One of the detriments of having unskippable 10 minute cutscene at the beginning of the game is that it makes starting over a slog and limit the child player from being able to enjoy their new 'toy'.

One of the positives of a 10 minute unskippable cutscene though is it makes it feel cinematic if you do a decent job of it. The turbulence private plane ride opener with peach, F.L.U.D.D. yapping about how horrible everything is, and Bowser tearing up with his bastard son makes it feel so unnecessarily cinematic it might as well be a movie for me.

Which it is, when people bring up the mario movie, this is all I'll think about and all I'll want to think about. Bless up F.L.U.D.D. I hope they are doing well. I miss the lil dude. They should stop dicking around and make a SM Sunshine 2 already.

Content Notice: NSFW discussion, mild feminist observations, Market analysis

Musical Accompaniment (looped)

It's a jigsaw slide game where you click on two squares of a larger image and swap them to complete the image. In this case, its naked anime women, often of a folk mideval or halloween variety. All white skinned cis women with these absolutely placid stares. No girl in here does the classic anime aheago, in part because 4 out of the 20 'levels' is just a slightly changed version of the same girl wearing a big hat.

I'm not somebody of a firm moralist streak. For instance there's a fairly easy slam dunk critique here that the slaughterhouse B roll 'chopping' of womens bodies and mixing them around that makes this jumble of flesh and genitals you have to properly taxidermy whole again is as objectifying as it gets. However, to the extent this is a fair criticism, it matters a lot less to me than real life issues like wage gaps or structural transphobia. In fact I've argued before that obsessing over obviously sexual content as if its a plight against women is missing the point because sexual pleasure comes out of a connection between objects where they objectify each other. I wont relitigate it here. You can read that point here if you're interested. It's just so much to say it would be contradictory rhetoric for me to take a stab here.

If we just think about the pure mechanics, in spite of it being obvious shovelware. I can't truly posture that I learned nothing from playing. It did give me a sense of spacial awareness of the body and spacial reasoning in general, and due to the fact the difficulty does not actually increase I did eventually get pretty good at doing the image puzzles quickly. However the sexual component of this text is actually at odds with itself do to how all of it is just them posing with no penetration or anything, and there's a looping dentist type lounge music song adorning it all. It gives an eerie quality that makes me think less of any arousal and more of a serial killer butchering a corpse to classical music.

One of the reasons I felt 'something' is that I was playing fast with the intentions of getting my 30 cents back within the 2 hour refund window just to see if I could. I saw there was 20 levels and I thought 'I wonder if I can beat it in time'. I got to the end in 70 minutes. However this very cynical speedrun motive on my part reveals a whole underbelly of the Steam Platform as a marketplace. Were this to be free or non refundable I would have had a remarkably more disturbed experience but that sensation got rerouted. I had in effect created an absurd goal that prevents any feeling of forlorn wistfulness in the moment on shovelware, in my mind there was no time for that. This commodification goes one foot deeper. The reason why anime porn shovelware is so popular on steam is that it by design fills the niche its going after pretty well. Steam as a platform asks for an upfront platforming cost of 100 dollars. In order to make your money back on a 1 dollar game you need 100 people to buy it and not refund it. Since its with your labor the best way to profit is to put as little labor as possible into the work. The trick of making it porn related is the important part because if you can get people to feel gratified they wont refund it but also by making it porn you guarantee that anybody that wouldn't like it wont review bomb you since you need to buy the game to rate it. This entire artifice forces by design developers to basically game the system in this way. The only reason I got this at all is because of the stupid steam badge resell money. Valve is not as evil a gaming corporation as they come, however the dominance of their digital platform is such that needless devs are stressed to make works that make back their 100$ publishing fee by design. As such, the game needs to constantly 'titilate' the player as much as it can get away with. Whether it be through bright flashing casino visual flair like Vampire Survivors, achievement spam like Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, or literal tits in the titilation like Horny Spell the general valuation is to keep the player engaged so long as to not realize at the very least 2 hours passed.

Steam as a platform is a flea market garbage place where everything is valued in level ups, badges, purchasable cosmetics, endless discounting tactics, devs are given no control over the layout for their store pages. Itchio is so much more developer friendly its not even worth mentioning, but the sad reality is thats not where the money is. Thus this titles pseudo guro eerieness is not a glitch so much as literally what consumption forces incentivize when all games are boiled down into 'competitiors' by attention economies and self invested unpaid wage labor. The attention economy is always itself a gamble and usually requires effective advertising campaigns so its better to just fulfill the base desires of the players you can pull in from the tags.

Even by this incredibly cynical economic metric then, Horny Spell has probably failed to make its money back. There is only 1 user review, and while the amount of purchasers is not accessible information, the fact there are 0 plays on this title at the time of writing before I got here, is telling. However, the question should not be 'did the developer achieve their economic goal' because quite frankly its this vague competative thinking that obscures the reality that, in my view, everyone should be able to achieve the economic goal of not worrying about rent, food, etc. because the system that puts a price on basic necessities in the first place should be undone.

I feel the question should moreso be 'is this really how we want to be titilated?' that question depends very much on what you're actually input into it. It can range everything from achievement spam to rouguelites to various porn game genres. However I feel like it's worth asking it towards Steam, as a platform itself: Is this how we want to consume?

I don't think it is, I pirate games or hell even buy of GOG sometimes in part to avoid the constant 'player is online' and 'external achievement' hell. I prefer almost every other way to get games than from Steam because I fundamentally think that the platform hijacks my mental processes and overwhelms me with so much of a library that my only response is to rip open new cheap games instead like they are funkopops or card packs. Horny Spell is not a reflection of authentic sexual desire, its a desperate facsimile of what Steam aka Valve inc. want.

When I put it that way, I kinda feel sorry for the poor bastard...

"Do you have a favorite? Me? It's hard to choose. They're all my children." - Chunkopop G-Tech Exec

Song Accompaniment

I've only done one cycle using as many continues as I needed, but I'm already convinced this is one of the best titles of the year so far.

A bold stance, so how can I possibly back it up? Well let's start from the difficulty structuring. A lot of SHMUP fans make a big deal about how finishing a game with 0 continues is proof of 'mastery' of the shmup at the bare minimum. That's when you can then properly speak about the mechanics from the standpoint of effective design or not so of course I'm not there. However I do find myself rolling my eyes at this stance because it's an opinion that reifies away the blunt reason for this to exist the way it does in the first place.

See, in the logic of most SHMUPs be it the Cave games or the Touhou franchise, the principle design approach is that you run in with a set number of lives and learn the patterns, die in the process and generally improve. This is all fine and well, with how short SHMUPs are there's a point to be made that it's in fact the main appeal. However, just taking this fact on its face reads as deeply unserious to me: The genuine reason SHMUPs have a 'continue' design in the first place is absolutely to crunch quarters. The genre is heralded for their difficulty on the idea of continuing through failure so you can master it in the reset, but if you step back for a moment it becomes obvious that the reason it's like this at all is because of a desire to play into arcade nostalgia and life design with a certain commercial process. For whatever reason the genre never adapted to early home console life systems, thereby going through a modular difficulty through the accessibility process from there. It never 'tested' out of itself. The translation to how it plays now is fundamentally awkward. As much as I like most of the Touhou games for instance, I hate the raw feeling of play being halted by a continue moment, that 'halt' is literally there for the player to pull a quarter out of their pocket. In a post-arcade era this has been translated to relaxing and finding resolve but since that resolve is usually on the timer there's generally a sense of panic. This is where Magic Vigilante intervenes, offering a slew of difficulties alterations: a modular life system health system that doubles the starting health, stage select, and most crucially a checkpoint based continue system.

On top of all this the designer even openly notes on the Itchio page that "Default value is 4. If you are not particular, I think the maximum value is fine.) Please use it because it recovers to this value when you clear the stage." Thereby openly encouraging the player to play on easy mode and then scale up from there.

For instance it's clear to me how the trajectory of difficulty scaling would work from here, you would play on 9 health until you get good enough to do a no CC run. Then on 8, etc. This along with the stage select allows the player to treat the game less like an endurance test, and more like a rhythm game. This design structure has more in common with being able to practice different movements in the later Guitar Hero titles or Rhythm Heaven than it does with its other genre contemporaries.

That said, SHMUP experts would probably be quick to outline that this random itchio browser title is just the first game I happened to play that does this rather than the first to actually do so, and I certainly concede to that point in advance. However, there's a fair reason to fixate on it anyway: it has a nice domino effect on the power fantasy approach to the genre here. In my view, games that give modular difficulty and encourage playing on an easier mode encourage the treatment of their world and environment as a power fantasy foremost. With a genre all about the fantasy of overwhelming ballistic warfare and competency being built through twitch dodging complex attack patterns, it's a genre almost entirely built for that power fantasy, yet most safeguard it behind the endurance test and I have to admit that I at least, don't typically associate power fantasies with endurance. I'll cut to the chase and say the lo fi magical girl power fantasy is an adorable approach to the genre. The whole experience has you fighting other magical girls and various bunnies in the meantime. The pixelated visuals and simplification of the enemies as red blobs that shoot out red arrows help keep incredible visual clarity, meanwhile the urban street scroll backgrounds. God these backgrounds are beautiful, they are still pixelated but done with a higher level of pixelation than all of the foreground enemies and characters thus allowing for various scrolling effects to happen without being disorienting. It all comes together with grace, feeling like a hazy dream you'd expect from a Cardcaptor Sakura fan.

Finally I will touch on the play mechanics themselves. This is a horizontal SHMUP which admittedly is not something I play often just because they don't generally get recommended. However if I were to hazard why, its likely that having to keep track of bullet patterns horizontally requires more of your peripheral vision thereby filtering the players who already have good periphery already, or forcing people with weak peripheral vision to glimpse back and forth more putting them at a disadvantage. Whereas, vertical shooters have a much more intuitive sense of tracking since the movement of the eye up and down goes faster. Bullet Hell games in general cause a lot less smooth eye pattern movement in particular, that is to say the eye is constantly jumping between points and the points in a vertical space are far easier to intuitate than a horizontal one. I use the terms 'probably' and 'likely' here because I'm not in fact an eye doctor. However, if you want a hypothetical reference point to better understand what I mean, think of how Tetris is laid out, the blocks fall vertical right? Well we could just think of the 'gravity' of Tetris if the game was played sideways as being a game about 'magnets' instead of gravitational measurement. I think you would agree that this Horizontris would be a lot less easy to measure and account for especially if the screen to do so is very large. Less hypothetically I have tended to find that when I play Pacman it's easier to run away from ghosts vertically than horizontally because I can more easily chart my escape route.

The point of this rather strange illustration here is to point out that if this is in any case true it thus explains the vertical dominance in the genre. Therefore it stands to reason that horizontal bullet hells have to in some way justify it through the mechanics. This is where Magic Vigilante shines most then through its main mechanic: Slow down. You build up a slow down meter through beating enemies that you can hold and after a small delay will allow to to more discretely navigate the bullet patterns. If you hold for long enough, you do a powerful counter attack, but it eats more meter in the process. This slowdown actually lasts for a really long time allowing for the player to fully gauge and process the bullets behind the ones you're currently avoiding. On top of this the boss health bar is actually positioned in 2 places, on both sides of the screen allowing for the player to more accurately assess how much more they need to navigate the wave. Finally, the game fixes this through having a wide range of resolution options so you can make the screen smaller or larger to fit your needs. The result is that it allows for a great sense of playfulness that comes from horizontal patterns, giving the odd sense that you are 'squeezing' through the bullets rather than flying past them.

Combine that with an absolutely adorable enemy design, wherein the player is fighting Bunnies and Mice blobs as mini bosses, and a kicking Progressive Electronic Orchestral soundtrack, and I think you have one of the best SHMUPs staring you down in a while! In contrast to the unfortunately benign droll of this write up, the effect is far more minimalist and gorgeous than I let on. It's also far more difficult than I make it sound to. Give it a shot!

Music Accompaniment

A solid murder mystery story that obeys the premise it set out before going for the 'twist'. A genuine whodunnit as a birthday party game for Amy. It's important to note in a slew of contemporary whodunit stories willing to break their own rules for a story: Disco Elysium (2019), Knives Out (2019), and even I would argue Tangle Tower (2014); The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog (2023) stands as a completely honest and 'solvable' mystery. There's a contained reasonable mystery to solve before it ramps the plot in the 3rd act. Impressive on its own, far moreso for an 'april fools' work. Not willing to settle on just this the text also flirts with the mundane realities and interest that shape our 2020s world: infinite runners, beatboxing, escape the room entertainment, and even the anxiety of labor as 'many hats' gig economy service worker. To be clear my point here is regardless of whether it's manifestly 'critical' of each of these factors, for instance many of the nerds among us might be disappointed that the game doesn't poke fun at infinite runners. Regardless though even the acknowledgement that these are reflections of contemporary helps the player feel more immersed in the world. On top of this, the decision to make the player character the 'watson' sidekick is a great way to offset failure states in a fun and realistic way such that if you are wrong about some fact Tails can wrestle the falsehood of your reasoning away allowing for the story to remain on rails.

As a light comic strip style 2 hour romp into the world of Sonic as a fun cheeky cartoon world, this is fantastic. It's nice to see the Sonic cast intermingle in mundane and non combative environments, something that has truthfully not really been done aside from the comic book series, even the cartoon show is your general 'enemy of the week' formula, so I hope that they feel comfortable exploring this friendlier character driven side of the world of Sonic. All we have to do is look at another story involved game like Sonic Frontiers (2022) which admittedly seems perfectly servicable as a 3D action platformer, to see the comtemporary problem with sonic. It's not an issue of tone but an issue of centralizing 1 protagonist at the expense of the ensemble. What Sonic Frontiers represents is Sonic as a military general because its constant planning and preparation through him, crucially none of the other characters talk to each other. The ensemble cast approach to sonic has been discarded ever since the 3 character structure of Sonic 06' (2006) was written off as a mistake. As such, Sonic has been the default protagonist, which is monotonous when you have many other main characters you could explore, like in the case of Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) because in SEGA's view this and the ensemble approach is probably hurting the bottom line. The most endearing factor of Sonic in the view of the fans is how characters that arent Sonic interact with each other, the ensemble story building element, one that by design depicts Sonic as stageplay with all the shakespearean matters of miscommunication and deceit that come with. It's a genuine tragedy that this side of sonic has been unexplored and, as such, we can see The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog as the first signs of finally awakening from that hibernation. If viewed that way, then its a wonderful awakening by all accounts.

My colleague Cadensia is a lot more sour about the entrapment of this work as an april fools prank, for her

"It may be a shame to point this out, but The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, while a harmless experience, reveals the franchise's structural problems. Caught up in its own nostalgia and struggling to innovate around a character from another era, the Sonic Team proved incapable of coming up with a subversive and fresh concept. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog manages to do so, but the title is still plagued by being an April Fool's joke, and only seen as such by SEGA. There's something about the company's management that prevents them from really trusting a new generation that might have insights to offer on a truly major project." (link)

However there's two rebuttals to this line of reasoning I want to note here. This is a cynicism that over rides the corporate future based on what we already know, but we can't exactly rule out the idea that this is a test pilot work from SEGA to see if people would be interested in this side of the Sonic world merely disguised as an april fools joke. All we have to do is glimpse at the blatantly unfinished nature of other April Fools VN titles like Bug Fables: April Fools! (2018) to see how the formula of such a prank is supposed to go. It's not supposed to be a rich and finished story its meant to be a gag. There's no gag here, its a full free Visual Novel with a firm 3 act structure and an evolving minigame. So I wouldn't really rule this out based on that extra polish and care put into a 'joke' as a form of test piloting.

Beyond just that, the work is so flourished and well considered that even if it is just a shallow gag on SEGA's part this is a 'gag' that slipped through the cracks and let be told a millennial tale. An important note here is that compared to other corporate mega giants, SEGA is not that interested in copyright takedowns. This is obvious when looking especially at the development of Sonic Mania (2017) being made in tandem with fan developers. I don't want to go all 'glory to the corporation' but if we consider it as SEGA continuing to sabotage their own world, the lack of IP restriction means that regardless of what gets made in a stuffy 'canonizing' office building this work functions regardless as a joyful emission to other fans as a reference point for acceptable fan games that take the world into account as an internal space.

Anyway regardless of all that, the art is great and the positioning of all the characters is wonderful. I only have a couple minor complaints: I was not actually able to gather information and properly interrogate Rogue and Blaze in the casino and I really wanted to especially since Rogue is my favourite character. Aside from that the 'what would Sonic do' logic that tails puts forward, messianic blasphemy aside, doesn't really make that much sense. The sonic run minigame sections are meant to reflect your character thinking, but I don't know, the quickness and desperation of doing it reads to me a lot more as paniced 'racing thoughts'. Aside from just that, Sonic is not that forward thinking, in fact literally the core point of Sonic Adventure (1998) and the cartoons generally is that while he has a great heart and is proactive, he's not that thoughtful so relying on him as a way of life doesnt make sense in that context. This is an easy enough fix though, if you have somebody smarter like tails in the piloting seat during these minigames. However its not a huge loss that it is this way regardless. I also didn't play the story all at once either, so unlike my good pal Cadensia these runner sections didn't bother me much. Not to be too maternal but if you feel something as exhausting that may be a good sign to take a break! :3

All in all I think The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a perfectly fine detective adventure romp, and the fact that it takes place on a sci fi enhanced train makes it all the more satisfying as a way to keep the story both self contained and enjoyable. If you like train transport like me it satisfies that itch immensely. A great way to spend a couple hours and in the process connect to the genuine aspects of Sonic's franchise that adult fans try to talk up. Really hope detective novelists check this one out, might play it again someday, that really is how much fun I had with it C:

Musical Accompaniment (just choose to listen to however much of this that you can before you dont feel like it, my Music accompaniment guy is on strike right now).

So they took the Super Mario 3D World physics, movement system, and powerups and threw them into an open sandbox level with the benefits of Odyssey's collectible design of not disrupting your play on picking up the collectible. I really disliked how Odyssey handled its moons, many of them just being haphazardly littered in the playspace, in deserts etc. By the standards of Odyssey then, Bowser's Fury is great in that every collectable is focused, with 5 hanging around each lighthouse and a few others on islands that you use Plessie to explore to.

Bowser's Fury actually answers 2 other issues in a couple Nintendo games to. Another recent one Breath of the Wild's Bloodmoon mechanic. In that piece, after a significant amount of time passed, a cutscene would interrupt you and all the enemies would respawn with several strong enough near you chasing you. The issue with this mechanic was that there was no threat to it, at least not in the mid to late game, since you would be stocked up on pausable quick heal items, and it would be easy to simply outrun the enemies. Here, Bowser occurs during the 'night portion' as a legitimate threat. He has blocks fall from the sky near mario and will breath a sizable flame attack near the player that they have to find cover to avoid. On top of this, you can also ward off the Reptile's bile by collecting a catshine (the primary collectible) early thereby giving the player legitimate control over the desperation state and allowing them to do something that isn't just run away for a few minutes. At no point was I irritated with Bowser coming up to attack me, sometimes he would disrupt me from the shine I was trying to get, however Bowser himself is also nessecary to collect shines as well by baiting him to break blocks and running to spawning islands that show up during the night. I hope that the Zelda development team takes note of how this game handled the day/night cycle tension because it was honestly a mess in BotW and comparing it to this shows a night and day difference.

Aside from this, Plessie is also acts as a reply to the sailing mechanic in windwaker. Compared to a small sailboat, here you ride a large sea mammal that emits a hefty rumble on a jump giving a weight to the journey. They also make the travel time from one island to another proportionally significantly shorter than whatever you are trying to do on said island whereas Windwaker was oversatisfied with being sailing simulator for most of its runtime. One other way it prevents a feeling of tedium is making Plessie vital on her own terms for collecting around 20% of the possible shines. These factors all work to keep the player constantly in a satisfied relationship with the collectathon element while still keeping them engaged with the environment. You are on a satisfied unbroken pursuit from one place to the next. The only thing I wish Plessie had here is a small boost operator. None of the timer functions would have needed to be remanaged, a small boost would just let me 'feel' the animal actually moving faster whereas tilting the stick forward doesn't convey a great sense of a change in speed.

One interesting note here is that most of the movement is based around power up swapping. Your movement options like the long jump, triple jump, and backwards verticle jump are all still cramped or removes. While this wasnt particularly an issue in the linear level design of 3D World (Especially if you played as peach who had the raccoon suit power baked into her movekit), it does provide a small issue with the large sandbox playspace, instead you gain movement control through power up accumulation and management, being able to hold 5 of each power up and swap to them at will. For instance you climb the side of scaffolding with the Cat Powerup, swap to the Raccoon one, and then float over to the other piece of scaffolding. This mechanic works mostly well and its honestly way more appealing than trying to do the obnoxious hat combos jumps in Odyssey, and is more accessible in general, my only grievance here is that it renders the basic mushroom powerup redundant due to this accumulation, since all powerups make it a dead power up from random box hits and 100 coin level up drops. On that note, here I unveil once again my fundamental hatred with coins. I hate the constant bling sound on picking them up and they simply were not necessary to litter this playspace with. I might be one of the only people unironically annoyed and averse to the coins that isn't a no coins challenge runner but I must be honest in saying that if there is a way to avoid such redundancy its better off to do so.

Speaking of redundant, the 'theme' here is that everything is cat themed, cats sprawl all over non hostile spaces, cat power ups are used in the Giga Bowser fight, and cat ears appear from all the enemies you fight. The first two are fine, but the others push the experience too much into the realm of 'gimmick' or 'joke game' which doesn't really fit in with the pollution anxities and kaiju descalation neuroticism from Bowser Jr. While we are on the point of aesthetic presentation, the sludge effect looks great, especially with contemporary lighting and liquid physics effects, it drips and sputters out like an oil spill coming alive which is fantastic.

Spontaneous Critique on Cameras

What isn't great is the fact I have a sleepy camera for viewing it all. I believe that Mario 64 has actually the best camera in any 3D game I've played, which is a bold statement because most people dont really know how to use it and thus see it as a nuisance (which for me is part of the appeal to, I love having to fight with the camera sometimes in games its actually funny as hell to have Borne levels of confusing camera positions happen out of nowhere in the same way its funny when you long jump off a cliff when you meant to ground pound). To me, the Laikatu camera has so many functions in its favor that I could easily write a fluff piece about how it makes 64 a perfect game as its own, however to cut a long story short, there's a speed to which the camera will snap to the various fixed positions that isn't found in almost any 3D console game afterwards. Most 3D console platformers/action games have at least compensated the monopoly of this garbage 360 drone camera by making the speed for moving it reasonably fast (though not nearly fast enough imo). 3D world actually did bring back the fixed camera positions for the single player campaign, but made the positional change points slight and for the most part not tracking the player as they move forward. Most of the camerawork was semi isometric so I get why they couldn't port that over. However they could have at the very least made the camera more sensitive and move more quickly because stuff will attack you off screen and it will take a full 2 and a half seconds to reorient the visual space to figure out the confusion. This has been a problem in every Nintendo released 3D game since Mario Sunshine but at least Sunshine is kind of funny about it since Mario Sunshine has a wacky masocore energy to it in random bursts. The reason I'm highlighting it here then is that its the worst the camera has probably ever been for this. I was constantly getting annoyed in the Giga Bowser fights because the dude would roll off screen and I'd have to pan over forever to put him in view. This is simply an end point problem of what happens when you make games built around spectacle with contemporary graphics. For instance I would prefer that the sensitivity is increased, but this is a double bind, because with the graphical polish on display it would feel woozy and disorienting scrolling through that much information before settling the edge of the frame. I dont mind because I've played a lot of games, so I get why inexperienced players wouldn't enjoy that. With that said it's also a tacit point against staying in the realm of 3D graphical fidelity too long in general, because the issue ultimately becomes a problem of juggling visual business with the conveyance of context sensitive information.

I noticed for instance, in Resident Evil 4 Remaster that due to the visual business of the space, yellow paint effect is adorned to all the movable objects to convey context sensitivity. Meanwhile, the wacky camera controls in Metroid Prime Remaster were also stripped back due to the fact its 'antiquated' design comes in sharp contrast to an increase in visual business. The clear appeal is the market dominance of spectacle as immersion. I'm deeply opposed to it. Environmental detail is not that vital if it ambiguates control. Immersion comes through a sense of control or lack thereof, and through impassioned dialogue and interaction with other characters. A lot of modern 'polished' games offer a pretty environment for the expense of less control and clarity, and generally game environments have problems with letting characters speak for themselves. For instance here Bowser Jr. attempts a dialogue with Mario, and instead of letting that dialogue function on its own, an awkward disembodied narrator interprets what Bowser is saying to the player rather than letting the man speak for himself either through pictures alone or voice acting. You might be thinking 'so what?' well, I think the reason people have become too skiddish to letting characterization happen through imagery, body language animation, or various other non dialogue interactions is because people who play games for whatever reason seem to have trouble properly interpreting non dialogue interaction on their own. For instance Transparency made a strong argument in favor of the idea that people ragging on Balan Wonderland for the 'nonsensical story' were simply not paying attention and I would have to say I agree with her assessment. This is an ultimately sad state of affairs, I think its because people are afraid of the ambiguity in images but it creates another paradox. In modern gaming you have complex facial rotoscoping and detailed environments, both of which 'enhance' a raw interpretive ambiguity. Yet, instead of taking advantage of it games like Death Stranding and The Last of Us are obsessed with talking to you. In cutscenes, in the walk and talk, in dialogue boxes, etc. You can't share a stare or look at a painting. It's chatter until the day goes by. Instead of 'talking' this point to death I'll instead just vaguely gesture at Journey as a clear example of how non-verbal storytelling and non graphically 'real' space can be effective for immersion. Whether maximally so or not I leave up to your discretion.

Aside from these admittedly exaggerated complaints, I feel like what makes Bowser's Fury work in its favor in this format is its short runtime and compact open sandbox design. If the game was 3 times larger as some people are wistful about, a lot of what makes it work would begin to strain if it went on too long without being rehauled properly, all the moments I mentioned annoyed me are functionally footnote complaints to an otherwise solid experience. I recognize that such a difference is probably found in the fact most people who played this actually liked Odyssey as well when I find that one bland and flat.

The weakest aspects of this one come from the fact it borrows, for the purposes of nostalgia sales, the design approach of Mario Bros. 3 (1988) and New Super Mario Bros. (2006). Specifically the egregious gambling nature of the casinos and box choice houses, insistence on timers in every level that prevent leisurely play, overabundance of coins despite having no meaningful extrinsic value, and inane boss reuse in spite of how simple they are, and worst of all needless score information. The score factor admittedly becomes more meaningful when playing with multiple people since there becomes a competitive crown stealing aspect, but I cant help but think that one of the main reasons Mario Galaxy plays so well is because they had the good graces to fade out the non relevant parts of the hud display during play. If you pick up a green mushroom in Galaxy you get treated with a life indicator for about 5 seconds and then it disappears, allowing you to focus on the beautiful aspects of play in front of you with no intrusive text in the way. Meanwhile in Super Mario 3D World you never escape from the fate of knowing all these needless stats at all times. I really hate the proximity score affects and abundance of coins and all this stupid pachinko shit that was in Super Mario Bros. 3 that people are too rose tinted to realize just suck then to and add nothing to the experience besides the stupid brain jingles you shouldnt want to be there anyway.

I wanted to lead with this caveching because I think in terms of spectacle this is otherwise a Mario title at its most dynamic and beautiful. Part of that praise comes from the fact I can play as Peach and not Mario which is huge because I'm a girl and love playing as girls in games. Beyond just that, all the levels are like 3 minutes long at most and literally every level in this damn game has a different camera angle, set of mechanics, and player interaction with the powerup. You'll bounce from 1 level where they expect you to climb like a cat between rafters to another level where you have to mow down pirannha plants with your jumps, to another level where you have to explore on the beach for a while to progress. There's a constant showmanship here in the oscillation of play, levels are short but sharp, like a violinist doing a solo. Does this make the levels come off more 'disposable' in a sense sure, but only really in the build up of the overall composition of the play experience. Each level is dynamic enough to exude its craft. There's one level I really loved where you were fighting everything in the shadows, this was used once and never again. Some may think that this approach is disappointing because it squanders a strong mechanic, however I think this helps keep the experience fresh and surprising. Sometimes the restraint is useful in building a larger moment.

Everything about the aesthetic of this is evocative of a circus performance, all the characters including Bowser are playing dress up. You surf on a large animal and save small people, its a Mario equivalent of Alice in Wonderland, which is a circus of dreams in its own right. Theres jazzy big band music and the lead up towards the end goes all out in flair and clourfulness. They are always changing the camera position to keep things disoriented 'towards' something, the center of the circus arena maybe? You're constantly going up and towards the center of the pit, even when you look on the map that's how it's laid out. Mustering your courage through green stars to progress to the top of the trapeze and perform your part of the show. The game had the good graces for instance in the final fight not to do an operatic showdown against Bowser in a 3 Stage Boss Fight ala Mario Galaxy or Mario Oddysey but instead switch it up by making it an autoscroller where you balance your position on the climb up dodging his invincible attacks. The stage itself becomes the boss which shows an incredible understanding of what is actually satisfying in these titles!

There are some ways in which I agree that the game feels mediocre, the build up takes time so the early worlds are admittedly snoozeworthy, though that can be counterbalanced by playing with friends or focusing on getting all the green stars early on. More crucially, the long jump in this game is painfully garbage which makes running into a boost just the operable mode. Stringing long jumps is a classic movement tech in these titles so stripping it away to force players not to have fun leap frog moments is a huge whiff. However, for me at least I think the statements of mediocrity are overstated.

This is way better than any of the 2D Mario titles its borrowing from, and significantly better than the 3D ones that came after it. It's even better than Mario Galaxy 2 as blasphemous as that may seem. Playing as Peach is just a breath of fresh air honestly, the amount of control on her float tech is incredible. I think most the people who weren't keen on this one overemphasized the humdrum of the early sections, played in isolation, or didn't play as peach. Try and separate yourself from these factors and you have a fantastic adventure. You don't see the circus aesthetic in earnest aside from this and maybe like Dropsy done without some of the exploitative elements of Barnum freakshow entertainment weighing it down, so have a heart when its done well I say. Stay Peachy!

Loads, epic cutscene, everyone is on rails and there's ninjas running around, this is sick!

Crazy bright menu everyone's dancing here's some emotes!

Cool!!

Okay now I play :D

3 minutes pass

In game, no gun, somebody else has gun. Blam blam I'm dead.

YOU PLACED #97

Bad luck, just try again

3 minutes pass.

Go for edge this time, somebody is already at the nondescript gas station I picked. Guns me down after I get to the ground.

YOU PLACED #99

That's literally last place...

Ok one more try :/

....

.......

.......

YOU PLACED #92

I got filtered by Fortnite, lobbies too sweaty. Pls fix MMR, I can't play.

CW: Global Warming, NFTs, Neoliberalism

Song Accompaniment

Played out of curiosity from Dan Olsen's latest video The Future is a Dead Mall which dedicates its entire runtime to a thorough analysis of it. Decentraland is an NFT focused social oriented MMORPG where the point is that you have to buy the land and assets through crypto. He does more justice to the abomination than I ever could, focusing primarily on its 'post scarcity' [economic model] (
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxHTuFh2bVJvrHu8WUjl_WNfiOqDjgX-aU) and corrupted 'landlord moderators' style system of so called 'governance'.

Anybody who has either watched Olson's other videos on NFTs or Fortnite is already going to be well aware of the systems of commercial artifice, fragmented 'community building', and desperate ponzi delusions that underline a lot of these. To such an extent that the video itself might seem redundant especially after NFTs already had their big crashpoint recently. That's the thing though, this place is still alive and still functioning in 2023, crypto is not your typical product rugpull. It's a system of, I guess I would call, 'post nostalgia'. I saw on one mans plot all these billboards and banners of the bored ape yacht club and ETH and thought on the one hand the guy who put this all up may not have been on in a while, but on the other hand the people who believe in the future of this stuff have built such an insecure sense of identity out of advertising products that I wouldn't be surprised if it was built yesterday as a 'shrine' of how far they've come. We are coming into the era of advertisement as interactive experience. I teleported randomly into an event at one point where people were all talking on a zoom meeting about the value of Metaverse. Everyones avatar was just standing around as these blown up zoom conversation was displayed on the side. Afterwards, everyone was ushered inside and the worst fashion show/ball music started playing that I left.

Elsewhere the place is littered with these disturbing nouve riche ideas of immaculate sci fi casino spaces, bars, auction house etc usually empty of furniture with just PNG images on the wall. An important point here is that all of them had to have 1 wall open so that the camera doesnt freak out when you're inside meaning all the buildings feel less like buildings and more like Kiosks or Booths which is great because well, thats kinda what they are.

One really interesting point that leads into this feeling of haunted fragmentation is that the music is also a pay to use. So it will randomly play as an asset without fading in properly, often needing a moment to properly generate in, so you're always being startled by the worst house music you've heard. Along with that almost nobody is on and outside of prerecorded messages nobody talks 1 to 1 as avatars despite there being a voice chat button which gives everything a 'dead' quality to it. The space is absolutely gigantic so at best you'll find 1 person in a random area from teleport who is AFK, so its mostly just a museum of garbageart.

There's something inherently amusing about touring a space that isn't meant for you though, being able to gawk at unfinished architechture and the frantic aspirations backing them. That sense of hauntedness and fragmentation is usually referenced as a marker that something is 'bad' but I'm not so sure. Decentraland operates to me as such a unique attempt at upselling entertainment service as a possession product that to simply discard it and call it bad is to do it a minor disservice. The function of this feels like a tacit parody of all the other social MMOs that are less forthright about doing the same thing, it feels 'unreal' in spite of the fact these are real people operating and who bought all this stuff. For instance, the commodification of fashion attire in VR Chat and Second Life are equally as absurd. Along with the desire in a lot of more objective oriented MMOs like FF 15 explicitly trying to upsell you on the idea that if you buy the full version you can own your own house. These strange fauxscarcity trends are everywhere. Hell even discord nitro has it, there's no bandwidth being hurt by having animated gif emotes for unpaid users, its privatized only for the bottom line. It's worth noting then that Decentraland and its advocates are not just profiting off this, the sell value comes in imagining a future for which all their obnoxious advertising becomes justified. They are selling a future even if they don't implicitly believe in it.

Peter Fraise refers to the concept of the clash of abundance with hierarchies as 'Rentism'. He says that

"But an economy based on artificial scarcity is not only irrational, it is also dysfunctional. If everyone is constantly being forced to pay out money in licensing fees, then they need some way of earning money, and this generates a new problem. The fundamental dilemma of rentism is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends." link

The point here is that it's within this reference point of abundance that people are thinking. I really do think you see stuff like this in the crypto imagination because literally never is their concern on food or energy crises, they assume a utopian system in which these logistics are already taken care of. All that's left then for them is a series of entertainment identities to choose from. I don't find these people inherently ridiculous for this, after all is this not how we are generally trained to think? Cultural consumption under neoliberalism is bargaining constantly about which choice out of a line to vote for and what the new blockbuster movie is like. It's a constant pull of selling something now to ignore the larger issue, for example energy crises under global warming.

It's just that in order for this system of thinking to work, everything has to constantly be in a state of cultural trend adoption and abandonment. Nostalgia has to constantly be working faster and thus, reappeal these relics to somebody down the line. In order for it to work people have to change fortnite and roblox and only after a few years, rather than decades, get you to say 'remember old fortnite'?

In the same way people buy into the fiction of there being isolated news stories that only refer to local narratives of crime or devastation rather than any understanding of it coming out of environmental forces, class antagonisms, and the violence over resources, the adoption of fast fashion market identity experiences is a similar distraction technique. Countries see a world in which water becomes scarce, they are already fighting over it. People trapped into digital delusions don't think twice about it. They sell the idea that neoliberalism as a model of self pimping and privatization is actually going towards making everyone lives better as a whole, that there's more of an abundance of resources when in fact the opposite is true. The environment is decaying at a literally unsustainable rate and there's not enough abundance to keep up with that. They tell people that because having to make things out like problems are getting worse and that wars may be inevitable with the current system lead to uprisings. Countries and the people that lead them only believe in their own domination and territory, there's no dream of 'future' up there but they have to maintain the fantasy that there is regardless.

People who buy into the liberal reasoning of progress don't see it that way. In order to believe in the delusion that you can merge accumulation of physical into the digital entirely, you have to believe in these Thiel-esque forms of psychotic utopianism and immortalism. This is 'your' ladder to climb, and thus you don't have to settle on any preferences or identity, that there's almost more to consume. Just ignore death, we will fix that to, everything can last for which you can continue on this trend of fast fashion and control.

The world of Decentraland is sad, silly, and pathetic, but I'm glad I got to see it, because in my view it's the end states of merging your sense of self with the internet under neoliberalist notions of the future. There's an implicit understanding that you aren't meant to appreciate these 'sincere parodies' but I'm not so sure. The design of things in this world is fucked up in such a specific way that it would make for a rich inspiration point for almost any game dev out there. This stuff is trash but its the trash of an ideological monopoly worth reinterpreting. Until a revolutionary future truly takes force, we need stuff like this around, and for people like Dan Olson to put a microscope to it so we can see the larger world for the rotting machine that it is.

Accompaniment

The strong appeal of Pizza Tower style has already been spoken for. Its caught on like wildfire to the point of rampant fanaticism, friend of mine Appreciations articulates with a frenzy that

"I really think this game is one of the best indie games ever made and just like pizza in general, nobody dislikes all pizza. You will find something to enjoy here and odds are, you'll love it." Link

In more specific terms, Jenny accurately relates the appeal here to that of crass 90s cartoon animation.

"At its core, Pizza Tower is an ode to all that 90s stuff that I love. It's a bit ugly in style, but in that deliberate Ren & Stimpy or Ed, Edd n' Eddy kinda way, and I warmed up to it almost immediately." ending her sentiments with "At the end of the day, yeah this is really fucking good. Believe the hype, etc etc" link.

Along with this I've felt the sensibility of Pizza Tower's strong appraisal in a lot of the rest of my online life to be it social media use, internet discussions, algorithm content praising the game, streamers enjoying it, etc. The hype seems neverending, it's a shame though because after completing it with a 66% mark I feel entirely disconnected from this perspective. The title overall feels like all style and no substance. All cheese and no sauce.

There are so many glaring flaws with Pizza Tower's (2023) fundamental design in my view that it leaves me baffled nobody else has spoken for them yet. In order to vent my frustrations most effectively I want to first take a step back and say that even though people have been laudatory it would be false to say there has been no criticism about where it falls short. To turn back to Jenny and Appreciations for a moment they've both offered something in this regard. Appreciations mentions that the down attack is finnicky as sometimes it will input a swipe attack over a ground pound, and that they felt no motivation to go 100%. In a more controversial post ponders on bigoted jokes that the developer plays into highlighting his sense of offensive stereotype as a form of humor. Meanwhile, Jenny focuses more on hit detection and the deception of health, particularly for her in the case of bosses though I should say I experienced this outside of just boss fights as well.

While I could quibble on the ways in which these are accurate or not (the one on stereotypes for gags is especially accurate, unfortunately, you have the happy merchant grabbing you (semitic stereotype), and large 'crosseyed' baseball player that mistakes you for a ball (retardation visual stereotype) just to name two. However I want to shelf those concerns and focus on the issues I have with the design fundamentals.

Pizza Tower tries to use a 'ranking' formula of design to motivate player engagement, something that you might be familiar with from 3D sonic titles like Sonic Adventure (1998) or platinum action titles like Bayonetta (2009). The problem is this badge mastery system contrasts with the nessecity to check in nooks and crannies for secrets, thereby slowing you down and killing your combo. No matter what you do your first run of any level is probably going to be around a B at best because you'll be trying to comb for the 5 ingredients on every level, which are necessary to complete the story. The idea here is that in freeing them it works as a reward motivator, but due to the fact that they and the secrets are often tucked out from a linear runpath, even slightly, they instead become a collectible you have to remember and stop for. More to the point this combines with digging for secrets and 'poking' for an optimal route. Unlike the concise 1 minute platforming tests like Dustforce (2012) or Super Meat Boy (2010), Pizza Tower's levels go on for anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes. This sets in a sense of fatigue at individual level mastery where you have to try and fail constantly to get it precise. The problem is that there's no tangible reward for getting better at the individual levels besides an overall progression mark. If you 'P' a boss or a level the number percent goes up, but nothing cosmetic or informative happens as a result of doing well or poorly, there's no unlockable content as an extrinsic motivator. NPCs in the tower don't comment on your performances. No clothing options are unlocked. Peppino doesn't calm down or gain confidence. It's just an achievement for achievements sake.

This is an issue because the 5 off path collectable ingredients you have to catch arent as optional for completion as they first appear. In the beginning the threshold ratio between ingredients needed from each level to unlock a new floor is 50%, one might think based on that that you may need to pick up ingredients but not worry about them too much but you'd be wrong. By the end that percentage rises to a dramatic 90%. The issue is since there is 5 ingredients per level you have to find you actually have to be thorough on each level in finding them. Based on whether the player knows this going in or not makes a big difference because the end you're going to be forced to go back to levels you had skipped over or didn't get all the ingredients from.

Putting the ratio threshold for completion this high is frustrating because its easy to miss an occasional ingredient, and many of the levels themselves are frustrating. Once you get near the finish line the story is practically begging you to climb back down and finish it out a little more through this padding mechanic. End game backtracking is meant to play into that sense of nostalgia and wistfulness, 'I came this far and now look, I'm so much better'. However, because of the amount of gimmicks and gags per level there's not a fundamental sense of player improvement. What happens instead is just a fetch quest followed by, to be vague about the ending, an effusive celebration of itself 'remember this boss? remember this mechanic?' it's ultimately shallow though, because you unlock nothing from being good at the individual levels themselves. This creates a contradiction where you are rewarded for doing the bare minimum but almost not at all for exceeding expectations, as the range between both becomes smaller as the game goes on. The S and P ranks for non boss levels are functionally 'challenge runs' of the game, you're likely to get a B or better without even trying. So by the end all you end up feeling is that you know a few more mechanics. There's no sense of growth or player immersion.

Contrast this to another platformer like say Celeste (2018) where the window of player ability to complete the game is incredibly large. There's a wound rope of difficulty around optional yet visible cherries and toggle accessibility options. Celeste respects the players time by outlining that the Cherries serve no explicit function, they are a side challenge that implicitly build a sense of character for the player, focusing more on building its story elements instead. On the other hand then Pizza Tower deceives the player by telling the them the collectibles matter but not making it clear how much they do. By keeping the rewards of its goals ambiguous it relies on the player to feel that desire to explore its levels and master them. When the player finds out that they don't get anything for doing these side quests it taints future experience of play. When I restart playing Pizza Tower again I know despite all the stats and checklists thrown at me that only the ingredients matter. The secrets, rankings, and achievements are meaningless. However since they aren't treated that way, since they are conveyed as important visual stimuli it becomes a part of play that gets in the way rather than enhancing it. In Celeste the cherries don't mean anything besides knowing how much goes into the pie at the end, but since you were always told that and then the story keeps quiet about their inclusion for the entire run, you can adjust on a new playthrough how much or little you feel like caring about that.

This was really difficult to word properly but the end experience is that I felt like I was being needlessly graded and told to backtrack rather than feel a part of the world. Something needed to have changed in this system for me to feel comfortable, either:

1. Easier: The levels needed to be overall shorter in length so I could master them

2. Less Grading: Less visual information about how 'well im doing' needed to be conveyed to me

3. More Lore: The secrets and rankings needed to unlock cosmetic or lore content in the world for me to feel more immersed for doing well

4. Less Padding: The ratio of ingredients need to complete needed to be a stable reasonable threshold 50 - 75%, and the final level needed to be cut

5. Less Obfuscation: The eye secrets needed to be removed entirely so that I could focus less on 'combing' levels for extra points and more on actual execution

Without any of these taking place this experience has become 'style at all costs' which while amusing in moments becomes distressing as a design philosophy. It feels like a design philosophy chosen to keep the player playing as much as possible so you can see all it has to offer. As nice as it looks, it comes off as desperate and frustrating.

Less abstractly a few other miscellaneous issues

-Proximity score doesnt matter since its just about collecting as much as you can and keeping a chain, so the score should only show up at the end

-Camera needed to be zoomed out from the player a bit more because you end up just flailing at high speeds as it is

-If you turn the HUD off a -5 still ticks in the top left corner during the runback portion which is very distracting

-The bosses only test your postitioning and not your ability to execute running maneuvers which feels not in pace with the point of the game

-They put the best song in the tutorial, a catchy bass song with tons of fancy hi hat use, the other songs aren't half as good so they feel weaker. Probably just shouldn't have even used it because it makes everything feel disappointing

-The levels that kill you based on time have an unreasonably high completion threshold compared to end level runbacks, meaning you'll have to repeat them more than you would a normal stage

-there needs to be more discreet 'Grading thresholds' between A and S rank for non boss stages. S Rank forces a 2nd run through the level out of a player which borders on challenge mode feeling. Adding a couple more ranks around this point in the scale would do a lot to implicitly reward the player for doing better.

-The happy merchant bit in the Slums really bummed me out, like what the fuck man

I want to end on one last note. Appreciations nailed one thing I agree on, they noted that "You've got yourself a winner in Pizza Tower and that winner here is adrenaline." My qualm is that rewarding adrenalinic high intensity action response puts a person in a more impulse driven mode. I'm not sure that mode is 'good'. Anecdotally, this specific form of adrenaline puts me in a state of frustrated anger once I start to feel like I cant do better or the game is fucking with me. That anger boils me up and tends to make me dysphoric as a result. I'm not sure how much this applies to other people but I'm not too convinced that rewarding a surplus adrenaline hormones on tap like this from titles like Sekiro or Pizza Tower etc is actually good for us? It certainly isnt good for me, that's why I tend to play 'non difficult' story focused titles. I've noticed people say I'm not trying hard enough, but I wonder especially looking at how social media rewards impulsive thinking if its possible people have it backwards. Maybe everyone else is trying too hard to get that spike, and telling me I need to, as well.

Look, I'm not saying that it's healthy I respond to action input with the rage I do by any means, but I'm far from the only rage gamer. Like, I've never seen somebody rage quit a visual novel for example. It's always the people fucking up in rhythm games breaking stuff, its always the League mates freaking the fuck out about not having place down a ward etc. It's never the Final Fantasy nerds having fits. Again these are all anecdotes but its just food for thought. At the very least it explains my preference against it and why I tend to be so critical of finding design harmony in it.

Musical Accompaniment

American Election (2019-2022) is a penned by Greg Buchanan the same person who wrote Paper Brexit (2016-2020), both stories use stark drab visual stimuli along with the twine engine. While a lot of other twine developers tend to prefer the quick hyperlinking of actions onto new pages and leaving the visuals of each location up to the reader, the man of the hour here prefers a much more 'cinematic' approach, rather sequencing long discussions and scenes in terms of chapters and having the player sit and wait through rather than choosing from a list of drop down actions for what they are going to do, as is more common in something more involved in actions like the work of Pourpetine ala Cyberqueen (2013) or Vesp: a History of Sapphic Scaphism (2016). Instead he has decided to focus on thoughts and spoken word, denoting a sense of powerlessness on the player. Along with this Mr. Buchanan seemed rather concerned with continuously updating his own works for much longer than most other Twine developers. For instance on his page for the Paper Brexit there's a part that says that

"[A game with the same title was released right before the original 2016 referendum. This 2020 version is almost entirely new, sharing only the setting of the cafe.]"

This may seem at the surface an odd decision to constantly be tweaking on a work in the support of a sense of 'accuracy'. However it begins to make a lot more sense when you realize this guy worked on the writing team for No Man's Sky which has changed form over the years so fundamentally in a desire to live to consumer expectations that it isn't even remotely the same. Concerns of art preservationism over such a renewal of a work aside, I bring this up because its baked into the dingy noir political thrillers of these stories themselves. The fact that the politics of empire are shifting into more desperate measures means that for the writer to feel comfortable with their own work it now needs to move beyond the speculative dynamic and worm right into social accuracy. My serious observation is that the page having this row of conspicuous awards tacked as the first thing you see when you scroll down is there to enhance the atmosphere of the text. To give it this sense of formality that we are in the world and its continuing to beckon us to smile through the formalities adjusted at us.

Now in these stories you are playing as a character close to the heart of Empire and trying to change it with the agency limited to only words and a choice of mental anxieties. You have far more control in American Election to choose between whether she believes in global warming or god than in any dynamic that changes the course of the story. It's worth mentioning that to just write this off as not having enough character agency is silly because you still have more than you would in a real life version of this scenario. Generally Abigail has litany of options at these tense response moments to be rude, polite, or quiet. Swapping these around throughout the story feels appropriate but I'm honest I don't really believe having so much control over her religious, political, or occupation motivations is appropriate at all. One thing the story does not budge on is the idea that Abigail is a lesbian, this is a choice baked very deeply into the arc of the story. However it combats with how you choose to express the characters other desires and opinions, would a person who sees rebuilding America through the Trumpian antagonist of the story Truman Glass also believe in a woman's right to choose, religious agnosticism, etc. and be lesbian? It felt to me like the story was giving me too many options to decide who my character is, but I feel like given the tone of the story doing so actually undermines it a bit.

You don't merely become a campaign assistant through a lack of principles. If there's any job in the world that would expect principles, it would be somebody who would help potentially mold the state apparatus. Even if the principle was self interest, thereby it being a job, that would still be a principle, one actually worth fleshing out. Personally I think this would have been the most realistic one given the type of character Abigail is, but that's not what I picked, I picked for Abigail to be a jingoist just to see what would happen and I was disappointed with the result. My issue here is that the story gives me too many choices to the point it feels reality warping. At one point towards the middle of the story I could choose the name of Abigail's childhood dog and its sex right in this flashback sequence. Nothing strains the fiction more than realizing you're not really playing from within a range of somebody internal 1st person internal mind but as a magician's hands that warps the story throughout the course of it. I spend so long on this complaint because for the most part it is the only one.

Words and even actions for characters of moving from one place to another or choosing to say one thing to a person over another is reasonable and realistic. Thoughts on the other hand are sporadic, principled in personal experiences, and usually outside of a persons locus of control. The only story that has allowed for a genuine dialogue within thought itself in a stabilized player character that isn't explicitly customizable to the degree of gender, race, etc. is Disco Elysium (2019) this does absolutely fucking suck for interactive fiction devs because its ruined the facade of what they do. However the fact of the matter is that Disco Elysium is not just a story but an application of specific understandings of the mind as a place of contradictions and its own form of internal dialogue conflicts to a CRPG format. There's a genuine sense in which Disco Elysium has affirmed a new accuracy about how the mind functions. We would all be too embarrassed to admit that our mental faculties are often disagreeing with us and that the inner voice is actually a lot more incoherent than we let on, but that is exactly how it works. For these devs I think the only way forward is to either accept this concept of internal psychic manifestation similar to how Disco or say Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk do it or on the other hand to keep player input entirely on the level of fixed actions rather than mental considerations. There should be more fixed motivations and vindications within Abigail beyond her just being gay to set up a plot device and revolve the story around tokenization.

The fact that I don't get to know what Abigail's religious beliefs are but instead only affirm some onto her operates as patriarchal in a form of appeasing the reader that I noted in my NEET Girl Date Night post when I said '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'. The juxtaposition of this problem onto American Election is intriguing to me because unlike that story, this one follows no pretenses of educational resonance or romantic resonance. It's only interested in the political dramas it wants to tell. In this sense I think this performs as a common denominator objectification of character to player relationship through personal beliefs themselves. That is to say that the presumption of assuming the thoughts of a character that you're only just embodying is to objectify them and to treat them as only an object in support of a goal.

Here you have a whole story built around this idea of manipulation and self interest, however even in spite of the clever piano building progressions and novel idea to show locations but not character portraits. The main character is still inoperable as a character of sympathy or resonance because we to are simply just like Glass himself merely puppeting the protagonist right down to her thoughts for our own bidding. I don't care how good the story is if the character feels too much like a toy, rather than an agent with their own personal interests that grow out of actions. As such I've essentially closed the door in my interest this hackneyed choose your own mindventure version of storytelling. Dont just hand me a character, express her to me, show her wants and fears and desires. Do not make me choose these aspects of her. That's just sloppy. It means we tokenize her as much as Glass does in doing it this way. Until interactive fiction gets its shit together though a lot of very 'formal' and 'serious' works are going to continue to replicate this dysfunction in character writing.

Also, this point is much more preferential, stories of domestic empire tending bore me regardless because nothing sympathetic or reasonable happens that far up the hierarchy anyway. It's all so droll up there. Would rather be in the shoes of the streets like in Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest (2020) or even something more speculative like Metal Gear Rising: Revengence (2013). States apparatuses read to me as painfully allegorical since the rules of power tend to be so monotonous, you have to make the story feel 'accurate' up there by alluding constantly to real events and real actors. Dude didn't even bother to name swap out Obama for somebody else. Just downright hackneyed to me.

Song Accompaniment

mil rosas (2021) is an autofiction about Gaby fighting cancer while her family pop in and out to offer words of support. Meanwhile she is playing through as one of the sisters put a 'very boring' fetchquest part of an RPG game on her GBA. The player is tasked with completing this fetchquest while the family pops in to say hi at triggered points in the journey basically interrupting the 'action' of walking and talking with visual novel esque dialogue the that you have to look up from the screen and nod about.

I put emphasis on explaining this because it is to my mind a completely unique set up for a more narrative driven 'story within a story' video play, its worth checking out for that reason alone. I also think given the story is touching on an aspect of disability and illness that is actually ignored, that being a marked lack of mobility and desire to locomote regardless. This double narrative works immensely well and conveying the sense of stasis and isolation that accompanies such a struggle.

The play doesn't settle with just stopping here though. It does something a bit bold and shreds away the conventions of proper names attached to any of the speaking characters whether in the GBA or the IRL characters. This obviously marks as a form of confusion for the player, but it also forces them to pick up the IRL story through context clues. After all we don't walk around outside of work with name badges attached to us so it makes sense not to do so. Along with this the action button, usually used to pull all of the text on screen, here it just skips to the next line instead. So you have to wait for all of it to scroll on screen before hitting the action button. These two factors work in tandem to 'slow down' the normal pace of play, it also makes narrative sense the couple times you make this mistake because one of the psychological effects of chemotherapy is fogginess so it makes sense you would mess up. This whole mediation on health and family works phenomenally well.

My favorite factor that the narrative so elegantly teases at is the idea that handheld consoles have a specific unique quality in their focal experience that elevates them as anxiety suppression devices. A lot of us are used to the concept of sitting down and playing a video game on giant monitors or huge pieces of hardware. This is all fine and well, but it can shred away the appeal of having something in between your hands to mess around with on a trip or as a way to relax between social moments. Handhelds perform a similar function that light novels and magazines do. One of the earliest Nintendo success stories that caused them to pivot was the Game and Watch series which was literally a cheap digital clock with a bit of arcade gameplay for business men to pass the time on the train. The technology has expanded many times over since then allowing for more complex actions and narratives, that's the value mil rosas touches on. The imagined town and delivery situation is a bit more broody than people might initially expect from a top down GBA game, but I really like that idea of a serious and slightly gothic hand held adventure. To this effect how occasionally sassy and poetic the GBA dialogue is works for me, and makes me yearn to play these sorts of hand held titles over the more breezy titles associated with it. My guess is that this distinction in style is due in part to the spanish cultural background. There's rose beads and, going off the name of the work, it was written primarily with a spanish culture and background in mind. So that's likely where the gothic flair is coming from, which I can appreciate.

There are some thorns to this flower though. I mentioned earlier that I liked the dialogue design but I have some caveats: The fact that it functions equally in both the game and IRL the same seems awkward to me. For one I think the GBA characters having names when they talk would have made sense since that's a notable convention worth some parody on. More specifically though the pace and function of both dialogues operating and scrolling the same reveals an issue of narrative monotony. These two realms should operate distinctively because the whole point is that the Handheld is a form of escape. On top of this, the rather dreadful song adds a lot to the piece but doesn't change or stop when you enter or exit a room. Real missed opportunity for immersion here. That being said an argument could be made that the music is not actually playing from within the GBA, that its just an auditory hallucination or non diagetic accompaniment. If this is the case, it does improve the sense of monotony and dread but even here I think it should have lightened up or changed as the story went along from the initial sense of disorientation since its indicated within the plot much the same idea.

With that said this is a really unique and profound reflection far worth giving a shot. Especially in terms of the spatial nostalgia during illness makes it absolutely worth giving a try!

P.S. I recognize that assessing the 'value' and formal reflection on an autofiction may come off as rude or meanspirited. I notice that a lot of people get too shy when talking about the formal qualities of a 'personal' work. I think this can do a disservice to the art form though. Almost all poems are about grief, trauma, or personal love but we take no mind in analyzing poetry and form. Poets usually don't get hostile against poetic analysis of their very personal poems. I think if we really want to develop our minds and engagement with this medium its worth assessing what even the most personal works did and where they may have faltered. In particular the way critics seem to treat criticizing very personal videoplays as if you're battering somebodies brainchild reveals a quite false assumption that art cant be personal if its made by more than a half dozen people. All art has the element of 'personal' in it, and to assume we should hold back our thoughts on assumptions of how personal something is I think misses the point of good criticism in being agnostic to this fact entirely. No I think the reason people jump to this idea that its 'too personal to criticize' is out of a veiled sense of embarrassment of experiencing (and often enjoying) something outside the bounds of what they are 'supposed' to. Stop being so shy then! People love to know about the obscure. Just food for thought.

Loadout change current trashed space. Tense discussions at the periphery hiding and seeking ballistic confectioneries. Combat. Combat droned crimson standoffs accelerate slaughter quick ziptied carefully.

Good boy.

Phone language carrier capacity broken torque dead ended demands. Castled sanity envelope firing squads. Manifesting a; late on rent early on work to rise noise gated communities. Implore once twice three trimes not even sniff up the powder down mauve cocktails try trye against. Reset undeath worship screaming gun sound affected glands of despair over producing. Experiments in pentagrammatical style but dont chew your food: regurgitate it. Still life in vitro clamoring. Diagnosed with character syndrome its charred. Pitch: Can do anything you pleased. Puh. Pee. Pitch: You're the master of your destiny. Purpet Pi- Strikeout: Decieted fucking moron. When in doubt crater your health away for a chance. Climbinginginging ladders fallinged over hog resources pork yourself alive just for a chance. gunked up, get pick sale choose a Quest desire for the whole load right on your face doctored glow.

Good boy.

Devastate the land its your oyster shuck it makes no difference oxygen for nobody steal your heart upsell it to the highest bitter choose life thats obvious choose reliving thats blunt carve your own turkey steal from the fand that heeds lookie there in the sun a happy contract scorch earth with flavor now 'Pitch:' thats what youre supposed to do buy borrow die ad infinitum. Man radiodated break down splice dials through the azure blastwave exit. Emptied lilac tongues were made for cutting no backstory only present belly for you. Futures' market twisting fun percent getting rocks off exchanging pleasures downstream. Die roll natural funny terse queries easy win instant found footage diagrammed explanations 'its like this' they say. Grooped dangstalkers of reason keep upcharging larval intents. Thrall applauds turns and say 'Youve been a naughty boy' stay hermetical cause zilch want that expense so drop it already.

Good boy!

Song Accompaniment

This post-silicon faux introductory approach to platform character programming design, well meaning as it is, obscures information in 2 ways.

1. The toolkit here gameifies entirely around you the player being able to tweak towards a working character slowly through the introduction of new information rather than give you a top down understanding of how a good character looks and plays and working backwards from there. As such the useful part of the information is put at the end rather than at the beginning. I believe this is probably because Mark creates his videos in mind for an audience constantly in burnout so he has to 'slow cook' his observations rather than lead with information. You don't want to risk overstimulating the player with information so you give them 1 thing at a time but the player character themselves is going to feel like shit until you have all the functions to tweak open to you.

2. This corporate silicon mess doesn't feel good no matter what you do, because games are actually more about their visuals and music than they actually are about their 'movement'. As he explains, all the movement is completely up to what style of game you're trying to make, and as such its about the audio visual design. You can't make the character feel good to play when you have a horrible non-progressing mallsoft B-Side trumpet song playing in the background and with the visuals all looking like Paper Mario: Sticker Star put through a smoothie blender. It will always feel like chemotherapy that way. Yes you first start by prototyping the movement with simple pixel art and usually throw the sounds and music in last in these projects at the end, but before you start designing at all you imagine a world you want to externalize, is it a fluffy pillow or an industrial nightmare? You can't make a game with just a base awareness of mechanics and free art assets like this. You need to have an idea of what you want it to look and sound like. It would be remarkably less glamorous but this should have been made with simple pixel NES style limitations, possibly with a black background like how Metroid (1986) or Ice Climbers (1985) looks.

There's a lack of firm data, for example the acceleration and deceleration seem useful but they don't give you frame data of the stop and start points (or even just a second timer). Everything is styled to be interesting but not informative. As an actual toolkit, this is worthless. Like yes the preset for mario is slow, but that's because in mario you run and there isn't a coded run button to oscillate the speed.

Anyway, even if we ignore all that, there's just other functional issues that get in the way. For whatever reason run input information on the controller buffers data so your character always turns with uncontrollably slippery lag after changing inputs. I gave up playing this twice because I didn't realize this was just because of poor coding. The input keyboard controller is the arrow keys and the space button which is also a terrible layout.

This is the part where I'm supposed to say something needlessly snarky about how GMT should stick to making videos or how essayists should stay in their lane. I'm not going to say that. I think information simulation games are great, Balance of the Planet (1990) is an information game and it's one of the most ambitious and informative titles out there. I think Video Essays about Game Design are great, people can have great information without even having a hands on approach with the numbers and coding. Xator has a fantastic video/essay on the Mario bounce, which is relevant here, and from my understanding that's all gathered from historical data and reviews. To his credit, I don't know GMT that well and he seems to make shallow stuff but apparently his Boss Key video inspired one of my favorite levels in a game, the esoteric sky dungeon from Yo! Noid II: Enter the Void (2018).

All I'll say is that good observation comes from thoughtful consideration and research. Not out of being performative or hitting a production deadline, nor by babysitting readers/players with a series of continuous priming statements. Historical comparison or Breaking down a graph goes much further. Even without that, just get to the point, you really don't have to tutorialize the audience constantly. It does help to have a good taste in non-verbal music though because otherwise people will get sick, faze out and click off :3

Accompaniment Song

Truthfully, in comparison to most of my write ups, I have to come clean about personal ignorance in my experience here. The speed at which I initially played this and when I did was either before when Detchibe wrote their piece highlighting more of the ZX Spectrum John George Jones titles it was deriving off of, or with such little attention to this fact I might as well not have noticed. I played this without context originally, so of course without the context I enjoyed it. After a replay with some context I still really like it though and since I'm in the minority on that I feel like I should unpack why.

Beloved trashart explorer Detchibe notes that the appeal of go to hell (1985) and soft & cuddly (1987) was not per se the edginess or the tedious game design, but how games of this booming 80s microchip technology allowed for more vibrant texture work for independent artists which was a huge step up. Stating that its was 'functioning as a showcase for the creative liberties allowed by the microcomputer boom of the early 80s' you can definitely see that in the intricate detail of the monster design setpieces from those titles. Those two titles were an inspiration point for the forwarding of independent digital game art primarily.

Cadensia in her grace follows up that historical note by agreeing to this appeal and then, in her own post highlighting an interview showing its a product of blatant boredom of the developers part.

"For John George Jones, the development of his games was a way of killing time: according to the strange interview he gave to Sinclair User, he was first and foremost a disillusioned musician who wanted to amuse himself with people's reactions to the violence of his games before returning to other activities that would interest him more. There was no big project behind it, no real desire to push the boundaries of video game design, just a feeling of boredom."

It makes sense that if you're going to make a game out of boredom as a way to illicit abstract sensations and practice animating doodles, you wouldnt make a tight narratively driven title, you'd make a labyrinth. So we need to turn our attention to game design philosophy of the labyrinth for a moment. Firstly we can see a level of similar maze abstractions in several iconic Atari 2600 titles that were the rage only a few years before. Adventure (1979) has no explicit story or map keeping the player in a state of the unknown. This style of abstract player discovery based design was the go to for any game on that system that wanted to try to produce a dynamic experience, rather than a static goal oriented directed one like say Pacman (1980). Only 3 years later the infamous licensed game E.T. (1982) is where this lack of clarity in purpose and exploration upset players, its because it was too abstract and unclear what the goal is. A rift happens here, do players want a clear goal or a hidden one? It probably depends on how long a player is willing to put up with feeling lost. Put another way, all maze games that dont show the entire maze like Pacman has to deal with the potential fatigue any player might have until they rush for a map. Back then there was much more patience with being lost, we rush for maps all the time in games now but back then there weren't so many options. Nonetheless the failure of E.T. should show that technocultural analysis only takes us so far, at some point every player is going to get frustrated and upset, especially if the sound is bad or overbearing.

This top down obfuscation of a goal via only fragments devise by design a feeling of disorientation, allowing for the images themselves to be treated with added novelty and with difficulty arising from how large the hidden mazemap actually is. In this way within the limitations of the time we can think of George Jone's games as haunted house experiments, early attempts a more expressive spookhorror design. I don't think this is too far a stretch, after all people decorate for Halloween out of a similar sense of boredom and desire to amuse themselves as much as freak out other people and both games show creepy medieval symbols that tend to get associated with this more stylish horror.

The issue here for me is that these 2 George Jones titles are, frankly, unplayable. Mainly because what it achieves is done more slowly and rudimentary than the massive surplus of haunted house titles after it we now live within. This is the inevitability of artistic technologies in how they will snub older design applications. Beyond that, the large labyrinthine game is now in a state of arrested development both because that 'player unease' is now much more effectively explored in first person perspective horror games, and where it doesn't Yume Nikki (2004) and its seemingly endless inspiration works has now cleaned shop. Whether a player enjoys or even finishes Yume Nikki its no doubt a masterpiece in the emotive ambiguity of maze design. Its effective dream diary feeling and its establishment of a 'home' is such that the player can always feel infinitely lost without much immediate distress or compulsion to find the exit, often wanting to stay lost in many instances. The sound and music helped here to, the ambient soundtrack of Yume Nikki is immaculate and warms the player towards the feeling of being lost. A lot of games really do live or die on their music and sound design, honestly.

Anyway, this represents a distinct philosophy towards the maze entirely where its exploration for its own sake rather than for an explicit exit or goal. This may seem like a counterargument to the out of history comparison here, as I acknowledge they are functionally incomparable right? Let's take to it absolute extremes before you decide that. If the appeal is to be so horrified I want to leave rather than explore, I have at my power something that in a physical cornfield maze or haunted house I dont, I can leave immediately. For digital mazes, I can just shut off the console, thereby 'leaving the maze' and origin of discomfort immediately. Of course people still play games that 'scare' them, but the point of my illustration is that these old titles by their rudimentary design only have symbols towards an endgoal so the momentary symbolic collection loses its historical value without something other propulsion to play, I can just leave by just turning off the machine which trivializes merely objective or museum based gawking, there needs to be some other internal set of systems to keep me around. The character movement in these John George Jones games so that symbolic collection of historical items first hand is slow, which kills any 'masocore' reason for play, it doesn't help that there's no save function I know of so turning off is the only way to reset the maze without dying anyway. Which begs the question, why bother? Like, why collect these experiences with my eyes through direct hand input if I'm not even enjoying it when I could just look up somebody else doing it online now? If the only thing here is a bad maze with some good art I can just watch a video instead. More ruthlessly, absolved from its historical context, what value would these titles even represent to me now being as outdated as they are?

Well Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed (2014) actually has a rather blunt answer: The art style is pretty cool and worth updating and reusing in a modern context. Consider FGSGS for a moment as a discursive attempt at updating the appeal of ZX for a modern audience. FGSGS gets rid of the large map design, instead going for a tight few rooms, but leaves the disorientation still intact. There's a fluid sense of constant movement, not just from the floaty player character but the constant dripping of needles and running of player monsters. Along with the midi industrial song hunter killer by Smersh. This is all a modernization, the lack of music and ability to have several fluid animations on screen at once makes the original titles feel like literal molasses. FGSGS expounds to us that there's much in its bright neon framework we can borrow and use now, it shows how exciting it all is and does it with a novel sense of style, replacing the mideval iconography with more 21st century anxieties like hospitals and anarchism.

When you add it all up it repurposes the original elements of haunted horror unease for a short industrial retronostalgia of the forgotten technology for a new audience. That audience, if signposted to at all, is likely other internet game designers at the time. 2014 was still fairly early in itchio's platform development, originally coming to the public in 2013. The rudimentary nature of it is probably intended to make an appeal that this stuff even exists to other designers in the same way the popular trading of Playstation graphical design style via 'PSX' is (itchio as a platform has a rich amount of cultural exchange that make these actually active decisions, but thats a topic for another day). Seeing the history of the microcomputer itself having the notable outbursts be much the same makes this as a rather 'fitting' interpretation do you think?

That is not to say that this wasn't made for public showing and viewing, and that you can't get anything from it and shouldn't talk about it. Rather, we are a secondary audience, the primary audience is people who didn't already know about the ZX spectrum and found immediate sensual novelty in doing so. As a more informed secondary audience, I think instead of prodding at Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed with our dissatisfaction for not meeting our various expectations, its worth appreciating it as an digital memory that tries to compound this old artsyle of to that of the present because I know that what probably happened here is we found out about ZX spectrum through this and just went to look them up first. Much more preferable I think to having some studio buy out go to hell give it a bit of extra movement and then upcharging it on a cultureless store page like steam. People say a lot in defense of remakes and remasters but I much prefer the more down to earth approach of just making your own inspired derivative work that calls back to those older works. You can think of it like just a nonverbal 'remember X?' blogpost in that sense.

Sure there's something to be said for how hollow it feels. It's short and doesn't have that same creature design, the soundtrack feels hollow with the number of political visuals on screen. Hospitals, people tied to anarchist books, the death of 'punk'. Rather than seeing this aspect as a failure though I see it as what a contemporary and chronically online set of fears is. The longer you spend online the more you get nervous of whats happening in the margins and how those are and should be amplified. I think Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed is just poking a bit of fun at these fears by centering them as a 'new' haunted house. The game reads a bit more reactionary or at least politically stunted with its needles and hostile hospital designs in a post covid environment but this would be an unfair to place on it, in america at least there were larger healthcare concerns by this time that justify this. As for the 'death of punk' stuff, that old trope, I think that it's such an obvious fear that it would be foolish not to include in 'digital funhouse' mirror of fears. One that even Cadensia touches on in her conclusions on in the game, that it would be a poor decision not to use it to unease the player. I think that's plenty thrilling enough, if you asked me.

I write so extemporaneously and in such excruciating detail here for such a nothingburger of a work for many because this approach probably explains why I like more games than I don't especially on itchio. I'm not thinking about them in terms of satisfying a set of explicit design rules (weak level design or movement ability) or sociopolitical aggression ('not punk enough'), so much as what there is to be charitably remembered from each piece I spend time with. As long as the memory isn't offensive or upsetting I think it's worth keeping around and giving a respectful nod to, personally.

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Thanks to Detchibe for keeping me remotely updated and involved in the Backloggd Discord Game of the Week during my exile, along with all the attendees for the thoughtful criticism so far (If I haven't quoted you its out of respect for peace of mind, my new policy is to only quote people I'm following or who express comfort with being quoted). This was a fun exercise. I hope to do another one of these soon :3