around page mark 4000 or so. I believe this was roughly far enough in the story that I met the highly charismatic and quite lore complex Trolls but I believe I had stopped due to the investigation intermission I was on wearing me down. Now I've decided to try carving through this Text again so I figured I would give a small reflection on it.

For one, I want to start off by settling that Homestuck is actually more of a game than even most Kinetic Visual Novels. You see while a majority of the text does function as a Kinetic Visual Novel, there are various hyperlinks you can click on throughout the journey that meander you into nonsense. For example when speaking about Betty Crocker's aroma on the reread you can click a link that takes you to the Betty Crocker wikipedia page.

Most of the links tend more substantial than just this. But regardless it reveals the first cultural button that Homestuck is pushing on, the idea that its own text is embedded in relation to a lot of texts around it which are themselves constantly moving. This process of change of evolution is reflected in the massive amount of fan content and the fact that there has been more and more fan participation in the story. Up until now, we usually think about the effects of fan participation as an audience as something hostile and oppressive, one of the most notable examples being the re utilization of death threats that Hideki Anno recycled into End of Evangelion. By comparison, perhaps in part due to the playful and immature tone of the work, Homestuck's fan participation for a long time remained frenzied but relatively warm. Originally I was under the impression that Homestuck's fandom didnt have a whole lot of controversy and that Andrew Hussie was mostly ok, but upon reading a couple articles I realized that there is litigations going on, and the Hussie quite frankly sees himself as a reluctant cult leader now. I think the intelligence with which he speaks about it here is telling:

“The content vacuum created by a cryptid leader results in overwhelming conditions of parasociality, and the projections of personality, morality, and biographical data onto the blank-slate leader can get ludicrous, and often pretty spiteful. Then again, depending on the atmosphere of any given moment in fandom, there may be at least as many simps projecting absurd deification fantasies on the leader.”

source

What I find so impressive about this is how it seems to show something that I picked up in what I read and am aware of when it comes to Homestuck itself: This terminally online lingo is culturally accepted and then utilized in order to tell a more immediately accurate story. While it keeps hands off with just simple teenaged irc interactions early on, people saying 'thats boring bro', it slowly billows out more and more into niche internet slang and technologized thinking especially once the trolls become involved.

It's particularly for these later parts of the story I'm interested in reading to, and in particular want to prime myself for some of the spinoff content: Psycholonials, HiveSwap. Along with the late game embedded in the work itself Alterniabound. But I will say that the humor and direction of early homestuck does actually amuse me.

One of the most startlingly effective things about how Homestuck functions is that it will spend a lot of time with its characters fumbling around to figure out what to do. Characters will stand around jamming items into each other and getting confused with how their own interaction systems (called Capchalogues). I always thought these meandering moments were really entertaining as they call back to not knowing what to do in a point and click game. On top of that the rich mess of the environments and rooms of most of the characters is relatable, having shit just littered all over the floor and constantly sorting through it is how a lot of people online including myself tend to live, but also shows a skill in environmental storytelling that backs up a lot of the more dialogue heavy portions of the game. I was complaining recently how most visual novels tend to perform description through internal monologue, so the lack of focus on internal monologue here is going to help my reading a lot.

I think a lot of people on here are critical of this for being only either 'technically a game' or plastering it in a teenaged nostalgia about how they played it, but will probably never play it again. Honestly I can't help but find both of these approaches somewhat uncritical and tedious. While there's no impression on people to do anything I think referencing the text via nostalgia from what I understand of it does it a huge disservice to the primary themes of change and hyper-subjectivity. While perhaps rereading the whole thing is untenable for most depending on life circumstance, flipping the book back to your favourite moments or scenes or quotations does a lot to keep you tethered to the identity with a work, rather than just throwing it on like a hat when it suits you. For example, i'll throw on random episodes of MLP to help keep my memory with the main work sharpened. On whether or not its a game point, I just find this so frankly ridiculous. The failstate is not finishing the damn thing which a LOT of people have done. Also visual novels by their digital design are games, so this is also a game.

The fact is, I hear a lot about how I should read homestuck but a lot less rather why or what it means to the person in particular. Perhaps this short circuited nature is exactly what Hussie is referencing here and has a right to do so. Eventually people will 'wake up' from the cult and disavow from it etc. But the glamour of the music has also pierced out to me, with Toby Fox even having apparently done the music for certain parts. I'm excited to hear that music in its original format all other things aside.

That's why I plan to reread and actually finish Homestuck this time. I figured I'd leave a note here going in on my previous impressions and positive feelings towards the work. If it's somewhat dry and unspecific in relating to character dialogue I would understand, I really remember really liking Dirk Strider and his awesome sunglasses. A lot of people say I'm like a femme Dirk Strider sometimes so that makes sense. I also really like Nepeta's whole catgirl aesthetic is cute and her desire for roleplay is so fun.

Anyway I learned also that if you have any interest in playing the game now, the browser version is a bit busted and the sound no longer works. So it's best to download it from here. If all goes well expect another write up down the chute here soon.

With the assistance of this list I started digging around for a morning game to play. I was astonished.

Tess, the timid girl, wakes up one morning after something mysteriously bad that happened yesterday, gun in hand, room doubling as a title screen, a common decision close to my heart. She receives a letter from her friend Minnie beckoning her outside.

Little did I expect when little Tess walked out those doors into the great abode that the game would blanket me with some of the most incredible electronic birdsong imitation in any game I've ever touched. The blissful green hills that your character has to ballet over while dispatching the pests in her way. Screen pulled in close to you character such that the whole affair of shoot and gunning is turned protective and intimate, reinforced by the ambient electronics of the surrounding world. Its translucent starry twinkling giving me the motivation to see this journey to the end.

The world of Tess is not one of outright hostility, the enemies only are doing their thing or responding as a defensive maneuver, aside from a final boss all the enemies are only at most retaliating, nobody shoots back which weaves well into its melancholic setting. It's a wistful game with a specific kind of emotional core backing it, one that often only comes across in smaller titles like this.

To break with the more poetic style of affection for a moment, I want to give particular focus on how it handles external 'non diagetic' UI and pickups. Usually in games like this, title screens, save functions, and pickups serve as 'middle men' for the game experience. This is sort of hard to pin down but when you open a game the title screen and options menu ends up functioning closer to the front page of a book, saying something like 'welcome to this adventure'. Which is what makes having the title screen be interactive so special, it immerses you to remember you are experiencing something audio visually rather than treating it as a tool. These extraneous functions are further minimized when you save, there's no title screen to save at, instead its at checkpoints but the save menu is as simple and quick as it needs to be, 3 saves, slap it in and it will tell you where you are in the game and the time it is in real life right now. This is the only point where your immersion with the experience is disturbed, but it's one I quite like, as it makes me reflect on the long passage of time and generally just gets under my skin a bit in a way I personally appreciate. That being said I'm almost certain if this game was made today it would probably be an auto-save or something like that with no menu at all. How do pickups serve as middle men? Usually because they are something you have to idly collect in order to improve your character, but even here this process is simplified by using Cave Story's style, all XP does is improve your health but that's what XP does across the board. If you shoot and open XP crates they give exponentially more XP than a normal enemy rewarding exploration over enemy grinding.

Perhaps game design and audio visual aesthetics are not as separated as we might assume. The soothing color palettes create a feeling of environmental intensity thereby imbuing the game as a whole with an enhanced sense of player character struggle. But more nuanced examples of this are the size of what you can see on screen, Tess screen is small, but this actually sets a situation where unlike Cave Story you have to respond much more quickly to the enemies in your path rather than seeing everything a mile ahead of you. Despite this, Tess plays like a charm and is even smoother to handle than Quote's (I think that's his name?) slightly pixely and chunky character. Also when your character speaks to somebody the generic and somewhat annoying text scrawl sound is replaced with one small ghostly 1 second sound effect that emits from each character. I can't express how absolutely satisfying this is, I wish more games did this.

The game only clocks in at around 20 to 40 minutes in length, but I don't think it being much longer would be in the benefit of the game at all. For one it allows the music, which is gorgeous, to fill out the experience more fully with less repetition. Music repetition being one of the secretly most difficult things for a game to deal with in terms of production. But even beyond that, I feel that the game's bitesized experience cultivates an aesthetic experience all its own, you're relationship with Tess is really just 1 day long, a blip on the map. You're a foreigner in her world, which gives it an even more dreamlike experience. Short simple games, as an amateur critic, become also a great bus stop on the journey to improve on writing about games both because it allows others to easily check your work and lets you more clearly mark the effective parts of an experience that longer works may dull out due to the cognitive tedium with longer game experiences. I've personally always been an advocate just in general that efficient and small games are better than games that are just trying to fill your time with as much content cramming as possible, in part because we live in a time now where there's an overabundance of games, something our gaming forefathers didn't have the privilege of.

Overall the fact that this game is dodging game design conventions to more unique ones that have been tried before but not cohered in this specific way makes the game an absolute highlight. Especially because it doesn't rely on metacommentary to do so which is itself a tried and true convention.

If you're familiar with and like games with heavy yet melancholic aesthetics imbued with strong color palettes, for example games like the more aggressive and philosophical Off, the more soothing and melodic Grimm's Hollow, or the more chilled out exploratory Knytt than you might like this game (and for those who've tried this consider these recommendations as a potential dessert). Not to mention that its an obvious game worth trying for Cave Story fans.

I wont spend long on this, but I noticed that this is yet another debut 1 man team 1 and done game, by a game dev who posted their work on GameJolt and then went dark. 7 years ago the guy teased a sequel and nothing ever came of it. You can sort of tell that the original game here leaves room for a sequel but as awkward as it is I think the lack of one and ambiguity left here works in the games favor as to give it a more dreamlike quality to its simple narrative. Although apparently he worked on the soundtrack for 1 other game before this called 'Rip Demo' I might check out. A damn shame, but it seems the practice of dropping one or 2 games ever and then disappearing from the scene (the most famous RPGmaker game ever Yume Nikki being an iconic example of that) is tragically common to the indie scene it seems, something that makes their often 'outsider' status all the more worth exploring and appreciating.

Also, sigh. Yes I'm also happy that there's a green cloaked protagonist with a mask I can turn to and think happily on to overlay a certain minecraft memelord.

CN: Discussions of Gamer Elitism, Blatant Racist Depictions, Discussions of White Supremacy in Game Design, Passing References to 2 Conservative talk show hosts.

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KAZooK is meant as a 'party game' and minigame collection on the PSP, released by the now defunct company Monte Cristo. A paris based game studio that, as far as their wikipedia page suggests, made absolutely nothing of significance, which I suppose makes sense considering the person who put this into the database didn't even bother to add their company name. They made such wonderful and lovely games like 7 Sins, in which you use the 7 sins to get in girls pants. Yeah…. Or…um.. Dino Island! An early 2000s management simulation game where you make your own jurassic park! Which I literally never heard about and seems to have an abysmal framerate. With the speed of releases, 4 a year or so, Detchibe assured me that this company and even KAZooK itself is 'definitely shovelware'. So basically the studio has this track record of Tycoon Games and War Games. These games reach right past crude right into the realm of sleazy which probably makes sense considering they started out making a bunch of Wall Street simulators. Regardless of all this though, the company decided to try and make a budget party game for the PsP which it seems they had no prior familiarity with. What's the worst that could happen?

PsP Analysis:

Before I talk about KAZooK properly I want to reflect on something about the PsP itself. You can skip this portion if you're not interested, scroll until you see ~~~, but I feel like the nuances of this system are probably worth consideration in advance. I used to have a PsP as a kid and unfortunately the thing didn't last long. I got a few PsP games to play in the car, from what I can recall Daxter and a Frogger game, but not much else. I must have for the year of having it as a wee child of 10 had about 3 games total to portion out and I think there was a few reasons for this. For one, an older person trying to find a game to play for a child on the PsP would often be at a loss. The PsP's library was for the most part intended for teenagers and adults, with games like Soul Kalibur etc. There was no 'Mario' for the console because the system was never even intended to compete with the DS. There's an interesting guerilla advertising campaign that reflects this where they hired people to paint graffiti on buildings (with permission) in order to make the PSP seem cool and badass.

But when we talk about the PSP being at the least 'more for teenagers' specifically we probably mean more in the age range of 15-18 or so, not 12-14. Why? Well put simply, the PsP is a console that requires enough maturity and experience to know you shouldn't fuck around with your electronics too much. For example, the PSP was great for its wide screen and amazing graphics, but the front of the screen was this glossy polish just waiting to be smudged and scratched up. But there was no guard, no way to protect it from the potential damage. This was something that a younger person probably would not give much thought to at all especially because the DS had a stylus and actively made its whole gimmick around touching the screen with it.

I remember mostly being just entirely confused what to do with it and just barely trying to get it to work. The idea of being able to play online PsP games with a friend was absolutely out of the fucking question because nobody my age (8-10) had one of these things, and I was a quiet kid anyway.

The PsP and the DS are often seen as competitors despite Sony's own wishes to appeal to an older demographic. What they probably didn't realize is that their more 'mature' lineup of games that are crasser and rely on 'darker' stories honestly means near nothing to most gamers. I say this with with a profound level of respect, but unless you're somebody like Chandler you as a gamer are not going to give a fuck about the tonal energy. Most gamers, even into their 20s are still playing stuff like pokemon, and so this concern about trying to 'appeal to certain demographics' often falls on deaf ears in a wider console competitions sense. The reality is that the PsP had such a disparate library and such an amount of care given to it that most people would just pick the DS and be fine with playing the more pulpy and cartoonish 'Phoenix Wright' if they were desperate for a story. What I'm trying to say is that most gamers really prioritize game functionality over dark themes and a good story. Which is why the humorous criticism now of 'nintendo adults' is starting to catch on, you have a lot of people out there that played mainline Pokemon, Zelda, and Mario and are just frankly not really that ready to move on and consider other games in a way that doesn't negatively compare them to these games (for example the people who call the Binding of Isaac 'worse Zelda').

It also reflects an often funny growing pain about gamers in general: Most of us listen to Nine Inch Nails sure, but only people like Blood Machine and Chandler try to look for this edgegoth style in games. This is functionally the reason why Blood Machine is honestly a lot cooler than me about for example the ending of Sonic Adventure, a game that ends explicitly with a mythically shocking tragedy. For me its hard to stop the junevile instinct of saying 'why the fuck would they do this edgy bullshit in a kids game' which is sort of immature of me, but is an instinct towards light and fluffy stuff with little tonal whiplash that a lot of gamers tend to share. When people talk about gamers being a non category because 'everyone plays videogames' it often misses the fact that gloomier narratives by design are rare, and that there's a very specific age range where it is expected that gamers wont treat edginess as sort of a novelty (in the way of the tendency to play Hatred or Postal 2). And treat the melodramatic, the gothic, and the edgecore as a legitimate aesthetic with its own capacity and aims. One thing I love about Blood Machine is how completely disconnected from that bias against those aesthetics and how much scorn she has for people putting it down. Her favourite games cover everything from the cybernoise of Kane and Lynch 2, to the noirgoth of Max Payne simply because she doesn't let that bias about a game having a 'dark' or 'tragic' narrative really get to her.

Recently we were feuding a lot about demographic analysis and how useful it actually is, with me exaggerating that x or y game feels like it should be for me but is actually for kids. Sort of teasing at this maturity tension. I want to make an even bolder point here and argue that 'games enthusiasm' and 'casual gaming' are distinctly different demographics to appeal to even if they have significant overlap. For example usually what you will hear in defense of the idea that videogames are a shared hobby by all is the sentiment that even grandparents play games but, and I really hate to be the person to break this to you guys, Words With Friends and Candy Crush are casual experiences for pissing a bit of time away. Sure you have the more family oriented Wii but I don't think the Wii Sports games invite a sort of enthusiasm. This is not to say that casual games are bad but rather to highlight that the people who play Mario Party are a way wider and usually less intense and enthusiastic about continued and improved play, than the people who would play Terraria. Now a games enthusiast could play both, but a casual gamer is going to drift more towards those lighter ways to expend time. This is sort of where this paradox of maturity actually comes most at its head, we may accept all these games as videogames and even accept all these people as 'gamers' as a way to put down the obnoxious elitism around skill checks for being a 'true gamer'. However the idea of a Grandma playing Octopath Traveler is still categorically unusual to us. Enter one of the most unabashed gaming weebs I've ever met: Britta Food4Dogs. She's great because she talks about her passion to collect and find figurines for games I've never even heard of, stuff presumably from the PSN and PS Network stores, allowing her experience like Hyperdimension Neptunia and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. She's a wonderful and thoughtful elderly lady who plays these games with the subs on. If you're more interested in the story, I can send you here for her life story. The reason I felt this tangent was worth mediation is because I sort of reject both the universalist 'everyones a gamer' and 'true gamer' sentiments. Food4Dogs can play some platformers but mostly sticks to these turn based longer anime narrative action adventure and turn based games. I think its worth recognizing that this is deeply unique to her age but also if we reach beyond the thought process of it being just about age we can view it more as a lack function. Food4Dogs got into this realm of escapism out of trauma and grief, saying she needed something to throw herself into entirely. But this sentiment, of going to escapism has not been an accepted virtue of the 'boomer' generation. Instead, often due to a mix of technophobia and traditionalist elitism, 'great literature' or an hour or so of 'casual' tv/games is privileged instead. Not to even get into wider technophobic nationalistic bugbears like Censorship, parental maturity ratings, or the evengelical fear of "Magik". This has been an enormous disconnect I've had with my own family, and if you want to be charitable is perhaps the spine behind why there's a certain sort of elitist opinion about perseverance and there being this category of 'true gamer'. It's a form of alienated call and response and ingroup cultivation so that they can pretend to get closer to people while in fact often doing the opposite.

How does this relate to KAZooK? Well, KAZooK was released on a console known for its significantly more mature and obscure library, where the incentivization was towards more narrative driven titles. And these dorks thought, with all that in mind, that making a party game collection with crude humor was a good idea for collecting market share. While in general demographics are usually more critical in terms of their absence, I believe that pushing out of the 'casual' experience and into the 'enthusiastic' experience with gaming is actually quite a noble goal. To give people larger and well realized modes of escapism to build their perceptions and identity around that go beyond the 'pseudo casual' storytelling of Star Wars to something instead like Mass Effect is, in my view, not in itself a problematic desire. If I didn't think that, I probably wouldn't waste as much time on writing about games as I do by design tests readers to be more 'involved' with the experiences they have. On top of this it's sort of a reflection on why I wouldn't even really think to review Mario Party at all because I don't have anything to say about it that would enhance the relationship between gamer and player, negatively or positively (aside maybe convincing people that Mario Freak Me Out, but I can talk about that another time). With that all in mind, KAZooK releasing on here instead of the more accessible DS, which Monte Cristo had recently made a game on, was an enormously stupid marketing decision. Not to mention as you'll soon see there's enough perseverance based game design decisions that would turn that more casual audience off, meaning they functionally made a game for like nobody.

Now let's return again to the subject of functionality. The subject of game functionality is where the PsP actually takes its most damning hit and may reflect another reason why I wasn't given that many games on the system. Because of the desire to control more of the market, the PsP made a frankly dumb decision of locking the hardware down to using these clunky fucked up discs called the UMD, a disc system that was made pretty much just as a way to suck up more money. Grandparents trying to pick out a game would be further alienated due to this as well. You had to get this mini disk that was inside a case, open up the back of the PsP and sort of stick it in there. But the other issue is that there was nothing really clipping it in place, if it jostled even a little bit the disc would not be read. But you also were supposed to not actually take it outside the mini case and that would actually destroy it. In my childlike confusion I almost broke the first game trying to peel the edge open because of this. This dated trash disc reader never needed to be done this way, they could have just done it as downloads even back in 2005 and there would be no issues whatsoever, but they waited a long time before going that route, something like 3 or 4 years. Proof that this was really them just being market sharks instead of simply hardware limitations is that while you could probably have bought and downloaded movies on the PSP to, they released them in this UMD format as well. I understand that a lot of people are obsessive about having the physical hardware but at my poor age when I couldn't have actually gotten the thing to work properly for more than 10 minutes without holding it with more caution and grace than a fine china tea set, I would have much rather had it go that way. I imagine most of the people older than me who got one of these thought the same.

That being said, if you could keep good care of it and were able to get one of these after 2010 when you can buy and download games (or in actual fact, you could easily pirate games on them to). It was an impressive piece of hardware with stunning graphics, a lot of abilities for modding and an interesting library. It also had the ability to hook up to a TV and play on there, which is fucking crazy impressive for something made before the I-Phone. You can also hook headphones up to it! One game that I played on the Emulator before that I didn't remember was the Final Fantasy Tactics the War of the Lions which due to its inclusion of cutscenes and a wonderful retranslation that makes the dialogue read like Shakespeare's best is considered far superior to play than the original. Imagine if you will playing something that beautiful and involved on a long ride, plane, train, car, whatever. And you can absolutely see how this console had its moment in the sun. I'm sure there are obscure releases on this console that from a narrative perspective might just as well outperform any other portable console. In fact I know almost without a doubt that War of the Lions is better than all the Switch titles I've touched combined (I really hate the switch). So sure, if you were the right person in the right place and time you were probably experiencing the sort of video game Kino most could even dream of. However none of this came to pass in my case, about 1 or 2 years after I got the PsP with still my limited library of like 3 games, my dad spilled soda on the machine by accident ruining it, it got thrown out and really I didn't get to spent much personal time at all with a handheld after that point, sadly. I borrowed a DS a few times from a friend but that was about it. Needless to say I wasn't exactly mourning the loss of the PsP (although I do sort of think I'd want one now).

Now before I move on for good, there's one other set of pros and cons that are worth consideration here: how do the buttons feel? Well I don't have the console in front of me so i'm going off of 15 year old memories, but they are iconic ones. For the most part the buttons feel quite good, the d pad and shape button are tactile and don't fight with you at all, but if a game is more involved and uses the L and R buttons it starts to get even more awkward. Most importantly though is the thumbpad. I remember thinking as a dumb kid that the thumbpad actually never felt right because, I suppose to keep something from breaking, they flattened the thumb pad and had it stick really close, that means that feel wise it was more like a rug I was sweeping around than a thumb stick. The awkwardness here is that this thumbpad was positioned below the d-pad instead of above which means for walking around you had to cramp your thumb downwards and at a sort of angle while playing. I imagine this shaped the library in a lot of nuanced ways, there's no way in hell that you would be able to interact with all the buttons at once which is why my assumption is that the PsP probably had a lot more in terms of visuals and narrative design, involving turn based games than more commonly expected action games or platformers. This meant that any game that required you to use a lot of active movement were probably not going to work out too well.

Almost every game in KAZooK's party collection requires deft and highly involved movement and coordination. For example Zombie Blaster, the 2nd game playable requires you to move around to aim at targets in order to stop your blonde girlfriend (!!!) from being hit by enemies. Meant to imitate a sort of rail shooter experience except its really just the 1 screen. Now you can use the D pad in order to do this, but that's not going to get the job done particularly well which is why the 'rugstick' would instead have to be used. This is definitely where the experience of playing on original hardware becomes squandered a bit, see I emulated this game, and played it with an xbox remote (I would use a playstation remote but I'm not entirely sure where I put it) which means that the joystick and the larger screen with which to see everything would make the game significantly easier in this way and, in a certain sense, lose the game to translation a bit. That being said you could argue that for a lot of experiences, considering the awkwardness of the original console its a game feel translation issue that would enhance the experience rather than harm it.

In KAZooK's case it sort of successfully did both at once, if you consider 'enhancing' as a disparaging term in this case.

~~~~~~~~~~~

When you boot up KAZooK you are greeted to a blinding white screen where you have to choose your language between the different flags while the most fuck ugly shirtless rodent mascot tries to do a rap sign hello to you. He sticks around in the title and options screen everywhere while you try to set stuff up. He reminds me of that weird creepy uncle you just don't want to really ever be around in the same room with, and the fact that it's just a still mascot makes it all the more disconcerting. The menu UI and visual look never get bet or more intelligible than this btw. Note also that the flag is not the US for English, but the UK flag, which is enhanced by the fact this game never came out in the US. You're then immediately met with the most inexplicable an opening title sequence I've ever witnessed, a statue in the middle of a town is hit with lightning and then the most abominable collection of 3D character assets, that feel like the art designer of Big Mouth took too much ambien and tried to make a bobblehead sim, huddle and crowd around the screen like a bad birthday surprise party. Welcome to KAZooM, fuck you.

What I found funny about this game is that PSP experts seem to know about it, with one youtuber even openly commenting in 2021 about it in a drier mechanical fashion as a game in a list of terrible video games. What I'm surprised by however is that this game hasn't gotten the 'animated clown game tuber' treatment that people are probably used to with AVGN or the now infamous JonTron, when I initially looked it up I hardly at all found videos of it. But this game would be perfect 'tuber bait for that style of outrage and chronologized confusion. This again reflects the fact that the PSP library probably doesn't really suit that sort of Jovial review so that genre of youtube has probably not even found it. But it's probably also doubled by the fact that this game is so wildly obscure that I had to capitalize the letters in the search engine to even get the result. I have no clue how many copies its sold, but the fact that as of the time of writing not a single person has marked this as anything, played, backlogged, wishlisted, nothing it probably a good hint that it wasn't too many, further undermining its potentially as a party game since you would need to be online close to another person who had it (and lets not forget the dogshit UMD format which would interrupt your multiplayer experience at the slightest sign it wasn't plugged in correctly, and unlike computer games, there's no way to really 'hot seat' a portable game anyway so by all metrics this was a party game where nobody else showed up to your sad pathetic party.

Now before you start playing you have to make a profile and character, and we are about to figure out why this game probably didn't get manufactured and distributed in America. You only get to choose between two black stereotypes. Either a bushy eyebrowed guy with a gold chain and a 'gangster' bandana donning his scalp. Or a fetishized black slender women with huge red lips, a red jumpsuit mostly unzipped, and huge tits for the character model, half showing. Both are pretty explicitly meant to be african american stereotypes. Now if you wanted to be incredibly charitable you could read the fact that you can't choose a white character from the start as actually a bit subversive since white people would then have to experience what it's like to not be the status quo. You have to slowly 'unlock' the rest of the mostly white cast so surely that's kind of cool? Well even if they weren't deeply racist stereotypes already, I wouldn't really say so. See, in order to get these other characters you have to get enough score to get enough money to unlock them which already textually implies that these unlockable characters are 'worth more' and the 'reason to keep playing' than your starting ones. Your motivation to play is to basically become more white. I did a bit of snooping and as if to confirm my suspicions, there's no indication from the box art material that this game was intended to appeal to a black audience since there's not a single black person on the cover . There is a racist asian stereotype though so that's cool, finally a game Steven Crowder can enjoy I guess.

Bigotry is actually made even more explicit by the progression system in terms of the minigames, so, the minigames themselves each operate as an attempt to imitate some other style of game: Ping Pong, a SHMUP, a Baseball game. But generally there's 2 things about them. Almost all of them are score attack games with the more money you get meaning you get closer to unlocking a minigame from the shop, but that also means none of them have an end point. They also attempt to make almost all the games harder by just making you do what you did before slightly faster each time. There's a few exceptions to this but fundamentally what this ends up doing is making it so eventually based on your reaction time you just can't clear everything in time just fundamentally. To top it all off, a lot of the games seem to revolve around reaffirming prejudices. For example, within the first 5 games you have unlocked from the start, 1 of them is a game called 'pool party' where you have to hit the baseball to throw the guys in the pool out of the line, a quick gendered 'spot the difference'. However as I mentioned before the sprites are so ungodly ugly that the main visual indicator I could reasonably rely on to look at the tits. I can't even begin to tell you how humiliating the whole conceit of doing something like this irl made me feel, it made me recall this one time I was dragged on a cruise ship and you had those guys who would basically pump up the party and he had me 'as a guy' wear lipstick and coerced me and a few others to kiss the head of another guy. These 'gendered' jokes are just homophobia and transphobia so I feel like the feeling of that anecdote probably reflects the gross and humiliating 'humor' behind this game. Considering the fact you were batting the men and based on some other demographic, male power fantasies of all the women standing for you probably plays into it too. The one right after that labeled 'Trash Radio' is you hearing 4 different people all shock jocking into the radio (all men) expletives that show as images (think like how Dropsy does it) and your job is to censor the bad one of the four. Whats funny about this one is how it defines censorial content from not, I suppose part of the humor and learning is supposed to come from mistakes but instead it just feels weird. Boxing for some reason needs to be censored, alright noted. But then I had one that showed Bunny, Mad Face, Flower, and Basketball and seeing the once again heavily racialized shock jocks (its ok because one of them is white, but actually they just recolored the asset of another guest thats actually at the table!) I thought 'well surely if Boxing is Censored, then so is Basketball' but instead angry face is censored. Why?? Is angry face censored???? You don't think people are allowed to be mad on the radio???? Have you no clue how annoyingly angry Rush Limbaugh was????? Is it not acceptable for people in France to be mad on the radio? I don't understand…

Bear in mind, you have to get a high score in order to unlock new content by doing the actions again but faster, which just sucks, the only way I can progress is through either blatant prejudice or the shittiest ping pong in my life. Also let me not that it takes FOREVER to unlock a new game or character, they flat priced everything at 10k, and you get 100 for playing a round but more if you get on the score leaderboards. Except the issue is if you're doing really unusually well the leaderboards would probably have a score skyrocketed so high that you wouldn't be able to reap money from it, not to mention it actually takes a long time. The leaderboards are catastrophically hard to breach, I got to round 15 in several of the games and often only got halfway to breaking 10th place (which if I recall correctly only rewards you like 300 dollars). This game reminded me that if you place a store based on skill in a game you better be reasonable to player competency and actually think about how long it will take to unlock the next thing.

Like, this is a piece of shovelware, similar to that of Action 52 and 10001 Games in 1. Where the only appeal of the game is to have as much differing content in it. I presume from a consumption perspective the idea would be you find one or two games in that collection you like and then ditch the rest. That's what makes turning shovelware into a progression experience so unfathomably inane. You want your player to enjoy some of the game, so why would you even bother locking it off? There's no way a shovelware mini games-collection purchaser would want a progression loop to lock them off since the demand is for a wide array of content. My theory is that the meditative style of play, to brainwash you, is actually a bit intentional. Even though it sounds conspiratorial I think there's merit in that because there's a hypno swirl transition that loads between menus and the music is as repetitive as it can get, bordering more on a commercial jingle than a 'song'. Saying that makes it sound like a challenge to everyone who has not played this to give it a try, and sure do whatever you'd like, but you're going to be surprised to find that its not just a vile game, but a dull and lame one too. It goes way too hard into those Jet Set Radio style aesthetics without realizing the real appeal which just glazes the game with a very corporate charmlessness. It's a painful experience but not an amusingly painful one, a 'please switch the TV channel to something else this is freaking me out' level of bad.

Okay so I want to talk about 1 other thing, which is that you can actually use a cheat (!!) to get extra money. You can get 100000 dollars by changing your name to "MoneySux" but the problem is… that's only enough money to Buy 10 of the games XD. the profile activation thing was a pain the fucking ass since you can't switch profiles easily and it was having difficulties letting me switch my name, so I was able to get it to work about twice to play around 15 of the 30 games, I playe. They were all equally either offensive or vacuous. A fighting game with no block or dodge options, a racing game with 1 single lap, and a game with all about button mashing to break a guitar on your PSP. There were a few that were 'bearable' and actually had an idea, for example Dance Off has you spitting in the mic in a 'rap off' where the idea is that you have to copy what the opponents do, much like FNF across a visual bar at exact times. The way they make it harder is by first sending two separate bars of information to copy, and then in the later rounds taking away the ability to read the notes after he said them. This forces you to sort of use basic short term memory skills but there's still a fundamental problem, you don't have anything but implicit timing to when your turn starts so typically you'll miss the first note you intended to hit and health doesn't reset so eventually you just lose anyway. The game is also so unbearable that having it actually challenge you in any substantial way just makes shit way worse.

Finally, you can access the credits from the menu, but the credits run as slow as possible, with each credited person and company coming on screen individually every 5 seconds. I highly suspect that developers knew they made garbage shovelware, and really wanted to hide their involvement as much as possible and so went to their lead and said 'lets turn the credits into an optional dance sequence!'. That's smart of them and was ultimately a good call as this game doesn't even have a wikipedia page dedicated to it.

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I suppose you could argue since I only played half the games I haven't really 'completed' it, but I feel like I've done enough diligence that I can claim to have completed it more than almost anybody else on BL, and the game literally just wont let me play the others without unnecessary grinding.

This write up was commissioned as part of a contractual agreement with the BL user king bacho who successfully cracked the code on a previous game. Initially this was intended to be for the phillips C-DI game Hotel Mario which I may do a reflection on of my own accord one day, but I was having issues getting the emulator to work properly. So he rerolled me this obscure trash instead. In some ways I quite appreciate it since I feel like I was able to offer a much more robust condemnation of this game and its contents. Although there is that lingering question of if I actually learned anything, I learned about a french shovelware company, how videogame publishing can employ racist logics, and what happens when you release a game with no real thought given to the platform you're releasing on (clearly they were able to make a DS game before they just decided not to). I suppose I was also reminded of how great the PSP library is so if its no problem for purists that I'm not playing on original hardware I might play more PSP games in a while. On the other hand, I wouldn't exactly say I'm insecure about it, but spending a dozen pages ridiculing a game with no prior attention to it does feel on the whole a waste of time. Like I know about 3 people that I'm almost certain would read through all of this but I'm not really doing much of anything beyond giving them the morbid entertainment of seeing me whine about my bad experience.

Previously I inquired about that critiquing bad games that the majority of people seem to like is worth doing, but what about games people dont like? If doing that can cause ego problems in terms of hubris and piss people off, then I would describe the act of doing this as a way to cause severe alienation, being in a desert of knowing that you wasted your time playing something obscure and bad and don't want others to really directly experience it either. I feel you can probably draw blood out of any stone if you punch it hard enough, but I don't exactly see myself going out of my way to critique the failings of the NES "E.T." game that much for example, nor on shovelware, nor on trashy phone games. Detchibe and Franz were both threatening me with playing (Mario) the Music Box which honestly seems like a good time in comparison to this greasepube of a game. Regardless, I think I learned my lesson not to run this sort of prize ever again >:C

Firstly I'm openly reflecting upon this game so that people know that if you care about LGBT aubiographical trauma games (ie. No One Can Ever Know, Madotsuki's Closet, etc.) this is a very significant one to get to. My guess is that if you follow LGBT people, including me, youre going to see this on a lot of 'end of year' lists.

Now one thing I want to point out that is interesting is that due to how emotionally affecting this is, most people have gone on to speak about how it made them cry or reflect their own experiences. Even from people on here actually known for usually writing more erudite reflections. This speak to the power of its performance, but I'll be the one to highlight how.

Once you run the game on browser it blows up to fill your whole browser windows as large as possible, regals you the controls and then allows you to walk. Then, once you move to the edge of the screen 2 things happen:

Would you like to see trigger warnings? (Yes, No)

And then the first line of self narration from Ann: "The problem with talking about this is: I don't know how people will react"

One of the narrative vulnerabilities that segments this from other games of this type is that it will absolutely ask you as a player to think about your intentions in play. Pretty immediately, Ann covers both the fact that sex-work is often lionized and that this is fine by trans people as a narrative of independency. And also that, not simply just the 'text' but the main autobiographical narrator does NOT want this game to be used as a weapon to scold sex workers. What makes this great is that she effectively pulls this off without resorting to second person phrasing saying 'you might think' etc.

Ann is deeply unjudgemental in a general sense but also correctly figures out through her own internalizations that she doesn't really know yet who is reading that, that who could be anybody.

Ann as a character is very timid, flat, and introspective allowing for her lines to travel to the player directly and without flourish. Lines flow out of Ann completely naturalistically like "I couldn't really hear anything" rather than trying to describe it in some detail or another. This enhances the fact that its utilizing the smaller text box design of game boy games. Comprehension and clarity never become an issue during play.

The story is about how Sugaring made Ann less connected to her sense of self-worth and identity as a woman, which may explain why her avatar is a ghost rather than any attempt at depicting herself as a trans woman who just came out recently. It works as another fracture to remind the player that this is just a representation of the events reinterpreted by an older developer who views it as trauma.

Even outside of that the visual design and compositions are absolutely masterful. For example you end up seeing her crush sally from every angle in 2D space during close up scenes, when you move from walking to full on portraits. All of them are gorgeous but here's 2 examples from early on. Even for people who may not personally get much from the story itself, the mastery of the art design is to die for, especially if you're a fan of Game Boy Color games.

I'll join everyone else quickly on the more personal reflection here I admit this part is a bit TMI so skip it if you don't care:

I have always personally had a unstable relationship with the prospect of sex work, due to my own economic conditions and general dysphoria I haven't even felt close enough to the state I want to be in in order to really consider it. Hell the best camera I have for online sex work is a web camera that had its hinge broken off because a friend smacked a fly. So I have actually engaged in and desired the idea of sex work as somewhat of a liberatory function, mostly for online because I always saw irl stuff as both much more seedy and much more anxiety inducing. The matter of fact is I'm a bit of an agoraphobe in general because I can't control how im seen, not just a fear of transphobia but a functionally Weirder fear that I might be only beautiful from a specific angle and the fact I dont have a camera that shows people that angle makes me miserable. As such I tend to also imbue sex work with this mystic sensibility that anybody doing that probably feels visually just perfect, a 2nd order jealousy and dysphoria justified. To a large degree I think this is probably just my own brainrot due to dysphoria, but the reason I'm giving so much depth on this set of cognitive interactions and desires is that while Ann is not critical against embellishing sex work outright, she does show that its not all fun and games for Sally and that Sally feels sort of like she needs to put up a 'sociopathic' identity in order to detach. Even if you are stunning and beautiful, and even if you can utilize it to get independence through others. The fact of the matter is a large part of the game is about being desired yet trying not to let yourself 'know' the other person too much.

On a larger point this is not the only occupational ability given this degree of fixation as a liberation tool in Transfemme spaces. The Blackpaper by Nyx Land is a now slightly dated manifesto that makes a dramatic argument that Transwomen and coding are intertwined, using a quite conspiratorial logic via connecting the word UNIX to biblical references. Seeing this as a 'high IQ' form of liberation, a lot of trans women also imbue coding with this sort of liberatory function, and I feel I should stress that it's actually mostly harmless. While the Blackpaper is weird it imbues a lot of transwomen with a faith and narrative to move on. The reality is just that just as Ann shows an inability to endure to the standards of her field the other reality is that even though its a coping mechanism, we shouldn't actually expect queer people to individually 'be' good at something. For one, it takes a lot of time to get to where you want to be anyway, being a good coder or a good sex worker is not that much different a skill than, say, being good at makeup. In the same way its not ok to push transwomen to be better at makeup or tell them they haven't tried hard enough so to does it reflect here. On top of that for non-transfemme people the sentiments we are good at Hoi4, Fighting Games, Coding, Game Development, are all culturally accurate on a large level but still stereotypes. I'm not good at any of this stuff and a result can mean that people often ignore what I am good at or want to be good at. There are a lot of people out there that fail to meet any of these abilities and are seen as unexceptional, the irony is that Ann or more to the fact the author, Taylor, is 'good at Game Design' (or maybe more art design) but that's not core to the narrative at all. She just wants to exist and this happened a decade ago. So when trans people (of any gender) tell you they just want to exist in peace this is more what we mean! We shouldn't have to find a skill that makes us separated from transphobia, wherein the leisure time to improve in these lionized skills is usually dramatically truncated in comparison to a cis person anyway. The desire to 'overcome' is inherent in anybody looking to escape the chains of capitalist exploitation but we are creatures first, not workers. And as such the narrative of overcoming implies by its own design that others didn't overcome, and until we listen to what they are saying and help them, things aren't going to get better.

Anyway, I straight up don't trust anybody who gave this a 1 out of 10, and I'm summarily blocking all those fuckers in advance. A natural memoir about transphobia and trauma and you give it a 1? Get the fuck out of here with that. A 3-5/10 I can understand, but a 1 is just showing transphobic ass in a way that's 'subtle' enough not to get reported. If you're reading this and you did that, fuck you, I don't want anything to do with you. Scumfuck bastard.

Edit: Franz mentioned to me that these people have a history of doing this. I knew I was onto something. Keep an eye out on these dudes..

Usually when people talk about the Nintendo company being out of touch they are usually referring to the fact they keep shutting down mod creations and stopping smash melee online. While I think this is a fair complaint, I think people often hold a large degree of amnesia or ignorance when they reapply that to their game design and reiteration of popular IPs.

For example the reason they appear out of touch for the most part is actually because they want to make money. Making money may be funtionally out of touch but it's only because those interests don't rely in making the most stellar experience anyway. Puppeteering and using an IP character as abundantly as the mario characters is something that would only ever be accepted in gaming spaces where nostalgia is not just seen as acceptable but actually necessary to the identity of gaming. There's far less skepticism here than say, Avatar 2, on a larger level. The idea that one person can play metroid dread when another older man walks into the room smiles and boisters 'I remember when I played Metroid as a kid' is a fundamental fantasy to gaming's apocrypha. However it doesn't take much to recognize that usually when this same IP overdose is done in other media like Films and Anime its not always so warmly recieved or usually lasts as long. For example in anime you have similar reference points like Lupin or Astroboy, but the Astroboy anime only had 1 newer series after its long TV run and, while Lupin is gigantic, nothing about Lupin is particularly obsessed with coasting on its own tropes and aesthetic. There's lighter titles about ghibli made castle exploration like "The Castle of Cagliostro". And then more recently the darker and more sensual "The Woman Called Fujiko Mine" which is a stylized smokey tone. Then you've got "Goemon's Blood Spray" which is an openly bloody and nasty samurai film. Meanwhile mario has a bit of whismy going on on the side with the paper mario series where there's a bit more engagement with mario as a story and the relatively melancholic Mario Galaxy, but really by all other purposes mario doesn't really change its aesthetic, design choices, or tone much from game to game. Hell the closest we have to something actually haunting and dark is the Mad Father parody game (Mario) the Music Box which as you can probably guess, is a fan game. The reason for this is not actually that complex, the distribution of what is allowed with the IP is held much tighter. Lupin gets a much more involved treatment because they allow Lupin's world to fulfill any niche by giving it to any writer and director that has an interesting idea what to do with it, similar to say how the Batman comic work. You let the IP be wielded by anybody with an idea. Nintendo likes to keep a much more closed door approach, much to the series detriment. This is most clearly seen by the fact that the casting for the new mario movie is as 'safe' as possible. This is because Nintendo is both uninterested as a company in extending that hand, but also is probably the result of having less overall control of the market as they would like to pull off that more hands off treatment especially since game production can actually go wrong via excess glitches etc., while the worst that can happen with comic book production is that the end result just looks kinda ugly.

The best example of them coasting on their nostalgia to me is the New Super Mario Bros. series, which through contrast with this game you see exactly why. All the New Super Mario Bros. games look and play the exact same. Have the same meaningless outdated 'score' and 'timers' that call back to the very first games in the series, and the only marked improvement besides graphics over Super Mario World, and Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3 is that you can play with several people at once, which due to the fixed camera on 1 player just doesn't work as anything other than an extended novelty joke.

The New Super Mario Bros. series performs this blandness most through its slightly more 'jumpy' soundtrack, where on certain beats all the enemies on screen will do a small dance animation at the screen. But for me at least this slightly more jazzed version of the songs just leaves me feeling hollow. Part of the function of nostalgia is that criticizing these decisions as bland and pathetic at all borders on immature, because the games are 'made for kids' and supposed to just be light and fun. However the frustrating design of a lot of the levels in New Super Mario Bros Wii makes me think that is a weak reposte, since unlike those earlier games which are mostly able to be progressed by younger people, this game has a remarkably higher level of difficulty with large lava pits, a lot of run and jump sections, and vertical scroll sections with a bunch of obstacles involved. New Super Mario Bros. is just a gaudy coat of paint where its not entirely a remake of a game, but exists in this limbo state of a reiterative experience to that 2D Mario nostalgia because look, you can still find canons that warp you out of the world, isn't that cool?

This is what I like about Super Mario Flashback, a fangame made with respect to all the bright and light 2D mario games and trying to cultivate on their various strengths while entering in something new. For example the wall jumps from "New" are here but the triple jumps from it, and those spin jumps are removed. Both decisions lead to cleaner platforming as those movement options were usually way too circumstantial to use properly anyway. SMF also makes some other compelling design arguments: What if instead of a timer and lives, we just replace it with an attack score feature that processes how many coins you picked up and how quickly you defeated the the level? Moving the gameplay closer to something like the frantic and optional improvement metrics of Bayonetta or Sonic Adventure. This reprocessing of coins and the elimination of the lives system actually just makes Nintendo who still insists on these outdated features look relatively embarrassing and out of touch in a design sense. Nobody has thought positively about a life system since the early 2000s, seeing it usually as an irritation to play that forces you to repeat sections you already know. We all pretty fundamentally know this, and yet despite Nintendo segmenting levels with checkpoints they still haven't found the courage to move beyond life systems. After all it would reinforce how absolutely meaningless picking up coins actually is. Since the detriment to losing all your lives has never been even remotely harsh enough to encourage that exploration.

Super Mario Flashback adding this score attack feature that grades you at the end for how well you did, thereby justifying the score and coins would have been enough, but matter of factly Flashback has one other trick up its sleeve to distinguish itself: An absolutely baller soundtrack. The reinterpretation of the Overworld song slots itself nicely into as a synthed out groovy remix of the original, using new chord progressions as specific moments to make it seem like an improv jazzfunk reinterpretation rather than simply a faithful remix. The result is something that sounds more like Persona music than strictly Mario music which works much better for its purposes. This is the first time my ears perked up when hearing a Mario song in years because, I'm sorry Odyssey's orchestral mess did nothing for me.

Much like New Super Mario Bros., Mario is quiet here besides letting out a small yelp when he gets hit. Mario has always been significantly more quiet in the 2D games, for the legitimate game design reason that in 3D those hoops and hollers serve a purpose of orienting and being aware of your jumps and decisions more clearly by using a mix of aural echolocation in that space and by distinguishing those aural noises from the surrounding sound effects nessecary for giving your player character even better of a hint whats going on. 2D Space doesn't need this and has never needed this. So in New, the biggest issue was that there was still constantly other noises, coins, lava, a loud soundtrack etc. it was hard to hear your character make the sounds nessecary for 2D control coordination. SMF makes sure to turn those taps and pats way up, which is satisfying as hell.

This shows that nostalgia is ok if its reinterpreted in ways that transform beyond the limitations of the original design expectations into something that merges older tropes with new experiments in form. Also the fact that Mario Flashback does away with the lives system means that it makes it more widely playable to more people by design, but it does lie slightly on the more involved side of player performance, for example having to time and weight a pulley platform, or jump on several flying Koopa's in succession along with its slightly longer level length.

The only reason its not full marks is not because I fundamentally hate mario game (though I don't like Mario as a main character, I can save that grievance for another time), but instead due to two factors: There's no 'boss' or castle to finish the experience off, which is a shame. Also, there's some choice sections in the secret level that due to the mechanics of portal use just read as frustrating. One bit which has no other obstacles is just a 'memorize the order' section that didn't need to exist, and 'guess' based jumping sections with falling goombas. This isn't a deal breaker or anything, but it reeks of Mario Maker style design choices that bring down an otherwise stellar fan game.

One other sidenote on movement is that Mario gets a 'boost run' after a bit, but I'm not really a fan of that mostly because there's really no way for me to know when the boost is going to hit besides getting really used to the timing, some sort of visual indicator for when he goes blastoff mode would have been nice. I imagine if the game was a lot longer I would just get used to it in the same way you learn drift boost timing in a Kart game, but that's my note on that.

Overall this game confirmed a suspicion I was holding on for a while, which is that Mario fangames and overhaul mods are doing far and away more interesting and inviting things with the Mario IP than Nintendo, and in just the way that SMF enhanced that for me to give these fanworks more attention, it also made me fully come to recognize just how flavorless the last 10 years of Nintendo from a game design perspective really have been.

CN: Mild references to Suicide

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Amazing gunplay, great environments. One thing that I don't think is brought up when talking about this game is that, at least for me, its sort of the perfect modernization of arcade games. You spend every level surviving and picking up tapes that you have to listen through, and if you get shot once you get demoted to the last level, but with the random generation of rooms, tape, guns, and enemy spawns it's not guaranteed you'll get to where you were before, backsliding is completely possible. The dressing to disguise the more arcadey nature of this is a serious discussion of guns, suicidality, and a very thinly spread out narrative of people being trapped in a virtual system told slowly through notes and pickups, which you can only piece together after 100s of attempts.

The reality is that you'll probably hear the tapes dozens of times over which is one of the reasons why it makes out that its trying to hypnotize you, with really crisp audio in comparison to the first game. This is no accident, in fact there's a moment where if you explore the main area for long enough you can find an arcade cabinet for Receiver 1, its aware of its game design relationship here. In fact each level threshold takes around the amount of time, 15 minutes or so, that you would probably expect the average person to spend invested at an arcade. For 4 tapes it can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes depending on how soon they spawn, eventually you'll know the spawn placements of them but never whether they are actually in a building or not. This fact is further intensified by the fact that you can replay the game with a larger narrative surrounding it, 'beating' the game doesn't mean never playing it again.

While some people may see the tone as hamfisted in places, with how dramatic many of the audio logs are and how a few of them are cries of the suicidal, I think the fact it can juggle a more haunting tone with how breezy gameplay can be is no easy feat and contrary to that opinion I think it works well as a sort of unique insidious tone. You can run fast in this game, REALLY FAST, but it requires tapping the button forward over and over again. You can snipe enemies as soon as you see them out of the sky, and they make a really cathartic crunchy crash sound when the flying drones fall. The gun preparation and tension of leaning around walls leads up to moments where you can shoot as if you're playing 1 of those carnival shooting games. Still the pace is also methodical, theres more fear here than in most horror games. The jumpscare of being gunned by the turrets or chased by the flying drones is unparalleled and it somehow keeps that intensity after many hours of play. On the flip side the arcadey nature allows you to get into its 'flow state' more which fits the nature of what the game is trying to convey about how guns in media have become normalized.

Reciever 2 specifically utilizes RNG and a fail state to great effect, transforming it into a game that you can play for hours or plug and play once or twice a night. Really have to give it to the sound design team because every noise in this thing, the hums the shots the cracks the running all sound incredible. The lighting is great to but if it wasn't for that incredible sound design this wouldn't be half the game this is. High recommend for audiophiles.

I want it to be known that this review is mostly up for posterity. My refreshed views (mostly on worry of how it can hurt eyes) became more refined in a later post you can read here: https://backloggd.com/u/Erato_Heti/review/664032/

Please do not read this 40 minute review unless you have an obscene amount of time

CW: Gambling, Invoking Queer status to support an argument, quoting other users at length, terminally online debatelording, Russian Roulette, Exceedingly Dry, Lots of Hypotheticals

Est. Time to read: 40 minutes

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PART 1: THE GREAT VIP CASINO METAPHOR

Vampire Survivors is a relatively easy one stick shooter, with game design that consists of walking as the form of play and no actual ability to shoot. Instead you are tasked with moving around to avoid contact with the enemies as you pick up collectables. You can also pick up chests that reward the player with random amounts of loot with a long and exciting chest animation. As you play a half hour run, you continuously level up choosing between what to level up through a pool of 3 choices, however once you get to the end of a run you will have exhausted the majority of the options in that pool, meaning that keen players can force specific builds after playing for long enough.

There are performance issues with the game, the game produces 'number go up' gameplay through having the player automatically produce projectile spam, but the game starts to chug along and lag out at the end of a run due to the number of objects on screen careening the game to a halt. It is very odd that most people who play this game don't point this fact out at all because it makes it more nauseating and difficult to look at than it already is. However my impression is the reason this isn't focused on is that runs tend to play themselves out in the last 5 minutes so no amount of lag could prevent your character from winning. The game also looks like a visual skunks fart, with the halloween tier 'spooky' castlevania enemies sticking out like a sore thumb over the rest. That being said, while these issues are very grating aesthetically, my overall issue is with the design psychology, not just that it runs poorly or has a bad upgrade tree.

I think you could summarize my perspective on the design trappings of this game through the 2 following premises:

1. The game is a time waster with very little intervention or challenge against the player, since the only thing you can do besides walk around is choose from an incredibly limited upgrade pool that becomes samey and effectively fixed across runs.

2. The prior is an intentional design decision, along with flashy animations and reward jingles that are meant to mimic a sense of catharsis that you would get from being at a casino and to put you in a similar zen state.

Now that's perfectly fine, but I don't just think this is a bad game: I think it's a malicious psychic vampire of a game, and that calling it out from this perspective is seen as weird and histrionic. The question is why do I find this worthy of such an absurd condemnation? To illustrate properly it may be worth turning our attention to the design inspirations for the game: pachinko parlors and the mobile games market. The dev of Vampire Survivors mentions that his inspiration for the game was a mobile game called ‘Magic Survival,’ which I don't think anybody has played, but it's a carbon copy of that game with a new coat of paint. Same UI layout and everything.

You know what phone games I'm talking about: the maliciously designed pay-to-win grandma trap Candy Crush, the actually made by an Australian casino company Raid Shadow Legends, and infinite runner mobile ad junk like Subway Surfers. I don't think most people would come to the defense of these games, and many more would actively condemn them as seedy and gross. However, because Vampire Survivors is so deeply popular as a PC release, people are comparing it positively to games like The Binding of Issac instead and missing that particular connection point.

Anybody who has played any of the games previously mentioned knows what I mean when I use them as a point of reference, but people still find it uncomfortable to actively talk about why mobile games are like this in the first place. It's in part because the primary way you can get apps on your phone is through the monopolized app stores, which are not optimized with customer service in mind. Instead their store algorithm explicitly promotes free games with ads and microtransactions as much as possible. Following this is an issue of immersion through the lens of Natasha D. Schull’s ‘Addiction by Design’, as being in the 'machine zone' where experiencing play in a fugue zenlike fog is the only thing you care about. Phone games do actually have a bit of a problem in achieving this because of the fact that you usually mess with your phone while doing other things. That being said the most successful games are able to pull off a microcosm of this version, Candy Crush has a sordid history for actually addicting its player base, but instead of sitting in front of a large machine for a half hour and losing your money before finally peeling yourself away, you can play a few rounds of it and games like it whatever adware junk in your pocket at the bus, then in line for the restaurant, and then as you're falling asleep. Etc.

I'll concede something here: a large portion of the hangup on this argument, and how intense the discontent is, seems to be that most mobile games at least try to fuck you over with microtransactions and pay-to-play models, which are considered bad. But this game is 3 dollars you pay all at once and then never have to worry again, how bad can that really be? Surely that's not indicative of gambling or addiction and thus needs to be described via something else.

I want to defer to a rather brilliant analogy that Pangburn came up with during a fantastic discourse on the game’s addictive (or in his view, lack thereof) elements:

"I am strolling around a casino, perhaps nursing a drink, and a floor attendant notices me, beckoning me over to a new wing of the facility. it's a VIP room with a low price point of several dollars to get in filled with the same slot machines as out on the floor. the difference here is that once you have paid you have a lifetime of access to the suite, where you can continue to push the one button to your heart's content. the catch here is that there is no payout and you know for a fact that you'll never roll the jackpot for your first few hours, you must sit there and continue to press the button until your odds rise and rise, converging to a near perfect chance of the triple 7s after multiple dozen hours of play. at this point, you can return to this hall at will to watch the triple 7s appear again and again. this is how vsurv sounds to me. I think this sounds fucking stupid and I have no interest in playing it. " in the comments here

However, he contends that he doesn't have a 'moral issue' with it. He then goes on to say that
"the end state is fixed and you're always aware you will reach it at some point. it's not really ‘gambling’ when the odds are always in your favor, right? which is not to say it can't be addictive in its own right, but I hope this makes my thoughts on the matter clear. "

I don't want to deconstruct this too mercilessly but I do want to point out a few interesting things about the VS scenario and how it distinguishes it from this analogy. Mainly the idea that if you play for long enough you will hit the point of getting 7s and always will get 7s. Here's where I find this slightly misleading: the 'jackpot' of VS play is winning which means in order for the analogy to be accurate it would be something closer to guaranteeing you get 7s after waiting and intently interfacing with the screen for 30 full minutes. Although one could argue that the destruction of enemies is also a 'jackpot' reward system, I feel it's actually comparable more to just visual encouragement data like the bright candy explosions in Candy Crush, or the neon bright machines and loud sound effects of slot machines, rather those smaller moments are not the real 'jackpot' you are in pursuit of. Whereas people who play Binding of Isaac are playing to see a new unique run and how the tear effects synergize, its not just about finishing the game in itself.

At the same time there's the assumption that gambling is merely bad because of the house edge, but this risks over simplifying the process of gambling itself. Just yesterday, I played no money poker for the point of prestige and no money was involved, and as such I find that a genuine interest in playing poker as a game seems to distinguish it from a perception of gambling. However, the idea of risking increasing stakes is still there and can thus lead people to take up higher risk poker. Sports betters start off by watching the sport, then they start betting after warming up a while.

However, let me ask you a question: if I played real money poker and I was the best poker player in the world, is that not still gambling? If I was the best poker player, and I was playing with random people, my odds of winning are probably 90%, maybe even more, so is gambling identified by that 10% risk? Is it identified by the house edge? You can come ahead consistently in poker, people play this game for money after all.

Perhaps the nuance here then is that poker is a genuine game that can also still be described as a vehicle for gambling. If that's the case then honestly maybe any game could be a vehicle for gambling, and it's just about how well that engine is tailored to do so. To come back to the "slots'' example then, here's what GoufyGoggs has to say on it when musing about arcade games in comparison:

"No one wants to play a slot machine where you aren't forced to put your money on the line after all. The reliance on leaving outcomes up to chance fundamentally prevents a creative space from ever forming, they’re inherently destructive as Caillois put it. So what you're left with is just the addictive practices and negative impacts on mental health without any of the tangible benefits. " cited here

Now I feel like it's worth comparing this point to something like Blackjack. Blackjack is an insanely simple 'game' that has to a large degree been solved on what number and below you hit and what number you don't. it's automatic, with the only room for discretion being when you should split or double down. There's no room for a creative space of play to breathe, it's a totally static play experience. Poker is incredibly dynamic. They are both gambling. Even so, another question that might be worth bridging: can Candy Crush be called slot machine gambling? After all, the later levels absolutely have a 'house edge'. I'll leave that question for you, but hopefully you can see on some level it reveals a pedantry over word choice and the contexts we attach them to. That pedantry in part implies a moral disgust with gambling where there isn't with single player game experiences, in spite of the fact the boundary between both is very unstable.

PART 2: GAMBLING IS ACTUALLY AWESOME

This is where I start saying things that really just completely veer off the map from anybody else so far: I don't even dislike gambling, I dislike money, and I dislike people being coerced into situations where they feel they can't stop, and I dislike the games that encourage this. Money is not the sole reason Gambling is good or bad. The idea of playing something for stakes, even with a house edge, can be reapplied to other forms of stakes, like Prestige or an erotic form of stakes like strip poker. Gambling can exist in a world without money and sort of already does through shit like 'spin the bottle'. The reason I'm emphasizing this is that the only real concern is that the play needs to be dynamic enough not to mentally fatigue and lull the person interacting in it. Slots and Blackjack get washed out when you remove money, but not universally. Some people still like being in the zone with Blackjack and I can imagine people getting a compulsion to play on these slot machines without money once a habit has been built. It's not really about the money, it's about the habituation through automated play. On the contrary, what we currently consider gambling can be seen as a vector for genuine expressions of creative humor and identity. For example when playing a best of seven of different games, popular streamer personalities Ludwig and Jerma traded out the idea of playing for money for instead playing to see who else has to wear a silly shirt on stream. The games they all played as well were dynamic, in a way all competitive multiplayer games by design tend to be.

This is deeply funny and engaging version of stakes, and the explicit difference that Detchibe focuses on in their own post,
"The issue is that players are largely uncritical of what they are consuming, why they find it pleasurable, and whether or not it is actually enjoyable. Pleasure and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive, but pleasure is something that happens to you, and enjoyment is something earned by you." source

Being acted upon for pleasure under Detchibe's ruleset can only happen through games that don't pass a degree of dynamic threshold, for example playing at the roulette table, the results strictly only happen to you through random chance, a pleasure, rather than being joy seeking in themselves through a dynamic input that causes the results. In poker you have an incredibly wide array of options: bluffing, folding, playing a weak hand to the bridge, purposefully losing hands in order to win later for intel, etc. This is by design dynamic play. Earlier I mentioned the enjoyment a person can get with 'playing for stakes', but I didn't mention how doing this for an ego and without money involved can obviously be bad in both games and 'gambling'.

Some ways people perform self harm with a game is by playing it for far far longer than they should without taking a break. Meanwhile, gamblers often play without 'taking a break' and in the process losing more money or assets than they expected, this process may produce pleasure for them but not enjoyment. To get dark for a moment, there's nothing about Russian Roulette that makes it a non-game, the results just happen to you with minimal player agency and input. Clinically we could refer to russian roulette as technically a pre-established and static 'game' of chance with no input from the player whatsoever besides rolling the barrel until a certain random point, the results are by this metric technically 'pleasurable' for the living player as the operation of death was not done upon them, but not enjoyable. There's obviously the stakes themselves which are awful, but even if it was being done with a nerf dart the game itself is so static and unrewarding if played many times that the only way to have fun with it and produce more pleasure is by either getting in a tantric zone, or by raising the stakes. For people who play static non microtransaction single player games, those stakes are by time and reward catharsis "I will play today until I get 3 wins", which increases to 4, or 5, etc. Playing a static game like slots is the same. The results are static and not deeply determined by what the player does.

It is my belief that the most 'addictive' games in part can come from playing simply for the reward receptors of having something 'happen upon you' and not engaging in your own branching set of decisions and cognitive inputs, and where it no longer becomes about the dynamic play of the player. To tie this explanation to the Great VIP Casino: A team in WoW start learning how to do boss Raids and they are getting wiped, but in a dynamic and chaotic way where random players are rushing in and dying, its hilarious, but the way to win is actually almost perfectly solved and the results of a win or a loss become increasingly unconcerning and unchallenging. Eventually they get good enough at knowing how to build and prepare for the raid that the odds of success ever increase, yet being prevented from 100% by internet issues, physiological interventions, etc. Eventually the issues of pure success stop, that stops becoming the 'jackpot'. They now know exactly how to pull the enemies etc. Now they are redoing this raid for a .5% rare item drop which they are going to sell or use in arena fights, the new 'jackpot'. The only reason for playing the raid is in order to get this next level of jackpot which is inevitable, but takes much stress and many hours, after the point of vastly diminished dynamic returns, to get. The results are not enjoyable, they are pleasurable, they fulfill a compulsion. This is indistinguishable from the VIP Casino except for the fact that the real 'reward' jackpot for play is much more rare, this seems like a very important distinction except when you recognize that this is the exact type of person who would be compelled into a WoW Raid loop after having spent a week at the great VIP Casino.

Fuck WoW and fuck Blizzard (hot take I know) for doing this, this is how this system operates and it shouldn't need to, there's no reason to limit certain items to such a low drop rate, it should just be a test of basic ability and skill not pure compulsion and time gating. The issue with this version of the events is that it encourages compulsion and encourages a raising of the stakes in at least a few problem players. Some players will never stop playing in the Great VIP Casino or they will seek out a version of the casino now with lower odds and higher stakes, or they will play at the Great VIP Casino for a longer amount of time than last time for the same pleasurable results. For WoW raids, a new boss can come out that now has a .1% chance of dropping that item but maybe it takes quite a bit longer and a few more players with no change in the dynamic set to play, this means it takes more time and labor in order to achieve the same base pleasure. For Vampire Survivors then, this can be seen in 2 different ways, either receiving pleasure from trying to get higher win streaks in the original game. Or through playing Clones where the only change is how long a run takes, or if you need to spend real life money to get further. We are assuming that these 'Knock Offs' provide no enhanced player input and are still 1 stick shooters with small upgrade pools. In this case, either Vampire Survivors is an addicting gateway game for static increased stakes gambling (with time, money, or mental acuity) or its a boring game that sucks to play. The only difference being decided by when the player has the decent sense to 'cash their chips' and leave. There's no way to leave this situation untainted.

From this you could say that I hate this type of gaming more than the umbrella medium of 'gambling' itself as the static and hedonically unrewarding nature of a game would stress you to the point of going further and further in order to activate those same pleasure receptors, eventually to the point of either oblivion, self harm, or non-play. Most players will choose non-play, but because of the existence of the primary 2 potentialities, there needs to be various approaches to mitigate or be aware of the mental trappings of play.

Now to go back to Vampire Survivors for a moment. The issue and stakes purported by the game are obviously not money but time. Your reward for doing well enough in the game is that you get to learn and beat it slightly faster, which is an unengaging form of stakes. Compare this instead to the false equivalence examples I've seen brought up within the idle game genre. Cookie Clicker can obviously ask for large amounts of your passive time, months in fact, which by my time wasting critique may seem damning. That said, there's a significant distinction between those idle games where the goal is to find out more of the lore and world like Universal Paperclips or The Longing and games that are primarily interested in locking off content and completion behind time walls that you either have to pay through or play to compulsion to escape out of like Adventure Capitalist. These malicious design traps can exist in idle games but it's not core to the genre, and in fact Universal Paperclips is a great example of a short idle game that conveys its message and gameplay without taking advantage of the player's time needlessly. This is not a genre issue, this is not a gambling issue, and this is not an 'upgrades in games are bad' issue. This is uniquely a game design issue.

That being said it gets quite complicated talking about the nuances of where that difference can be identified so I'm going to outline some common rebuttals I've seen first:

1. All games, especially those you get good at, are about getting to win-states you have to wait out through increasingly minimal cognitive levels of interfacing.

2. Concerns over how the condemnation is described, ie. calling design malicious, evil, or predatory design practices feeling like loaded moral language.

3. The game can be completed 100% in 30 hours, and many other games like CS: GO, League, etc. eat much more player time and are thus more worthy of condemnation

4. Why refer to it as 'morally bankrupt' etc. rather than just unengaging design or simply just a bad game?

For points 1 and 3, I agree that within the premise of being concerned about the excessive waste of player time you could say that any arcade game being functionally endless is just as bad if not worse. However, I think that while the 'jackpot' of VS gameplay very much is connected to finishing a run, not all games are about the compulsion to finish. For score attack games the concern is just to get further, and for shmups the concern is about also completing the game on one credit, not just completing a run in general (though completing the game also is find). Thus, the implicit challenge of a game is its most salient point of consideration. Run completion should be one of many carrots for play, not the only one. VS has nothing implicit in its system that says you should stop playing when you hit 100% or if you should go for it at all but it has nothing of the opposite either. Instead it presents such catharsis through finishing a run and viewing shallow on-screen destruction that your mind will tune out quickly. The only desire for such completionism is in the player who might want to unlock new characters, but even after doing that getting 100% is not seen as a legitimate overarching nested goal in the way it is for Binding of Isaac, nor would it make the play better if it was.

Time and time again you read what people say and they refer to game as 'addictive' and that they 'dont want to stop playing'. This has to be thought of as an issue that is primarily compounded through static play, as what undynamic play can do is cause the player to treat the repetitive task as simply a way to make time goes by faster, and hibernate the mind in a tantric state. This is best expressed in Cakewalking's post on the game,
"I have 50 hours in Vampire Survivors. I treat it like a time machine. I use it to travel 30 minutes forward in time and feel nothing afterwards." source

The issue I have with this is that trying to time travel forward, considering everyone's time on the earth is limited, seems like quite literally a self-loathing gesture (which is why I refer to it as self-harm earlier). A primary argument for why people would want to do this is to quell anxiety or stress, but then this gets you back to those external stressors faster, whereas most games with a challenge tend to slow people's time down. A more reasonable explanation for it is that it's not a consciously-desired process and is instead being utilized for various other means, but I think the primary symptom that arises from this practice is at the very least low self-esteem. Focusing on only a select few games that speed up time means you have far less to dynamically socialize with others, which trends towards social atrophy. You could say that more dynamic gameplay like the Binding of Issac are equal in this regard, however I think the staticness of a game has a freezing effect on the mind such that if the few games you play are more static than dynamic it's much more likely to make you fall into that social atrophy. This may seem crazy or absurd to point out, but I think it's a valid reason to be upset with art that causes this. Less dynamic games register us as less dynamic people not in the sense of making us literally less interesting as a shallow judgment but in that it limits the scope of speech. Currently I've been obsessed with Undercards, and I recognize that's a game that nobody really knows or cares about. That being said, if given a moment to genuinely express and be excited about the game I could speak about it for hours upon end. But the repetitive and limited scenarios mean that you could probably only squeeze the lemon of discussion out of Vampire Survivors for a few drops if that. Similarly, a Candy Crush player has a lot less to say on their game of choice than a Tetris player. This may seem odd since Tetris is, on the surface, a far simpler game, but Tetris experts can talk about various stacking combinations, tricks, and speak about bonding over their hobby with others. Candy Crush players are isolated, and a lot of the purpose of the design, I feel, is to alienate people by crushing emergent gameplay into simple randomness generation checks that can be surpassed by playing over and over, but also increase your odds and thus lower the lack of pleasure from a loss through spending money. If you don't believe me that this actually happens to some Candy Crush players, don't take it from me, take it from the following study called
"Are you addicted to Candy Crush Saga? An exploratory study linking psychological factors to mobile social game addiction"

In the conclusion on the data, where they query the habits and preferences of play of 400 Candy Crush Saga players, they note that:

"According to DSM-IV’s classic definition of addiction, the present study found that 7.3% of the respondents were addicted to mobile social games. Given that there are 215 million mobile online game users in Mainland China (CNNIC, 2014), 7.3% does not represent a small number of addicts." And that, "With regard to the psychological variables, loneliness and self-control were found to be significant predictors of mobile social game addiction."

Vampire Survivors and Candy Crush play vastly differently of course. Vampire Survivors is a numbing experience with a time set that you are moving to complete and finish, whereas Candy Crush is a short series of individual time limited high stress levels. Candy Crush has you acting with swiftness and high cognitive and anxious response. These games on the surface could not contrast more, but both offer only the illusion of control and of outcome. Your results in Candy Crush are only found through how the next set of candies coming in are generated, it's easy to get to a point in Candy Crush where you fail a level by not being able to match the candies. In Vampire Survivors your results are decided by the random generation of the item pool upon level up, meaning that even if you can go for a specific build some amount of the result is left up to chance. The odds of the loss are of course vastly different, but neither provide the player enough agency to breach the upper limits that might come from bad luck nor are random elements forced to make them change and adapt their style of play to what is on screen. I will admit that this specific point may be perhaps the weakest in this whole post by far, but if I was wrong here and that Candy Crush did have a lot of control and variation in play, that would not be a defense of Vampire Survivors, it would be of Candy Crush. Perhaps the best way to quantify how they are both addicting is by highlighting the low amount of player agency and the endless appeasement of play.


PART 3: THE THOUGHT-TERMINATING DISTRACTION POINTS

With all of this settled, I now want to turn to the points of contention that I consider less relevant to the game in itself. Let's start with point 2. The idea that labeling this predatory or evil design is worth resisting. Woodaba put it best when they referred to this as 'tone policing,'

"No, I'm not terribly convinced by this tone policing, I think "predatory" is a perfectly reasonable word to describe a design philosophy cultivated from the ground up to create and reinforce gambling addictions, given that these mechanisms are literally designed to prey upon people. [...]

I think managing tone and tenor in conversations like this can be worthwhile, I just wasn't convinced by your statement that the tone was inappropriate in this instance." comments here

Ironically, even the value-neutral attempt to use the phrase tone policing is getting tone policed, because in our current political climate a lot of words feel polarizing and loaded. I'm not going to pretend I don't understand how these descriptors to a game of leisure would upset or distress people. The phrase 'predatory' is one that I try not to rely on as right now it's a phrase mainly invoked for the purposes of transphobic grooming accusations and thus is tinged with that moral weight. On the other hand, I actually enjoy words like 'evil' or 'amoral' which have been used as negative descriptors by friends in the past see for example Detchibe recently concluding their review by calling Moriyama Middle School "A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it." source , which makes me want to seek out and play the game more, not less. This is a struggle that is often core in my relationships with others. That said, even though my perspective on wording is very odd, I can still fully appreciate what they are actually trying to say and recognize that I'm bringing my own over-conscious linguistic baggage and identification with 'evil' to the table which can distract from the discussion. In a way you could say all moral language like this is distracting and meant to apply needless pathos, but these are speaking trends that are also really difficult to get away from in part because using more loaded language gives us a leg up in the attention economies. This is why all of the most outrageous social media posts are strange moral claims. Frankly nobody even tries half as hard to tone police over ableist remarks like 'stupid' or 'schizo' etc. and especially stuff like the r-slur was so common in gaming circles until about 2 years ago when everyone decided that its a no-no slur. I'm not saying increasing sensitivity to that is a bad thing, merely illustrating that there's far more hypocrisy on word choice than people let on. Nobody sits there and studies over each and every word they speak to make sure it's maximally accurate, because someone can just pick the one word you messed up on and highlight it for why it means you're wrong anyway. Doing so can only really be seen as a pedantic distraction. Language is messy and this is why the sentiment of 'good faith' online is so important.

On that note, Point 4 on moral claims, is one that I think is also a distraction point, as morality in general is a murky subject. However, I'm sympathetic as to why people find this worthy of contention. It feels like an attack, especially considering the fact that if you try to make an argument for or against a game or its developer, it can read like the same sort of political censorship that promotes book burning or banning mature video games. As Pangburn points out, "my first thought is that it affirms china's stringent limit on online gaming by minors, but I don't think me saying that here is going to be very popular on either side of the debate LOL"

However I don't think, taking the example of Candy Crush and the negative effects from its players that this is a defacto bad policy if certain games are regulated or restricted, to quote the paper utilized there that issues of self control and isolation were the largest factors of addiction to the game, following this they point out

"Society should be aware of the threats that mobile social game playing pose to players. Research on vulnerable groups has shown that children and adolescents are more susceptible to the influence of the media than others are (Gentile and Stone, 2005). Therefore, parents should pay close attention to their children, and teachers should monitor their students. "

Now I think that the specific restriction of all online games leaves a lot to be desired, and plays into my concerns I'll reference more in depth in a moment. However the actual doing so is based on objective policy data, but it's important not to conflate this meaning of objective and data with the 'my opinion is right because I said so' version. A good analogy might be how smoking regulations happened in response to the negative results of smoking being scientifically proven, it was first outlawed from kids and then warning labels were given to adults. I believe you can do pretty much the same thing and make a similar argument of regulation of a game like Candy Crush or Vampire Survivors.

For me, it's just about pointing out that it’s worthy of condemnation first, not endorsement. I don't want people endorsing games that create negative habits or, more strictly, waste my time. This is literally no different than, say, expressing that you think a story has damaging elements while not trying to actively ban the book. It's just that instead of a narrative, it is design, something people have less awareness of than they think they do.

As for the issue of policy implications in particular I'm just an internet dork, not a politician, and neither are you probably! This also has nothing to do with the point LOL. However, I'll try to address this best I can. Others have positioned arguments that the ESRB should have discretion in terms of highlighting gambling elements in a game, especially to minors, but that sort of regulatory framework leaves a lot to be desired. You could do that nudity popup disclaimer that steam has for games, but that's not a client capacity that can be universalized unless you get the government involved, which is a hefty conclusion. I don't put a lot of faith in the regulatory networks for making a clear distinction between a 'gambling aesthetic' like say Sonic Adventure's casino level, and 'addictive game design elements'', I feel like the core problem here is that we would need to rely on some sort of state policy procedure in which the government could specifically and objectively identify non dynamic and destructive play and properly regulate it. Aesthetics are always in flux even if they are alluring to the right demographic, but as I've pointed out earlier, what we consider truly to be the worst of gambling is only found through this undynamic play. Roguelites could be thrown into this bucket despite the fact that in my view they are the opposite. Take for example a game like Luck Be a Landlord, which has a constant 3 choice upgrade system similar to Vampire Survivors, but also requires a lot of decision making and forethought on what to choose, losing a run is almost entirely within player agency. How do you think a large government entity would perceive a game like that? Personally, I think that they would slap a 'promotes gambling' logo on it, but even if minors played the game (who are the most culpable) the reality is that extended play of it would probably make the less discretion-based system of an actual slot machine significantly less compelling because the play of a slot machine would be automated and have no genuine player input for winning a run.

One last point before we wrap things up. This negation of discoursivity does not just happen in the negative appraisals of our arguments. I want to close this post with what my good friend and critical eye Detchibe had to say about the initial, in actuality quite rushed, insight. I will make sure to leave the full quotation as such in the comments below as the first post, however for brevity there is one sentence in particular I want to harp on: "And as you and I and countless others have stressed time and again, there isn't anything implicitly wrong with a passive model of consumption when done responsibly and with an awareness that it is oblivious consumption." I think that while this might not be the intention of the post it speaks to a 'universalizing' diplomatic impulse that I don't think is entirely true. I think this game is actively mentally unhealthy in a specific way that even slightly more cognitively taxing games like 20 Minutes Til Dawn with its active shot aiming isn't. It's not an indictment of failure on your part, but you got there by a system that is actively taking advantage of you. I believe that this impulse while deeply well meaning and appreciated is actually sort of dangerous as it rushes to assuage conflict and disagreement through settlements of harmony. I highlight this not to shit on the absolutely wonderful words of my friend, but to instead expose that thought-terminating cliches are everywhere. One of the most annoying things about me is that I resist them constantly even when they are well meaning :p , but I'm sure I make mistakes on this too so feel free to call it out if you see me doing it.

I don't want the conversation to end, I don't want to 'let bygones be bygones'. This is perhaps the most important issue in terms of gaining a trust and understanding of each other's taste and improving them. You can still like Vampire Survivors after reading all of this, but the point is to be more mindful of recommending it to others. Again, some people like smoking but almost nobody recommends you become a smoker. So to conclude, Vampire Survivors is a mobile game in desktop's clothing, and has a lot of intentionally addictive design traps. So the console a game runs on should not be the sole point of contention for whether its good or not. It's important to be critical of cheap desktop addictive shovelware.

For now however I think I need to stop and digest the scene for a while before saying more, or using other games both positively or negatively for highlighting this, which is what I hope my newfound Court may help do. Fixating forever on one game can be boring and ironically in its own way a waste of time especially for a game with such polarized opinions. Imagine how much more productive this conversation would have been if it was over the mobile game market instead, a game like Candy Crush, which is more clearly delineated as pernicious. I want people to call games like these out of course, but mainly so I don't play them myself. The main reason Vampire Survivors was called out for this was not that it was just some '3 dollar game' but that its one of the most financially successful video games in recent years.

If you have thoughts feel free to leave them below, I'd love to read them

Note: My original post on the game was in reference to more off topic conversation surrounding the harassment by its fans and speculation about its place as a tool for streamers, which was happening to GoufyGoggs, who I was casually dating around the time this had happened as a result of a mutual crush held for a few months, and has recently become my girlfriend. Initially I was going to revamp this post to 'prove' the level of harassment and make people 'bear witness' to the attacks of character and disrespect leveled at her, however I realized that to a large extent such an operation is painful and excessive, and that it takes the bear minimum amount of research into the subreddits or youtube comments surrounding this topic to sympathize, this type of harassment needs not be immortalized in its particulars. I'm not going to quote people misgendering my own girlfriend for other people lol thats ridiculous.

That said, if you have not read the original version of the post, you can read it here (right now it's a google doc but it will be switched to a cohost post asap). The TL;DR of it is conveyed in the 1st link referenced in that post.

Special Thanks to Detchibe and Pangburn for the wonderful peer review and fine tuned grammatical editing on this, without their help I would not be able to write this half as well as I wanted to. To Franz for the well reasoned moral support and understanding. And to my new girlfriend Heather aka GoufyGoggs whose research on this game was a powerful catalyst to my own.

POST SCRIPT EDIT:

Reading this back I realize that I pretty much just dropped the policy proposal point, negating a policy potentiality out of suspicion rather than replacing it. I did that in part because I didn't want to let my heavy handed socialist ideals get too heavily in the way of the critique. I think one of the main reasons people engage in habitual behaviors like this is because of a desire to escape from labor insecurities, often not acknowledging that the therapeutic element is short term reward for long term set backs. This perception is tracked pretty heavily from Addiction by Design where the 'machine zone' is described as a space for escaping insecurities of life generally. I think that the only real policy proposal that would fix that underlying habitual response is by providing better labor security (slashing the 'gig economy' for example) and not promoting cultures of workaholism and burnout. By having a better safety net for people it would prevent anxious self destructive play. Not just for online gaming or gambling, but for other vices to like smoking and alcoholism. I'm probably playing way more of a game than I otherwise would because I don't want to think about my future: getting a job, a home, food, etc. In that sense I can totally understand uncritical play and can't condemn individuals for engaging in it really. The only way to really fix that quite reasonable anxiety is by eliminating it entirely via radical proposals like free housing, food, UBI, etc. The reason I never explicitly stated it in the original piece is because I didn't want to risk over complicating the network of critique there. Only to then simplify it with anti capitalist rhetoric forcing readers to either accept that as true or throw out the entire script. Hammering about labor rights over and over is not the most conducive to open dialogues I'm afraid. Regardless, even if you don't hold my perspective on that point I hope you can see why more general regulation would have to be done with consideration and care.

As of now, I've successfully beat the game with Jules, the sexy shotgun wielding lady in the intro that gets picked up by the trucker Jeff, before the truck breaks down and they are forced to go to the resident evil style monster mansion featuring several floors of hopping heads, zombies, and meat cubes among many other strange and disconcerting monsters. Doing so took me 6 hours across about 50 runs.

The reason I want to highlight this is that this is substantially longer of an amount of time you would expect to beat a roguelite game, with Isaac and Monolith clocking in at maybe 2 or 3. Whereas Gungeon takes significantly longer, around a dozen or so. The issue is not actually how long it takes, the gunplay is very satisfying and rooms go by at a brisk speed. The issue is actually that you are locked to only the 2 starting characters as the only 2 genuinely playable until you successfully beat the game. Which means that your choice of character is essentially gender locked. For me I played as Jules, because I liked how she looked and identify my play more comfortably with women, which is why I must unfortunately remark that the character starts with 4 health to Jeff's 8. This is not an insubstantial difference because on average the highest you can push your max health is around 3. Which means Jeff naturally starts with more health in a run than you would ever need. The effect of this, whether the designers meant this to be the case or not, is that Jeff is a significantly easier character to play due to his toughness. This is sexist, as not only does it not make a great deal of sense that a truck driver would really be like this, but that you are obstensibly punished for not playing a male character. At least in Gungeon I can make an argument for the female characters being strong, with the Hunter having a great starting weapon and a dog, and to that effect with exception of the robot, the health pools are not dramatically messed around with, and to my memory you can play as 4 different characters right from the start of the game, 2 men and 2 women. The sexism is not the only issue with this tho, it also massively constrains the early player space of play to only have 2 characters out of the 8 unlockable vastly restricting your approach to play without doing so to such an extent that all the initial play experiences would be homogenous like in Issac. This is a huge oversight! The actual sexualization of the women merchants in the game is something I'm fine with, because as a dyke I to find sexy women a great motivator for play. But making your starting cast of women way more difficult to play, I can not abide!

That aside the gunplay is as satisfying as it is in gungeon if not more. Similar to gungeon if you use a machine gun the remote rumbles out small vibrations but if you use a rocket launcher there will be a delay and then a blast vibration. This is fundamentally the same as in FPS games, but applying this to the Roguelite formula means that the guns you use are always in flux, and its such that you always feel out every vibration. The one neat factor Dead Estate has over Gungeon and other rougelite games is the velocity. Sometimes you have to jump in the air in order to shoot enemies and you can vary this to different hop intervals as you would in a platformer. This is replaced with a dodge and is very cathartic, you dont have to spend as much time guessing the invincibility frames in a jump. It's not nearly as much a bullet hell gamers test of giving close attention to exactly where your character is on the screen and as a result feeds into the speed of the combat. It's a wonderful intervention into the formula and I hope to see it more as the dodge roll becomes more played out and tiresome for combat.

Now I want to gesture to the core issue with the design, overconsistency in the early game. So, there's 2 seperate shops you encounter on a floor, the Nursing Room and the Witch room. The Witch room will give you various passive upgrades you pay for that can effect your run, and an Ambrosia that can full heal your character. The Nursing Room on the other hand gives you clear stats buffs: Strength, Movement Speed, and Health. The issue here though is that Strength becomes THE thing to hard upgrade, and the fact is these Nursing rooms appear on every other floor. Thus the heuristically best way to play the game ends up being

1. Collect as much money as you can on floor one
2. Increase damage output 2 or 3 times
3. Play until floor 3 with better damage
4. On floor 3, max out the damage buff

The reason why this is should be obvious to any person who has played these games for a long time. Eventually the easiest floor becomes the 1st floor, because youve naturally encountered almost every layout of a room and by design the game leaves its weakest enemies for floor one as not to lead with a feeling of unfathomable unfairness. But as a result it means that eventually the 1st floor becomes the easiest to clear out without a problem and eventually its just about how to get the most consistent edge, meaning shooting for consistent early game character buffs poses no genuine risk to the player. Chunks will spawn, an invincible enemy that chases around and attacks you but poses no real risk to the player. So its all about damage.

'But hold on' you might be asking, 'surely damage is not ALWAYS the best pick, sometimes speed or health would be, right?'. In a purely theoretical sense sure, but factors like health caps dont matter besides ambrosia refuel being healing for slightly more. The real problem though is that damage matters for challenge rooms in which you have to dispatch enemies within 40 seconds in order to recieve rewards. These rooms are simply just stat checking for damage and so, in order to garuntee getting 'free' items you need to max out damage the most possible.

They could easily have redesigned the game where the nursing room is less consistent or gone entirely. But they didn't do that, which means every early run becomes the same and the only reason that is fun is because I like how satisfying the pots are when I crack them open.

In isaac the only way I have a high consistency across is either by visiting a shop or by getting a devil deal. The first of which is a substantial and often inadvised opportunity cost, and the 2nd which requires perfect play of not getting hit by the boss which only really good players are going to consistently attain and which still requires an incredible amount of skill and knowledge of the systems.

Visually and in terms of being a post-newgrounds love letter to crudeness this is solid stuff and something I want to like more, but because of this, its probably something I'll only keep playing for a month and then mostly forget about.

I will say tho I appreciate they didn't pull the external character buffs progression stuff, and instead just leaves a difficulty toggle for people who want to play on easy mode. I can't stand when games let be basically pay with in game 'currency' to make the game ostensibly easier, and looking even to popular works in this genre like Hades which also do this, it would have been easy to succumb to.

I think it might be interesting to compare and contrast this game, with both 20 Minutes Til Dawn and Vampire Survivors but I don't want to get too deep in the weeds so I'll generally talk about the ways this game is distinct then highlight some similarities. I also want to note though that I find this game far less egregious than VSurv on the whole, and that when I talk about all three I'm strictly talking about them as games and not secretly saying 'one is actually a slot casino' (in fact not needing to do so was the whole point of my write up there as marred as that thesis statement might have been) or w/ever so relax.

In contrast to those games. This one goes for a more 3D fixed arena combat approach swapping out the top down angle for instead a diagonal aerial view, such that you might be familiar with from Diablo or Torchlight. At first this may seem indistinguishable and unimportant, but its actually enormously so in terms of keeping a dynamic visual busyness. What I mean by this is that all three of these games bring catharsis to the player by melting all the enemies on the screen into collectable gems as much as possible, with 20 minutes electing more towards the feeling of being cramped and Soulstone here being as many unique enemy attack patterns and 6 auto attacks from the player character, meaning the screen is absolutely melted over with visual eye candy, my 3rd and final run I had built bomb skills and the result was that there were so many explosion effects on the screen I was going crosseyed. However it felt very coherent and dynamic due to this camera adjustment and 3D effect. To help make things intelligible the enemy attacks show the hit box which you can avoid with a dash. The results are an effective display of visual noise that you can easily sift through while still feeling fun and chaotic. The top down angle by design limits to a degree the chaos of the eye candy because with the character centered on the screen it makes clear how homogenous the movement and evasion is. One of the issues I have with VSurv, is honestly just how boring and static the movement of the character in particular is, I feel like hot molasses just trudging along and melting everything in my path, and the centering only makes the evasion in 20 Minutes feel about as well as it can. This is by far the nicest thing I have to say about Soulstone Survivors and why I would say it's probably an amusing enough toy for a few runs. Reminds me of when I was a kid an fantasized all my toys violently crowding and attacking each other in huge duels to the death, this is just a slightly automated adult satisfaction of that same pleasure.

However this is unfortunately not enough to overcome some of the game design issues, the enemies having a large variation in their attacks along with you having to aim your auto attack and dodge I think leads it above the mere base point of it being a simple skinnerbox. But the problem is that the way level ups choices happen (which are constant, I felt like I was leveling up every 30 seconds) make the decisions obvious. So similar to VSurv you choose between three options, with the attack variations of what skills you pick feeling really unique and enjoyable. With a row of 6 actives and then a bunch of passives, the issue is that the way they dole these to you is through random chance rarity modifiers, but each 'option' you pick from is induvidually randomized and there's a clear indication that epic options are almost always better than rares, which are almost always better than commons, etc. So outside of the occasional health buff, the decisions pretty much choose themselves, you almost always pick up the highest rarity one, you can typically do this without even worrying or considering it much, which means those constant level ups become a quick visual nuisance you scroll past. There are other choices that are similarly automatic, for example the experience upgrade is an auto pick in this game and VSurv early on in a run because of the scaling. It by design means that you are basically trading (and barely) 1 early game level up for 3 late game ones, which with the damage modifiers not making the game difficult until then makes the choice a no brainer. Basically this issue would be solved if they got rid of the XP Modifier and either locked an entire option pool to 1 rarity or switched out the rarity system entirely. I would prefer the later because 20 Minutes and VSurv already recognized that building towards synergies is generally more satisfying than the variance of random basic power up pools. Now when you kill bosses in either of those games you do get a high varience quality reward, and I take issue with this as well, especially in VSurvivors case where the chest animation makes me downright impatient but at least within that matrix its a design decision that already makes sense.

The Experience scaling as a level up in particular is a particularly stupid design decision across all 3 of these games though. I understand on the surface this may seem anal retentive, but the issue is that whenever there's a degree of genuine difficulty in these games, the degree to which you win or lose a run is decided that much more by the level of variance of getting the XP upgrade. You naturally have an option that is far and away stronger than every other earlier in the game than later on. Whereas most of the rest of the pool settles in a place of equal strength and depends generally on how you build synergies. In theory the lack of explicit synergies in Soulstone would actually mean that there is even more nuance in your upgrade decisions as it would make playstyle and builds infinite, but this is once again simply squandered by not locking the rarity pools.

I think there's one point in particular though that really just confounds me and to a degree gets on my nerves, and thats the statistical advantage out of game upgrade skill tree. This is something I noticed in the Mirror in Hades to, heres my functional problem with it: Doesn't a 3% damage boost upgrade just make all your future runs 3% easier? Doesn't that mean, until Ascensions come into play, that the hardest run of the game is your first run? To illustrate why this confuses me so much lets genre hop ever so slightly to how most roguelites do it. In Isaac or Slay the Spire what you unlock from completing a run is new items added to the pool, this does not nessecarily make the game easier or harder. It might make the game ever so slightly easier in isaac if you get brimstone added to the pool, but you still have to actually find it. If Isaac had an upgrade tree that made your tears do 30% more damage, it would be indistinguishable from an easy mode. But once you level up these skill trees in Soulstone or Hades its not exactly you can undo that unless you play the game with a wiped save, whereas having an extra item in a pool in a rouguelite game just feels natural and fun. I think what's so confusing about this progression system to me at least is typically when I want to play a game I want more challenging or interesting things to happen over the course of runs. I don't want to make the game easier for myself.

Now you could argue that the prestiege mode in Soulstone Survivors balances this out, and you would be right, but think about that for a moment: I'm making the game slightly easier to make the game 'harder' to make it easier again. It would only be after getting to the highest prestiege and all the max out on the progression tree that I would stabalize to the 'real' difficulty, but then if I went back and decided to play a no presteige run to relax, that run would not just be easier than the presteige difficulty it would be naturally easier than your initial run of the game. Here, you would instead have to guesstimate the initial game difficulty, is it prestiege level 3, 5? This is confusing and why I think fixed easy and hard modes from the outsdet is completely ok! The Progression system becomes a sort of Negative Prestiege, which seems to nullify the whole point of having one.

If I was to speculate why these games in this genre seem to do this anyway is that, it just leads better for a ratrace and feeling of growth and attainment over the system, but unlike in just adding more skills to the pool, the addition is completely artificial. Progression systems make sense when you're playing Diablo or other dungeoneering RPGs as your character is supposed to get stronger in order to keep up with the strength of the enemies but thats 1 continuous run. In a game like this, its the equivalent of taking anabolic steroids over adding a new workout routine that focuses on your cores. Yes you are theoretically getting stronger and in a mercurial sense its earned to the degree that you used the steroids and its your life to do so, but in the long run its the illusion of satisfaction, decision making, and personal growth rather than actually doing so (tho I realize this is a very strained analogy when considering gender euphoria of doing so like with transmascs, I would attribute that to more of a continuous upgrade system of self growth like in the dungeeoneering example. Anyway hopefully you get what I mean.). Not to mention this isn't like the progression system to make certain sections of dark souls easier by going out of your way to finding humanities and using them sparingly. You get bonuses to these progressions by simply playing the game for long enough, that's it.

On that note, it's pretty much exactly for this reason I take issue with Hades game design as well. It's honestly one of the go to design decisions that can immediately turn me off to a game. Just leaving aside the issue of whether these systems are intended to needlessly compel you to play more, the appreciation for it by other players and yearning for it has always confused me. My assumption is they just don't really notice it, which is why I spent so much time putting precision on it here.

I don't think any of this stuff makes the game egregious or awful to the degree VSurv is, I can understand what people are saying when they like this game even though I think improving or erasing these issues would really add a lot to the play experience. But all these factors do take what could be a great and entertaining game and sort of squander it a bit. This is also what I was trying to get across with VSurv itself being particularly a game design issue, theres game design issues here to for sure and for me at least that's a far bigger point of contention than simple moral remarks on the game itself. You can say basically the same in terms of hating monetization models etc by scaling out the problems like this I think.

Still I agree with Detchibe in hoping other designers take note more of the strengths of this iteration on the automated twin stick shooter genre. A great version of this game is very much possible!!

In Dan Olsen's recent video "Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft" he brings forward a distinction anthropologists have been digging at for years between Free Play and Instrumental Play with the primary focus being how game systems often trend towards the optimization and mass adoption of Instrumental Play. Instrumental Play is playing with an explicit purpose and optimizing towards that purpose as best possible, and free play is playing without an explicit goal in mind, usually for emergent entertainment experience.

How a self limiting role play character is often seen within these systems is usually they are the first to be scorned. This rejection of the Roleplayer is exactly what makes games like Space Station 13 so important as it's a game where being good at roleplaying is the optimization. For example, when I play as a Security Officer in that game I'm adopting the role of surveillance and control, but the important thing is that I need to be lenient and at least a little bad at my job in order for emergent gameplay storytelling to come out of it, for the antagonists to be able to bring necessary creative friction and conflict to the story. Meanwhile if I play as the occupation of a geneticist my occupation is to mess around and change the DNA of random people who want it.

This is not a write up about Space Station 13, or WoW, this is about Eco. In Eco, you are tasked with playing a 1 month long MMO experience where the primary goal is to get to a level of technology and knowledge that defeats a looming meteor within 1 month. You have to work in solidarity with at best around 30 people in a large market economy trading and selling products in order to help get your own profession. If you run into trouble with other player behaviors like for example massive deforestation, you can have representative create policy around it. This policy network is a fundamental building block that transcends the game beyond just a mundane market simulation as the coding allows for you to make ridiculous automated stimulus and taxations, and allow for for example hunters to hunt on anybodies property etc. It also gives a vector for people to express power, at least in theory.

If you can follow what I'm saying so far, and you're a long time reader who tends in agreement with me, you might notice where the friction here starts. Specifically through who gets chosen to wield this executive power, the checks and balances, but also in how non-cooperative free market economies tend to be. In order to have a large factory in the game you need to set the price for factory goods like say a Car well beyond the value it actually is, so that with said profit you can build more room for more machines. But before you can get the small room for the automobile machine, you need to attain money and materials from strangers through either spending a lot of time and labor to do so, or by selling food stuff you've gathered higher than their value. You can usually find a few people who have not priced their goods mindfully and you can usually get an advantage that way. People are also hilariously bad at regulating the economy as its often seen as 'unfair' and can turn players away, so the free market system because the default expectation which isn't ever questioned due to the fact the game is so easy that disaster states never happen.

This is fine but there's a few problems with the game as it is at the moment, the game is only difficult because you have to rely on strangers in order to do their professions to beat the meteor. Which means that people who have grouped up with different professions can actually speed through this system. If you're sharing stuff, you don't have to pay taxes for the goods you are sharing in every server except one official one called White Tiger. That means that all it takes to break the game in almost every server is a group of 5, and thus usually means the threat of the meteor isn't a threat at all, and once that conflict with the meteor is gone the server dies.

The other issue is that the wielding of power or acting in behavior that would be seen as inventing conflict is also unacceptable on most servers. The server owner is always there to basically dictate the play experience and in a mad rush to pull as much of the player base as possible, these server owners have to dictate conflict immediately rather than let it play out through the government policy systems. You can think of this as the equivalent of playing in another kids sandbox wrong and explicitly told if you don't play it right, you will be kicked out. The hard power of conformity set by these guys pretty much ruins the possible fun of the game.

Again, the official servers, including White Tiger, don't suffer from this issue, as long as you follow the minimal rules against hate speech etc. there is no overt guiding light. However, every server that isn't White Tiger still suffers from the group speedrunning trick (not to mention the difficulty as it is is way too easy anyway) since White Tiger is the only place that has systems to prevent this in place it's the only place that is worth playing. However, the amount of legal information you have to read makes it inaccessible to most of the playerbase which doesn't in itself make it mediocre, but it does mean you'd be spending a dozen hours over a month to grasp the basics of the system in a server with these Sandbox Dictators only to prepare for the 'hard mode' of Eco in 1 server where joining the Eco official discord is defacto necessary in order to play.

But here's the real issue: Due to the length of the game and the focus on tasks, Instrumental play becomes so dominant that Roleplaying withers away. There is no RP scene in Eco, and the result is that you become a clown for trying to engage in RP when everyone else is just trying to mine rocks. RP is treated with suspicion in this game as its seen pre-emptively as a set of actions and values that by themselves create conflict, its seen as rude. In Dan Olsen's video he gives the example of a barefoot dwarf that walks around everywhere which pulls the players away from working as efficiently as possible to finish the raid. This is the similar experience any Roleplayer has when trying to play games in which optimization is valued. Being someone you clearly aren't is not optimal. This becomes especially true when considering the fact that over the month less players are around and the ones that remain become increasingly tired with your shit.

The other issue, at least in my case, that being trans itself is seen as a sort of 'bad roleplaying' by most cis people (the majority of people). So I have no 'authentic' self I can retreat to that would satiate the patriarchal expectations of the much older player base (around early to mid 30s), in order to play as a man it would already be a form of roleplaying, so why not stress that falsity further for entertainment? If I were to be trans, for them, it would be going from 1 form of annoying roleplaying to another even if people aren't being openly transphobic, this is how its viewed. They want me to roleplay in a way that doesn't stress their preconceived biases. Thus I've always saw roleplaying in itself as an act that can support queer acceptance, and a safe haven for us. As it lets people get used to being around others that act far outside the scope of expectation you are used to.

The lack of RP or RP acceptance in Eco is my main issue with it, I think the main way this would be fixed by the game being more popular and advertising the game to younger people. By doing that there would be enough different players engaging with the game that there could be RP servers. This is the ultimate blueprint for an RP game in many ways but its squandered by the the player base and needless incentivization of Instrumental play. I've struggled with articulating this tension for why I spent 1000 hours playing a game I don't really like. I think I thought I could get joy from play by becoming good enough that the RP could be seen as not a detriment, but this was always a fruitless goal. This is a system built entirely for trying to reflect society, and it has effectively done that in its incredible ability to repress flamboyance. If you see people RP'ing in a game you wouldn't expect them to, you can probably guess that person is LGBT. It's free play we go to in order to almost get away from the bigotries against ourselves. That being said, I will never bother voicing or RPing in a space that clearly doesn't accept me. I despise these people and this community, the patriarchal normativity is more toxic than league by far and I have nothing but contempt for the rigidity these people abide by.

There are moments where I can shine through, but nobody wants to play on RP terms, so it just ends up an exercise in social self isolation. Just go play Space Station 13 instead.

Instances like this are exactly why I believe that games can become tools of repression and be cultivated for that reason, and why I think it's important to be so critical of them. Unlike Dan Olsen I don't just see this system as 'recreating the real drama of life' but instead the disjunction shows the failure of a system to allow for creative play. Without creative play you're left with rote compulsion loops and patriarchal normativity, and I think it's important as players and designers to move away from that as much as possible.

Honestly amazing, although incredibly lewd at times. A story about finding romance in the crux of familial decay, a tragically normal tale for trans people. I absolutely love how insecure the naturalism is here. To illustrate, I will quote the best examples:

"Hey", I say as I wave back. I doubt she hears me, since I forgot to raised my voice, even though there's a good distance between us."

"It would have haunted me forever if I hadn't seen her all night."

""Can I sit here? Do people ask if they can sit somewhere? I usually just sit." "

I recently had a girl stay over for only 36 hours at my families house and I was so insecure, when you're around people for the 1st time you feel an urge to put on the best face but it generally falls apart super quickly. It felt mundane but also terrifying, the precarity of it all. Of being seen for the bodysituation you exist in.

Romance is in saying somebodies name back to them simply, I was anti-romance for a long time but I understand now that its as simple as that.

This is a visual novel but also an aesthetic treat for anybody that can deal with an erotic transgirl relationship. We've almost all met online, because there's only roughly 7% of us on earth, and most of us are in hiding. As such, Love meets beyond the flesh.

Low opinion here not because I'm some NEET-phobic conservative but because nameless (and, curiously, genderless) protagonists dating people as a way of 'knowing' grosses me out. There's a lot about how standardized this specific format of short RENPY dategame has become to the point that ends up making games like Milk Outside and Doki Literature Club seem like these astounding subversions outliers to the genre. However to whatever extent that can even said to be true, it would mostly be because short 1 night date Visual Novels are almost at odds with themselves. Why does the nameless protagonist named 'you' go on the date. Why depict this world with intense visual depth but have a faceless dissociated protagonist?

Your protagonist can constantly call her cute, its the only compliment really on their mind, but how dissociated it felt when the girl said 'so are you'. Obviously the idea is that the bland questioning of your character and ease with which they can be positioned as the 'inquirer' is so that its easy for the reader to place themselves into the text, but is this really even working anymore? Haven't we broken away from this bland self insert protagonist as a people like a decade ago?

To illustrate why this problem effects the mechanics, let me take a moment and analyze one of the decisions you make in the game. At one point Kara expresses about how 'fucking based' it is to be a NEET, and you're offered 3 responses:
1. It is?
2. Definitely Based
3. Whats a NEET

The issue is that option 2 and 3 openly contradict each other in terms of the internal knowledge of the player character. Either they know what a NEET is and concur, or they don't know what it is. But the knowledge of one should rule out the other, these options are presupposed based on how aware the player behind the screen wants their player character to be. This means that the player character knowledge is not fixed in place. So either we live in a world where the player character knows what a NEET is but pretends they dont, or they don't know what it is and pretend they do. In either situation the character, if not percieved as a 1 playthrough stand in for the player is being a duplicitous snake. However the innocuous plausible deniability and wish fulfillment doesn't question this contradiction or bring it up. The player unimersed in the experience though sees it right away, and these contradictions in option sections remain for the entirety of the experience.

While there's an obvious criticism to be made about how this flux in player knowledge is immersion breaking, its not the only issue. The other problem is that it limits the scope of player choice to be so obvious that it reduces any impact out of choosing at all. The choice is pretty much made for you on first play based on how much you already know and feel about the topic of NEETism or how much you want to pretend you want to know. There's no fundamental diversion in questioning her in one option or agreeing with her in another, its all in the name of trying to shmooze her at the end of the day. Yet almost all the choices in this game are fundamentally questions based on knowing. Now obviously you can still play with a nameless 'knowledge flux' character like this but their status within dating games should not be so assumed. This is a function that works better for an edutainment game like Tomato Clinic. Or a therapeutic inquiry like with Milk Outside a Bag. But in games based around the idea of dating it registers the experience as canned and phoned in, your player character is a nothing so actually getting more intimate means nothing.

The 'edutainment' consideration is being teased at through a cultural relationship obviously, but does so to an extent that is almost distracting. Trying to mix the aspects of learning with the fiction of intimacy can and often does threaten to undermine the former in advance of the latter. It's very telling that some peoples ideas of the best way of connecting to a cultural frame or reinforcing their own is through doting on and trying to kiss women. Even Don Juan didn't go that far.

A lot of the pace of the game itself and decisions you make feel underwritten. This really feels like a 1st draft that wasn't properly proofread. At some point if you decide to order pizza with Kara, she states that she only prefers grilled chicken on pizza and can't stand pepperoni, indicating that the pizza you would order would have grilled chicken on it. However when it shows up she boldly announces that she went on a whim and tried for half cheese half pepperoni instead. This is far from the only writing goofup, there's one where Kara says you can sit down wherever you'd like and then you just continuing standing there and ask if you can sit down somewhere like 10 minutes later. It's hard to come up with some sort of textual justification for this, I think this is just the result of being underwritten as a lot of this genre tends to be and trying to offer you as many tensions as possible only to relieve them through player choice. It's fine, my character can express autonomy sometimes. I think that it's only a bug to critical readers though, the whole point is to captivate readership of people who wouldn't think twice so how poorly written most of these sort of dating storygames tend to be might be part of the point. These are so easy to make that quality doesn't matter much at all.

The game also registers to me as a little creepy I think. You can demand certain actions out of her like to clean her room or kiss you. And she does turn you down sometimes, but the actual framing itself of the act as an overt demand makes me really uncomfortable. This is another aspect with which it becomes part of a mechanical limitation of the RENPY software itself, you could offer a variety of longer choices where your character would say more things so you can fully follow if its a choice you want to make, but the limitation of the renpy dialogue box popups mean that any choice longer than a sentence would spam the screen with an overwhelming amount of words from which you'd only be able to choose one making such a venture unwieldy. Compare this to Twine, where the options are all filled as text at the bottom of the screen and the distinction is as different as night and day. Renpy Visual Novels I would argue just don't functionally work for the aspects of dating. Not to mention that the initial date is set up by her cousin who 'sees her more as a sister'. I don't know, it's a piece of fiction so I can't think of a more leering and opportunistic starting point for the story.

Finally is the object of the text herself, Kara, a genuinely pathetic E-Girl who seems to be shy but indicates no issues ever speaking to you. An internet otaku and gun nut with some clear indications of autistic neurodivergence. This is all solid stuff for a character study, issues is most of her identity seems to come out of a pride for having a NEET lifestyle (which doesn't even map onto the mild shame most NEETs actually have) and her overt elitism over her own hobbies. She calls working people 'wagies', she obsesses over the distinction between weebs and otaku so she can write off shonen anime only to give basic unprofound plot synopsis of the slice of life stuff she watches. She reminds me of a defanged version of Tomoko from Watamote. Except unlike how anthematic Kara is, Tomoko's story is one of constant struggle. Everything here is almost too smooth. It feels like the fact she doesn't need to even try and learn about you but simply exist in front of you to be getting in the way of her own motivations to learn to date. Being barely presentable to another human is just another hobby, it's not a sign of improvement at all no matter how much she insists to you towards the end is it. Beyond that I find her general elitism and obsessive use of l33tspeak to be ineffective in imbuing charm, authenticity, or a strong connection to the main character.

I also had some pretty severe issues with the lack of openess about the characters gender presentation. There's several obvious clues to the fact Kara is supposed to be trans, the Blajah and shirt in particular being 2 of the largest cultural indicators. But neither the character nor the creator wants to confirm the gender of the character as trans or cis. Which would be fine, except most people are going to just assume the character is a cis woman. It's hard not to explain this in a way that doesn't come off as gatekeeping but Blahaj posting is a largely established trans icon. Recently there's been a lot of cloutchasing ciswomen who take the iconography of trans women and play into them with an included 'transition timeline' joke as well. Kara has her own ambiguous version of this tweeted by the dev. Even assuming the best intent here, that this is a stealth trans character written for the purposes of normalizing trans women. I feel like by writing the story through such a leering mode, and by not having any overt mention of the transness of the character it only further divorces away from the potential awareness and respect cis people would have. Furthermore most trans people have lived a life of tribulation and necessary perseverance, like protrayed by Celeste. So even if the author did reveal the character was trans, it would not be a wholely useful reference point for understanding the trans experience. The fact this is instead the text plays into the reterritorialization of trans interests and subcultures as cis makes me pretty upset, so I thought I should at least do my do diligence in expressing that. The fact of the matter is some people are going to read this and be confounded I'd even call Blahaj such a clear indication of being trans, which shows the degree to which our icon and symbols are already being pillaged from us by people who don't care about us at all.

It's generic RENPY dating trash, but I figured that while the oven is hot I should pick a relatively popular one for expressing my grievances. The mixed to positive reception this game received while remembering how much overt mockery Milk Outside did is starting to piss me off, so I guess I'll just end it here to prevent myself from going on some sort of tirade.