Erato_Heti
CW: Critical Waffling on Gaming as an Artform, Mental Health Discussion
Est. Read Time: 14 mins
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A twine game in which you as the unnamed player character have 10 seconds left to express all your love to nameless lover before everything ends. Refreshing in how absolutely information overload a romance in the face of desperation is.
Game is actually sort of simple and what you would expect here, there's no ending or bit of information in an ending hiding that 'reveals the whole story', instead you just scramble to love as fast as possible. Love turned into a warioware game with high replayability 'kiss me', 'love me', 'fuck me'', 'just look into my eyes'. It's all the same in the manic compression of the apocalypse, all action drowns into 1 and speed reading is the name of the game.
I wont say I have anything particularly novel or unique to add to this but I do want to hone in on 1 point. In particular, when you strip back the queer traumabonding innate to this there's one other factor the game here reveals upon play. On a mere ludomechanical level, the game is a meditation on how the size of a games possibility space is maybe one of if not the core aesthetic axis on which a game functions as an aesthetic argument to the player that they assess from.
In the gaming mind, games with a low amount of possibility space and games with high ones often seem to be deeply at odds. In a derogatory sense you have the perception against works with a low possibility space as being insulting. What I'm referencing here is not genre locked at all. It can be walking simulators, kinetic novels, 'waiting games', as long as its keeping the players input actions minimal thats all that matters. For a lot of gamers this lack of optionality, of having to wait out a story prepared for them, is deadly similar to a tutorialized hand holding. It's despicable in the sense that it robs the player of seemingly the only 'point' of the interactive simulation, the ability to interact.
In direct contrast games that are highly dynamic and have high possibility space require an actively information comparative effort on the behalf of the player. This can be anything from playing a game with a high number of multiple endings, or trying to make use of limited information on the fly in a rouguelite or an FPS game, at the end of the day it seems that a lot of games criticism is about assessing the relationship of possibility space in the form of immersion.
The conclusions drawn from this are not obviously 1 size fits all, and it would be easy to problematize the point I've made, after all a lot of people including me appreciate low possibility space games. However, on a base level the sentiment seems to be that a kinetic novel or a walking simulator is 'less of a game' (or at least quarentined as an 'art game') and that those high information vector prediction and/or comparative assessment points are 'more of a game'. Within the twine genre for example 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds (2016) which has you solving a problem with 16 outcomes is 'more of a game'. That on the other hand, another in the same engine, The Tower (2018) with its 1 button used to forward the momentum is perceived really more as a slightly interactive art piece than a game. Thus the way both are engaged with in terms of how much it speaks through the possibility space or lack thereof is what the mechanically focused critic takes note of.
At the end of the day it all seems to be assessed in terms of these possibility functions, does a game live up to the promise of its dynamicism or is there 1 player dominant strategy that kills the illusion? Is a walking simulator about to use its 1 interaction point to powerful effect and immersion is it just boring? Is the RNG in a game helping enhance the player possibility space or it is hindering it? In my view in the race to treat games as an artistic self contained medium this tends to be the reference point that most critics I come into contact with focus on.
I have actually no direct interest in challenging this relationship. Without treating game design in this way as a cornerstone for understanding the medium, there's a high risk of otherwise equating its abilities overall as synonymous with Film or Literature. As only ultimately a personal computer version of what those mediums can do, the interactivity here matters a lot, in fact its probably mission critical.
Instead, I want to make this claim: the 'artfulness' of a game in terms of a high possibility space and its cognitive effects (stress, anxiety, disorientation, etc.) is often mitigated or overlooked. A lack of knowledge about how high that possibility space really is usually not taken seriously as an effect for one simple reason, people talk about games comprehensively in the terms of a past experience. As such the fact that at one point a player didn't know all the options of the effects of play is part of the immersion regardless of how 'true' they all are. Maybe a game gives you 20 choices and 14 of them just change a single sentence if that, but the fact there's a direct sense of being overwhelmed by choices is a meaningful point of analysis. The fact of the matter is nothing novel in terms of a rich story is 'hiding' in any of the branch choices in this game, its all the same rush to love at the end of the day, but the illusion of the possibility spaces' effect is part of it. Finally, there is one last point here, whether or not your experience is being 'timed' or not effects your choices a lot to and your sensation. Being pushed to make options quickly enhances further that illusion of being pressed on possibilities, the inability to pause and totally assess whats in front of you is a rather important distinction to that cognitive mirage. Choices made under a stress of time are always going to feel more important than choices made with a lot of time, this is just a result of how thinking works. It probably also explains the variable relationship with games as art in some regard because if you have less real life time than another player for the same game you'll be assessing the impact of the choices more openly.
Maybe this thought means something to somebody, or maybe it's all just exhaust to people that already know but now allow me to say this. 'Gaming' in terms of possibility assessment incentivizes trying to screen as many options as possible for the 'right option'. I can't help but notice how this agitation to 'decide' can play out in mentally corrosive ways. By being unable to recognize the manifestly stressful cognitive elements of trying to assess a possibility space and glamorize them we can risk harming ourselves with feelings of regret or self loathing that we haven't made the "right decision" in real life situations to. True often we do make suboptimal plays, but there's nothing suboptimal about say expressing love here. If the other person feels loved and appreciated the company in those glimmering moments that's enough. If we are unable to assess that the world shouldn't be about trying to make the 'best choice' for some ideal 'win state' we risk causing mental health problems for ourselves. Similarly, games with high or low possibility spaces simply require certain cognitave relationships out of you, and you're not a better or worse person for not being in the right mood for them at every moment in life equally. That would be impossible.
We really do need to try better both as critics and as lovers to actually assess that. Nobody is a better or worse person for having choice paralysis in a game or in real life. The whole point of mental health awareness has been about how sometimes those affects are completely out of control so its ideal in my view to try and see a connection point between both worlds. There is a degree to which this rush to say everything to somebody or do everything with them is not really just a game, its a simulation of a genuine struggle within the possibility space of relationships as a whole.
To conclude here, if the 'best game' is one that is cognitively taxing me as much as possible at all times then I cant say with high confidence I'm much of a gamer at all. Every game has its utility, place, and preference but on some level I think this discussion of what it means to feel 'overwhelmed' by a simulation or the effects of trying to bring the aspects of 'gaming' to the interpersonal world are discarded without consideration. Sometimes, playing games/being in relationships that expect minimal input from you is actually more than anything else a genuine form of self care, and its worth keeping that in mind :3
Est. Read Time: 14 mins
------------------------------------------
A twine game in which you as the unnamed player character have 10 seconds left to express all your love to nameless lover before everything ends. Refreshing in how absolutely information overload a romance in the face of desperation is.
Game is actually sort of simple and what you would expect here, there's no ending or bit of information in an ending hiding that 'reveals the whole story', instead you just scramble to love as fast as possible. Love turned into a warioware game with high replayability 'kiss me', 'love me', 'fuck me'', 'just look into my eyes'. It's all the same in the manic compression of the apocalypse, all action drowns into 1 and speed reading is the name of the game.
I wont say I have anything particularly novel or unique to add to this but I do want to hone in on 1 point. In particular, when you strip back the queer traumabonding innate to this there's one other factor the game here reveals upon play. On a mere ludomechanical level, the game is a meditation on how the size of a games possibility space is maybe one of if not the core aesthetic axis on which a game functions as an aesthetic argument to the player that they assess from.
In the gaming mind, games with a low amount of possibility space and games with high ones often seem to be deeply at odds. In a derogatory sense you have the perception against works with a low possibility space as being insulting. What I'm referencing here is not genre locked at all. It can be walking simulators, kinetic novels, 'waiting games', as long as its keeping the players input actions minimal thats all that matters. For a lot of gamers this lack of optionality, of having to wait out a story prepared for them, is deadly similar to a tutorialized hand holding. It's despicable in the sense that it robs the player of seemingly the only 'point' of the interactive simulation, the ability to interact.
In direct contrast games that are highly dynamic and have high possibility space require an actively information comparative effort on the behalf of the player. This can be anything from playing a game with a high number of multiple endings, or trying to make use of limited information on the fly in a rouguelite or an FPS game, at the end of the day it seems that a lot of games criticism is about assessing the relationship of possibility space in the form of immersion.
The conclusions drawn from this are not obviously 1 size fits all, and it would be easy to problematize the point I've made, after all a lot of people including me appreciate low possibility space games. However, on a base level the sentiment seems to be that a kinetic novel or a walking simulator is 'less of a game' (or at least quarentined as an 'art game') and that those high information vector prediction and/or comparative assessment points are 'more of a game'. Within the twine genre for example 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds (2016) which has you solving a problem with 16 outcomes is 'more of a game'. That on the other hand, another in the same engine, The Tower (2018) with its 1 button used to forward the momentum is perceived really more as a slightly interactive art piece than a game. Thus the way both are engaged with in terms of how much it speaks through the possibility space or lack thereof is what the mechanically focused critic takes note of.
At the end of the day it all seems to be assessed in terms of these possibility functions, does a game live up to the promise of its dynamicism or is there 1 player dominant strategy that kills the illusion? Is a walking simulator about to use its 1 interaction point to powerful effect and immersion is it just boring? Is the RNG in a game helping enhance the player possibility space or it is hindering it? In my view in the race to treat games as an artistic self contained medium this tends to be the reference point that most critics I come into contact with focus on.
I have actually no direct interest in challenging this relationship. Without treating game design in this way as a cornerstone for understanding the medium, there's a high risk of otherwise equating its abilities overall as synonymous with Film or Literature. As only ultimately a personal computer version of what those mediums can do, the interactivity here matters a lot, in fact its probably mission critical.
Instead, I want to make this claim: the 'artfulness' of a game in terms of a high possibility space and its cognitive effects (stress, anxiety, disorientation, etc.) is often mitigated or overlooked. A lack of knowledge about how high that possibility space really is usually not taken seriously as an effect for one simple reason, people talk about games comprehensively in the terms of a past experience. As such the fact that at one point a player didn't know all the options of the effects of play is part of the immersion regardless of how 'true' they all are. Maybe a game gives you 20 choices and 14 of them just change a single sentence if that, but the fact there's a direct sense of being overwhelmed by choices is a meaningful point of analysis. The fact of the matter is nothing novel in terms of a rich story is 'hiding' in any of the branch choices in this game, its all the same rush to love at the end of the day, but the illusion of the possibility spaces' effect is part of it. Finally, there is one last point here, whether or not your experience is being 'timed' or not effects your choices a lot to and your sensation. Being pushed to make options quickly enhances further that illusion of being pressed on possibilities, the inability to pause and totally assess whats in front of you is a rather important distinction to that cognitive mirage. Choices made under a stress of time are always going to feel more important than choices made with a lot of time, this is just a result of how thinking works. It probably also explains the variable relationship with games as art in some regard because if you have less real life time than another player for the same game you'll be assessing the impact of the choices more openly.
Maybe this thought means something to somebody, or maybe it's all just exhaust to people that already know but now allow me to say this. 'Gaming' in terms of possibility assessment incentivizes trying to screen as many options as possible for the 'right option'. I can't help but notice how this agitation to 'decide' can play out in mentally corrosive ways. By being unable to recognize the manifestly stressful cognitive elements of trying to assess a possibility space and glamorize them we can risk harming ourselves with feelings of regret or self loathing that we haven't made the "right decision" in real life situations to. True often we do make suboptimal plays, but there's nothing suboptimal about say expressing love here. If the other person feels loved and appreciated the company in those glimmering moments that's enough. If we are unable to assess that the world shouldn't be about trying to make the 'best choice' for some ideal 'win state' we risk causing mental health problems for ourselves. Similarly, games with high or low possibility spaces simply require certain cognitave relationships out of you, and you're not a better or worse person for not being in the right mood for them at every moment in life equally. That would be impossible.
We really do need to try better both as critics and as lovers to actually assess that. Nobody is a better or worse person for having choice paralysis in a game or in real life. The whole point of mental health awareness has been about how sometimes those affects are completely out of control so its ideal in my view to try and see a connection point between both worlds. There is a degree to which this rush to say everything to somebody or do everything with them is not really just a game, its a simulation of a genuine struggle within the possibility space of relationships as a whole.
To conclude here, if the 'best game' is one that is cognitively taxing me as much as possible at all times then I cant say with high confidence I'm much of a gamer at all. Every game has its utility, place, and preference but on some level I think this discussion of what it means to feel 'overwhelmed' by a simulation or the effects of trying to bring the aspects of 'gaming' to the interpersonal world are discarded without consideration. Sometimes, playing games/being in relationships that expect minimal input from you is actually more than anything else a genuine form of self care, and its worth keeping that in mind :3
2022
Est. Reading Time: 7 minutes
Policy
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Short heartfelt color book story VN about a girl that does a science experiment for enough money so she can meet her girlfriend.
There are 2 points in particular worth highlighting here. 1 is the style of dialogue, all of the dialogue here is in the NVL format, where dialogue stretches the entire screen. As opposed to ADV, where dialogue is mainly regulated to the bottom. The NVL format is not typically used in most VNs, especially not for the whole length of the game, so VNs like this that do by design bring attention to that fact. Here it becomes very appropriate to the theming of the story: disassociation, disembodiment, and trying to keep bonds through trauma. By having dialogue and thoughts screen the whole screen it reminds us of the fact that's what talking to people you love on the computer looks like to, dialogue that is continuous and endless rather than sequenced verbally. When you talk to people on the computer, the conversation stretches vertically and becomes a 'wall of text' with all the information starting to run in and become harder to decipher. In another way the internal thoughts seem to drown out the visual pictures in the background obscuring them from view which fits into the theme of disembodiment and anxiety. This all speaks to an alienated frusteration of digital belonging in the piece.
The other big point I want to bring attention to is that, without spoiling it, the story is built upon several Deus Ex Machinas happening to keep the plot going. Unreal interventions on the stories pace and sensibility from some 'outside' hand. Usually Deus Ex Machinas in stories have been seen as a story telling flaw, a terrible 'trope' that was to be avoided at all costs in part because of the fact the information is 'unfair' and 'unexpected' to the reader. However the Deus Ex Machina is only viewed this way in part due to secularization. Before secularization happened, this storytelling device had an air quite literally of divine intervention and reasoning, something that was important and hopeful to bring up in fiction to reflect religious convictions of those times, and to reflect the often inexplicable randomness of life.
By having several of them, i die a lovely life disrupts this by having a story built out of unexpected actions. By throwing away typical fictional logic of pacing and storytelling, it makes it so you are being taken along for the ride of the story, to be as 'disembodied' or 'disassociated' as the protagonist couple.
This is a very technical reading of the story, but only because I feel strongly this fiction is actually doing something worth mention. This is the debut story from lisa, but there are other recent short VNs over these struggles like Good Morning Is A Social Construct (2022), Momo's Diary (2022), and Blind (2020) that take similar approach. There's a structural novelty here in how experiences of trans discrimination, mental health, or substance abuse is being reconsidered in the realm of more subjective terrors. Such a relationship that I feel VNs are good at, calling back to movements focusing on emotionality like Romanticism, Sturm und Drang, or The Theater of Terror. It would be a real shame to miss out on these sorts of short stories just because of their unique multimedia elements and approach.
One final reason for explaining the positives of this in the way I did is because these stories also seem to function beyond basic allegory or metaphor. For example i die a lovely life has a lot for the moral critic to impugn, there's a lot of terror towards medical authority which reads as a 'bad look' post-covid. The religious elements could be read as bad storytelling or some form of fundamentalism. The fear of mental health medicine might be read for the moral critic as 'troubling'. This is an issue of 'moral optics' that is quite regular, and often tries to define itself in terms of seeing bad tropes like the 'predatory lesbian' trope or the 'Deus Ex Machina'. The problem becomes that for any well meaning and emotionally resonate reader this stuff does not work in cases like this, in part because this romanticism is usually not out to linearly justify the actions or condemn them. For the moral critic (which let's face it, is most people using social media) does not know what to do with a story like this.
That's why I believe it's vital to read these sorts of stories then, demoralizing the critical reference or at least seeing where that construction fails allows us to open the doors to other non allegorical or non moral readings of a works movement and meaning. For me, my reading of one night, hot springs and Curtain were so intense that they revealed alternative meanings. That is to say instead of seeing moral optics in these stories, I saw cultural distinctions and educational intervention respectively. I like to bring attention to art like this, because getting ourselves out of the habit of seeing art in terms of linear manifestos or propaganda we support is really important to avoiding an attitude of moral puritarianism that would rather lock up fiction that dares to be challenging. Consuming the challenging art first hand is a great way to avoid becoming book burners ourselves.
Less polemically, I'll conclude and say that everything that this work touches on are thing that I absolutely feel. I often worry I might never see the people I love in person again, that higher economic powers are going to keep us permanently disembodied from contact. This story shows to me that that's absolutely a real thing to worry about on the one hand, that the tragedy is you might be right. However, trying to change it through fighting for physical connection is a divine form of love, that being able to maintain love itself through the digital is itself a holy act. The soft and humorous way it went about it is exactly what I needed ;-;
Policy
---------------------------
Short heartfelt color book story VN about a girl that does a science experiment for enough money so she can meet her girlfriend.
There are 2 points in particular worth highlighting here. 1 is the style of dialogue, all of the dialogue here is in the NVL format, where dialogue stretches the entire screen. As opposed to ADV, where dialogue is mainly regulated to the bottom. The NVL format is not typically used in most VNs, especially not for the whole length of the game, so VNs like this that do by design bring attention to that fact. Here it becomes very appropriate to the theming of the story: disassociation, disembodiment, and trying to keep bonds through trauma. By having dialogue and thoughts screen the whole screen it reminds us of the fact that's what talking to people you love on the computer looks like to, dialogue that is continuous and endless rather than sequenced verbally. When you talk to people on the computer, the conversation stretches vertically and becomes a 'wall of text' with all the information starting to run in and become harder to decipher. In another way the internal thoughts seem to drown out the visual pictures in the background obscuring them from view which fits into the theme of disembodiment and anxiety. This all speaks to an alienated frusteration of digital belonging in the piece.
The other big point I want to bring attention to is that, without spoiling it, the story is built upon several Deus Ex Machinas happening to keep the plot going. Unreal interventions on the stories pace and sensibility from some 'outside' hand. Usually Deus Ex Machinas in stories have been seen as a story telling flaw, a terrible 'trope' that was to be avoided at all costs in part because of the fact the information is 'unfair' and 'unexpected' to the reader. However the Deus Ex Machina is only viewed this way in part due to secularization. Before secularization happened, this storytelling device had an air quite literally of divine intervention and reasoning, something that was important and hopeful to bring up in fiction to reflect religious convictions of those times, and to reflect the often inexplicable randomness of life.
By having several of them, i die a lovely life disrupts this by having a story built out of unexpected actions. By throwing away typical fictional logic of pacing and storytelling, it makes it so you are being taken along for the ride of the story, to be as 'disembodied' or 'disassociated' as the protagonist couple.
This is a very technical reading of the story, but only because I feel strongly this fiction is actually doing something worth mention. This is the debut story from lisa, but there are other recent short VNs over these struggles like Good Morning Is A Social Construct (2022), Momo's Diary (2022), and Blind (2020) that take similar approach. There's a structural novelty here in how experiences of trans discrimination, mental health, or substance abuse is being reconsidered in the realm of more subjective terrors. Such a relationship that I feel VNs are good at, calling back to movements focusing on emotionality like Romanticism, Sturm und Drang, or The Theater of Terror. It would be a real shame to miss out on these sorts of short stories just because of their unique multimedia elements and approach.
One final reason for explaining the positives of this in the way I did is because these stories also seem to function beyond basic allegory or metaphor. For example i die a lovely life has a lot for the moral critic to impugn, there's a lot of terror towards medical authority which reads as a 'bad look' post-covid. The religious elements could be read as bad storytelling or some form of fundamentalism. The fear of mental health medicine might be read for the moral critic as 'troubling'. This is an issue of 'moral optics' that is quite regular, and often tries to define itself in terms of seeing bad tropes like the 'predatory lesbian' trope or the 'Deus Ex Machina'. The problem becomes that for any well meaning and emotionally resonate reader this stuff does not work in cases like this, in part because this romanticism is usually not out to linearly justify the actions or condemn them. For the moral critic (which let's face it, is most people using social media) does not know what to do with a story like this.
That's why I believe it's vital to read these sorts of stories then, demoralizing the critical reference or at least seeing where that construction fails allows us to open the doors to other non allegorical or non moral readings of a works movement and meaning. For me, my reading of one night, hot springs and Curtain were so intense that they revealed alternative meanings. That is to say instead of seeing moral optics in these stories, I saw cultural distinctions and educational intervention respectively. I like to bring attention to art like this, because getting ourselves out of the habit of seeing art in terms of linear manifestos or propaganda we support is really important to avoiding an attitude of moral puritarianism that would rather lock up fiction that dares to be challenging. Consuming the challenging art first hand is a great way to avoid becoming book burners ourselves.
Less polemically, I'll conclude and say that everything that this work touches on are thing that I absolutely feel. I often worry I might never see the people I love in person again, that higher economic powers are going to keep us permanently disembodied from contact. This story shows to me that that's absolutely a real thing to worry about on the one hand, that the tragedy is you might be right. However, trying to change it through fighting for physical connection is a divine form of love, that being able to maintain love itself through the digital is itself a holy act. The soft and humorous way it went about it is exactly what I needed ;-;
2019
Est. Reading Time: 13 Minutes
Policy
_________________
Breezy Edritch DOOM Clone that's more Mutant than Clone. Highly enjoyable with pockets of frustration throughout.
A DOOM WAD that merges the eldrich horror visual style with classic DOOM run and gunning. Which comes away with a sensibility I can best describe as 'insect gothic'. A style that has been explored in other indie niche works like Vesp: a History of Sapphic Scaphism (2016) and Scarlet Bough game from Haunted Cities Volume 2 (2017). Perhaps these authors are leaning partially from the descriptive disgust thread found in works like Kafka's Metamorphosis (1915) or Cronenberg's bug infested reinterpretation of Naked Lunch (1991). Whatever the influence, most readers are going to see these connections as either obscure or a bit of a reach, and thats for good reason: Bugs, either as threat or as embodied character do not command a strong presence in the public imagination, in the same way a firey Demon from hell does. I think Shrine in its moody dark ambience and fields of biege and greens is trying to give weight to that alternative of the action FPS as a great vessel for imagining Insect Demonology.
For instance, the weakest enemy in Shrine are reminiscent of wandering cockroaches. Actually taking the odd effect of enemies Indirectly hobbling towards you and capitalizing on it. Most of the rest of the enemies follow a similar logic: You've got one that looks like a grasshopper and the most 'humanoid' enemy plated in black armor is a beetle. Certainly not every enemy in Shrine is like this, but a good lot of them are. DOOM here is turned moody and atmospheric, your character is unamed and so it everything else. You wander through sewers and forests, mainly with the motivation of playing a Unique Looking DOOM WAD but eventually after about 8 levels your character chimes in. Even the weapons, although indentifiable by their reference to the weapons normative in FPS games look and feel more buglike, for example the Chainsaw has looks like a highly detailed pincer. Everything here is identifiable to its original symbolic system of meaning, but strange enough to throw you off a bit. To speak nothing of the molars on your main character as you can see on the cover art here.
It's for that fact alone I think Shrine and indeed the work of Scumhead writ large is worth poking in on, although that comes with an awkward caveat that most of these games are rushed with the intention of covering as much ground in this umbrella niche as possible. Certainly nothing new to playing indie games but perhaps an unusual issue for people who like tight and compact levels.
To illustrate what I mean here, I played Lycanthorn II (2020) in may of last year, and ran into a visual bug that made me unable to enter a door allowing me to continue the game. The game being as obscure as it is nobody else knew that problem so I went directly to Scumhead for this reply that the game hasnt been updated in almost 2 years and that its been so long. 2 years since update brings us back to the year of release. Scumhead basically dropped the game, tweaked it a few times and moved on, with any considerate feedback taken in stride for the next game.
I can't be too mad at this process since what it lacks in cohesion and gameplay function, it makes up for in aesthetic novelty through churning. Which is to say that Shrine reflects a sort of issue there is with speaking about most of this kind of game. This collaboration of experimentation and rapid production can leave the rough pieces of the design feeling like a 'lost cause' to the player in the moment of release. The game might have a unique aesthetic sure, but that's all the reason its disappointing parts are as they are.
With those regards in mine, I much prefer the rough public attempts at rough drafts to stay public, warts and all, because it inspires me to appreciate aspects of design that go beyond just gamefeel and in a more self sense allows for me to trace the web of improvements and issues across a body of work from an author, and from a genre at large.
There are some real irritating points in this WAD, most particularly later on with the fact player health and ammo carries over between levels. That also means if your health is only a sliver left you spawn into the next zone with that amount of health. Serious issue on a few of the levels that chokehold healing points behind strong enemies. Not too rare of an issue but enough to be annoying.
The much larger issue is that the enemies overall are serious health sponges, meaning that in order to reasonably kill them you have to rely on these stronger guns which end up trivializing the existence of the earlier ones. This is not a profoundly new issue to, pretty much any FPS game every has it, DOOM has it, but you really do feel the strain of it on some of the later levels. With that said, the red orbs pickup being universal ammo pickups patches this problem over, which I appreciate. That said the ambience of the game overall is weighted down but the absolute noisiness of the world. Every pickup has a loud sound effect and there's hundreds of orbs. The shotgun is so loud it feels like it might bust out your eardrums. These are issues also carried over from DOOM which mixed its music so low in comparison to the sound effects (with no way to change it in the original releases). Here you can at least invert the audio volumes to stifle that issue, but it still bugs me the frequency of pickup noises and shotgun noises. Kinda just wish there was a muffler on both in comparison to everything else. Makes a brooding gothic exploration into a cackling mad noisepunk Hyena party.
On the positives, there's a wonderful variety in combat encounters and approach throughout. In general your focus tends to be on exploration and discovery over constant involved firefights typical of a SlaughterWAD. I prefer that, in part because of the enemies being damage sponges and in part because it allows me to soak in the damp environments and the serenity of running, it does ramp up in the last act in this regard though for people who find exploration boring. It explains why later games focus even more on that exploration aspect tho. With later DOOM mutants from the author such as Lycanthorne having a Zelda styled overworld map with 'dungeons' or Vomitoreum having a more metroidvania focus (unfortunately though that game later game fails horribly on delivery). It's at a nice synergy here overall. Also I really love this aspect Scumhead has picked up on combat encounters, sometimes its good to run away! A lot of the time your best option is to flee to the next level through the back door especially in the later levels. This is great, it adds a dynamic narrative element to the experience. You can fight every enemy you see but there's no reward for doing so outside of needing to in order to progress in a few instances. Fleeing from heavy encounters operates as a 'skip' function for overwhelmed players but is also a genuine way to play your adventure. It's integrated and fits right in with the boomer shooter games of yore where killing all the enemies was optional. They should really bring that design back, I feel, since it allows for another tool in case a player is experiencing a frustration with the game.
As strange as it is, maybe the most interesting realization I had from playing Shrine is that I dont care much for human players or human enemies. Humanoid creature hybrids is perfectly fine, and even cyborg is fine. For me though I've already seen enough humans that I tend to find their automatic inclusion frusterating. Nor do I enjoy human sounds to a large extent (this may explain why I tend to dislike voice acting). Human grunts irritate me to. The reason I bring this up is because the main character makes human grunts and I feel like that might be the biggest oversight of them all. I'd rather they make scittering insect groans or something. The human element of player characters are the least engaging and the most universal for marketing reasons. You have to make your main character a human who makes vaguely human noises for mass audience appeal, for highly marketable appeal. That's why the mario series a world of highly surreal fantasy has a human character with a mustache and overalls. I balk at this, it fatigues me immensely in a way that is hard to properly get across (its also why I openly play characters like Dry Bones and Boo in the Mario Kart games).
I much prefer a fiction and an overall canon of the non-human. My fellow critics can think DOOM is the best game of all time, but I prefer and long for worlds that dont arrest me with their humans in the way DOOM and games like it do. Those games are necessarily more fringe, but I firmly place my flag there as a matter of appreciation for the aesthetic cohesion found within. For me, those games are absolutely worth discussing more readily. I feel like while games overall have recognized the value of non-human mascots in horror and 3D platforming, its not been as adopted in action games as a whole, or RPG games. Which is a real shame.
Make no mistake, there are frustrating moments in Shrine but the overall package more than makes up for the occasional bump in the road.
Policy
_________________
Breezy Edritch DOOM Clone that's more Mutant than Clone. Highly enjoyable with pockets of frustration throughout.
A DOOM WAD that merges the eldrich horror visual style with classic DOOM run and gunning. Which comes away with a sensibility I can best describe as 'insect gothic'. A style that has been explored in other indie niche works like Vesp: a History of Sapphic Scaphism (2016) and Scarlet Bough game from Haunted Cities Volume 2 (2017). Perhaps these authors are leaning partially from the descriptive disgust thread found in works like Kafka's Metamorphosis (1915) or Cronenberg's bug infested reinterpretation of Naked Lunch (1991). Whatever the influence, most readers are going to see these connections as either obscure or a bit of a reach, and thats for good reason: Bugs, either as threat or as embodied character do not command a strong presence in the public imagination, in the same way a firey Demon from hell does. I think Shrine in its moody dark ambience and fields of biege and greens is trying to give weight to that alternative of the action FPS as a great vessel for imagining Insect Demonology.
For instance, the weakest enemy in Shrine are reminiscent of wandering cockroaches. Actually taking the odd effect of enemies Indirectly hobbling towards you and capitalizing on it. Most of the rest of the enemies follow a similar logic: You've got one that looks like a grasshopper and the most 'humanoid' enemy plated in black armor is a beetle. Certainly not every enemy in Shrine is like this, but a good lot of them are. DOOM here is turned moody and atmospheric, your character is unamed and so it everything else. You wander through sewers and forests, mainly with the motivation of playing a Unique Looking DOOM WAD but eventually after about 8 levels your character chimes in. Even the weapons, although indentifiable by their reference to the weapons normative in FPS games look and feel more buglike, for example the Chainsaw has looks like a highly detailed pincer. Everything here is identifiable to its original symbolic system of meaning, but strange enough to throw you off a bit. To speak nothing of the molars on your main character as you can see on the cover art here.
It's for that fact alone I think Shrine and indeed the work of Scumhead writ large is worth poking in on, although that comes with an awkward caveat that most of these games are rushed with the intention of covering as much ground in this umbrella niche as possible. Certainly nothing new to playing indie games but perhaps an unusual issue for people who like tight and compact levels.
To illustrate what I mean here, I played Lycanthorn II (2020) in may of last year, and ran into a visual bug that made me unable to enter a door allowing me to continue the game. The game being as obscure as it is nobody else knew that problem so I went directly to Scumhead for this reply that the game hasnt been updated in almost 2 years and that its been so long. 2 years since update brings us back to the year of release. Scumhead basically dropped the game, tweaked it a few times and moved on, with any considerate feedback taken in stride for the next game.
I can't be too mad at this process since what it lacks in cohesion and gameplay function, it makes up for in aesthetic novelty through churning. Which is to say that Shrine reflects a sort of issue there is with speaking about most of this kind of game. This collaboration of experimentation and rapid production can leave the rough pieces of the design feeling like a 'lost cause' to the player in the moment of release. The game might have a unique aesthetic sure, but that's all the reason its disappointing parts are as they are.
With those regards in mine, I much prefer the rough public attempts at rough drafts to stay public, warts and all, because it inspires me to appreciate aspects of design that go beyond just gamefeel and in a more self sense allows for me to trace the web of improvements and issues across a body of work from an author, and from a genre at large.
There are some real irritating points in this WAD, most particularly later on with the fact player health and ammo carries over between levels. That also means if your health is only a sliver left you spawn into the next zone with that amount of health. Serious issue on a few of the levels that chokehold healing points behind strong enemies. Not too rare of an issue but enough to be annoying.
The much larger issue is that the enemies overall are serious health sponges, meaning that in order to reasonably kill them you have to rely on these stronger guns which end up trivializing the existence of the earlier ones. This is not a profoundly new issue to, pretty much any FPS game every has it, DOOM has it, but you really do feel the strain of it on some of the later levels. With that said, the red orbs pickup being universal ammo pickups patches this problem over, which I appreciate. That said the ambience of the game overall is weighted down but the absolute noisiness of the world. Every pickup has a loud sound effect and there's hundreds of orbs. The shotgun is so loud it feels like it might bust out your eardrums. These are issues also carried over from DOOM which mixed its music so low in comparison to the sound effects (with no way to change it in the original releases). Here you can at least invert the audio volumes to stifle that issue, but it still bugs me the frequency of pickup noises and shotgun noises. Kinda just wish there was a muffler on both in comparison to everything else. Makes a brooding gothic exploration into a cackling mad noisepunk Hyena party.
On the positives, there's a wonderful variety in combat encounters and approach throughout. In general your focus tends to be on exploration and discovery over constant involved firefights typical of a SlaughterWAD. I prefer that, in part because of the enemies being damage sponges and in part because it allows me to soak in the damp environments and the serenity of running, it does ramp up in the last act in this regard though for people who find exploration boring. It explains why later games focus even more on that exploration aspect tho. With later DOOM mutants from the author such as Lycanthorne having a Zelda styled overworld map with 'dungeons' or Vomitoreum having a more metroidvania focus (unfortunately though that game later game fails horribly on delivery). It's at a nice synergy here overall. Also I really love this aspect Scumhead has picked up on combat encounters, sometimes its good to run away! A lot of the time your best option is to flee to the next level through the back door especially in the later levels. This is great, it adds a dynamic narrative element to the experience. You can fight every enemy you see but there's no reward for doing so outside of needing to in order to progress in a few instances. Fleeing from heavy encounters operates as a 'skip' function for overwhelmed players but is also a genuine way to play your adventure. It's integrated and fits right in with the boomer shooter games of yore where killing all the enemies was optional. They should really bring that design back, I feel, since it allows for another tool in case a player is experiencing a frustration with the game.
As strange as it is, maybe the most interesting realization I had from playing Shrine is that I dont care much for human players or human enemies. Humanoid creature hybrids is perfectly fine, and even cyborg is fine. For me though I've already seen enough humans that I tend to find their automatic inclusion frusterating. Nor do I enjoy human sounds to a large extent (this may explain why I tend to dislike voice acting). Human grunts irritate me to. The reason I bring this up is because the main character makes human grunts and I feel like that might be the biggest oversight of them all. I'd rather they make scittering insect groans or something. The human element of player characters are the least engaging and the most universal for marketing reasons. You have to make your main character a human who makes vaguely human noises for mass audience appeal, for highly marketable appeal. That's why the mario series a world of highly surreal fantasy has a human character with a mustache and overalls. I balk at this, it fatigues me immensely in a way that is hard to properly get across (its also why I openly play characters like Dry Bones and Boo in the Mario Kart games).
I much prefer a fiction and an overall canon of the non-human. My fellow critics can think DOOM is the best game of all time, but I prefer and long for worlds that dont arrest me with their humans in the way DOOM and games like it do. Those games are necessarily more fringe, but I firmly place my flag there as a matter of appreciation for the aesthetic cohesion found within. For me, those games are absolutely worth discussing more readily. I feel like while games overall have recognized the value of non-human mascots in horror and 3D platforming, its not been as adopted in action games as a whole, or RPG games. Which is a real shame.
Make no mistake, there are frustrating moments in Shrine but the overall package more than makes up for the occasional bump in the road.
2009
Product of a time in the indie game dev scene where making women blunt metaphors for personal demons was not seen as hackneyed yet because all the boys were still going through their poetic phase, right around there with Braid. I don't think I would say it was a 'more innocent time' but it was. A time. MGTOW circles would love a game like this.
That all said the color plallete is unique and soothing despite the fact its, yaknow, browns mixed with piss yellow. Points for that honestly.
Make no mistakes though I'm biased, I would absolutely be more accepting of this premise if the main character was a lesbian and not some grungy sadboy @-@
That all said the color plallete is unique and soothing despite the fact its, yaknow, browns mixed with piss yellow. Points for that honestly.
Make no mistakes though I'm biased, I would absolutely be more accepting of this premise if the main character was a lesbian and not some grungy sadboy @-@
Highly worth playing! I feel like this is the computer games enthusiast equivalent of enjoying a really sensitive and heartfelt cartoon (what comes to mind being Steven Universe or MLP). More to the point, there's often a lot of machismo jeering over seeing such displays of honesty and communicating sensitive information as crude and childish. I feel like by taking something so personal and painful like being trans in japan it displays a least to me how both at complete aversion to honesty or instead just sugarcoating the text as 'wholesome' and saying nothing else obscures the genuine bite underneath the surface.
Nobody in one night, hot springs gets violent or angry. Nobody dies if you make a wrong decision. The stakes are low and mundane but the rewards within the story system themselves are very high. The rewards outleap the risks in leaps and bounds, but shame creates a distortion effect where the rewards do not seem remotely worth it.
In America, where I'm playing this game from, the shame of asking a service place for particular accommodations is miniscule at best. 'Karen' customers in America come out of especially consumer privileging relationships with the service industry. American culture puts emphasis of shame instead to authenticity, employment dependency, and educational accommodations. There's a degree where which in private life there's a demand to be your 'authentic' self and that if you fail to meet up to the grand grin of authenticity you're not being a people person. However in employment life there's a degree instead to service the customer and the employer, to be everybody but yourself. Transphobia is most felt as an adult in America from the effects of employment discrimination like this.
I bring this point up mainly in relation to the zenful construction here, this cultural distinction is anticipated. Yes these considerations from the protagonist Haru are genuinely not that big of a deal to an American. For the people in Japan though these considerations are no laughing matter, bothering the system by asking for those accommodations is impolite and rude, which is a huge deal. The general impulse to a lot of these questions is 2nd hand cringe in japan, a higher likelihood to not make trouble. I believe part of what is great about this work is that it exposes within this cultural difference an implicit understanding just how hard and just how internal this process is.
I think the focus on specifically Japanese leisure experience reflects this to. The ginseng tea, clothing, and baths all have a quality of relaxing a tension. When Haru does get in a bath she mentions that she can feel the muscles in her body getting less tense. A lot of shame and self loathing itself marks itself in the body, its no surprise that Haru speaks often of being worn down and sleeping so much, and being 'too tired to talk about transgender stuff' if you refuse a lot of it. That effective connection between stress, shame, and discomfort and active bodily pain through not being able to be involved in the same leisure activity as everyone else speaks to a specific pain in discrimination that isn't generally touched on.
That's ultimately what makes the 'wholesomeness' of this text most worthwhile. It educates in the most non-intrusive way possible, hearts are deducted if you don't correct people for misgendering Haru or correcting people asking deadnames. You as the player are then implicitly encouraged by the games mechanics to go back in time and pick a different option. The game is encouraging you as much as possible to experience more. Going for the good endings is novel and going for the bad endings is just kind of boring. That doesn't mean people who got bad endings first in one night, hot springs are bad people. Instead I'm attempting to point out that such a mundane and transparent story with simple mechanics can reveal the concerns of the culture it spawned from.
There's a few different stories about particularly American reflection of trans shame. For purposes of here I'll highlight one He Fucked The Girl Out of Me, a text all about how labor relations and poverty create the blocks for shame. There is something very clearly vile and violent about that story, being around seedy people you have to fake fawning to. I believe that just as a lot of Japanese people would probably learn a lot about their cultural differences by playing that game, people outside Japan can see what one night, hot springs puts forward. Both reflect how trans people are suppressed and do it by focusing on the struggles of the mundane. Of having a tension in your muscles you cant get rid of.
Most importantly, what I love about these 'wholesome' texts is specifically how they try to bid and build networks of solidarity. In one night, hot springs being a good ally is about speaking up for discriminated people and motivating them into having a better time without pushing them, it's about communicating honestly about difficult topics. I believe that stories like this help us slowly push past the flaws of our own nation's culture and slowly build towards a necessary global solidarity.
This is why I take 'cartoons' more seriously and love them so much. The moral of the story is more complex the more you think about its wider implications and applications. Anybody who liked this game, you basically just played a really cozy episode of a TV cartoon, so think twice next time before you make jokes about bronies, otaku, or even 'disney adults' etc. They are not immature adults, they are people trying to interface with characterization and moral messages that are focused on solidarity and connecting with others. Tragic or violent art is often too stressful and reductive to those interests and so art very similar to this make it to their top 10s instead.
Nobody in one night, hot springs gets violent or angry. Nobody dies if you make a wrong decision. The stakes are low and mundane but the rewards within the story system themselves are very high. The rewards outleap the risks in leaps and bounds, but shame creates a distortion effect where the rewards do not seem remotely worth it.
In America, where I'm playing this game from, the shame of asking a service place for particular accommodations is miniscule at best. 'Karen' customers in America come out of especially consumer privileging relationships with the service industry. American culture puts emphasis of shame instead to authenticity, employment dependency, and educational accommodations. There's a degree where which in private life there's a demand to be your 'authentic' self and that if you fail to meet up to the grand grin of authenticity you're not being a people person. However in employment life there's a degree instead to service the customer and the employer, to be everybody but yourself. Transphobia is most felt as an adult in America from the effects of employment discrimination like this.
I bring this point up mainly in relation to the zenful construction here, this cultural distinction is anticipated. Yes these considerations from the protagonist Haru are genuinely not that big of a deal to an American. For the people in Japan though these considerations are no laughing matter, bothering the system by asking for those accommodations is impolite and rude, which is a huge deal. The general impulse to a lot of these questions is 2nd hand cringe in japan, a higher likelihood to not make trouble. I believe part of what is great about this work is that it exposes within this cultural difference an implicit understanding just how hard and just how internal this process is.
I think the focus on specifically Japanese leisure experience reflects this to. The ginseng tea, clothing, and baths all have a quality of relaxing a tension. When Haru does get in a bath she mentions that she can feel the muscles in her body getting less tense. A lot of shame and self loathing itself marks itself in the body, its no surprise that Haru speaks often of being worn down and sleeping so much, and being 'too tired to talk about transgender stuff' if you refuse a lot of it. That effective connection between stress, shame, and discomfort and active bodily pain through not being able to be involved in the same leisure activity as everyone else speaks to a specific pain in discrimination that isn't generally touched on.
That's ultimately what makes the 'wholesomeness' of this text most worthwhile. It educates in the most non-intrusive way possible, hearts are deducted if you don't correct people for misgendering Haru or correcting people asking deadnames. You as the player are then implicitly encouraged by the games mechanics to go back in time and pick a different option. The game is encouraging you as much as possible to experience more. Going for the good endings is novel and going for the bad endings is just kind of boring. That doesn't mean people who got bad endings first in one night, hot springs are bad people. Instead I'm attempting to point out that such a mundane and transparent story with simple mechanics can reveal the concerns of the culture it spawned from.
There's a few different stories about particularly American reflection of trans shame. For purposes of here I'll highlight one He Fucked The Girl Out of Me, a text all about how labor relations and poverty create the blocks for shame. There is something very clearly vile and violent about that story, being around seedy people you have to fake fawning to. I believe that just as a lot of Japanese people would probably learn a lot about their cultural differences by playing that game, people outside Japan can see what one night, hot springs puts forward. Both reflect how trans people are suppressed and do it by focusing on the struggles of the mundane. Of having a tension in your muscles you cant get rid of.
Most importantly, what I love about these 'wholesome' texts is specifically how they try to bid and build networks of solidarity. In one night, hot springs being a good ally is about speaking up for discriminated people and motivating them into having a better time without pushing them, it's about communicating honestly about difficult topics. I believe that stories like this help us slowly push past the flaws of our own nation's culture and slowly build towards a necessary global solidarity.
This is why I take 'cartoons' more seriously and love them so much. The moral of the story is more complex the more you think about its wider implications and applications. Anybody who liked this game, you basically just played a really cozy episode of a TV cartoon, so think twice next time before you make jokes about bronies, otaku, or even 'disney adults' etc. They are not immature adults, they are people trying to interface with characterization and moral messages that are focused on solidarity and connecting with others. Tragic or violent art is often too stressful and reductive to those interests and so art very similar to this make it to their top 10s instead.
CW: This is a Eulogy piece so there's talks about Death and the world, but Eulogies are hurt by spoiling them too much even in CWs. So please just read responsibly and know I'm not going to bring up anything intensely triggering in subject matter. If you get outraged or upset, things I try to CW in advance of, in this case thats the point. I will be talking about Suicide Statistics and the Pandemic though.
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"Advertised both in this game and the original is a series of 3 failed kickstarter campaigns which, distressingly enough, is still up despite the original creator's death. On top of this, both of the current games he has up on Gamejolt are free, and the kickstarters are about making faithful 'remakes' of these for a pitifully small amount of money." - Erato Heti, Presentable Liberty Insight emphasis my own.
This game is never coming out, at least not by Wertpol. That said I think there's something almost painfully important about a game that will never come out to remain on here. It marks a crucial gravestone of the unfound aspiration of the young artist. If works like "Portrait of The Artist By a Young Man" reflect the process of the bohemian in the unsteady early phases before reaching a point of actualization (in Joyce's later fiction like Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake both considered to be the greatest in the western canon). Then its in works like these, like Presentable Liberty, No Longer Human, and The Bell Jar that are important to telling the other side of that story of the plights of the young artist and thinker. The story of a life cut short.
Originally I wasn't even going to talk about this, even though I knew it was on here, as I was afraid that by mentioning its here the memorial itself would be ripped away. I thought that even rating it and giving attention to it at all would get it destroyed by the site moderators or by IGDBs content system. I don't care anymore, it's still here months later, and its still been ignored. If that does happen, it'll reflect a deep truth, the systems of artistic memory don't want you to remember the failed project, they desperately want you to forget that it was even tried.
It's important, at least to me, that people didn't know that this existed for so long. This whole textual eulogy, to a man I don't know, reeks of pretentiousness, or at least pretension. Of setting myself, some loser critic that uses a website too much, to speak so highly of a work. To compare it to the literary works of Plath and Joyce? Not only is that patently ridiculous as the game isn't that good, but also who the fuck am I to even be doing that?
But, and you have to excuse me, that's exactly it, I'm just some nobody. We all are nobodies in the cruel grip of future-time, none of us are really immortalized, some can just delay how long it is until we are forgotten, for a little longer, but none of us are so immortal as we think after death...
On the other hand to, there also the fact the most people are on a razor's edge with the expression of their early work. Joyce almost lost portrait in a fire, because he almost threw it away in there, his family fetched it out for him so the story goes. Of course these early works aren't perfect, of course they are unrefined. It doesn't take all that much to convince anybody they are worthless.
A casual friend of mine on a rotting social platform once reflected something to the effect that she was sad about all the games that haven't gotten made, and that she thinks about that a lot. I mused, naively, that this is "a humbling reminder i think." and that stuff like the pandemic, and global warming are 'background stories' in the world stage. privately I recall thinking something to the effect of seeing it as regretting all the aborted babies that were never born but I guess I never said that part to her. I might have also incorrectly convinced her I was right or that it was too sentimental to post publicly...I feel so bad for causing that now that I look back it, her reflection would have been so useful here and now I'm isolated with the thought with nobody else to quote off of. Who even tries to talk about the art unfinished, because the author behind them is dead?
It's hard to even say that sort of naivete is wrong. In fact, it's deeply useful to living an unperturbed life to ignore it for the most part. In the same way ignoring the existence of the cemetary in your town is a real plot of land taken up...important to try and put it out of your mind.
It's also important for the nation state to under report or ignore death causes to, especially ones that could have been prevented. I played Presentable Liberty during the pandemic and connected the concerns of work to what I saw as "The Party of Death", the party, not of any one political party affiliation mind you, that's able to capitalize on Death itself, and use it to keep their engine going. I believe now, part of that is in obscuring the numbers as best possible, until its too late:
"With the latest COVID-19 deaths reported to WHO now exceeding 3.3 million, based on the excess mortality estimates produced for 2020, we are likely facing a significant undercount of total deaths directly and indirectly attributed to COVID-19."
Excess Mortality is the way of finding out the true number of deaths by comparing to what it was before an event has happened. This is how was know also, that during a recession, suicide rates usually spike, from 1999 to 2007, a study titled INCREASE IN STATE SUICIDE RATES IN THE USA DURING ECONOMIC RECESSION found in the results that:
"A one percentage point rise in unemploy-
ment is associated with a 0.99% increase in the suicide rate
([0.60, 1.38], p < 0.0001), which is closer to the association
estimated when there were no labour market protections
(1·06%)"
Source:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61910-2/fulltext
It's not meta-data per say, so much as just analyzing public statistics within a specific period of time. The idea that suicides go up with a recession is a powerful point in the statistical imagination. I say that because the metadata over a long time, century say, it doesn't exist. At least, not to my knowledge.
Let me complicate it even more: this paranoia about recessions and death became very transparent to the Party of Death as a political tool that may have used it as a tool to invoke more death. The idea is great in our public conciousness of the time, the argument that the economy should be opened up because people are going to die from issues other than sickness, like say depression or unemployment. This is in spite of the fact that suicide actually went down during the pandemic. In a study called Changes in Suicide Rates — United States, 2018–2019 it was found that, contrary to our expectations of recessions "From 2018 to 2019, the overall suicide rate declined for the first time in over a decade." and, more specifically:
"In 2019, a total of 47,511 deaths were attributable to suicide. From 2018 to 2019, the overall suicide rate declined significantly by 2.1% (14.2 per 100,000 population to 13.9) (Table); among females, the rate declined by 3.2% (6.2 to 6.0) and among males by 1.8% (22.8 to 22.4)."
One thing we do know though is that, suicide is preventable, but what does it mean to be preventable? Well, it means that it's preventable by how societies are structured, same article:
"Research has shown that suicide is preventable and that risks for suicide extend beyond mental health and lack of access to mental health treatment alone (7). Suicide prevention must focus on the constellation of associated factors, including mental illness, substance misuse, high conflict or violent relationships, social isolation, job and financial problems, lack of community connectedness, barriers to suicide-related care, and access to lethal means among persons at risk."
Suicide is preventable, but not at all merely by the 'strong will' of individuals. One does not 'think' away a barrel in the mouth from going off, either it goes off or it doesn't.
Society, in particular the negligence of the machine of neglect in the 2000s, it killed this man and many like him, as suicide went up 33% over the course of the 2000s. Then, it turned around and killed millions in pandemic neglect. Both are dead, both were filled with many 'artists' and people, and family, and everything else that one can fit in the labels of a human body. The most important of all though, is 'nobody'.
It will probably kill again.
Keep an eye on that Excess Mortality number. Check in on death trends, and who's dying and who isnt. Don't let The Party of Death keep this information out of your mind for too long, that's how they like it. Rest in peace Wertpol, you were able to illuminate a truth about economic reality.
In Memoriam, Wertpol
-----------------------------------------------------------
"Advertised both in this game and the original is a series of 3 failed kickstarter campaigns which, distressingly enough, is still up despite the original creator's death. On top of this, both of the current games he has up on Gamejolt are free, and the kickstarters are about making faithful 'remakes' of these for a pitifully small amount of money." - Erato Heti, Presentable Liberty Insight emphasis my own.
This game is never coming out, at least not by Wertpol. That said I think there's something almost painfully important about a game that will never come out to remain on here. It marks a crucial gravestone of the unfound aspiration of the young artist. If works like "Portrait of The Artist By a Young Man" reflect the process of the bohemian in the unsteady early phases before reaching a point of actualization (in Joyce's later fiction like Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake both considered to be the greatest in the western canon). Then its in works like these, like Presentable Liberty, No Longer Human, and The Bell Jar that are important to telling the other side of that story of the plights of the young artist and thinker. The story of a life cut short.
Originally I wasn't even going to talk about this, even though I knew it was on here, as I was afraid that by mentioning its here the memorial itself would be ripped away. I thought that even rating it and giving attention to it at all would get it destroyed by the site moderators or by IGDBs content system. I don't care anymore, it's still here months later, and its still been ignored. If that does happen, it'll reflect a deep truth, the systems of artistic memory don't want you to remember the failed project, they desperately want you to forget that it was even tried.
It's important, at least to me, that people didn't know that this existed for so long. This whole textual eulogy, to a man I don't know, reeks of pretentiousness, or at least pretension. Of setting myself, some loser critic that uses a website too much, to speak so highly of a work. To compare it to the literary works of Plath and Joyce? Not only is that patently ridiculous as the game isn't that good, but also who the fuck am I to even be doing that?
But, and you have to excuse me, that's exactly it, I'm just some nobody. We all are nobodies in the cruel grip of future-time, none of us are really immortalized, some can just delay how long it is until we are forgotten, for a little longer, but none of us are so immortal as we think after death...
On the other hand to, there also the fact the most people are on a razor's edge with the expression of their early work. Joyce almost lost portrait in a fire, because he almost threw it away in there, his family fetched it out for him so the story goes. Of course these early works aren't perfect, of course they are unrefined. It doesn't take all that much to convince anybody they are worthless.
A casual friend of mine on a rotting social platform once reflected something to the effect that she was sad about all the games that haven't gotten made, and that she thinks about that a lot. I mused, naively, that this is "a humbling reminder i think." and that stuff like the pandemic, and global warming are 'background stories' in the world stage. privately I recall thinking something to the effect of seeing it as regretting all the aborted babies that were never born but I guess I never said that part to her. I might have also incorrectly convinced her I was right or that it was too sentimental to post publicly...I feel so bad for causing that now that I look back it, her reflection would have been so useful here and now I'm isolated with the thought with nobody else to quote off of. Who even tries to talk about the art unfinished, because the author behind them is dead?
It's hard to even say that sort of naivete is wrong. In fact, it's deeply useful to living an unperturbed life to ignore it for the most part. In the same way ignoring the existence of the cemetary in your town is a real plot of land taken up...important to try and put it out of your mind.
It's also important for the nation state to under report or ignore death causes to, especially ones that could have been prevented. I played Presentable Liberty during the pandemic and connected the concerns of work to what I saw as "The Party of Death", the party, not of any one political party affiliation mind you, that's able to capitalize on Death itself, and use it to keep their engine going. I believe now, part of that is in obscuring the numbers as best possible, until its too late:
"With the latest COVID-19 deaths reported to WHO now exceeding 3.3 million, based on the excess mortality estimates produced for 2020, we are likely facing a significant undercount of total deaths directly and indirectly attributed to COVID-19."
Excess Mortality is the way of finding out the true number of deaths by comparing to what it was before an event has happened. This is how was know also, that during a recession, suicide rates usually spike, from 1999 to 2007, a study titled INCREASE IN STATE SUICIDE RATES IN THE USA DURING ECONOMIC RECESSION found in the results that:
"A one percentage point rise in unemploy-
ment is associated with a 0.99% increase in the suicide rate
([0.60, 1.38], p < 0.0001), which is closer to the association
estimated when there were no labour market protections
(1·06%)"
Source:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61910-2/fulltext
It's not meta-data per say, so much as just analyzing public statistics within a specific period of time. The idea that suicides go up with a recession is a powerful point in the statistical imagination. I say that because the metadata over a long time, century say, it doesn't exist. At least, not to my knowledge.
Let me complicate it even more: this paranoia about recessions and death became very transparent to the Party of Death as a political tool that may have used it as a tool to invoke more death. The idea is great in our public conciousness of the time, the argument that the economy should be opened up because people are going to die from issues other than sickness, like say depression or unemployment. This is in spite of the fact that suicide actually went down during the pandemic. In a study called Changes in Suicide Rates — United States, 2018–2019 it was found that, contrary to our expectations of recessions "From 2018 to 2019, the overall suicide rate declined for the first time in over a decade." and, more specifically:
"In 2019, a total of 47,511 deaths were attributable to suicide. From 2018 to 2019, the overall suicide rate declined significantly by 2.1% (14.2 per 100,000 population to 13.9) (Table); among females, the rate declined by 3.2% (6.2 to 6.0) and among males by 1.8% (22.8 to 22.4)."
One thing we do know though is that, suicide is preventable, but what does it mean to be preventable? Well, it means that it's preventable by how societies are structured, same article:
"Research has shown that suicide is preventable and that risks for suicide extend beyond mental health and lack of access to mental health treatment alone (7). Suicide prevention must focus on the constellation of associated factors, including mental illness, substance misuse, high conflict or violent relationships, social isolation, job and financial problems, lack of community connectedness, barriers to suicide-related care, and access to lethal means among persons at risk."
Suicide is preventable, but not at all merely by the 'strong will' of individuals. One does not 'think' away a barrel in the mouth from going off, either it goes off or it doesn't.
Society, in particular the negligence of the machine of neglect in the 2000s, it killed this man and many like him, as suicide went up 33% over the course of the 2000s. Then, it turned around and killed millions in pandemic neglect. Both are dead, both were filled with many 'artists' and people, and family, and everything else that one can fit in the labels of a human body. The most important of all though, is 'nobody'.
It will probably kill again.
Keep an eye on that Excess Mortality number. Check in on death trends, and who's dying and who isnt. Don't let The Party of Death keep this information out of your mind for too long, that's how they like it. Rest in peace Wertpol, you were able to illuminate a truth about economic reality.
In Memoriam, Wertpol
2022
A mixed bag. I think this game is probably worth playing if you want a milder take on institutional pressures and how they effect subjective worth, more intense versions of that tale can be found in harsher portrayals like the No One Can Ever Know, the christian trauma of We Know The Devil, and the wandering inadequacy found in Life Tastes Like Cardboard . Holy Ghost Story instead glides for a more tonally mundane relationship to such insecurities, giving a possible tonal alternative to the ideas of such suffering as this usually climactic limit-experience that breaks through to some comfort. Though it should be mentioned I highly recommend prioritizing those works if you can handle them.
That's why it's actually worth talking about seriously, since a more impressionist watercolor portrait of these issues is not seen much around. In theory, this game is really adding something totally profound and useful to the table by taking such subject to the ghost story, as it allows us to view the problems more in relationship to an abstracted past than a post-traumatized present. It allows the reader to 'refresh' from the sins of a bad grade or a failed semester. Yet at least in my view it's held back by scattered execution and sophomoric presentation.
The best parts here are in how word choice and sentence presentation reaffirms the overall theme of being too paralyzed by your own mental shortcomings to push forward.
In particular, that theme of guilt-bearing insecurity is found through how sterile a lot of the text part of the presentation is. For example the scroll of the text is at such a pace where you will be outpaced by the scroll itself while still feeling its effect. Then, the text itself is in a unfamiliar font style, what the font checking system brought up to me as blackboard, apparently mainly used for formulas in textbooks. The effect of these two operations in tandem is like looking at "letters grouped together but making no words that looked like anything to me", to quote the ghost girl protagonist Siobhan. This overall translucent makes it feel like the reader is constantly fazing in and out of focus with the text and this is a great effect genuinely as it connects well to the feelings of perpetuity. These are reinforced further by the use of classical piano riffs in the empty classroom sequence giving a hauntological 'failed learning' element added intensity. Classical music is a go to for studying and learning, but if you've ever actually tried it then like me you probably found it far too disorienting to actually keep on for very long. By using the simplified melodies that repeat rather than move through the whole movement, that hauntological element of being trapped in the past is there. Now people have almost entirely technologically adjusted to using electronic ambience or lo fi hip hop instrumentals, giving these orchestrations even more of an antiquated effect. It really captures that reality that this is in part about trying to make peace with the hauntology of past pressures. Of a tradition and feeling of learning that you may have been subject to and is familar but is not entirely your own. This is Siobhan's story, and she makes damn well sure to remind you of that at more than a few points in the narrative.
This effect on it own already produces one problem, the overall disjointedness and passiveness means that you're not going to be taken in by Siobhan's tale all at once and your initial relationship will probably be one of irritation before settling in properly. She just starts talking to you as if there's no trouble at all, and the sentences flow gives a sense of tedium and impatience that isn't really settled evenly in advance. While narratively fitting, it also relies on a profound amount of reader persistence that is likely exacerbated when considering the games weaknesses of giving the average player nowhere else to focus their attention.
For example the visual presentation in general falls much further with how rudimentary the rest of the visual information is. Siohban has her hand stuck permanently ajar her hip, with no other change in character gestures. The school space itself is so generic I was constantly wondering in the back of my mind whether it was using the same environments as Doki Doki Literature Club (altho the Prologue and Resolution settings were stellar). A lot of the dialogue is flat and there's no striking vocabulary or unique word choices for the reader to weigh. I bring this up not to be mean spirited but instead to point out that a visual novel is great for giving information in a way that distracts from the weight of the tone, the eye candy is meant to give readers something to latch onto in distraction, for particularly literary works, the point of the visual novel format is to capitalize on these distractions to such an extent as to cause the reader not to feel irritated by the oppression. Finally the 'hideki anno' style title card transitions read for me as just abruptly distracting, and just felt like a homage. Sure, the dreamlike fragmentation and the feeling of being shattered into the next piece of text is neat, but it was ineffective to me due to that minimalism.
I'm very sympathetic to the addressed reasons why the work is as rudimentary as it is, mostly being as Woodaba mentions in their own retrospective, to quote:
"Anxiety prevented me from reaching out to talented artists and musicians I know about commissioning stuff that would have helped give the game an actual visual identity to call it's own, and I don't want that to happen next time.".
The only reason I want to call attention to it at all, is because more visual novel readers weirdly don't even seem to give a shit about this quality at all in how they overall feel about a work, instead moving for philosophical or moral critique. In my mind, Milk Outside a Bag Outside a Bag is probably the best in terms of maximizing its visual information and transitions in ways that help the reader give focus away from the brutality of the work, and to no fucking avail in that case. At best you'd get an aside of admission 'its pretty' before reveling in a critique of the abstract representation of mental illness as being shallow. For a lot of people it seems the overall effect of Visual Novels matters mainly to them only how much they liked the characters and how 'shallow' they thought the thematic undertones are. This is something I know that I won't individually change at all, to the point that calling it out is probably just grandstanding. It's just hard to convey how intensely frustrating and reductive that approach can be to progress in the arts.
Due to a lack of focus given to the mechanical or formal aspects of the medium, people instead move to needless moralism, and the fact is Visual Novels as a genuine medium are not taken seriously so it makes sense why there's not a large push for those nuances. It's not until we actually start respecting the medium and even seeing these niche indie projects as worthy of critical value will we be able to see a reasonable dent in the isolation here. So as not to soapbox too much more myself, I think the best way to view this work is as an early public manuscript and prototype for getting the bearings with renpy. Otherwise it's almost entirely hard to justify the merits of it being in the visual novel form when a purely text driven system like twine would suit it 'better'. That's not to say I think it shouldn't have happened though, I think its important to ask ourselves 'would this games story and presentation fit better in x engine/medium' and then realize that if the answer to that is 'yes' and the game is an early work, its probably intended to springboard the creator into better familiarity with the engine in question than be a fully fleshed masterwork. Without that heuristic, it's easy to be unnecessarily cruel to any text that passes you by. That said I think it's still acceptable to let such distinctions affect overall opinion.
With that said there's also a lot of typos to the point the strains the immersion people tend to have with typos, which I'm quite surprised have been so overlooked by others. Last time typos were mentioned about a work that was written by a regular of the site (Post-Night Devil Disclosure) the author went back and cleaned up the typos. So maybe that's why people are not even mentioning it, because they realize such a complaint would seem dated? Nonetheless, they are frequent enough to make for a very jagged ride.
A part of me is unsure about how to feel on how choices are handled. The first 2 dont matter and the last one matters a lot, but comes as a complete refutation to siobhan's powerful characterization of self agency. However overall the character portrayal of siobhan is great, it shows her as a combination of plain and yet feisty, a combination typical I tend to see in christians I've interacted with. I do think it would have been more effective in terms of the descriptive elements if a spare adjective was thrown in now and then.
Regardless, I look forward to Woodaba's next venture here if it comes to pass. I think they have a good understanding of the foundations outlined. It's always cool to see this process of game creation demystified to as it creates the conditions for others to try it out for themselves.
I will say though for anybody reading, and I quite honestly do not mean this as a slight to this game as this is just something I've been thinking about reading obscurity projects, but if you make a game and even if you publish it publicly, its completely optional to add it to this database. This probably seems painfully obvious but if you don't upload it, odds are nobody else will either, and so you don't have to have this looming fear of having your passion projects judged by online bullies in advance. I've seen people upload internet films they've made to letterboxd and then regret it so I feel like its worth noting that immortalizing the work in a public database is optional but likely difficult to remove after including it.
Similarly, Do not add Woodaba's or any other user on here's games to IGDB without their permission. Not everything needs eyeballs, and your +1 to the games you've played is not that worth the potential detriments there. I hope I'm not stepping a line by mentioning the importance of that here.
That's why it's actually worth talking about seriously, since a more impressionist watercolor portrait of these issues is not seen much around. In theory, this game is really adding something totally profound and useful to the table by taking such subject to the ghost story, as it allows us to view the problems more in relationship to an abstracted past than a post-traumatized present. It allows the reader to 'refresh' from the sins of a bad grade or a failed semester. Yet at least in my view it's held back by scattered execution and sophomoric presentation.
The best parts here are in how word choice and sentence presentation reaffirms the overall theme of being too paralyzed by your own mental shortcomings to push forward.
In particular, that theme of guilt-bearing insecurity is found through how sterile a lot of the text part of the presentation is. For example the scroll of the text is at such a pace where you will be outpaced by the scroll itself while still feeling its effect. Then, the text itself is in a unfamiliar font style, what the font checking system brought up to me as blackboard, apparently mainly used for formulas in textbooks. The effect of these two operations in tandem is like looking at "letters grouped together but making no words that looked like anything to me", to quote the ghost girl protagonist Siobhan. This overall translucent makes it feel like the reader is constantly fazing in and out of focus with the text and this is a great effect genuinely as it connects well to the feelings of perpetuity. These are reinforced further by the use of classical piano riffs in the empty classroom sequence giving a hauntological 'failed learning' element added intensity. Classical music is a go to for studying and learning, but if you've ever actually tried it then like me you probably found it far too disorienting to actually keep on for very long. By using the simplified melodies that repeat rather than move through the whole movement, that hauntological element of being trapped in the past is there. Now people have almost entirely technologically adjusted to using electronic ambience or lo fi hip hop instrumentals, giving these orchestrations even more of an antiquated effect. It really captures that reality that this is in part about trying to make peace with the hauntology of past pressures. Of a tradition and feeling of learning that you may have been subject to and is familar but is not entirely your own. This is Siobhan's story, and she makes damn well sure to remind you of that at more than a few points in the narrative.
This effect on it own already produces one problem, the overall disjointedness and passiveness means that you're not going to be taken in by Siobhan's tale all at once and your initial relationship will probably be one of irritation before settling in properly. She just starts talking to you as if there's no trouble at all, and the sentences flow gives a sense of tedium and impatience that isn't really settled evenly in advance. While narratively fitting, it also relies on a profound amount of reader persistence that is likely exacerbated when considering the games weaknesses of giving the average player nowhere else to focus their attention.
For example the visual presentation in general falls much further with how rudimentary the rest of the visual information is. Siohban has her hand stuck permanently ajar her hip, with no other change in character gestures. The school space itself is so generic I was constantly wondering in the back of my mind whether it was using the same environments as Doki Doki Literature Club (altho the Prologue and Resolution settings were stellar). A lot of the dialogue is flat and there's no striking vocabulary or unique word choices for the reader to weigh. I bring this up not to be mean spirited but instead to point out that a visual novel is great for giving information in a way that distracts from the weight of the tone, the eye candy is meant to give readers something to latch onto in distraction, for particularly literary works, the point of the visual novel format is to capitalize on these distractions to such an extent as to cause the reader not to feel irritated by the oppression. Finally the 'hideki anno' style title card transitions read for me as just abruptly distracting, and just felt like a homage. Sure, the dreamlike fragmentation and the feeling of being shattered into the next piece of text is neat, but it was ineffective to me due to that minimalism.
I'm very sympathetic to the addressed reasons why the work is as rudimentary as it is, mostly being as Woodaba mentions in their own retrospective, to quote:
"Anxiety prevented me from reaching out to talented artists and musicians I know about commissioning stuff that would have helped give the game an actual visual identity to call it's own, and I don't want that to happen next time.".
The only reason I want to call attention to it at all, is because more visual novel readers weirdly don't even seem to give a shit about this quality at all in how they overall feel about a work, instead moving for philosophical or moral critique. In my mind, Milk Outside a Bag Outside a Bag is probably the best in terms of maximizing its visual information and transitions in ways that help the reader give focus away from the brutality of the work, and to no fucking avail in that case. At best you'd get an aside of admission 'its pretty' before reveling in a critique of the abstract representation of mental illness as being shallow. For a lot of people it seems the overall effect of Visual Novels matters mainly to them only how much they liked the characters and how 'shallow' they thought the thematic undertones are. This is something I know that I won't individually change at all, to the point that calling it out is probably just grandstanding. It's just hard to convey how intensely frustrating and reductive that approach can be to progress in the arts.
Due to a lack of focus given to the mechanical or formal aspects of the medium, people instead move to needless moralism, and the fact is Visual Novels as a genuine medium are not taken seriously so it makes sense why there's not a large push for those nuances. It's not until we actually start respecting the medium and even seeing these niche indie projects as worthy of critical value will we be able to see a reasonable dent in the isolation here. So as not to soapbox too much more myself, I think the best way to view this work is as an early public manuscript and prototype for getting the bearings with renpy. Otherwise it's almost entirely hard to justify the merits of it being in the visual novel form when a purely text driven system like twine would suit it 'better'. That's not to say I think it shouldn't have happened though, I think its important to ask ourselves 'would this games story and presentation fit better in x engine/medium' and then realize that if the answer to that is 'yes' and the game is an early work, its probably intended to springboard the creator into better familiarity with the engine in question than be a fully fleshed masterwork. Without that heuristic, it's easy to be unnecessarily cruel to any text that passes you by. That said I think it's still acceptable to let such distinctions affect overall opinion.
With that said there's also a lot of typos to the point the strains the immersion people tend to have with typos, which I'm quite surprised have been so overlooked by others. Last time typos were mentioned about a work that was written by a regular of the site (Post-Night Devil Disclosure) the author went back and cleaned up the typos. So maybe that's why people are not even mentioning it, because they realize such a complaint would seem dated? Nonetheless, they are frequent enough to make for a very jagged ride.
A part of me is unsure about how to feel on how choices are handled. The first 2 dont matter and the last one matters a lot, but comes as a complete refutation to siobhan's powerful characterization of self agency. However overall the character portrayal of siobhan is great, it shows her as a combination of plain and yet feisty, a combination typical I tend to see in christians I've interacted with. I do think it would have been more effective in terms of the descriptive elements if a spare adjective was thrown in now and then.
Regardless, I look forward to Woodaba's next venture here if it comes to pass. I think they have a good understanding of the foundations outlined. It's always cool to see this process of game creation demystified to as it creates the conditions for others to try it out for themselves.
I will say though for anybody reading, and I quite honestly do not mean this as a slight to this game as this is just something I've been thinking about reading obscurity projects, but if you make a game and even if you publish it publicly, its completely optional to add it to this database. This probably seems painfully obvious but if you don't upload it, odds are nobody else will either, and so you don't have to have this looming fear of having your passion projects judged by online bullies in advance. I've seen people upload internet films they've made to letterboxd and then regret it so I feel like its worth noting that immortalizing the work in a public database is optional but likely difficult to remove after including it.
Similarly, Do not add Woodaba's or any other user on here's games to IGDB without their permission. Not everything needs eyeballs, and your +1 to the games you've played is not that worth the potential detriments there. I hope I'm not stepping a line by mentioning the importance of that here.
2022
Interesting in concept. Takes the system of the hilariously obscure and failed digital card game Artifact and massively simplifies it. Basically, the idea is you have to use your cards as resources to control 3 separate territories, rather than attacking the enemy cards or clearing enemy health. After 6 turns, whoever has 2 of the 3 territories wins. There are no spells either, just a bunch of hero that give you 'power' towards that goal thus dramatically simplifying deck building.
There's a lot of special unique nuances to the game as a result, in contrast to something like hearthstone, to the point that it becomes difficult to properly convey. For example the game has only maximum 12 card decks, and you only play 6 turns, so you end up getting a lot of hand consistency as a result, but ironically you also dont in a way that's difficult to pin down. For one, there is 50 different territory effects many of which radically change the pace of the game, for example one is called "The Raft: Whoever fills this location first draws a 6-Cost card. It costs 0." This benefit is so huge that it becomes imperative to try and race for it after it being revealed, but 1 territories effect is revealed each turn. So naturally if that effect is the rightmost territory, what will happen is that the game becomes almost entirely decided by who risked putting a hero there first without even knowing what the effect would be. It's really hard to describe just how volatile these various effects become to the course of the game but at the same time because you only get 75% of your deck in the short game you cant 100% rely on running 1 late game closer combo, not to mention the territories will probably just mess up your gameplan anyway.
The other really strange inclusion is the 'bluffing' component. Basically you can at any point double the stakes of play by 'snapping' meaning that if you win you get double the amount of ladder elo to further towards those extrinsic rewards, rewards also double on the last turn to. You can basically use this as an option to in theory scare your opponent into leaving early by leveraging a snap to 'raise'. Or you can cut your own losses and leave. This creates a neat little poker game metagame that has an air of unusual suave charm to the experience, considering the vulgarity surrounding aesthetics at play here.
What you're left with as a result of these mechanics is a strange type of deduction game where you have to try and figure out how strong you think peoples remaining hand is, whether they are running 'x' late game card and whether or not you have to tools in your next few turns to control the territories. This part of the game is very amusing and a great foundation for the play experience.
The issue though is that the ladder fundamentally doesnt matter at all, due to the fact the extrinsic rewards for doing well are so trivial as to be irrelevant. Half of them give no actual reward at all in terms of currency or cards instead just giving you barely a daily play rate of gems, the other half give prestige bonuses like just new avatars or titles which could not possibly matter less because there's no in game social element whatsoever. So while there's an intrinsic reward for ranking up there is no meaningful motivator for taking the 'stakes' of play that seriously. To compare think of how it feels to play no-stakes poker, realizing that raising or even all inning does not matter at all. Folding naturally only becomes important when you specifically want to stop playing or if only you specifically want to win, but the 'non seriousness' of the play environment has a natural effect of completely rattling the 'good' players of poker because without actual risk their opponents play decisions become that much more unpredictable completely undermining the point of the game. This is why I argued so incredibly fiercely to the idea that gambling does in itself have a profoundly dynamic and entertaining mode of play in my Vampire Survivors write up, and I stand by that 100% here.
The issue is obviously not that I want them to financialize the game even more than it is, if anything this complaint actually comes out of the opposite. This complaint is bundled in with the general fact that this game is really making you grind for those cards. But it's doing it in a really odd way. Unlike making you rip open card packs and experiencing the 'novelty' of having a card others might not, instead you have to rank up your cards through a 'pool' system. With the cards you unlock being in that pool. This has a lot of theoretical consistency as literally almost nobody in the same card pool level as you is going to have cards you wouldn't, thus allowing you to assess what your opponent is going to play more accurately, and not get rolled by the opponent running 1 broken 'legendary' card you dont have. The issue is that the ranking system is not pool locked at all, eventually you will get to a point where you're fighting against players are running cards you've literally never seen before. At these ranks you're no longer fighting players that have just 1 or 2 new cards but rather, players for which every card is new. The issue is that accessing the options of those pools (say pool 3 or 4) is only doable by months of daily quests really, or by fronting a lot of cash to get there more quickly (and even this would still take probably a week just to get there since even the shops have a cooldown). Combine this with labyrinthine upgrade systems, season passes, shops options, etc. and you seem to have a system that heavily incentivizes envy over success. The implicit game function seems to be that how well you can play doesn't matter at all, instead, doesn't that enemies Rhino seem so cool? Too bad, you have to get to level 300 first. Grind chimpmonkey grind.
You have a game almost entirely dedicated to paywalls and timegates. A game that has throttled the dynamicism of card games into the chemical compounds of envy. They know what they are doing, they know that if they made the ladder matter at all it would make the player too satisfied, and you're never supposed to be too satisfied. It's the same reason why Diablo Immortal gives you nobody to play with after you spent 10 grand on it, you thought that was an accident? No child, you buy because you are unsatisfied, and you are unsatisfied so you buy. The heart wants, and it wants, and it eats itself alive with the almighty dollar.
Download your parasite little one.
There's a lot of special unique nuances to the game as a result, in contrast to something like hearthstone, to the point that it becomes difficult to properly convey. For example the game has only maximum 12 card decks, and you only play 6 turns, so you end up getting a lot of hand consistency as a result, but ironically you also dont in a way that's difficult to pin down. For one, there is 50 different territory effects many of which radically change the pace of the game, for example one is called "The Raft: Whoever fills this location first draws a 6-Cost card. It costs 0." This benefit is so huge that it becomes imperative to try and race for it after it being revealed, but 1 territories effect is revealed each turn. So naturally if that effect is the rightmost territory, what will happen is that the game becomes almost entirely decided by who risked putting a hero there first without even knowing what the effect would be. It's really hard to describe just how volatile these various effects become to the course of the game but at the same time because you only get 75% of your deck in the short game you cant 100% rely on running 1 late game closer combo, not to mention the territories will probably just mess up your gameplan anyway.
The other really strange inclusion is the 'bluffing' component. Basically you can at any point double the stakes of play by 'snapping' meaning that if you win you get double the amount of ladder elo to further towards those extrinsic rewards, rewards also double on the last turn to. You can basically use this as an option to in theory scare your opponent into leaving early by leveraging a snap to 'raise'. Or you can cut your own losses and leave. This creates a neat little poker game metagame that has an air of unusual suave charm to the experience, considering the vulgarity surrounding aesthetics at play here.
What you're left with as a result of these mechanics is a strange type of deduction game where you have to try and figure out how strong you think peoples remaining hand is, whether they are running 'x' late game card and whether or not you have to tools in your next few turns to control the territories. This part of the game is very amusing and a great foundation for the play experience.
The issue though is that the ladder fundamentally doesnt matter at all, due to the fact the extrinsic rewards for doing well are so trivial as to be irrelevant. Half of them give no actual reward at all in terms of currency or cards instead just giving you barely a daily play rate of gems, the other half give prestige bonuses like just new avatars or titles which could not possibly matter less because there's no in game social element whatsoever. So while there's an intrinsic reward for ranking up there is no meaningful motivator for taking the 'stakes' of play that seriously. To compare think of how it feels to play no-stakes poker, realizing that raising or even all inning does not matter at all. Folding naturally only becomes important when you specifically want to stop playing or if only you specifically want to win, but the 'non seriousness' of the play environment has a natural effect of completely rattling the 'good' players of poker because without actual risk their opponents play decisions become that much more unpredictable completely undermining the point of the game. This is why I argued so incredibly fiercely to the idea that gambling does in itself have a profoundly dynamic and entertaining mode of play in my Vampire Survivors write up, and I stand by that 100% here.
The issue is obviously not that I want them to financialize the game even more than it is, if anything this complaint actually comes out of the opposite. This complaint is bundled in with the general fact that this game is really making you grind for those cards. But it's doing it in a really odd way. Unlike making you rip open card packs and experiencing the 'novelty' of having a card others might not, instead you have to rank up your cards through a 'pool' system. With the cards you unlock being in that pool. This has a lot of theoretical consistency as literally almost nobody in the same card pool level as you is going to have cards you wouldn't, thus allowing you to assess what your opponent is going to play more accurately, and not get rolled by the opponent running 1 broken 'legendary' card you dont have. The issue is that the ranking system is not pool locked at all, eventually you will get to a point where you're fighting against players are running cards you've literally never seen before. At these ranks you're no longer fighting players that have just 1 or 2 new cards but rather, players for which every card is new. The issue is that accessing the options of those pools (say pool 3 or 4) is only doable by months of daily quests really, or by fronting a lot of cash to get there more quickly (and even this would still take probably a week just to get there since even the shops have a cooldown). Combine this with labyrinthine upgrade systems, season passes, shops options, etc. and you seem to have a system that heavily incentivizes envy over success. The implicit game function seems to be that how well you can play doesn't matter at all, instead, doesn't that enemies Rhino seem so cool? Too bad, you have to get to level 300 first. Grind chimpmonkey grind.
You have a game almost entirely dedicated to paywalls and timegates. A game that has throttled the dynamicism of card games into the chemical compounds of envy. They know what they are doing, they know that if they made the ladder matter at all it would make the player too satisfied, and you're never supposed to be too satisfied. It's the same reason why Diablo Immortal gives you nobody to play with after you spent 10 grand on it, you thought that was an accident? No child, you buy because you are unsatisfied, and you are unsatisfied so you buy. The heart wants, and it wants, and it eats itself alive with the almighty dollar.
Download your parasite little one.
My Policy Guidelines
-----------------------------------------------------------
Abstract industrial calamity on the struggle of the repressed queer youth against the forces of theocracy described through electrical wire pulses.
I beat the game and moved over to NG+ difficulty which is where the story really starts to expand and show itself. Considering the length of the game itself (3 to 5 hours) this is already a really cool approach, because it allows for the disinterested player not to be as burdened by the interstitial storytelling elements (told usually through text flashes of on screen poetic language) while operating as a way in which the invested player can reach further into the heart of the world without the burden of excess irritating content. The overall effect is an electric rave of great combat fundamentals set to a blast of haze and color. Great for a satisfying a gamer's midnight.
The game's premise is one of trying to beat a timer, a percentage ticker counting up to your demise, but unlike UNSIGHTED (the last game I spoke about) the only person you overtly have to worry about saving is yourself.
One thing I absolutely have to commend the game for here is the feedback on attacks and the sound effects. Each of the various weapons you use have a 'pacing' to them and the industrial electronic whirls and whips make the fights feel extremely satisfying. This game similar to UNSIGHTED also has a parry mechanic but there's one integral reason which bothers me much less here: The rewinds. At any point during a fight you can use one of your 'rewinds' to set the fight back to the starting health and healing items you had going in, this means that you have plenty of time to both practice and attempt to progress. Learning the mechanics of parrying no longer come as a sacrifice, and for bosses you have a much looser leash for getting the attack patterns right. Adding onto this while parrying does improve your damage output significantly, what an effectively timed parry really does is 'break' through the enemies defense. This 'break' mechanic can come from simply pressuring with your own damage irregardless, using your close range attacks until you run out of stamina and then using your long range familiar to pressure while you recharge stamina. It's never so heuristically clear to try for a parry or punching a lot of damage because most enemies will do a mix of ranged attacks and close attacks meaning waiting around near an enemy in order to parry ends up making no real sense. The result of this is that every fight transforms into a dance, especially when there is more than one enemy you are fighting. Each fight becomes a rhythmic sway of dodges and attacks rather than either frustration or mindless sweeping of enemies outright.
Most people would be quick to compare this game, with its bonfires, lack of explicit hub, stamina management, and parry mechanics as similar to dark souls (ie, being a soulslike). However, I'd like to argue due to the speed of play and importance on not getting overwhelmed by enemies, along with the ability to switch your weapon loadout to provide for incredibly unique play to something more like a top down Bayonetta. Soulslikes for me at least are usually indicated by having high risk systems (like dropping/losing a lot of materials on death) and by having a focus on death as an important force in the play experience. Lucah deeply roots for you not to die, you can't spend 10 attempts on a boss because each failure is not a learning moment in itself but a threat of losing entirely. The game is largely balanced around that fact, the bosses are challenging without being needless health sponges, in part because they too are involved in the dance to 'break' their defenses. Once you break their defense you can usually chip out over 20% of their health if not more, and god damn it's damn satisfying every time. The CRACK sound feels like you shattered a bone. The item management is also simplifyed to great effect to, you have some heals and some rewinds that reset at a bonfire, but unlike the souls series which this system may seem most comparable to thats it. As much as I like Dark Souls 1, my least favourite aspect of that game and many games like it is that when you fail in a fight after using an item, for example pine resin, you don't get that item back. Meaning that if you are doing bad you end up having to waste time farming for materials. Inversely those same items can be so strong as to turn fights into complete jokes, which is why the Souls community have termed using these accessibility options disguised as items as 'resinous behavior' or referring to it as 'resin'. Unlike many jokes in the gaming community around difficulty oscillation this one is not as filled with the scorn of overt ableism, because the issue is not so much that you are using an item to make the fight more accessible but rather than its found through a specific niche in game item of utility which would only work in that area/boss or which register the game on the whole so easy as to end fights before you even hear more than 15 seconds of their theme play. People dont harbor nearly this same judgement and humor about equipping armor or increasing the number of flasks. In Lucah, these power imbalances are avoided simply through item simplification making each fight feel that much more cathartic.
One thing I do really like here is that none of the enemies in the game have enemy collision damage. They only hurt you when they attack. It's only on playing games like that I begin to realize just how stupid and damaging to gameplay enemy collision actually can be for a lot of games. The intent of a lot of these systems with their parrying and aggressive play is to be as close to the enemies as you can. In theory then, enemy collision seems like a great way to add a 'risk reward' factor similar to say grazing against bullets in touhou. The reality however is that it incentivizes players to keep their distance and not even bother. Imagine for a moment a fighting game when even touching the enemy player would emit passive damage, that would be immensely unfun right? I believe a lot of game designers probably looked at how a lot of early games like the metroid series did enemy collision damage and assume outright this is the best way to do things, but it barely even makes much sense. It's not like they are covered in thorns so why is that happening? On top of all of that, the 'collision' of enemy hitboxes are not always clear so it becomes yet another irritation. For platformers this system makes a lot of sense but not so much for action fighters. Overall what I'm complimenting the game for is reducing and simplifying its systems of play.
Now I want to move to a few slightly passive criticisms that have halted the game from getting a perfect score. The games length is quite short so while these criticisms may seem petty I think they are overall justifiable since they are much more likely to stick out like a sore thumb. I will also double these issues with recommendations to players in order to alleviate these potential issues.
Firstly there's an area in the 4th verse where you have to input a code in order to open a door. If you don't have the code insanely strong enemies will appear and wreck your shit. My issue here is that there's no way to leave the fight once it started. This system of sticking you in an arena cage match with the other enemies usually is great, but the problem here is that the only way to leave this area is to die and lose a lot of time on the clock. You can also beat through the enemies if you're good enough and I did but 2 new problems present itself if this happens. The 'code' for unlocking takes significantly less time than it does to brute force through the lock, registering it a waste of time, and because the only way to leave is to die it takes away from the perseverance. Simultaneously even if you do brute force, there's still more enemies on the other side and if you die to them before reaching the next bonfire the code resets and you cant get through. The way to fix this is simple: just let me leave the area after I trigger the code! Anyway I had to close the game and reopen it after I found out the code reset because I didn't want to waste time dying. Not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things but certainly felt like a bit of an oversight. If you play the game yourself and activate that code by accident just die and then go somewhere else, it'll be fine.
There's a colosseum arena in verse 6 in which you have to dispatch enemies in order to proceed. Most of these fights are so easy that they register as a complete joke, with usually only 1 'phase' to them. It's possible that this is meant to have some thematic implications, as it also doubles as a way to introduce the ranking system. If you do excessively well in a fight you get a ranking at the end (similar to Bayonetta's medal system) which becomes deeply important on replay. However you can already get tutorialized through this system by an optional set of challenge fights from a trainer, so I feel like the actual colosseum portion could have been made significantly more difficult. I'm thinking particularly here of how rewarding the length and multiple phases were in something like Hollow Knights colosseum, and while that length wouldn't work for this game it would have been a great way to add more timer anxiety to the back half of the game.
Another issue is the end game fights. In the 8th verse your timer is automatically set to 75% to add extra tension. The problem is that this final area is a tower climb through an arduous gauntlet of about 6 demanding fights in a row, bookended by a long elevator ride so if you start running into problems here and die even twice it's not unlikely you will lose to time before you can see the end fights out. This didn't happen to me but I can only imagine losing at this point in the game would be deeply irritating and disappointing. My recommendation here is to use the accessibility options to make the game easier (particularly adding health and making enemies weaker) at this point if the idea of losing in the last act in this way would feel unfair or bother you. This goes ditto for the final boss which I have to admit here is the only point where the accusations of a boss feeling like a health sponge has merit. One aspect I don't like about the game all that much is that it hides from you the actual health of the bosses you fight, the enemies 'power up' at the end of clearing a health bar and resets. Instead I feel like they could have just rolled it all into 1 health bar with those threshold points so that you know how sparingly you need to use rerolls or healing. This is the functional difference for why say Radahn felt like a cathartic and rewarding fight and Elden Ring whereas a lot of the other 'power up' bosses felt frustrating and bullshit. It's this old mechanic of introducing spectacle and awe at the expense of player fairness, and my appreciation is very much in the latter camp. I will say that the final boss isn't timer based but it makes it even more awkward when you die. Usually you're rolled back a bonfire and time is added but at this point it gives you a prompt of whether you want to fight the boss from this 'scene' or start again which really feels artificial. They could have just put a bonfire at the start of the final sequence on the walk in to alleviate this, without breaking the narrative much at all.
That being said, one 'weirdo opinion' I started to gain from playing this, is that maybe players are given so much knowledge and information in the first place that its spoiled us a little. Every piece of player information fights with the immersion of the game environment, and this is often why the 'games' I talk about the most tend to be walking simulators and visual novels, because a subconcious part of me wants immersion over bland information mechanics. To bring this back to Lucah, when you attack enemies numbers fly out as if you're playing some SHMUP, with the indication being to let you know comparatively how much damage your weapons are doing, you can equip a virtue (basically the modulated 'skills' using a maximum point threshold). That tells you how much health they have. For me I got so enamored with the games sketchy abstractions and electrified colours that these number pop ups got on my nerves and so did actually the bosses health. In a lot of the early final fantasy games, the enemy and boss health wasn't given at all and in contrast to this feeling of frustration it instead felt tense and unique. You would be able to approximate just how much damage it takes to kill an enemy you've seen before but every new enemy would feel authentically bizzare and unknown. This thrill from player non-knowledge also did not really affect the player negatively much at all since for the most part there would be enough tools that taking down fights wasn't that hard regardless. I recognized that maybe both in pursuit of simplicity and immersion over 'information' I turned off the enemies UI. While I would actively recommend people give turning enemy UI off a try, a part of me also thinks the game should have had this turned off automatically to start anyway leaving this instead as yet another accessibility option. It would have a thematic effect to, with the themes of surveillance allowing for the enemies to seem like they know more about you than you do them. With all that said though, just due to some of the attacks the final boss of the game gives its less an issue of 'unfair health' so much as it is that the final boss can burst out damage and give you no reasonable room to pressure, especially in its 'third phase'. This may seem like a paragraph of pure contradiction considering what I said previously, but perhaps the best was to settle this contradiction is to say that I care about immersion but dont care about 'spectacles' of difficulty. The multiple phase difficulty with a 'burst' of difficulty at the end lies both to the 'information' player and the 'immersion' player. For the immersion player, one of the best things that Fromsoft actually revealed to the player in their early work, and to gaming culture as a whole. Is that bosses dont need to get stronger in order to be rewarding to narrative function. Bosses like the phenomenal Maiden Astrea in Demon Souls and the Great Wolf in Dark Souls indicate that a boss getting weaker can be deeply cathartic for both players. That's not to say that every boss should get weaker, but not every boss needs to be increasingly demanding through concealed information. What having a lot of multi phase boss fights in a game does is make players play with far too much caution and distance. In a game like this the last thing you want to incentivize is passive play and distance which is why I find these sorts of bosses so irritating. With that said outside of the final boss this issue is mainly a non problem as the reset item allows you plenty of time to practice out those fights. You may end up losing once or twice but you probably wont get hardstuck by any means. If you do though feel free to use the accessibility functions liberally.
Finally I want to touch on the NG+. The NG+ is awesome in concept. New story information is given to the player, the timer goes much faster because now you know where everything is and dont need to fish for items (since all your weapons and virtues roll over), and the ranking mechanic returns with force here. You can get rid of time from adding to the timer by doing really well in fights, with bonuses for not getting hit and completing the fights quickly. But the problem is you can farm fights out by resting at a bonfire and then redoing the easy fights, allowing you to make the timer a non issue during replay. Now I think that there's a punish system for this, as it means that your rank from your last attempt is mitigated to a bit less than before, but its still useful enough for farming time that it doesn't matter enough. The best way in my view to amend this would have been to prevent respawning enemies, as the 'failure' for death adds such an extreme amount of time (one tenth of the bar) that respawning the enemies would be unnecessary anyway. The way it is not renders the NG+ sort of mostly a joke.
With all that said, the combat fundamentals are incredible here, and the story itself is abstracted and yet traumatic in a way that can be emotionally effective without being bleak. The mystique of the game here is to die for and I can't recommend it enough for that reason. There's clearly a lot of focus on the trans experience here in repressing for higher powers and a more interesting 'trauma at the center of the world' framing which just begs to be read into as a literary function. There's no puzzle mechanics to be stressed out by, its a sleek telephone tower of a game in terms of its presentation and effect. While I would usually spend some time analyzing the queer repression themes, due to the already length of this piece, metamorphosing the end of the write up into literary analysis would be at best awkward. A lot of the themes and characters are made overly anxious and edgy, with several of them wishing openly to be dead. I think its probably most comparable in tone to We Know The Devil, a game also about queer repression under theocracy. I would definitely recommend that Visual Novel instead if you want a characterized direct intimate relationship with the plights of youth trauma, but if you're a fan of We Know the Devil already this more mystery oriented dream parable might work as a great double feature there. Overall this is a great diamond in the rough of a game and I'm incredibly excited for the sequel Death of a Wish. The only real filter here is the early game patience you have to have, once you get past the train section in particular its a great ride from there.
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Abstract industrial calamity on the struggle of the repressed queer youth against the forces of theocracy described through electrical wire pulses.
I beat the game and moved over to NG+ difficulty which is where the story really starts to expand and show itself. Considering the length of the game itself (3 to 5 hours) this is already a really cool approach, because it allows for the disinterested player not to be as burdened by the interstitial storytelling elements (told usually through text flashes of on screen poetic language) while operating as a way in which the invested player can reach further into the heart of the world without the burden of excess irritating content. The overall effect is an electric rave of great combat fundamentals set to a blast of haze and color. Great for a satisfying a gamer's midnight.
The game's premise is one of trying to beat a timer, a percentage ticker counting up to your demise, but unlike UNSIGHTED (the last game I spoke about) the only person you overtly have to worry about saving is yourself.
One thing I absolutely have to commend the game for here is the feedback on attacks and the sound effects. Each of the various weapons you use have a 'pacing' to them and the industrial electronic whirls and whips make the fights feel extremely satisfying. This game similar to UNSIGHTED also has a parry mechanic but there's one integral reason which bothers me much less here: The rewinds. At any point during a fight you can use one of your 'rewinds' to set the fight back to the starting health and healing items you had going in, this means that you have plenty of time to both practice and attempt to progress. Learning the mechanics of parrying no longer come as a sacrifice, and for bosses you have a much looser leash for getting the attack patterns right. Adding onto this while parrying does improve your damage output significantly, what an effectively timed parry really does is 'break' through the enemies defense. This 'break' mechanic can come from simply pressuring with your own damage irregardless, using your close range attacks until you run out of stamina and then using your long range familiar to pressure while you recharge stamina. It's never so heuristically clear to try for a parry or punching a lot of damage because most enemies will do a mix of ranged attacks and close attacks meaning waiting around near an enemy in order to parry ends up making no real sense. The result of this is that every fight transforms into a dance, especially when there is more than one enemy you are fighting. Each fight becomes a rhythmic sway of dodges and attacks rather than either frustration or mindless sweeping of enemies outright.
Most people would be quick to compare this game, with its bonfires, lack of explicit hub, stamina management, and parry mechanics as similar to dark souls (ie, being a soulslike). However, I'd like to argue due to the speed of play and importance on not getting overwhelmed by enemies, along with the ability to switch your weapon loadout to provide for incredibly unique play to something more like a top down Bayonetta. Soulslikes for me at least are usually indicated by having high risk systems (like dropping/losing a lot of materials on death) and by having a focus on death as an important force in the play experience. Lucah deeply roots for you not to die, you can't spend 10 attempts on a boss because each failure is not a learning moment in itself but a threat of losing entirely. The game is largely balanced around that fact, the bosses are challenging without being needless health sponges, in part because they too are involved in the dance to 'break' their defenses. Once you break their defense you can usually chip out over 20% of their health if not more, and god damn it's damn satisfying every time. The CRACK sound feels like you shattered a bone. The item management is also simplifyed to great effect to, you have some heals and some rewinds that reset at a bonfire, but unlike the souls series which this system may seem most comparable to thats it. As much as I like Dark Souls 1, my least favourite aspect of that game and many games like it is that when you fail in a fight after using an item, for example pine resin, you don't get that item back. Meaning that if you are doing bad you end up having to waste time farming for materials. Inversely those same items can be so strong as to turn fights into complete jokes, which is why the Souls community have termed using these accessibility options disguised as items as 'resinous behavior' or referring to it as 'resin'. Unlike many jokes in the gaming community around difficulty oscillation this one is not as filled with the scorn of overt ableism, because the issue is not so much that you are using an item to make the fight more accessible but rather than its found through a specific niche in game item of utility which would only work in that area/boss or which register the game on the whole so easy as to end fights before you even hear more than 15 seconds of their theme play. People dont harbor nearly this same judgement and humor about equipping armor or increasing the number of flasks. In Lucah, these power imbalances are avoided simply through item simplification making each fight feel that much more cathartic.
One thing I do really like here is that none of the enemies in the game have enemy collision damage. They only hurt you when they attack. It's only on playing games like that I begin to realize just how stupid and damaging to gameplay enemy collision actually can be for a lot of games. The intent of a lot of these systems with their parrying and aggressive play is to be as close to the enemies as you can. In theory then, enemy collision seems like a great way to add a 'risk reward' factor similar to say grazing against bullets in touhou. The reality however is that it incentivizes players to keep their distance and not even bother. Imagine for a moment a fighting game when even touching the enemy player would emit passive damage, that would be immensely unfun right? I believe a lot of game designers probably looked at how a lot of early games like the metroid series did enemy collision damage and assume outright this is the best way to do things, but it barely even makes much sense. It's not like they are covered in thorns so why is that happening? On top of all of that, the 'collision' of enemy hitboxes are not always clear so it becomes yet another irritation. For platformers this system makes a lot of sense but not so much for action fighters. Overall what I'm complimenting the game for is reducing and simplifying its systems of play.
Now I want to move to a few slightly passive criticisms that have halted the game from getting a perfect score. The games length is quite short so while these criticisms may seem petty I think they are overall justifiable since they are much more likely to stick out like a sore thumb. I will also double these issues with recommendations to players in order to alleviate these potential issues.
Firstly there's an area in the 4th verse where you have to input a code in order to open a door. If you don't have the code insanely strong enemies will appear and wreck your shit. My issue here is that there's no way to leave the fight once it started. This system of sticking you in an arena cage match with the other enemies usually is great, but the problem here is that the only way to leave this area is to die and lose a lot of time on the clock. You can also beat through the enemies if you're good enough and I did but 2 new problems present itself if this happens. The 'code' for unlocking takes significantly less time than it does to brute force through the lock, registering it a waste of time, and because the only way to leave is to die it takes away from the perseverance. Simultaneously even if you do brute force, there's still more enemies on the other side and if you die to them before reaching the next bonfire the code resets and you cant get through. The way to fix this is simple: just let me leave the area after I trigger the code! Anyway I had to close the game and reopen it after I found out the code reset because I didn't want to waste time dying. Not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things but certainly felt like a bit of an oversight. If you play the game yourself and activate that code by accident just die and then go somewhere else, it'll be fine.
There's a colosseum arena in verse 6 in which you have to dispatch enemies in order to proceed. Most of these fights are so easy that they register as a complete joke, with usually only 1 'phase' to them. It's possible that this is meant to have some thematic implications, as it also doubles as a way to introduce the ranking system. If you do excessively well in a fight you get a ranking at the end (similar to Bayonetta's medal system) which becomes deeply important on replay. However you can already get tutorialized through this system by an optional set of challenge fights from a trainer, so I feel like the actual colosseum portion could have been made significantly more difficult. I'm thinking particularly here of how rewarding the length and multiple phases were in something like Hollow Knights colosseum, and while that length wouldn't work for this game it would have been a great way to add more timer anxiety to the back half of the game.
Another issue is the end game fights. In the 8th verse your timer is automatically set to 75% to add extra tension. The problem is that this final area is a tower climb through an arduous gauntlet of about 6 demanding fights in a row, bookended by a long elevator ride so if you start running into problems here and die even twice it's not unlikely you will lose to time before you can see the end fights out. This didn't happen to me but I can only imagine losing at this point in the game would be deeply irritating and disappointing. My recommendation here is to use the accessibility options to make the game easier (particularly adding health and making enemies weaker) at this point if the idea of losing in the last act in this way would feel unfair or bother you. This goes ditto for the final boss which I have to admit here is the only point where the accusations of a boss feeling like a health sponge has merit. One aspect I don't like about the game all that much is that it hides from you the actual health of the bosses you fight, the enemies 'power up' at the end of clearing a health bar and resets. Instead I feel like they could have just rolled it all into 1 health bar with those threshold points so that you know how sparingly you need to use rerolls or healing. This is the functional difference for why say Radahn felt like a cathartic and rewarding fight and Elden Ring whereas a lot of the other 'power up' bosses felt frustrating and bullshit. It's this old mechanic of introducing spectacle and awe at the expense of player fairness, and my appreciation is very much in the latter camp. I will say that the final boss isn't timer based but it makes it even more awkward when you die. Usually you're rolled back a bonfire and time is added but at this point it gives you a prompt of whether you want to fight the boss from this 'scene' or start again which really feels artificial. They could have just put a bonfire at the start of the final sequence on the walk in to alleviate this, without breaking the narrative much at all.
That being said, one 'weirdo opinion' I started to gain from playing this, is that maybe players are given so much knowledge and information in the first place that its spoiled us a little. Every piece of player information fights with the immersion of the game environment, and this is often why the 'games' I talk about the most tend to be walking simulators and visual novels, because a subconcious part of me wants immersion over bland information mechanics. To bring this back to Lucah, when you attack enemies numbers fly out as if you're playing some SHMUP, with the indication being to let you know comparatively how much damage your weapons are doing, you can equip a virtue (basically the modulated 'skills' using a maximum point threshold). That tells you how much health they have. For me I got so enamored with the games sketchy abstractions and electrified colours that these number pop ups got on my nerves and so did actually the bosses health. In a lot of the early final fantasy games, the enemy and boss health wasn't given at all and in contrast to this feeling of frustration it instead felt tense and unique. You would be able to approximate just how much damage it takes to kill an enemy you've seen before but every new enemy would feel authentically bizzare and unknown. This thrill from player non-knowledge also did not really affect the player negatively much at all since for the most part there would be enough tools that taking down fights wasn't that hard regardless. I recognized that maybe both in pursuit of simplicity and immersion over 'information' I turned off the enemies UI. While I would actively recommend people give turning enemy UI off a try, a part of me also thinks the game should have had this turned off automatically to start anyway leaving this instead as yet another accessibility option. It would have a thematic effect to, with the themes of surveillance allowing for the enemies to seem like they know more about you than you do them. With all that said though, just due to some of the attacks the final boss of the game gives its less an issue of 'unfair health' so much as it is that the final boss can burst out damage and give you no reasonable room to pressure, especially in its 'third phase'. This may seem like a paragraph of pure contradiction considering what I said previously, but perhaps the best was to settle this contradiction is to say that I care about immersion but dont care about 'spectacles' of difficulty. The multiple phase difficulty with a 'burst' of difficulty at the end lies both to the 'information' player and the 'immersion' player. For the immersion player, one of the best things that Fromsoft actually revealed to the player in their early work, and to gaming culture as a whole. Is that bosses dont need to get stronger in order to be rewarding to narrative function. Bosses like the phenomenal Maiden Astrea in Demon Souls and the Great Wolf in Dark Souls indicate that a boss getting weaker can be deeply cathartic for both players. That's not to say that every boss should get weaker, but not every boss needs to be increasingly demanding through concealed information. What having a lot of multi phase boss fights in a game does is make players play with far too much caution and distance. In a game like this the last thing you want to incentivize is passive play and distance which is why I find these sorts of bosses so irritating. With that said outside of the final boss this issue is mainly a non problem as the reset item allows you plenty of time to practice out those fights. You may end up losing once or twice but you probably wont get hardstuck by any means. If you do though feel free to use the accessibility functions liberally.
Finally I want to touch on the NG+. The NG+ is awesome in concept. New story information is given to the player, the timer goes much faster because now you know where everything is and dont need to fish for items (since all your weapons and virtues roll over), and the ranking mechanic returns with force here. You can get rid of time from adding to the timer by doing really well in fights, with bonuses for not getting hit and completing the fights quickly. But the problem is you can farm fights out by resting at a bonfire and then redoing the easy fights, allowing you to make the timer a non issue during replay. Now I think that there's a punish system for this, as it means that your rank from your last attempt is mitigated to a bit less than before, but its still useful enough for farming time that it doesn't matter enough. The best way in my view to amend this would have been to prevent respawning enemies, as the 'failure' for death adds such an extreme amount of time (one tenth of the bar) that respawning the enemies would be unnecessary anyway. The way it is not renders the NG+ sort of mostly a joke.
With all that said, the combat fundamentals are incredible here, and the story itself is abstracted and yet traumatic in a way that can be emotionally effective without being bleak. The mystique of the game here is to die for and I can't recommend it enough for that reason. There's clearly a lot of focus on the trans experience here in repressing for higher powers and a more interesting 'trauma at the center of the world' framing which just begs to be read into as a literary function. There's no puzzle mechanics to be stressed out by, its a sleek telephone tower of a game in terms of its presentation and effect. While I would usually spend some time analyzing the queer repression themes, due to the already length of this piece, metamorphosing the end of the write up into literary analysis would be at best awkward. A lot of the themes and characters are made overly anxious and edgy, with several of them wishing openly to be dead. I think its probably most comparable in tone to We Know The Devil, a game also about queer repression under theocracy. I would definitely recommend that Visual Novel instead if you want a characterized direct intimate relationship with the plights of youth trauma, but if you're a fan of We Know the Devil already this more mystery oriented dream parable might work as a great double feature there. Overall this is a great diamond in the rough of a game and I'm incredibly excited for the sequel Death of a Wish. The only real filter here is the early game patience you have to have, once you get past the train section in particular its a great ride from there.
2021
CW: Videogame Difficulty Discourse
My Policy Guidelines
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Considering the thoughtfully effusive praise from Maradonna focusing on why its probably one of the best game titles to come out of Brazilian culture. Along with the more reflective post on the game by Archagent focusing on the mechanics of grief and passing away. I would be remiss to write off the game and dismiss it entirely, and following that I'm quite surprised how many people I follow (and I follow a LOT) haven't touched this title yet at all. Lesbian overtones, rewarding top down action combat, post apocalyptic storytelling, and anti human sentiments seem like taken together the sort of interests that would apply to most of the people who read what I have to say. Anybody who enjoyed Hyper Light Drifter for example would likely find great company here. However, I must stay true to my roots here as someone who writes about games mainly to vent a bit so let me get into my caveats.
I think actually the most simple way to put my frustrations are not actually with the game itself per se, but with how videogame difficulty is conveyed to the player. When you start the game you have an option between "Explorer", "Action Girl (Recommended)", and "Robot Apocalypse" difficulty. Most players in actuality on their first play through are going to be choosing between the easy and medium modes, and leave hard mode for when they are actually familiar enough with the game mechanics. I don't think I've ever seen somebody actively choose a hard mode in a game on purpose for their first playthrough as anything other than a joke.
Recently I read a fantastic analysis of the importance difficulty framing by Duranda called How Can Game Options Help Casual Players See The Core Appeal Of A Game?. The stellar takeaway is that difficulty framing is a mechanic that is important to the overall package
"Rather than your average difficulty settings which are often framed as 'the same gameplay, but stricter', difficulty settings that radically alter core game behavior are more likely to spark the imagination and in turn inspire deeper understanding of the game’s core appeal."
In theory this sounds like a huge ask for a 2 person indie title, but the curse I'm speaking of then is not so much specific to the game itself as it is to maybe the weakest point in both games critique and development that exists: Difficulty transparency. Writers often don't mention at all the difficulty they played on or the fluctuation in difficulties midgame. Whether they used assists and what they thought of them. Similarly designers tend to not give a clarity to the distinctions in difficulty. The reason why is because there's often a homogeneity in approach, that if you did not play the game at least on the recommended settings or above then you didn't really experience the game, instead you are just a passive object through it, no better than a journalist. This sentiment that 'casual' play should not be utilized is often undermined by the fact that it usually only applies to a specific type of game experience: The action genre. Compare for example most people's relationship nowadays with point and click adventure games, often dismissing their puzzles as 'nonsensical' and relying liberally on walkthroughs when needed and you get a general understanding that lateral puzzle games need not apply to this rule of thumb. What this rule of thumb fails to keep in mind though is that when it comes to more reflex based games different people have vastly different reflex times depending on various life factors and desires from gaming. Generally human reaction time to visual stimulus rests somewhere between 150 to 300 milliseconds, which doesn't sound like a huge distinction, but seeing as there is 30-60 frames in a second thats the difference between 4 and 8 frames which is the difference between seeing a wind up and responding or not.
In actuality this 'test' of player skill is usually already great for people with already fast reaction times. They get first breakfast to jokes of other players being 'filtered' by godhand etc. the rest have to rely on 2 factors to keep up with swift reaction times:
1. Learning the attack patterns through trial and error
and
2. Exploiting the systems in your favor, consciously or not
Let's actualize this through a game mechanic. In Unsighted there is a parry mechanic where upon seeing a red indicator on screen you hit a button to parry an enemy and then close in with a reply attack. What I noticed is that I was generally following attack patterns and audio cues for parrying instead because due to my slow visual reaction time (somewhere at a resting level between 250-300 for whatever reason) the ability to respond in time was simply not fast enough within that visual parry window. I would be calling the parry unreliable and thus getting annoyed with it, the reality is it was probably completely reliable to the 'average' and 'recommended' player and I fell just far enough out of that range to find that hard to rely on. Thus I had to exploit the Cog mechanic (which give you temporary buffs) and learn attack patterns through trial and error instead. Eventually I would run out of materials for using Cogs so I was floudering more slowly against bosses instead.
The problem is that for Unsighted, the combat itself becomes punishing based on whether or not you can parry in time. Parries are the way to output the most amount of damage so it becomes vital, especially versus boss fights, in order to not die several times in a row. But unfortunately, there's no time to spare here. Each time you die that much more time you lose to being able to help and save NPCs. You're letting everybody down when you die, not just yourself. It no longer becomes an at best tedious process of learning boss attack patterns and instead transforms into something actually stressful.
Far be it from me to make it out like this is just a reflex based issue though, this game in particular is mainly focused on puzzling into action combat. Outside of boss fights, action combat trends towards easy enough that it can be discarded as a general concern. So if you have issues with puzzling things out you will also be stressed by the doomsday clock. I don't for the most part. I can solve problems generally quite quickly. However if that does apply to you then you will want the time to be slower than the suggested amount as well.
This is compounded by the fact that in an environment where games like Majora's Mask and Undertale have already established a general player motivation to not let everyone down, there's often a huge stress to reset and start all over to do right by NPC's better and not have them die. At some point I looked at the amount of time I had left and said 'I can do this better if I restart' but of course that robs the 'authenticity' of the experience. Since I'm a 'memory vessel' of the original player character who knows a bunch of extra tricks I shouldn't this is why impressing difficulty to the player on the outset is incredibly important. Postmodernism aside, game immersion often relies on this feeling of the first time playing being imbued with 'authentic' experience. So if you walk into Unsighted and lose half the NPCs because you're simply bad at puzzle mechanics, that's not good. Sure the game is supposed to be stressful and give you a reason to persevere, but if its a matter of unknown limitations from the outset then you're fumbling around and not persevering much at all. This is the difference I can categorize between a feeling of actual stress and simulated stress. Simulated stress is the yearning to achieve, actual stress is recognizing that in spite of yourself, you just cant.
I can't stand most boss fights in games because they become pattern recognition checks with large health sponges attached to them. Due to my generally slower reaction speed this makes a great deal of sense. Most people with a better reaction time than me feel like they can learn and respond to attacks from a boss even the first time dynamically and quickly whereas I tend to have issues even keeping up.
This is all to say that I think the reccomended difficulty for Unsighted, at least for single player experience, is a bit too hard for what it's trying to push out of a player. You have 5 different dungeons to explore and map out plus a final boss and roughly about 8 hours to functionally do it before almost all the NPCs die. You can get dust that gives some of the NPCs an extra 24 hours of life, these tend to be somewhat rare. Each second a minute of in game time passes on the recommended mode so you're looking at an 24 extra minutes. That sounds like a lot but for example Iris, your 'Navi' character who actively helps you throughout starts with only 194 hours before they terminate and turn into an Unsighted (basically a zombie). That comes out to around 3 and a half hours give or take, and that means you have to shove dust in their maw for the whole game in order for them to be alive and help you progress for as much of the experience as possible. I think the time per minute should probably be closer to around 2.5 to 3 seconds considering the amount of content the game is pushing you to move through.
I may be wrong here, as it seems that most people who played through the game didn't mind and thought positively of it. But I think the fact is when we read Archagent's testimony for example we read the story of somebody for whom almost everyone died and while forlorn reflected that 'I did the best I could.' A completely valid experience, but not one that maps onto my own desires to save at almost all costs virtual NPC and their desolate society. I was pumping dust into everyones mouths to stave off death which meant that for me, death was not going to be slow and induvidual but instead a massacre over the course of 2 days. It wasn't staving off 1 NPC's death I really liked, but pretty much the entire town.
I think one of the other reasons I feel this extra pressure to the degree of either wanting to give up, start over, or get cynical is because the game's narrative pushes a 'chosen one' sentiment. You are the strongest robot of your type, out to save your wife and help anybody along the way, the rest of the town has all but given up on actively fighting and instead imbue all their hope for survival solely into you. In spite of that though, they still have to run shops apparently. I don't know about you but if I was in a dire last ditch effort post apocalypse scenario the last issue that would be on my mind is currency. Currency is usually the result of having to simplify larger logistical networks and trade so that bartering no longer becomes a nessecity. However often in scenarios of war and famine, food for example is doled out on a by person basis of basic need until the situation improves again. In dramatic scenarios merchants and shops fall by the wayside for a moment, so I find it interesting the degree to which games have trouble seperating from this currency process. Usually games more aware of this incompatibility justify it through saying the currency is some other life force, Dark Souls has 'souls' for example with the merchants saying 'I dont need money, I'd rather your souls'. Currency itself also becomes a gesture of the absurd and desperate. That's why it's justifiable that Hollow Knight has the shell currency system, so few people even use it now, and they are all incredibly delusional about the degree to which their way of life can still be maintained. Unsighted unfortunately doesn't have that excuse, all the characters know exactly that they will die next week. It feels like I'm being distanced from the actual help the people left want of me, they want me to help them as an old friend, and I do. But they also want me to be an obedient customer for them, which I don't.
Instead I would have preferred the checks for say, upgrading a sword, to be based on having the raw materials and maybe making me wait like a few hours. That would be much more realistic to what the game is trying to convey mechanically but of course it would be a difficult system to get right.
The only other negative thing I'll say about Unsighted is that it has a similar issue Elden Ring does, you have all these gorgeous iconic and in many cases sexy characters to speak to in the hubworld (a town). In total you have about 20 lines of dialogue for each of them outside of dramatic cutscenes which is not nearly enough to feel close to the characters and their plights. The focus was generally put on engaging combat, exploration, and puzzle design. All to well effect sure. However for me a game about grief and trauma should tend to have much more dialogue. I want to have 10k words from characters, I want to see some of them tear up about their own potential deaths and talk to me about the specific anime we watched together. I don't want to give an NPC 4 dust and get a cool effect from it, that's not the point for me at all.
In spite of all those misgivings I do think the feedback during attacks, variety of weapons, and visual design is quite good. The world is gorgeous and the puzzles are decently engaging although not replayable enough that I'd want to start over. The upgrade system of being based on 'chip' loadouts is novel even though it's hard not to justify running as much defense and stamina in the loadout as possible. The time mechanic itself is well established and I like it a lot, but the game is overall too difficult to actually sit through. It's not that I'm uncomfortable with failure, its that failure feels more like having to clear a giant roadblock rather than being gummed up for a few minutes. But it has to be emphasized here that this is probably some of the best character designs I've seen in a game like this. The sapphic energy of having a pony tailed muscle girl like Ariel and a pink haired pixie cut frown like Vana, with their distinct body types feels great. It's an awareness of the diversity of body types and hair styles that trans-women seem especially good at picking up on. Not to mention that the fact most of the cast is women and the character you play as is a woman just warms up my gay heart, but it's just not enough to pull it all quite together.
I would probably have felt a lot better about it had I played on easy mode from the start. I've set the mode now to explorer mode allowing me to actually fail with much more ease against the bosses, and also switched the combat to an easier difficulty too, but that doesn't avoid the fact that the simplicity in the choices and slow emergence of combat information in the early game didn't assist me well in knowing what I should have preferred. Not to mention that the disctinction between setting the game midgame to an easier mode and starting over does still have those mild knock on effects to immersion. In my subconcious I'll still know that the enemies are easier and the game is slower for a 'magic' reason that has no actual narrative justification. This game should have been trying to convince a player like me at all costs that playing on the easy mode is best suited, but instead dropped me into a pool that I wasn't ready to swim in. It's important to mention here that this has nothing to do with how familiar you are with videogames, as much as these games often try to make it out. This is why I feel like difficulty and its framing should be critiqued more, it's a generic issue for this game to have but one that does disrupt and trouble a player like me to the point of not wanting to play anymore considering the actual intensity of its theming by comparison. I refuse to believe that just due to my slowness in response time and quickness to actual stress that I 'shouldnt' talk about games or play them.
If only for any other reason, I realized today that when it comes to action games I really do start out as a 'casual' player. I think I've finally done my due diligence in recognizing that fact and that will probably reflect more clearly in future write ups. Along with that I'll be sure to make what difficulty I played on more clear in the future to where it matters.
It's possible I'm just wrong in this case particularly, that I need to grow a spine and watch some NPCs die. But I feel like if I'm going to have games based around fail mechanics leading to divergent outcomes, I would rather not be fitted with the 'chosen one' narrative of saving a town on top. It's the exact same reason why I've found Fallout 1 almost impossible to play. This is why my next game I plan to try and play and complete is Lucah: Born of a Dream, a game I played a little of before putting it down due to being distracted by something else. I'll be sure to do a write up on it as well fairly soon.
My Policy Guidelines
-----------------------------------------------------------
Considering the thoughtfully effusive praise from Maradonna focusing on why its probably one of the best game titles to come out of Brazilian culture. Along with the more reflective post on the game by Archagent focusing on the mechanics of grief and passing away. I would be remiss to write off the game and dismiss it entirely, and following that I'm quite surprised how many people I follow (and I follow a LOT) haven't touched this title yet at all. Lesbian overtones, rewarding top down action combat, post apocalyptic storytelling, and anti human sentiments seem like taken together the sort of interests that would apply to most of the people who read what I have to say. Anybody who enjoyed Hyper Light Drifter for example would likely find great company here. However, I must stay true to my roots here as someone who writes about games mainly to vent a bit so let me get into my caveats.
I think actually the most simple way to put my frustrations are not actually with the game itself per se, but with how videogame difficulty is conveyed to the player. When you start the game you have an option between "Explorer", "Action Girl (Recommended)", and "Robot Apocalypse" difficulty. Most players in actuality on their first play through are going to be choosing between the easy and medium modes, and leave hard mode for when they are actually familiar enough with the game mechanics. I don't think I've ever seen somebody actively choose a hard mode in a game on purpose for their first playthrough as anything other than a joke.
Recently I read a fantastic analysis of the importance difficulty framing by Duranda called How Can Game Options Help Casual Players See The Core Appeal Of A Game?. The stellar takeaway is that difficulty framing is a mechanic that is important to the overall package
"Rather than your average difficulty settings which are often framed as 'the same gameplay, but stricter', difficulty settings that radically alter core game behavior are more likely to spark the imagination and in turn inspire deeper understanding of the game’s core appeal."
In theory this sounds like a huge ask for a 2 person indie title, but the curse I'm speaking of then is not so much specific to the game itself as it is to maybe the weakest point in both games critique and development that exists: Difficulty transparency. Writers often don't mention at all the difficulty they played on or the fluctuation in difficulties midgame. Whether they used assists and what they thought of them. Similarly designers tend to not give a clarity to the distinctions in difficulty. The reason why is because there's often a homogeneity in approach, that if you did not play the game at least on the recommended settings or above then you didn't really experience the game, instead you are just a passive object through it, no better than a journalist. This sentiment that 'casual' play should not be utilized is often undermined by the fact that it usually only applies to a specific type of game experience: The action genre. Compare for example most people's relationship nowadays with point and click adventure games, often dismissing their puzzles as 'nonsensical' and relying liberally on walkthroughs when needed and you get a general understanding that lateral puzzle games need not apply to this rule of thumb. What this rule of thumb fails to keep in mind though is that when it comes to more reflex based games different people have vastly different reflex times depending on various life factors and desires from gaming. Generally human reaction time to visual stimulus rests somewhere between 150 to 300 milliseconds, which doesn't sound like a huge distinction, but seeing as there is 30-60 frames in a second thats the difference between 4 and 8 frames which is the difference between seeing a wind up and responding or not.
In actuality this 'test' of player skill is usually already great for people with already fast reaction times. They get first breakfast to jokes of other players being 'filtered' by godhand etc. the rest have to rely on 2 factors to keep up with swift reaction times:
1. Learning the attack patterns through trial and error
and
2. Exploiting the systems in your favor, consciously or not
Let's actualize this through a game mechanic. In Unsighted there is a parry mechanic where upon seeing a red indicator on screen you hit a button to parry an enemy and then close in with a reply attack. What I noticed is that I was generally following attack patterns and audio cues for parrying instead because due to my slow visual reaction time (somewhere at a resting level between 250-300 for whatever reason) the ability to respond in time was simply not fast enough within that visual parry window. I would be calling the parry unreliable and thus getting annoyed with it, the reality is it was probably completely reliable to the 'average' and 'recommended' player and I fell just far enough out of that range to find that hard to rely on. Thus I had to exploit the Cog mechanic (which give you temporary buffs) and learn attack patterns through trial and error instead. Eventually I would run out of materials for using Cogs so I was floudering more slowly against bosses instead.
The problem is that for Unsighted, the combat itself becomes punishing based on whether or not you can parry in time. Parries are the way to output the most amount of damage so it becomes vital, especially versus boss fights, in order to not die several times in a row. But unfortunately, there's no time to spare here. Each time you die that much more time you lose to being able to help and save NPCs. You're letting everybody down when you die, not just yourself. It no longer becomes an at best tedious process of learning boss attack patterns and instead transforms into something actually stressful.
Far be it from me to make it out like this is just a reflex based issue though, this game in particular is mainly focused on puzzling into action combat. Outside of boss fights, action combat trends towards easy enough that it can be discarded as a general concern. So if you have issues with puzzling things out you will also be stressed by the doomsday clock. I don't for the most part. I can solve problems generally quite quickly. However if that does apply to you then you will want the time to be slower than the suggested amount as well.
This is compounded by the fact that in an environment where games like Majora's Mask and Undertale have already established a general player motivation to not let everyone down, there's often a huge stress to reset and start all over to do right by NPC's better and not have them die. At some point I looked at the amount of time I had left and said 'I can do this better if I restart' but of course that robs the 'authenticity' of the experience. Since I'm a 'memory vessel' of the original player character who knows a bunch of extra tricks I shouldn't this is why impressing difficulty to the player on the outset is incredibly important. Postmodernism aside, game immersion often relies on this feeling of the first time playing being imbued with 'authentic' experience. So if you walk into Unsighted and lose half the NPCs because you're simply bad at puzzle mechanics, that's not good. Sure the game is supposed to be stressful and give you a reason to persevere, but if its a matter of unknown limitations from the outset then you're fumbling around and not persevering much at all. This is the difference I can categorize between a feeling of actual stress and simulated stress. Simulated stress is the yearning to achieve, actual stress is recognizing that in spite of yourself, you just cant.
I can't stand most boss fights in games because they become pattern recognition checks with large health sponges attached to them. Due to my generally slower reaction speed this makes a great deal of sense. Most people with a better reaction time than me feel like they can learn and respond to attacks from a boss even the first time dynamically and quickly whereas I tend to have issues even keeping up.
This is all to say that I think the reccomended difficulty for Unsighted, at least for single player experience, is a bit too hard for what it's trying to push out of a player. You have 5 different dungeons to explore and map out plus a final boss and roughly about 8 hours to functionally do it before almost all the NPCs die. You can get dust that gives some of the NPCs an extra 24 hours of life, these tend to be somewhat rare. Each second a minute of in game time passes on the recommended mode so you're looking at an 24 extra minutes. That sounds like a lot but for example Iris, your 'Navi' character who actively helps you throughout starts with only 194 hours before they terminate and turn into an Unsighted (basically a zombie). That comes out to around 3 and a half hours give or take, and that means you have to shove dust in their maw for the whole game in order for them to be alive and help you progress for as much of the experience as possible. I think the time per minute should probably be closer to around 2.5 to 3 seconds considering the amount of content the game is pushing you to move through.
I may be wrong here, as it seems that most people who played through the game didn't mind and thought positively of it. But I think the fact is when we read Archagent's testimony for example we read the story of somebody for whom almost everyone died and while forlorn reflected that 'I did the best I could.' A completely valid experience, but not one that maps onto my own desires to save at almost all costs virtual NPC and their desolate society. I was pumping dust into everyones mouths to stave off death which meant that for me, death was not going to be slow and induvidual but instead a massacre over the course of 2 days. It wasn't staving off 1 NPC's death I really liked, but pretty much the entire town.
I think one of the other reasons I feel this extra pressure to the degree of either wanting to give up, start over, or get cynical is because the game's narrative pushes a 'chosen one' sentiment. You are the strongest robot of your type, out to save your wife and help anybody along the way, the rest of the town has all but given up on actively fighting and instead imbue all their hope for survival solely into you. In spite of that though, they still have to run shops apparently. I don't know about you but if I was in a dire last ditch effort post apocalypse scenario the last issue that would be on my mind is currency. Currency is usually the result of having to simplify larger logistical networks and trade so that bartering no longer becomes a nessecity. However often in scenarios of war and famine, food for example is doled out on a by person basis of basic need until the situation improves again. In dramatic scenarios merchants and shops fall by the wayside for a moment, so I find it interesting the degree to which games have trouble seperating from this currency process. Usually games more aware of this incompatibility justify it through saying the currency is some other life force, Dark Souls has 'souls' for example with the merchants saying 'I dont need money, I'd rather your souls'. Currency itself also becomes a gesture of the absurd and desperate. That's why it's justifiable that Hollow Knight has the shell currency system, so few people even use it now, and they are all incredibly delusional about the degree to which their way of life can still be maintained. Unsighted unfortunately doesn't have that excuse, all the characters know exactly that they will die next week. It feels like I'm being distanced from the actual help the people left want of me, they want me to help them as an old friend, and I do. But they also want me to be an obedient customer for them, which I don't.
Instead I would have preferred the checks for say, upgrading a sword, to be based on having the raw materials and maybe making me wait like a few hours. That would be much more realistic to what the game is trying to convey mechanically but of course it would be a difficult system to get right.
The only other negative thing I'll say about Unsighted is that it has a similar issue Elden Ring does, you have all these gorgeous iconic and in many cases sexy characters to speak to in the hubworld (a town). In total you have about 20 lines of dialogue for each of them outside of dramatic cutscenes which is not nearly enough to feel close to the characters and their plights. The focus was generally put on engaging combat, exploration, and puzzle design. All to well effect sure. However for me a game about grief and trauma should tend to have much more dialogue. I want to have 10k words from characters, I want to see some of them tear up about their own potential deaths and talk to me about the specific anime we watched together. I don't want to give an NPC 4 dust and get a cool effect from it, that's not the point for me at all.
In spite of all those misgivings I do think the feedback during attacks, variety of weapons, and visual design is quite good. The world is gorgeous and the puzzles are decently engaging although not replayable enough that I'd want to start over. The upgrade system of being based on 'chip' loadouts is novel even though it's hard not to justify running as much defense and stamina in the loadout as possible. The time mechanic itself is well established and I like it a lot, but the game is overall too difficult to actually sit through. It's not that I'm uncomfortable with failure, its that failure feels more like having to clear a giant roadblock rather than being gummed up for a few minutes. But it has to be emphasized here that this is probably some of the best character designs I've seen in a game like this. The sapphic energy of having a pony tailed muscle girl like Ariel and a pink haired pixie cut frown like Vana, with their distinct body types feels great. It's an awareness of the diversity of body types and hair styles that trans-women seem especially good at picking up on. Not to mention that the fact most of the cast is women and the character you play as is a woman just warms up my gay heart, but it's just not enough to pull it all quite together.
I would probably have felt a lot better about it had I played on easy mode from the start. I've set the mode now to explorer mode allowing me to actually fail with much more ease against the bosses, and also switched the combat to an easier difficulty too, but that doesn't avoid the fact that the simplicity in the choices and slow emergence of combat information in the early game didn't assist me well in knowing what I should have preferred. Not to mention that the disctinction between setting the game midgame to an easier mode and starting over does still have those mild knock on effects to immersion. In my subconcious I'll still know that the enemies are easier and the game is slower for a 'magic' reason that has no actual narrative justification. This game should have been trying to convince a player like me at all costs that playing on the easy mode is best suited, but instead dropped me into a pool that I wasn't ready to swim in. It's important to mention here that this has nothing to do with how familiar you are with videogames, as much as these games often try to make it out. This is why I feel like difficulty and its framing should be critiqued more, it's a generic issue for this game to have but one that does disrupt and trouble a player like me to the point of not wanting to play anymore considering the actual intensity of its theming by comparison. I refuse to believe that just due to my slowness in response time and quickness to actual stress that I 'shouldnt' talk about games or play them.
If only for any other reason, I realized today that when it comes to action games I really do start out as a 'casual' player. I think I've finally done my due diligence in recognizing that fact and that will probably reflect more clearly in future write ups. Along with that I'll be sure to make what difficulty I played on more clear in the future to where it matters.
It's possible I'm just wrong in this case particularly, that I need to grow a spine and watch some NPCs die. But I feel like if I'm going to have games based around fail mechanics leading to divergent outcomes, I would rather not be fitted with the 'chosen one' narrative of saving a town on top. It's the exact same reason why I've found Fallout 1 almost impossible to play. This is why my next game I plan to try and play and complete is Lucah: Born of a Dream, a game I played a little of before putting it down due to being distracted by something else. I'll be sure to do a write up on it as well fairly soon.
My Policy Guidelines
-----------------------------------------------------------
"I know Kino when I see it"
What I find most interesting about Guilty Gear is that if I wanted to not like it a lot of the underlying complaints I have expressed with the fundamentals of league could apply here. While league felt tactile and rewarding to press the buttons and play a game, while the controls felt great. The amount of over complexity to setting up and learning the game, the excessive roster size (meaning you cant really guarantee knowledge and awareness on every matchup), and the obscure systems you have to learn from external knowledge is something that both games share. So why is it a problem in League and not in Guilty Gear?
There's a few shallow but not altogether dismissable reasons why. League is a team game, unlike guilty gear, so your mistakes get intensified by others and the culture of mocking people for mistakes is thus more intense. League emphasizes that there's a lot of setup you need to do and understand before you can even hop in, runes, shops items, etc. And of the course the length of a game is radically different, League's game system is 30-45 minutes per game which means if you feel miserable or dont want to play, you're trapped with the game for much than you might otherwise want. These distinctions do actually matter in terms of interfacing with these systems and their general implications. Instead of being about self improvement its about improving for a team and struggling to keep up. The more isolated way the game presents itself here allows for improvement and enjoyment at your own pace. With all that said though I do think that its worth the comparison because my experiences with non-platform fighting games, like Street Fighter and Skullgirls has been seeded with a degree of extreme frustration. Not being able to execute the moves I want to feels painful and often it feels like the game itself is moving at a pace that I can't possibly keep up with. Functionally not much is experienced differently on the macro level of trying to learn a game and failing between these 2 systems of complexity, fast execution, and deadly reflex.
Where Guilty Gear succeeds where these other games fail is that the game itself is so amusing and so bizzarre that getting the inputs right 100% of the time doesnt really matter. They went above and beyond in terms of player expression here, you can play a robot who set explosive traps or a girl wielding an anchor as a weapon. This player expression is something I complimented league for to, but the difference is that you don't feel tied down to having to learn the game or enjoy it through just 1 character. The game itself is fun enough to mash buttons in and try to get cool tricks to happen on screen.
Guilty Gear realized that the best way to make a game rewarding to play is to make it fun for casual players to mess around in. Skullgirls has a character entirely built around the concept of using drills but most of their attacks are built up in large chains you desperately have to flail to input properly. Meanwhile Guilty Gear gives plenty of decent and easy to execute attacks in neutrals or diagonals, then you can just flirt around with the half circles and chains from there as it suits you. Making the early game play experience not about technical execution at all costs in order to have a good time and not feel like you're missing out on half your attacks is pretty important. As long as I can get the dolphin attack to pop up from play as May once every game or so I'm fine.
The aesthetic components of Guilty Gear are also great. The game has a young adult anime feel similar to Baccano in that all the characters have a distinct personality and set of goals. The large roster becomes a positive because it feels like you're learning about a world through character play.
Overall the momentum based gameplay is so entirely satisfying that it becomes impossible not to recommend. I can also completely understand why the trans community was so excited to see Bridget come out as trans to, shes really cute and has peak 'boymoder' vibes in these earlier titles. A lot of japanese media feels pretty comfortable just resting on a net level of gender subversion, presenting a girl as a boy or vice versa, that to see transition as such a legitimate narrative throughline in Strive is really amazing.
You don't have to play a game for 30 hours to know if a game is good, you don't have to become an 'expert' that 'ordains' an opinion onto a game. Sometimes you just kinda know. Even if I never become good at this game or series I'll still respect it immensely and be able to squeeze at least 20 to 30 hours of fun out of each title jumping around and doing the flashy attacks.
-----------------------------------------------------------
"I know Kino when I see it"
What I find most interesting about Guilty Gear is that if I wanted to not like it a lot of the underlying complaints I have expressed with the fundamentals of league could apply here. While league felt tactile and rewarding to press the buttons and play a game, while the controls felt great. The amount of over complexity to setting up and learning the game, the excessive roster size (meaning you cant really guarantee knowledge and awareness on every matchup), and the obscure systems you have to learn from external knowledge is something that both games share. So why is it a problem in League and not in Guilty Gear?
There's a few shallow but not altogether dismissable reasons why. League is a team game, unlike guilty gear, so your mistakes get intensified by others and the culture of mocking people for mistakes is thus more intense. League emphasizes that there's a lot of setup you need to do and understand before you can even hop in, runes, shops items, etc. And of the course the length of a game is radically different, League's game system is 30-45 minutes per game which means if you feel miserable or dont want to play, you're trapped with the game for much than you might otherwise want. These distinctions do actually matter in terms of interfacing with these systems and their general implications. Instead of being about self improvement its about improving for a team and struggling to keep up. The more isolated way the game presents itself here allows for improvement and enjoyment at your own pace. With all that said though I do think that its worth the comparison because my experiences with non-platform fighting games, like Street Fighter and Skullgirls has been seeded with a degree of extreme frustration. Not being able to execute the moves I want to feels painful and often it feels like the game itself is moving at a pace that I can't possibly keep up with. Functionally not much is experienced differently on the macro level of trying to learn a game and failing between these 2 systems of complexity, fast execution, and deadly reflex.
Where Guilty Gear succeeds where these other games fail is that the game itself is so amusing and so bizzarre that getting the inputs right 100% of the time doesnt really matter. They went above and beyond in terms of player expression here, you can play a robot who set explosive traps or a girl wielding an anchor as a weapon. This player expression is something I complimented league for to, but the difference is that you don't feel tied down to having to learn the game or enjoy it through just 1 character. The game itself is fun enough to mash buttons in and try to get cool tricks to happen on screen.
Guilty Gear realized that the best way to make a game rewarding to play is to make it fun for casual players to mess around in. Skullgirls has a character entirely built around the concept of using drills but most of their attacks are built up in large chains you desperately have to flail to input properly. Meanwhile Guilty Gear gives plenty of decent and easy to execute attacks in neutrals or diagonals, then you can just flirt around with the half circles and chains from there as it suits you. Making the early game play experience not about technical execution at all costs in order to have a good time and not feel like you're missing out on half your attacks is pretty important. As long as I can get the dolphin attack to pop up from play as May once every game or so I'm fine.
The aesthetic components of Guilty Gear are also great. The game has a young adult anime feel similar to Baccano in that all the characters have a distinct personality and set of goals. The large roster becomes a positive because it feels like you're learning about a world through character play.
Overall the momentum based gameplay is so entirely satisfying that it becomes impossible not to recommend. I can also completely understand why the trans community was so excited to see Bridget come out as trans to, shes really cute and has peak 'boymoder' vibes in these earlier titles. A lot of japanese media feels pretty comfortable just resting on a net level of gender subversion, presenting a girl as a boy or vice versa, that to see transition as such a legitimate narrative throughline in Strive is really amazing.
You don't have to play a game for 30 hours to know if a game is good, you don't have to become an 'expert' that 'ordains' an opinion onto a game. Sometimes you just kinda know. Even if I never become good at this game or series I'll still respect it immensely and be able to squeeze at least 20 to 30 hours of fun out of each title jumping around and doing the flashy attacks.
2014
CW: Semi-Formal Discussion the Mechanics of Domestic Abuse, Queerphobia
-----------------------------------------------------------
This is very similar to a game that I don't like, Answer these 10 Questions. To name just a few similarities: both feature a breakup narrative, have the events narrated over by the other partner who feels 'wronged', and feature an obsession with the past with a very similar thematic conclusion. How can I express my bitterness about romantic reflections and then cling so heavily to this version? Is the difference just that this is a queer narrative about 2 transgirls in a band? Am I really that shallow?
Perhaps I am, but let me offer one counterargument. The difference that separates the 2 for me is that Curtain is a masterful reflection on the subject of trauma. When you boot Curtain you're greeted with a walking simulator so pixelated and hazy that you have to spend a few seconds even making out what's going on. Curtain spends its duration going over a story of intimate domestic abuse, by bringing us into the shared apartment of the abuser and making us victim to Kaci's constant put downs and destructive criticisms narrated at us when we interact with objects. The whole point is to show the desperate obsession that abusers have with controlling narrative flow and how both suffocating and yet unrealistic it is.
Everything you look at is controlled by a paragraph of postulation from the abusing party explaining the importance of it within specifically their framework of understanding. There's a forcefulness there, and most verbal domestic exploitation happens through this type of psychological tactic. You can be numb and realize that it's happening and yet still feel the effects of it on you as one of the primary issues that arise from being around somebody is aural. If somebody wanted to keep making noise they can, and your only way of halting that noise is either by plugging your ears or by leaving, both reactions that are too dramatic too do suddenly, so instead you are contained with the noise machines surrounding you, human or otherwise.
The digital space has allowed for a much better respect and appreciation of noise aversion and thus has helped mitigate this factor, but the reality is people will often play into it too much or even compensate with that by speaking more in physical space than they otherwise would. Perhaps you've noticed this effect from quarantine, everyone is suddenly more talkative because they have to make up for that period of isolation.
Abusers take the normality of chattiness and infect their personal relationships with it using it as a tool of control. Whereas in the quiz game this narrative tactic was being used by a mutual of victim party, here this narrative tactic is shown in itself as a vector of control, when combined with the hazy and abstracted visual form the overall experience works to create a trauma-environment. As somebody who has also suffered domestic abuse for prolonged periods of time before that specific mental haziness and lack of voice actually connects quite well with my own experiences.
The other thing I appreciate a lot is that it actually counters my weakest point from discussion on the previous game, that because I'm trans anything that I do wrong is the result of a system that refuses to look at me and perceive me as a woman. While this may be on the most functional level true, it avoids accountability and personal control entirely. Kaci and Ally openly make queer anticapitalist music as conveyed through the various excerpts. Yet, Kaci is still a deeply controlling over her own personal life and partner. Instead of seeing it as a contradiction it's a tacit warning sign. No amount of economic or queer theory can decongest relationship issues or disconnect someone from the pratfalls of fucking up. I realize that this entire write up sounds deeply cold and analytical but if it is, it's for a reason: We don't have a way to discuss how this stuff happens.
Do we honestly think all verbal exploitation comes out of bad actors? Of course not. Not all relationships are built on the same external function of power, while the abuse a man has towards a woman can be explained as financially beneficial to the man. Relationships outside of heteronormativity can't be rationalized so easily through feminism without falling into the trap of calling it 'manish' behavior. In order to actually combat domestic abuse there needs to be guidelines and information about the psychological mechanisms that pervade it and lead into it. Things like clinginess, inability to self isolate from other people for long periods of time, aural control, etc.
The reason why is because until there's a systematic analysis on relationship theories and patterns of control we are going to fall into the same epistemological traps over and over. It needs to go beyond the level of a simple pamphlet and hotline, and generic valourization of consent (which is important of course). Until then, two mechanisms of hate will continue to intensify:
1. External hate: Games/Art like this will be utilized as some strange anecdotal evidence that queer people are serpents and that you (the cis-heteronormative class) should be paranoid of them. Queerphobia can lurk between the arguments that queer people are openly violent or more psychologically abusive at ease. Note right now we are being called 'groomers' whereas before it was imagery of outright violence and tantrums, its now moved to this idea of insidious action. In time after using this trope out enough (and probably in response to a queer riot at their injustice) they will move back to the physical violence narrative. The only way to stop this interchange of narrative hate is through being able to take power out of the predation narrative through public awareness and learning.
2. Self hate: We should adopt these preventative measures for our own sake and safety. Even if the cismenance wont adopt this, being able to build genuine relationship theory would aid as one more proactive tool to combat this perception. I can't tell you the number of online relationships and polycules I've seen fall apart due to abuse and mistreatment and turn into public google doc accustions. We need to be more aware of these practices and protect each other from falling into these patterns. If not out of self preservation than at least out of compassion for each other.
This is my takeaway from Curtain, and the fact its such a polemical one speaks to the games strength as a powerful trauma narrative. The best trauma narratives perform a sense of intervention on the receiver and for imbuing that in me at least its worth full marks.
-----------------------------------------------------------
This is very similar to a game that I don't like, Answer these 10 Questions. To name just a few similarities: both feature a breakup narrative, have the events narrated over by the other partner who feels 'wronged', and feature an obsession with the past with a very similar thematic conclusion. How can I express my bitterness about romantic reflections and then cling so heavily to this version? Is the difference just that this is a queer narrative about 2 transgirls in a band? Am I really that shallow?
Perhaps I am, but let me offer one counterargument. The difference that separates the 2 for me is that Curtain is a masterful reflection on the subject of trauma. When you boot Curtain you're greeted with a walking simulator so pixelated and hazy that you have to spend a few seconds even making out what's going on. Curtain spends its duration going over a story of intimate domestic abuse, by bringing us into the shared apartment of the abuser and making us victim to Kaci's constant put downs and destructive criticisms narrated at us when we interact with objects. The whole point is to show the desperate obsession that abusers have with controlling narrative flow and how both suffocating and yet unrealistic it is.
Everything you look at is controlled by a paragraph of postulation from the abusing party explaining the importance of it within specifically their framework of understanding. There's a forcefulness there, and most verbal domestic exploitation happens through this type of psychological tactic. You can be numb and realize that it's happening and yet still feel the effects of it on you as one of the primary issues that arise from being around somebody is aural. If somebody wanted to keep making noise they can, and your only way of halting that noise is either by plugging your ears or by leaving, both reactions that are too dramatic too do suddenly, so instead you are contained with the noise machines surrounding you, human or otherwise.
The digital space has allowed for a much better respect and appreciation of noise aversion and thus has helped mitigate this factor, but the reality is people will often play into it too much or even compensate with that by speaking more in physical space than they otherwise would. Perhaps you've noticed this effect from quarantine, everyone is suddenly more talkative because they have to make up for that period of isolation.
Abusers take the normality of chattiness and infect their personal relationships with it using it as a tool of control. Whereas in the quiz game this narrative tactic was being used by a mutual of victim party, here this narrative tactic is shown in itself as a vector of control, when combined with the hazy and abstracted visual form the overall experience works to create a trauma-environment. As somebody who has also suffered domestic abuse for prolonged periods of time before that specific mental haziness and lack of voice actually connects quite well with my own experiences.
The other thing I appreciate a lot is that it actually counters my weakest point from discussion on the previous game, that because I'm trans anything that I do wrong is the result of a system that refuses to look at me and perceive me as a woman. While this may be on the most functional level true, it avoids accountability and personal control entirely. Kaci and Ally openly make queer anticapitalist music as conveyed through the various excerpts. Yet, Kaci is still a deeply controlling over her own personal life and partner. Instead of seeing it as a contradiction it's a tacit warning sign. No amount of economic or queer theory can decongest relationship issues or disconnect someone from the pratfalls of fucking up. I realize that this entire write up sounds deeply cold and analytical but if it is, it's for a reason: We don't have a way to discuss how this stuff happens.
Do we honestly think all verbal exploitation comes out of bad actors? Of course not. Not all relationships are built on the same external function of power, while the abuse a man has towards a woman can be explained as financially beneficial to the man. Relationships outside of heteronormativity can't be rationalized so easily through feminism without falling into the trap of calling it 'manish' behavior. In order to actually combat domestic abuse there needs to be guidelines and information about the psychological mechanisms that pervade it and lead into it. Things like clinginess, inability to self isolate from other people for long periods of time, aural control, etc.
The reason why is because until there's a systematic analysis on relationship theories and patterns of control we are going to fall into the same epistemological traps over and over. It needs to go beyond the level of a simple pamphlet and hotline, and generic valourization of consent (which is important of course). Until then, two mechanisms of hate will continue to intensify:
1. External hate: Games/Art like this will be utilized as some strange anecdotal evidence that queer people are serpents and that you (the cis-heteronormative class) should be paranoid of them. Queerphobia can lurk between the arguments that queer people are openly violent or more psychologically abusive at ease. Note right now we are being called 'groomers' whereas before it was imagery of outright violence and tantrums, its now moved to this idea of insidious action. In time after using this trope out enough (and probably in response to a queer riot at their injustice) they will move back to the physical violence narrative. The only way to stop this interchange of narrative hate is through being able to take power out of the predation narrative through public awareness and learning.
2. Self hate: We should adopt these preventative measures for our own sake and safety. Even if the cismenance wont adopt this, being able to build genuine relationship theory would aid as one more proactive tool to combat this perception. I can't tell you the number of online relationships and polycules I've seen fall apart due to abuse and mistreatment and turn into public google doc accustions. We need to be more aware of these practices and protect each other from falling into these patterns. If not out of self preservation than at least out of compassion for each other.
This is my takeaway from Curtain, and the fact its such a polemical one speaks to the games strength as a powerful trauma narrative. The best trauma narratives perform a sense of intervention on the receiver and for imbuing that in me at least its worth full marks.
2017
Policy
-----------------------------------------------------------
I been playing this game for about 2+ months now and I figured I should make a bit of an addendum on the original post as I've learned quite a few things about the systems and the community since then.
In my original post, I praised the game for it's ease of access for unlocking the cards. This ended up being mostly true, with 1 rather startling exception. While the hearthstone rarity system of Commons to Legendaries is there, and the overall time to unlock all those cards is significantly lower, there is 1 rarity I didn't recognize: The Determination Cards.
This is a special rarity level that you cant unlock through dust, instead you get DTs through collecting DT shards, and the way you get those shards is through doing monthly quests and getting high enough on the ladder at the end of the month. You can also get them through being high enough level at the end of the month. If you are legend rank you get enough for a determination card but the card you get is actually a random new one out of the determination pool.
The Determination cards are meant to be these special unique hard to get cards that change you relationship with the game. The problem is that often the effects they give you along with their stats make them insanely undercosted most of the time. For example the card omega flowey costs 11 G to play and then lets you load the board state with a followup spell. What this means is that from 1 card you get a serious board swing that you can reactivate with ease whenever you want. What this means is that if you dont have a determination card and the other player does you are very unlikely to win the game. Worse, not all determination cards are created equal, some have relatively weak effects so even once you have one, which would make you far more likely to beat a player without one, it means that the player who has the best determination card will beat you.
Now the trick about determination cards is that you can only run 1 in your deck, but the community generally openly admits the statline of these cards are already overpowered because 'they are supposed to be', when you combine that with their extreme rarity the result is that long time players who have all the DT's are naturally rewarded at the expense of new players.
This issue is made even worse by the fact most DT's are cards you have to build your deck around, so all of the top players end up building decks that are meta defining that most other players dont have and end up crushing them and creating envy. The result is that I have to resign my original commendation about the ease of access to getting all the cards. Unless you play the game obsessively it would probably take the average player over a year to get the full card collection if not more. I think the concept and cards themselves are not actually a bad idea, but the way to gain them is so totally dumb, they could have just made them cost a lot of dust but instead to make them seem special they had to lock them behind a lootbox system. The problem is that most of the cards are build around so often you find yourself in this frustrating place of having an idea for a deck that you cant entirely build because you dont have the Determination card for it. A system intended for mystique instead turns into one of gloating and frusteration.
Now I want to move onto talking about the other big realization, one that plays quite heavily into the discussion of instrumental play that I mentioned in my Eco insight about instrumental play (or the play behaviours of the 'hardcore' player). Instrumental play has an interesting relationship with UC for a few reasons. For one, most of the the demographic of the player base is on the younger side, teens to early 20s. Most people in that demographic tend to put a lot of their identity into being good at the game and other people not being good at it. Because of the fact you have clear access to the number of games any player has played and their winrate, rank, and # of games in a month, its really easy for these players to mock and degrade newer players for 'highrolling'. Here, the IRC function ends up becoming a bit of a beast. I can not in good conscience tell anybody who might be interested in playing this game to open up the IRC function. Just play the game and ignore any chat, treat it like hearthstone in this way. Granted the issue then is you'll never know how to build a good deck because most of the decks that are uploaded are actively bad and the discord for talking to other players about how to 'improve' your deck makes you culpable to their derision and elitism. At some point then it becomes a curious situation of being unsure how much of the actual game I'm even reccomending. If I take it seriously for a second I'd have to come to the realization that most people would get a kick from playing the game a bit before giving up due to the lack of inviting paratext. In hearthstone, you have several theorycrafting sites and popular internet icons giving you aid on the improvement. There's only 6 rarely active UC youtubers, and all your theory advice comes from bitter teenagers.
The top players are all super annoyed over players they see as 'worse' than them making 'suboptimal' play decisions. Not all equally and all the time but in general the culture is dominated by a discontent towards less established players. This is fairly normal of an issue in most games that promote competition, but I think there's one interesting factor that enhances this:
Most of the players perceive the ladder in UC as completely broken and able to let 'bad' players climb to master rank with ease. Due to how the system currently works, you can get to legend with a 45% win rate, which even in theory angers people. Thus the issue becomes 'elo inflation'. Everyone is good and so in the eyes of these players you need some other set of distinguishing factors besides the ladder rank itself for reasserting how bad a player is (often in an unconstructive way). Those factors are gloating over WR differences and making a big deal about playing for a long amount of time and consistently being in top legend, but more often then not this becomes a cudgel for good players to justify why they are good and humiliation bad/new players. It's videogame elitism at its finest but the issue is because of the scope and size of the game this is suffocating it. I was told that the same number of players play this year as they did last but my assumption is that its not new players, its people who've been playing the game for 3 years with a chip on their shoulder. It should also be mentioned that eventually good players are at a reasonable Elo level anyway that reflects their ability. In legend you have increasing elo similar to chess. So eventually in order to retain a 2150 elo you'd need to win at least 60% of the games you're playing. These players are taking out their occasional losses on those lower ranked players due to the hedonic treadmill of eventually getting to a point they can no longer climb higher from and lashing out at other players and systems as a result. Since these instrumental players are the top players this response is seen as an impressionable way to get better and fit in and suddenly next thing you know everyone after a certain rank threshold is complaining every third game about the other player 'highrolling' you.
There's one other interesting factor to, the higher rank you are the hard it tends to be to match in games because the player base is only around 20 players on at a time and most those players are not in legend. So what ends up happening is that the queue searches for around 4 minutes for another legend player, gives up, and matches you with a non legend player instead so suddenly your losses mean more and you're playing the game even less. Thus the backsliding of hedonic enjoyment with the game hits hard and if you follow the community energy the best way to replace that is through snark. This is not a result of the game its a result of the small size of the player base. This is not something that can just be magically fixed, and every attempt at fixing it is met with a degree of subconcious hostility by that established player base.
The kicker to me at least is that the community seems to actively misunderstand why the current ladder is so effective in the first place. It's literally more rewarding to new players more quickly, giving people a carrot system for continuing to play. Recently in the past few months the end of the month rewards were doubled, and while elo inflation is certainly a thing, the result is inflating more materials for better play to new players more quickly. The fact that people instead see the ladder system as it is as a bad thing reflects the culture surrounding the game. Which really sucks because this is probably the best card game I've ever played in terms of allowing for player creativity. Unfortunately all these hurdles get in the way and make play difficult. I would still reccomend the game immensely but just...dont open the chat. Embarrassingly I must admit through much of carrying myself with confidence and questioning established players knowledge, along with how many games I played, I've become a bit of a laughing stock in the 'community'. It feels humiliating to see one of my favourite games of the year weaponized against me like this.
Overall it's just sad to see a game being self cannibalized by a petulant and rude player base that's out of control. It's also sad to see this because community and warmth is the soul of Undertale, so the fact it became a place for humans to express their cruelty is tragically ironic, to say the least.
-----------------------------------------------------------
I been playing this game for about 2+ months now and I figured I should make a bit of an addendum on the original post as I've learned quite a few things about the systems and the community since then.
In my original post, I praised the game for it's ease of access for unlocking the cards. This ended up being mostly true, with 1 rather startling exception. While the hearthstone rarity system of Commons to Legendaries is there, and the overall time to unlock all those cards is significantly lower, there is 1 rarity I didn't recognize: The Determination Cards.
This is a special rarity level that you cant unlock through dust, instead you get DTs through collecting DT shards, and the way you get those shards is through doing monthly quests and getting high enough on the ladder at the end of the month. You can also get them through being high enough level at the end of the month. If you are legend rank you get enough for a determination card but the card you get is actually a random new one out of the determination pool.
The Determination cards are meant to be these special unique hard to get cards that change you relationship with the game. The problem is that often the effects they give you along with their stats make them insanely undercosted most of the time. For example the card omega flowey costs 11 G to play and then lets you load the board state with a followup spell. What this means is that from 1 card you get a serious board swing that you can reactivate with ease whenever you want. What this means is that if you dont have a determination card and the other player does you are very unlikely to win the game. Worse, not all determination cards are created equal, some have relatively weak effects so even once you have one, which would make you far more likely to beat a player without one, it means that the player who has the best determination card will beat you.
Now the trick about determination cards is that you can only run 1 in your deck, but the community generally openly admits the statline of these cards are already overpowered because 'they are supposed to be', when you combine that with their extreme rarity the result is that long time players who have all the DT's are naturally rewarded at the expense of new players.
This issue is made even worse by the fact most DT's are cards you have to build your deck around, so all of the top players end up building decks that are meta defining that most other players dont have and end up crushing them and creating envy. The result is that I have to resign my original commendation about the ease of access to getting all the cards. Unless you play the game obsessively it would probably take the average player over a year to get the full card collection if not more. I think the concept and cards themselves are not actually a bad idea, but the way to gain them is so totally dumb, they could have just made them cost a lot of dust but instead to make them seem special they had to lock them behind a lootbox system. The problem is that most of the cards are build around so often you find yourself in this frustrating place of having an idea for a deck that you cant entirely build because you dont have the Determination card for it. A system intended for mystique instead turns into one of gloating and frusteration.
Now I want to move onto talking about the other big realization, one that plays quite heavily into the discussion of instrumental play that I mentioned in my Eco insight about instrumental play (or the play behaviours of the 'hardcore' player). Instrumental play has an interesting relationship with UC for a few reasons. For one, most of the the demographic of the player base is on the younger side, teens to early 20s. Most people in that demographic tend to put a lot of their identity into being good at the game and other people not being good at it. Because of the fact you have clear access to the number of games any player has played and their winrate, rank, and # of games in a month, its really easy for these players to mock and degrade newer players for 'highrolling'. Here, the IRC function ends up becoming a bit of a beast. I can not in good conscience tell anybody who might be interested in playing this game to open up the IRC function. Just play the game and ignore any chat, treat it like hearthstone in this way. Granted the issue then is you'll never know how to build a good deck because most of the decks that are uploaded are actively bad and the discord for talking to other players about how to 'improve' your deck makes you culpable to their derision and elitism. At some point then it becomes a curious situation of being unsure how much of the actual game I'm even reccomending. If I take it seriously for a second I'd have to come to the realization that most people would get a kick from playing the game a bit before giving up due to the lack of inviting paratext. In hearthstone, you have several theorycrafting sites and popular internet icons giving you aid on the improvement. There's only 6 rarely active UC youtubers, and all your theory advice comes from bitter teenagers.
The top players are all super annoyed over players they see as 'worse' than them making 'suboptimal' play decisions. Not all equally and all the time but in general the culture is dominated by a discontent towards less established players. This is fairly normal of an issue in most games that promote competition, but I think there's one interesting factor that enhances this:
Most of the players perceive the ladder in UC as completely broken and able to let 'bad' players climb to master rank with ease. Due to how the system currently works, you can get to legend with a 45% win rate, which even in theory angers people. Thus the issue becomes 'elo inflation'. Everyone is good and so in the eyes of these players you need some other set of distinguishing factors besides the ladder rank itself for reasserting how bad a player is (often in an unconstructive way). Those factors are gloating over WR differences and making a big deal about playing for a long amount of time and consistently being in top legend, but more often then not this becomes a cudgel for good players to justify why they are good and humiliation bad/new players. It's videogame elitism at its finest but the issue is because of the scope and size of the game this is suffocating it. I was told that the same number of players play this year as they did last but my assumption is that its not new players, its people who've been playing the game for 3 years with a chip on their shoulder. It should also be mentioned that eventually good players are at a reasonable Elo level anyway that reflects their ability. In legend you have increasing elo similar to chess. So eventually in order to retain a 2150 elo you'd need to win at least 60% of the games you're playing. These players are taking out their occasional losses on those lower ranked players due to the hedonic treadmill of eventually getting to a point they can no longer climb higher from and lashing out at other players and systems as a result. Since these instrumental players are the top players this response is seen as an impressionable way to get better and fit in and suddenly next thing you know everyone after a certain rank threshold is complaining every third game about the other player 'highrolling' you.
There's one other interesting factor to, the higher rank you are the hard it tends to be to match in games because the player base is only around 20 players on at a time and most those players are not in legend. So what ends up happening is that the queue searches for around 4 minutes for another legend player, gives up, and matches you with a non legend player instead so suddenly your losses mean more and you're playing the game even less. Thus the backsliding of hedonic enjoyment with the game hits hard and if you follow the community energy the best way to replace that is through snark. This is not a result of the game its a result of the small size of the player base. This is not something that can just be magically fixed, and every attempt at fixing it is met with a degree of subconcious hostility by that established player base.
The kicker to me at least is that the community seems to actively misunderstand why the current ladder is so effective in the first place. It's literally more rewarding to new players more quickly, giving people a carrot system for continuing to play. Recently in the past few months the end of the month rewards were doubled, and while elo inflation is certainly a thing, the result is inflating more materials for better play to new players more quickly. The fact that people instead see the ladder system as it is as a bad thing reflects the culture surrounding the game. Which really sucks because this is probably the best card game I've ever played in terms of allowing for player creativity. Unfortunately all these hurdles get in the way and make play difficult. I would still reccomend the game immensely but just...dont open the chat. Embarrassingly I must admit through much of carrying myself with confidence and questioning established players knowledge, along with how many games I played, I've become a bit of a laughing stock in the 'community'. It feels humiliating to see one of my favourite games of the year weaponized against me like this.
Overall it's just sad to see a game being self cannibalized by a petulant and rude player base that's out of control. It's also sad to see this because community and warmth is the soul of Undertale, so the fact it became a place for humans to express their cruelty is tragically ironic, to say the least.
2022
Low opinion here not because I'm some NEET-phobic conservative but because nameless (and, curiously, genderless) protagonists dating people as a way of 'knowing' grosses me out. There's a lot about how standardized this specific format of short RENPY dategame has become to the point that ends up making games like Milk Outside and Doki Literature Club seem like these astounding subversions outliers to the genre. However to whatever extent that can even said to be true, it would mostly be because short 1 night date Visual Novels are almost at odds with themselves. Why does the nameless protagonist named 'you' go on the date. Why depict this world with intense visual depth but have a faceless dissociated protagonist?
Your protagonist can constantly call her cute, its the only compliment really on their mind, but how dissociated it felt when the girl said 'so are you'. Obviously the idea is that the bland questioning of your character and ease with which they can be positioned as the 'inquirer' is so that its easy for the reader to place themselves into the text, but is this really even working anymore? Haven't we broken away from this bland self insert protagonist as a people like a decade ago?
To illustrate why this problem effects the mechanics, let me take a moment and analyze one of the decisions you make in the game. At one point Kara expresses about how 'fucking based' it is to be a NEET, and you're offered 3 responses:
1. It is?
2. Definitely Based
3. Whats a NEET
The issue is that option 2 and 3 openly contradict each other in terms of the internal knowledge of the player character. Either they know what a NEET is and concur, or they don't know what it is. But the knowledge of one should rule out the other, these options are presupposed based on how aware the player behind the screen wants their player character to be. This means that the player character knowledge is not fixed in place. So either we live in a world where the player character knows what a NEET is but pretends they dont, or they don't know what it is and pretend they do. In either situation the character, if not percieved as a 1 playthrough stand in for the player is being a duplicitous snake. However the innocuous plausible deniability and wish fulfillment doesn't question this contradiction or bring it up. The player unimersed in the experience though sees it right away, and these contradictions in option sections remain for the entirety of the experience.
While there's an obvious criticism to be made about how this flux in player knowledge is immersion breaking, its not the only issue. The other problem is that it limits the scope of player choice to be so obvious that it reduces any impact out of choosing at all. The choice is pretty much made for you on first play based on how much you already know and feel about the topic of NEETism or how much you want to pretend you want to know. There's no fundamental diversion in questioning her in one option or agreeing with her in another, its all in the name of trying to shmooze her at the end of the day. Yet almost all the choices in this game are fundamentally questions based on knowing. Now obviously you can still play with a nameless 'knowledge flux' character like this but their status within dating games should not be so assumed. This is a function that works better for an edutainment game like Tomato Clinic. Or a therapeutic inquiry like with Milk Outside a Bag. But in games based around the idea of dating it registers the experience as canned and phoned in, your player character is a nothing so actually getting more intimate means nothing.
The 'edutainment' consideration is being teased at through a cultural relationship obviously, but does so to an extent that is almost distracting. Trying to mix the aspects of learning with the fiction of intimacy can and often does threaten to undermine the former in advance of the latter. It's very telling that some peoples ideas of the best way of connecting to a cultural frame or reinforcing their own is through doting on and trying to kiss women. Even Don Juan didn't go that far.
A lot of the pace of the game itself and decisions you make feel underwritten. This really feels like a 1st draft that wasn't properly proofread. At some point if you decide to order pizza with Kara, she states that she only prefers grilled chicken on pizza and can't stand pepperoni, indicating that the pizza you would order would have grilled chicken on it. However when it shows up she boldly announces that she went on a whim and tried for half cheese half pepperoni instead. This is far from the only writing goofup, there's one where Kara says you can sit down wherever you'd like and then you just continuing standing there and ask if you can sit down somewhere like 10 minutes later. It's hard to come up with some sort of textual justification for this, I think this is just the result of being underwritten as a lot of this genre tends to be and trying to offer you as many tensions as possible only to relieve them through player choice. It's fine, my character can express autonomy sometimes. I think that it's only a bug to critical readers though, the whole point is to captivate readership of people who wouldn't think twice so how poorly written most of these sort of dating storygames tend to be might be part of the point. These are so easy to make that quality doesn't matter much at all.
The game also registers to me as a little creepy I think. You can demand certain actions out of her like to clean her room or kiss you. And she does turn you down sometimes, but the actual framing itself of the act as an overt demand makes me really uncomfortable. This is another aspect with which it becomes part of a mechanical limitation of the RENPY software itself, you could offer a variety of longer choices where your character would say more things so you can fully follow if its a choice you want to make, but the limitation of the renpy dialogue box popups mean that any choice longer than a sentence would spam the screen with an overwhelming amount of words from which you'd only be able to choose one making such a venture unwieldy. Compare this to Twine, where the options are all filled as text at the bottom of the screen and the distinction is as different as night and day. Renpy Visual Novels I would argue just don't functionally work for the aspects of dating. Not to mention that the initial date is set up by her cousin who 'sees her more as a sister'. I don't know, it's a piece of fiction so I can't think of a more leering and opportunistic starting point for the story.
Finally is the object of the text herself, Kara, a genuinely pathetic E-Girl who seems to be shy but indicates no issues ever speaking to you. An internet otaku and gun nut with some clear indications of autistic neurodivergence. This is all solid stuff for a character study, issues is most of her identity seems to come out of a pride for having a NEET lifestyle (which doesn't even map onto the mild shame most NEETs actually have) and her overt elitism over her own hobbies. She calls working people 'wagies', she obsesses over the distinction between weebs and otaku so she can write off shonen anime only to give basic unprofound plot synopsis of the slice of life stuff she watches. She reminds me of a defanged version of Tomoko from Watamote. Except unlike how anthematic Kara is, Tomoko's story is one of constant struggle. Everything here is almost too smooth. It feels like the fact she doesn't need to even try and learn about you but simply exist in front of you to be getting in the way of her own motivations to learn to date. Being barely presentable to another human is just another hobby, it's not a sign of improvement at all no matter how much she insists to you towards the end is it. Beyond that I find her general elitism and obsessive use of l33tspeak to be ineffective in imbuing charm, authenticity, or a strong connection to the main character.
I also had some pretty severe issues with the lack of openess about the characters gender presentation. There's several obvious clues to the fact Kara is supposed to be trans, the Blajah and shirt in particular being 2 of the largest cultural indicators. But neither the character nor the creator wants to confirm the gender of the character as trans or cis. Which would be fine, except most people are going to just assume the character is a cis woman. It's hard not to explain this in a way that doesn't come off as gatekeeping but Blahaj posting is a largely established trans icon. Recently there's been a lot of cloutchasing ciswomen who take the iconography of trans women and play into them with an included 'transition timeline' joke as well. Kara has her own ambiguous version of this tweeted by the dev. Even assuming the best intent here, that this is a stealth trans character written for the purposes of normalizing trans women. I feel like by writing the story through such a leering mode, and by not having any overt mention of the transness of the character it only further divorces away from the potential awareness and respect cis people would have. Furthermore most trans people have lived a life of tribulation and necessary perseverance, like protrayed by Celeste. So even if the author did reveal the character was trans, it would not be a wholely useful reference point for understanding the trans experience. The fact this is instead the text plays into the reterritorialization of trans interests and subcultures as cis makes me pretty upset, so I thought I should at least do my do diligence in expressing that. The fact of the matter is some people are going to read this and be confounded I'd even call Blahaj such a clear indication of being trans, which shows the degree to which our icon and symbols are already being pillaged from us by people who don't care about us at all.
It's generic RENPY dating trash, but I figured that while the oven is hot I should pick a relatively popular one for expressing my grievances. The mixed to positive reception this game received while remembering how much overt mockery Milk Outside did is starting to piss me off, so I guess I'll just end it here to prevent myself from going on some sort of tirade.
Your protagonist can constantly call her cute, its the only compliment really on their mind, but how dissociated it felt when the girl said 'so are you'. Obviously the idea is that the bland questioning of your character and ease with which they can be positioned as the 'inquirer' is so that its easy for the reader to place themselves into the text, but is this really even working anymore? Haven't we broken away from this bland self insert protagonist as a people like a decade ago?
To illustrate why this problem effects the mechanics, let me take a moment and analyze one of the decisions you make in the game. At one point Kara expresses about how 'fucking based' it is to be a NEET, and you're offered 3 responses:
1. It is?
2. Definitely Based
3. Whats a NEET
The issue is that option 2 and 3 openly contradict each other in terms of the internal knowledge of the player character. Either they know what a NEET is and concur, or they don't know what it is. But the knowledge of one should rule out the other, these options are presupposed based on how aware the player behind the screen wants their player character to be. This means that the player character knowledge is not fixed in place. So either we live in a world where the player character knows what a NEET is but pretends they dont, or they don't know what it is and pretend they do. In either situation the character, if not percieved as a 1 playthrough stand in for the player is being a duplicitous snake. However the innocuous plausible deniability and wish fulfillment doesn't question this contradiction or bring it up. The player unimersed in the experience though sees it right away, and these contradictions in option sections remain for the entirety of the experience.
While there's an obvious criticism to be made about how this flux in player knowledge is immersion breaking, its not the only issue. The other problem is that it limits the scope of player choice to be so obvious that it reduces any impact out of choosing at all. The choice is pretty much made for you on first play based on how much you already know and feel about the topic of NEETism or how much you want to pretend you want to know. There's no fundamental diversion in questioning her in one option or agreeing with her in another, its all in the name of trying to shmooze her at the end of the day. Yet almost all the choices in this game are fundamentally questions based on knowing. Now obviously you can still play with a nameless 'knowledge flux' character like this but their status within dating games should not be so assumed. This is a function that works better for an edutainment game like Tomato Clinic. Or a therapeutic inquiry like with Milk Outside a Bag. But in games based around the idea of dating it registers the experience as canned and phoned in, your player character is a nothing so actually getting more intimate means nothing.
The 'edutainment' consideration is being teased at through a cultural relationship obviously, but does so to an extent that is almost distracting. Trying to mix the aspects of learning with the fiction of intimacy can and often does threaten to undermine the former in advance of the latter. It's very telling that some peoples ideas of the best way of connecting to a cultural frame or reinforcing their own is through doting on and trying to kiss women. Even Don Juan didn't go that far.
A lot of the pace of the game itself and decisions you make feel underwritten. This really feels like a 1st draft that wasn't properly proofread. At some point if you decide to order pizza with Kara, she states that she only prefers grilled chicken on pizza and can't stand pepperoni, indicating that the pizza you would order would have grilled chicken on it. However when it shows up she boldly announces that she went on a whim and tried for half cheese half pepperoni instead. This is far from the only writing goofup, there's one where Kara says you can sit down wherever you'd like and then you just continuing standing there and ask if you can sit down somewhere like 10 minutes later. It's hard to come up with some sort of textual justification for this, I think this is just the result of being underwritten as a lot of this genre tends to be and trying to offer you as many tensions as possible only to relieve them through player choice. It's fine, my character can express autonomy sometimes. I think that it's only a bug to critical readers though, the whole point is to captivate readership of people who wouldn't think twice so how poorly written most of these sort of dating storygames tend to be might be part of the point. These are so easy to make that quality doesn't matter much at all.
The game also registers to me as a little creepy I think. You can demand certain actions out of her like to clean her room or kiss you. And she does turn you down sometimes, but the actual framing itself of the act as an overt demand makes me really uncomfortable. This is another aspect with which it becomes part of a mechanical limitation of the RENPY software itself, you could offer a variety of longer choices where your character would say more things so you can fully follow if its a choice you want to make, but the limitation of the renpy dialogue box popups mean that any choice longer than a sentence would spam the screen with an overwhelming amount of words from which you'd only be able to choose one making such a venture unwieldy. Compare this to Twine, where the options are all filled as text at the bottom of the screen and the distinction is as different as night and day. Renpy Visual Novels I would argue just don't functionally work for the aspects of dating. Not to mention that the initial date is set up by her cousin who 'sees her more as a sister'. I don't know, it's a piece of fiction so I can't think of a more leering and opportunistic starting point for the story.
Finally is the object of the text herself, Kara, a genuinely pathetic E-Girl who seems to be shy but indicates no issues ever speaking to you. An internet otaku and gun nut with some clear indications of autistic neurodivergence. This is all solid stuff for a character study, issues is most of her identity seems to come out of a pride for having a NEET lifestyle (which doesn't even map onto the mild shame most NEETs actually have) and her overt elitism over her own hobbies. She calls working people 'wagies', she obsesses over the distinction between weebs and otaku so she can write off shonen anime only to give basic unprofound plot synopsis of the slice of life stuff she watches. She reminds me of a defanged version of Tomoko from Watamote. Except unlike how anthematic Kara is, Tomoko's story is one of constant struggle. Everything here is almost too smooth. It feels like the fact she doesn't need to even try and learn about you but simply exist in front of you to be getting in the way of her own motivations to learn to date. Being barely presentable to another human is just another hobby, it's not a sign of improvement at all no matter how much she insists to you towards the end is it. Beyond that I find her general elitism and obsessive use of l33tspeak to be ineffective in imbuing charm, authenticity, or a strong connection to the main character.
I also had some pretty severe issues with the lack of openess about the characters gender presentation. There's several obvious clues to the fact Kara is supposed to be trans, the Blajah and shirt in particular being 2 of the largest cultural indicators. But neither the character nor the creator wants to confirm the gender of the character as trans or cis. Which would be fine, except most people are going to just assume the character is a cis woman. It's hard not to explain this in a way that doesn't come off as gatekeeping but Blahaj posting is a largely established trans icon. Recently there's been a lot of cloutchasing ciswomen who take the iconography of trans women and play into them with an included 'transition timeline' joke as well. Kara has her own ambiguous version of this tweeted by the dev. Even assuming the best intent here, that this is a stealth trans character written for the purposes of normalizing trans women. I feel like by writing the story through such a leering mode, and by not having any overt mention of the transness of the character it only further divorces away from the potential awareness and respect cis people would have. Furthermore most trans people have lived a life of tribulation and necessary perseverance, like protrayed by Celeste. So even if the author did reveal the character was trans, it would not be a wholely useful reference point for understanding the trans experience. The fact this is instead the text plays into the reterritorialization of trans interests and subcultures as cis makes me pretty upset, so I thought I should at least do my do diligence in expressing that. The fact of the matter is some people are going to read this and be confounded I'd even call Blahaj such a clear indication of being trans, which shows the degree to which our icon and symbols are already being pillaged from us by people who don't care about us at all.
It's generic RENPY dating trash, but I figured that while the oven is hot I should pick a relatively popular one for expressing my grievances. The mixed to positive reception this game received while remembering how much overt mockery Milk Outside did is starting to piss me off, so I guess I'll just end it here to prevent myself from going on some sort of tirade.
Honestly amazing, although incredibly lewd at times. A story about finding romance in the crux of familial decay, a tragically normal tale for trans people. I absolutely love how insecure the naturalism is here. To illustrate, I will quote the best examples:
"Hey", I say as I wave back. I doubt she hears me, since I forgot to raised my voice, even though there's a good distance between us."
"It would have haunted me forever if I hadn't seen her all night."
""Can I sit here? Do people ask if they can sit somewhere? I usually just sit." "
I recently had a girl stay over for only 36 hours at my families house and I was so insecure, when you're around people for the 1st time you feel an urge to put on the best face but it generally falls apart super quickly. It felt mundane but also terrifying, the precarity of it all. Of being seen for the bodysituation you exist in.
Romance is in saying somebodies name back to them simply, I was anti-romance for a long time but I understand now that its as simple as that.
This is a visual novel but also an aesthetic treat for anybody that can deal with an erotic transgirl relationship. We've almost all met online, because there's only roughly 7% of us on earth, and most of us are in hiding. As such, Love meets beyond the flesh.
"Hey", I say as I wave back. I doubt she hears me, since I forgot to raised my voice, even though there's a good distance between us."
"It would have haunted me forever if I hadn't seen her all night."
""Can I sit here? Do people ask if they can sit somewhere? I usually just sit." "
I recently had a girl stay over for only 36 hours at my families house and I was so insecure, when you're around people for the 1st time you feel an urge to put on the best face but it generally falls apart super quickly. It felt mundane but also terrifying, the precarity of it all. Of being seen for the bodysituation you exist in.
Romance is in saying somebodies name back to them simply, I was anti-romance for a long time but I understand now that its as simple as that.
This is a visual novel but also an aesthetic treat for anybody that can deal with an erotic transgirl relationship. We've almost all met online, because there's only roughly 7% of us on earth, and most of us are in hiding. As such, Love meets beyond the flesh.