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Recently a mild friend of mine and game designer I'm a huge fan of released a video about Vampire Survivors as a sort of 'non-game'. You can view it here. So I first want to say I respect where she is coming from and how a seasoned game designer sees the same exploitative psychology in slow upgrade action RPG rougelikes as having the same skinnerbox habits. Essentially, she demands a specific rage on a particular point, when talking about the game she notices the lack of combat design, that regardless of your loadout the approach is always the same, dodge into the infinite void. "This is not combat design, this is NOTHING".

This argument is well put and rhetorically focused, and the focus on not wasting audience time is an apt starting point for most sensible game experience vehicles (although it's exactly where stuff like The Beginner's Guide comes in to take friction, but I digress). However, I do feel like 20 Minutes Till Dawn has something to include into this sort of discussion.

20 Minutes Till Dawn is an absurdly, vastly, better game for anybody who has played it. There's aim based weapon variety which require aiming at the enemy + slightly increased obstacle evasion, better aesthetic sensibilities, and a 10 minute decrease in overall time spent with the game. And all the characters you can play are slender girls with aesthetic principles rather than just Castlevania cardboard cutouts. You would be surprised how much difference these small changes make to the game experience.

At 10 minutes in, the combat variety is increased with a boss fight in a limited section of the map, it's not just mindless shoot and dodge. Your character load outs are all different with different effects they have and guns they can choose from.

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

Most early arcade games were not actually intended to be played ad infinitum, and so didn't have much difficulty throttling besides endurance and usually underdesigned obstacles. One that comes to mind is shown in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters where one of the primary subject Steve Weibe tries for the high score on Donkey Kong. In it his 2 main obstacles to success here are endurance and behind the scenes corruption in the high scoring scene itself. Yet there's a few moments splintered throughout Donkey Kong as an endurance test where the obstacles prove as Absurd, particularly one moment the documentary goes in depth about is 3rd Elevators. As shown by the example here, this is not good game design, this is game design that you're purely trying to outperform against, it's gaming as a higher level endurance sport with these janky obstacle getting in the way, but when we talk about it from the perspective of 'pure design' it becomes obnoxiously under considered and frustrating. Vampire Survivors is trying to bring this older style of play and experience as a rigourous test of endurance into contemporary progression systems. The idea is that you will eventually learn more optimal builds and try to finesse around the randomness to your best ability and endure its counting clock to a satisfying end. It's a neat idea of course but as an actualization of that system it's a fucking failure due in large part to its genuine lack of difficulty in general. Vampire Survivors is easy and genuinely uninteresting, its popcorn entertainment you can bloat on. But 20 Minutes Till Dawn is by all metrics an improvement and an actualization on that system, one that I think could be further improved upon but it a great step in the right direction, with fair inputs and a decent balance of difficulty and variety. The variety offered from skilled play means improvement exists.

The issue though is that 20 Minutes Till Dawn is a blatant clone of Vampire Survivors. We can't talk about it without admitting its apeing the formula with the exception of course that some people will decide to play it first.

Sometimes when we write about genres we don't like, I think we have a habit of trying to 'outsmart' the habits of the average gamer by implying that what they are doing is lackluster. The mobile gamer is a moron because Candy Crush is worse Bewjewled and they are both braindead match threes. FPS games are needlessly violent but its also point and click, nevermind that COD, TF2, and Splatoon all play and look completely differently. Incremental games are often derided as 'cookie clickers' and with the forward momentum of socio-cultural movement the nuances and interests start to roll into one another.

In the beginning of July, a close online friend of mine Nyx, who is a fashionista and film geek came over to my parents house which at 25 I'm still trapped in. I sat around with extreme anxiety about 'what were we going to do'. I didn't like going outside, and I was nervous about the fact all I had to do was really play on a computer. But those anxieties were severely eased when I realized how low maintenance my friend Nyx was, me and her would play this game a half dozen times in the morning hopping on and off the 1 player remote commenting on the general improvements as they happened. "I unlocked a new character!"..."Check out this new gun!". "Woah there's an upgrade system in here I didn't even know about". etc.

It was a blast and made me realize a certain nuance, a zen and kinship to gaming that is often ineffable to describe. And while I'm often deeply wracked with regret and anxiety I'll always look positively on this experience as I used to in a similar way when I went over to my other friends house and played Bloodbourne on her PS5 and traded idle chatter between some of the most incredible moments in a game. Or when the love of my life was around with me as I played the frustrating and slow No More Heroes system on the Wii as she cheered me on.

For me, gaming is one of the most deeply engrained social experiences I have, and a game constantly demanding a perfect difficulty curve is not always wanted. As much as you can trash something like Vampire Survivors, its Action RPG rougelite elements share a degree with Spelunky etc. It shares an 'evasion mechanic' with Binding of Isaac which despite Nyx's limited experience with games shares it as a favourite 'time waster' game.

But no matter what there will be downtime or lulls or things that are not perfect, things that are innovated eventually with time. Vampire Survivors had to walk so that 20 Minutes Till Dawn could take stride, and who knows, there will be another game in this genre yet we dont even know about. But it takes time, and game design is a paintbrush with time itself as the chronological palette. For what other art form has racing through the painting or enduring through it as long as possible as a genuinely lauded sport you can improve on. If nothing else I thank videogames for being able to give me an innovative solution to a long standing anxiety I have around how to passively loiter time with your friends, and with yourself. Videogame's are not limited to just doing this of course, but its one hell of an advantage its history benefits from. Most people I've seen successfully play Vampire Survivors with merit, have done it while streaming or with friends. I think its a bad game, but only in part because I know what the next best thing is and that's where I feel the focus is worth bringing. This is also why I don't believe in intellectual property rights, you could quite easily argue that 20 Minutes Till Dawn as a paid for 'mod' of Vampire Survivors in an abstract sense, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. There's lots of mods for Slay the Spire that use the engine itself. Lots of great games are really just borrowing a large degree of its resources from something else. I believe all people who make games or mods of games deserve financial compensation for their work without the threat of jail by those who own the original assets. As this game genre continues to mutate it'll begin to harmonize more with what Heather desires in these sorts of games, not less.

CW:Text Vomit, Excessive Gamer Tangents, Very Mild gameplay spoilers

Est. Reading length: Inchoately N/A
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I should note I got a free copy of the game from the developer because we are cautious friends. Not only for the sake of 'journalistic integrity' but also to point out that there's never been a situation where I played a game a developer gave me for free who I know personally and then I didn't like the game which is to say, I don't have a litmus test for how easy or hard I am to pay off. Who can say if I would have spoken about this game if I didn't like it? That being said the primary reason it is this way is out of poverty and not because I don't think the game is worth the money or anything like that. I definitely think with the amount of time it'll take to figure it out its totally worth it and one of the best games of the year so far.

Anyway, in respect to what everyone else has already offered on the game, I'll skip all the theming and presentation talk and just talk about the game mechanics proper. To me I feel like there's one hanging rhetorical question looming over the game design here which is the fact that it's a score attack game with a narrative. That question is something as follows: How do you make an 'endless score' game good in respect to player proficiency?

Let's take Pacman for example, Pacman is a deeply discussed point of consideration for how to design 'infinite score' games for many reasons. Heather and Matthewmatosis both have poured a lot of their own thoughts into it through DX by considering stuff like randomization, player proficiency, increasing difficulty, etc.

This is all in a good spirit, but the reality is this: You're most proficient player of pacman already knows the exact accurate array of moves, know exactly in what ways to manipulate the AI, and generally never feel like they are 'behind'. On top of this, Pacman miraculously ended up having an accidental end game that only absolute hardcore 'geek' players would have found. I can't say I've 'completed' arcade Pacman, probably almost nobody on this website can, but an ending does exist and thus the beauty of it being an 'endless' score game has dissipated. The difficulty of getting a 'higher' score for dedicated players is gone. A dynamic game has become flatlined with spreadsheets and planning over the years. This is the ideal case to. Compare this pure arcade game with something like Donkey Kong or Galaga to see followup problems. It's fairly clear from the outset what the methodology was for getting a higher score and so thus the motivation of play splits into 2 camps: Players who want to satisfy the urge to execute, and players that simply don't care. For the former it just ends up being an endurance test anyway and not much else. How good is your bladder to hold out to get a high score in a game you can't pause because that's the only thing stopping a highly proficient player to top the leaderboard in most games.

This problem with score becomes intensified immediately with home console gaming in a few different ways. For one, unlike arcade cabinets very few people are centralized and enthusiastic strangers to give enough of a shit about your new high score in Ninja Gaiden on the NES, like ok son thats great have you filed your W-2s yet? You might invite your friend over, but why would they care if they never played it before? The followup problem is that score became an afterthought in itself to 'narrative' design as well. As petty it may seem to bring it up, getting an infinite score in Kirby Adventure is insanely easy, it becomes a simple endurance test of walking to an enemy 10 feet forward, beating it up, walking backwards to cause it to spawn again and doing it ad infinitum until you're either bored or the score is maxxed. Far be that from the only game with that problem, almost every Megaman game has it too. Nobody considered it because it didn't matter, you would only put in the quarter for an arcade game under the motivation to either get further to see more of it or to get the high score. Now that the latter motivation is made defunct, the primary motivators become narrative or experiential. The artificial motivator to do it all better only exists in the minds of the player, to such an extent that it becomes brilliantly exaggerated to stuff like speedruns and no hit challenges, things that for the most part are best left up to the players to derive and find. But what about score as a motivator? What about game proficiency in itself? Without a well thought out score modifier it becomes a rather hollow and insulting piece of player motivation. One that we don't ever feel because it's lost. Our desire to care in a world that constantly churns from one game to the next makes it hard to find the appeal in it again, besides I don't need to be proficient if I can just watch what somebody else's efficiency at the game looks like. I don't need to play a soul level 1 run of dark souls I have too many games to play as it is and I can just watch Lobos Jr. do it and about 100 other things in the game more entertainingly and communally than than I did. Unfortunately, you fucked up too many times score, you have to be the least considered factor now (imprisoned). This is exactly the sort of issues that create games like Neon White, a game where score (time speed) is universally agreed to be its best asset is still its least capitalized on in comparison to its obsession with dating game narratives design and needless lore explanations, and then when you try to consider it in comparison to something like Lovely Planet (which often gets brought up in relate) the issue for that game though is the leaderboards are not global, theres time as a score in that game but its mostly for you and doesn't really 'do' much to motivate play that completing levels doesn't already provide. On a wider level I feel personally like the problem with this is that then both the designer and the player are completely out of touch with one another. Like, far be it from me to proselytize, but even though I like most games the only time I tend to feel like me and the score design are in harmony is when I'm playing absolutely silly shit like a golf game like Kirby's Dream Course or something lmao. So like, its only a score through and inverse minimization of score or time, rather than an accumulation of either in the other direction. Even when the motivator of score exists, it's only in its own minimization!

Enter then a game like, Quantum Bummer Blues, which exists within that score abandonment crisis and tries to intervene in some critical ways. The primary one is through health. Score is quite literally vital to beating the game in a way few games actually are, you have to get a threshold of score to refill your characters blood and life, if you don't give attention to it, you're not going to get very far at all. You have to care about getting a score in order to continue the narrative of the game. You can't just 'beat the game on 1 life' by evading everything it's not quite like that.

Following this, there's a deceptively high skill ceiling in the game if you work for it, it's just interesting because that skill ceiling is found mechanically through a very methodical patience with the game. You will fail and fail again, learn a sliver of gameplay information, and then repeat those sections again, different this time, with feeling. I don't want to give it all away but learning tricks for better play help you get just that little bit further. My main advice is read the how to very carefully and then after a few runs, read it again.

Next is the character feel. Early on you're going to be wrestling with the controls because the designer intentionally made the blood flow interstitial sections annoying to navigate. It's not just moving between straight lined pipes, you have to often trudge and crevice around these pixeled steps in the way. Which work to block and slow you down, the whole game is telling you straight from the get go 'slow the fuck down' and this design is reinforced by the fact you can at any time step into the pipes again to freeze the scene safely and just think about the plan of attack. In this process you'll realize that it's only those blue antagonist vertical shots that demand any sense of urgency and that going too fast and losing all your blood is what's going to kill you. Similarly the gravity feels like sludge. You fall incredibly fast and then have to push slowly upward, its like trying to control an sentient oil mine that threatens to end your run if you don't think things through.

Finally is how random it is, the green pellets and your specific situation going into each of the rooms can be accounted for in advance. Those green pellets start in the same place but start bouncing off in random directions very quickly. Meaning trying to section off 3 of them is going to be sporadic and random.

That's why it feels great when you finally piece all the mechanics together and pull off a successful run. You're fighting against the discomfort of your player character to essentially 'farm' points. But the more points you farm the higher your IV bag gets, and thus the faster the turrets spawn. You can very easily reach a situation where you're actually suffering from success and have to leave an area early. Creating these odd situations where getting rid of blood by painting half the screen as fast as and then hiding inside the red is the best move. This isn't even a mechanical spoiler because it's such a bizarre experience you won't even really be able to conceptualize how unintuitive it is until you actually see it in action. It's just a weird moment of balancing the various moving parts. It's the constant trade off of risk and reward and how awkward it all works is to great effect as a narrative device. It often switches between being slow and requiring a reasonable amount of risky movement and shooting. The pressure between moments of downtime to moments of blood bag balancing is incredible and shows that Heather has learned a lot from her thoughts on game design since she experimented with these same score based issues in her previous non narrative endless score game Endless Overdrive. The better you are doing in that game the most hostile it gets. My favorite side effect of this is that you can literally just enter and leave some rooms you don't like very quickly with no interactions at high levels of play with a full IV.

Yet ironically, hidden in this chaotic story about carceral torture is a genuine game where getting a higher score and playing it again not just feels fun but actually cathartic. The gameplay is spontaneous, methodical and has a lot of room for error but feeling satisfaction does not in itself come from getting to 1 million on the score counter. It comes from the wild proficiency and proof of ability to get there. The ability to know how to balance each of the moving parts.

One thing I had trouble bringing up and often do, is how score and game feel actually pervade and change the experience of a work because trying to do so in write ups like this borders on geometrical. As a result I often neglect to try, but that process of neglect is because of a historical and material neglect of the same. I don't have the tools for those kinds of explanations because I haven't had the access or time to hit up those books, but it creates an insecurity there. I can explain the textual ableism or depression of a visual novel just fine but descriptions of game design in itself are far more mysterious and ambiguous. In that sense the games 'ambiguity' around its design demands a special attention to it that you don't see much elsewhere.

The score itself doesn't really matter so much as hearing the squishy noises of a job well done and there's one important reason for that: The score doesn't show on the game over screen and no high score is actually accounted for outside of play. The only way you can commemorate the moment is by taking a screenshot or recording the game. The game makes the historical abandonment of score a genuine piece of its text. Sure whatever the game is about prison violence and the abuse of the young, its about queerphobia and all this stuff. Awesome, me and Heather get along for a reason there. But more importantly to me it's a manifesto about the narrative importance of those little points and what they can and should bring to gamefeel and for me, that's a much appreciated intervention I wasn't really considering. It's made this little few hour long gem almost certainly one of the best games of the year.

This is going to sound extremely panegyric to my friend but this is absolutely brilliant shit, I wouldn't expect anything less from an erudite woman who went to college for game design but it still highlights her far above just a friend or somebody we are all shaking the hand of out of some kind of academic respect. She genuinely is in a league of her own, bringing a much needed catharsis to game design, and for that I can only give a curtsey and a textvomit along with.

An interactive visual short story the size of a coffee coaster. The best way to describe why it's probably worth your time is in that it speaks about the small vulnerability shared between girls. I hear the wheezing and the weathered pain of this noise in my sleep. Realizing how asthmatic and exhausting the ghouls of your expression are. The industry of bodies has to keep on turning, but barely. It's all in the identity after the heavy night of drinking at a party.

Investigate the inky midnight through a wounded touch. To you its relayed as a blurb of text but the girls are having a vulnerable moment here, do you mind?
~~~~~
by girls of course I mean the discarded Undead.

CW: Suicide, Pandemic, Helplessness, Poverty, Global Issues Getting Worse

On Spoilers: I'm not actually a fan of spoiler tagging the whole document, so I have tacked in a 'spoiler section' point warning within it, with a bold capital lettering along with an 'end of spoilers' section. So just read around those points if you're interested in playing the game yourself and just want to know what I think in advance.

Est Reading Time: 15 minutes without spoilers, 20 with them.
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Now this is a fascinating one. In this is an apocalypse horror game, the main mechanic is literally 'patience'. It's a sort of anti incremental game, you have no control over anything, all you can do is wait. You are placed in a very small dingy 5ftx5ft prison room with a clock ticking on the wall, a bed, and a thick iron safe door with a grate on the bottom which you can't escape from. Through the grate, letters come streaming in under your jail door from various characters who want to speak to you. The primary one being the antagonist named 'Mr. Money' who has imprisoned you with a specific purpose. You see, a majority of the population has been infected with a very deadly virus, and the only healthy people left are isolated in their jail cells. The problem here however is that a lot of those people are killing themselves, so as a result the game is about encouraging your character through this correspondence and various material gifts, like posters etc., in order to spirit you to keep on living. Since you have no control over escaping from your cell, you just have to be patient and wait for people's letters to read about what's happening in the outside world.

The use of a very limited and garrish grey dented room goes a long way in making your stay feel as uncomfortable as possible, with some incredibly strong sound design backing it. There's a constant wind and clattering noise that brings an eerie quality to it all. The visual design of the letters and posters you adorn over time, while somewhat amateur in quality, are still made with a fine aesthetic craft. One of my favorite bits about the game is how each of the characters who send letters have very distinct visual designs around them and font choices that make them come to life.

For the most part, this game has a 'pulpy' quality to its horror where its riding the line as a dark joke in the mania of its writing similar to something like Little Inferno or Five Nights at Freddy's, coy yet dreadful. It grins at you while telling you that the world is currently being organ harvested, like a darker invader Zim (which would be Johnny the Homicidal Maniac if you know what that is). The game also feels less like a 'horror' game even if you might get scared, and more a thriller where the thrill is despondent. Being trapped on a long family drive slightly carsick, or a feeling trapped on a bad slow Disneyland ride. Less psychological horror and more psychological humdrum. That churning of dread in itself is so rare, that it's worth the price of admission on that point alone.¹

Yet, the ticket on the ride comes with quite a few caveats actually. For one, people have reported being seriously shaken up by this game. For one, a website peer Luna, who I highly respect has this to say "I really say this with tearful sincerity that this work should be locked in dungeons behind dungeons so as not to see the light of day ever again."ᵃ Calling it a 'mind poison' and mentioning it made several of her friends contemplate if they should even continue living, as she passionately puts it "I myself went through one of the worst months of my life quickly following this work and I don’t feel like I earned anything from it.". This is a rather serious charge.

Following this incredibly dramatic and compelling rhetoric. There's also the spooky issues this game seemed to anticipate early about our real world condition. Issues of isolation, despondency, and viral pandemics, economic depressions, mass incarceration, and political desperation. Recently its adjacency to the COVID pandemic has garnered with it a great deal of follow-up traction. Which is unfortunate because it seems the author can't enjoy the profound discourse around this game, since there's one final nail in the coffin of its horrific settlement. A game which depicts a highly normalized world of suicidality, in which people risk their lives or kill themselves, has a dev who, 2 years after this games creation, was driven to suicide himself. That all being said I was not really unsettled or disturbed by it too deeply, as I tend to get a lot out of reflecting on the 'darker' parts of humanity. This is not meant to be an 'edgy' point but I love reading pessimistic works like No Longer Human or the philosophy of Cioran, and generally enjoy the genre of psychological horror writ large. So if you have anything close to my proclivities take that as the go ahead to try it for yourself ^-^

Regardless of the interesting relationships to the text mentioned above, I would argue the main trauma the work is trying to deal with, and why it seems so prophetic, is that it is very concerned with the economy. Throughout the game you are told about the shady dealing of 'Dr. Money' who has manufactured a viral plague and then sells people a shoddy antidote. He does it all, selling people's organs, threatening and blackmailing people, war profiteering etc. All for his own pockets. None of this is even a spoiler, this is actually set up in the standard yet gothic incremental game predecessor game Exoptable Money which sets the backdrop for the lore here. You don't have to play that game first but this one is actually meant to be a sequel with events here that were a 'wedged' side plot in that one. We get to read about the decaying of the world: gray, black, and red markets merge into one bloody torturous chimera. As the supposedly pure 'white market' withers away. It's a brutal apocalypse one that Peter Frase, describes in his work Four Futures, as exterminism. He argues there's a punnett square of possibilities that exist after capitalism as we know it, and the one with the most hierarchy and scarcity of resources, and by far the most devastating, is exterminism:

"In a world of hyperinequality and mass unemployment, you can try to buy off the masses for a while, and then you can try to repress them by force. But so long as immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that one day it may become impossible to hold them at bay. When mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor." ²

More worryingly, one of the reasons why this game seems like it was able to 'tell the future' on COVID³ is clarified in a followup article he did on how the events of covid are a concerning predictor that currently in our real life we are on track for the 'exterminist' endgame hosted by the moment by the Party of Death

"For the Party of Death, the pandemic itself begins to appear economically useful, and the measures needed to combat it can come to be seen as worse than the disease — which, from the narrow perspective of capital accumulation, they may well be."⁴

He then goes on to highlight in that same article a warning, that you shouldn't just think the Party of Death as some indignant GOP candidates, the NY Times, Friedman, and honestly just basic cabal news is pushing for 'opening the economy back up'. I'm not the only one who lived through it either, people were constantly putting down and lifting restrictions every other week it seemed. The accumulation of scarce resources into the pockets of the rich, and clear structural 'violence' viciously merge into one monster, much like the ghastly cannibalistic world of Cruelty Squad. The only difference between that game and this one is you're kept at a birds eye view.

However here's the bit where I think the text is most brilliant, and also the one I find so fascinating. One of the main things that you get early on that you can use to stave off your dreary environment and bad situation, is video games. See, early on you're given a game device, and your hysterical 'buddy' sponsored by the institution to keep you happy, starts to buy you games. It's only after the second game he says he's too poor to get you any more games and profusely apologizes, and then his desire to keep you happy only gets worse from there as he disembowels himself to give you more incredibly basic and simple games.

This to me, is the brunt of the trauma that I felt was being communicated, almost as a sort of open form question 'is it even ok for game devs to expect money?'. 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. This being a hyperlink in the game, and imbedded as a sort of quiet plea in the ending of both after everything I've described so far, it feels just to include it in a reading of the game's themes. If that's not enough to sway you, the reveal of the first game is using cat fur and human organs as money generators. It doesn't take a scholar to see how economies of suffering would make a game developer feel insecure about offering something or asking for money for their work.

A lot of games on websites like itchio will sell their games in bundles for dirt cheap, there's always sales. The only people daring to sell games at the 60 dollar mark anymore are studios selling AAA exclusives on the newest console. Not even highly polished AAA steam games can resist a steam sale markdown after a few months. So in theory, game devs should not feel worried about this and I'd be the first to reassure them they can price their game however they feel is right without much ethical issue.

But look, let's actually not discard it, lets dwell with this insecurity for a moment. From the inside, it's hard for a highly isolated yet passionate game dev not to see and putting game experiences behind a paywall as not being self cannibalizing the same working class it's supportive of. Even in the best case scenario it might risk doing this. And the various worse case scenarios intensify as our global crises do. Climate change is only getting worse and asking for 5 dollars for a game might have you in a neurotic state that people might starve or miss their electric bill because of trying to support you and your work. Might rack up debt interest just to try out your game. Might lose an arm working at Walmart or amazon just in order to buy your cute independent game everybody is talking about, or worse, nobody. So, if you beg them in the form of kickstarters, whereby you can also try to justify your game dev abilities as a core ability you have then you avoid it right? In a weird inverse way, street begging has more dignity than a paywall from this sort of worldview. All the more sad is that compared to a lot of kickstarters Wertpol was not asking for all that much "Alright, so the kickstarter is over, and failed again at 3188€/12000€."⁴ he closes with "So I guess, currently, it’s ‘on hold’, possibly cancelled, I don’t know. I really don’t feel like thinking about any of this much more.`` The disappointment here is palpable. This is all in spite of the fact it got it 5 minutes of youtube fame through popular lets players like Markiplier playing it. A depressing reality is that when it comes to indie games, most don't recoup the funds to continue developing games themselves.

What is the one counterargument that can be done? Well for the people already dead from these sorts of insecurities about world purpose and ability, there is none. No charitable set of words is going to make the dead change their mind about the value of their art. Or bring much healing to the affected families, who probably wouldn't appreciate having the suicide seen as non-rational, like 'its ok little Timmy was just wrong about how much he hated himself' doesn't ring well. So I must say as sympathetically as possible here, I deeply understand. I'm not out to overwrite the insecurity of one lost and young dev so much as trying to pave a path out for those currently suffering5. Honestly it's less a matter of being rational or not so much as being disconnected from kinships of care.

While not all suicidality relates itself so heavily to the feeling of the violence impacting others and themselves just by being alive, most at least tend out of self isolated loops of despair that are difficult to feel escape from. However if there is any way to quell these traumas for the living, one potentiality might be through gaming itself. In this setting, the entirely grim situation and circumstances can be almost entirely blocked out by minimalist gameboy games. Almost all are actually playable and Buddy mentions to you that the games have frustrated people with their difficulty. There are twenty levels for each and they all consist of dodging obstacles for a goal. They are all fun to play and they kept me occupied from the awful situation. I literally played the entire game hooked on these minigames, grinding through them for badges that would align my room, and stopping to read letters in between, because what else was I supposed to do? What was supposed to be unbearable became for me, actually meditative and fun, dampening the still upsetting tale within. For most of it I was in a better mood than I wasn't. A similar use of gaming inside the game, in order to stave off depression, shows up in 'No One Can Ever Know' and using it lowers your dysphoria from impacting you. It's just as effective in that text as well at 'dampening' the pain of being alive there as well. Computer games dampening the effects of trauma seem to have a legitimate is small amount of research supporting those claims⁵ ᵃⁿᵈ ⁶. So perhaps game devs can take solace in knowing that their games can actually heal a lot more than they think. Even if it's a dreary art game I think the same basic point holds true. And rather than throwing these games in a dungeon, basic optional⁷ yet easy to read in advance content warnings about whats inside of each would go a much longer way than just throwing every game we don't like into a fire. If I sound passionate on this its because these same echos against challenging art exist in the discourses around queer novels in high schools, which many districts including the one I live in in america is currently out to pull from shelves.

Nonetheless, it's this focus on economies as harm, is bound to take an incredible toll if somebody is already having self esteem issues. The constant use of suicide in the narrative feels more like bleak if somewhat humorous at points narrative device rather than something you're supposed to consider seriously as an individual. As a matter of fact your character doesn't actually have a option to kill themselves even with the only 'decision' in the game, you just bear witness to others that do. At the same time, the letters you get from the people who do are wistful 'you can go on where I failed'. I feel like this game is answering a dark echo about economies themselves, which is to say that we call when they aren't working as desired depressions and recessions, but don't actually treat them as such. Which for me at least is a daring form of storytelling.

STORY SPOILERS AHEAD

I think another point where this economic concern comes across is that your main character is constantly being sent letters of pure sincerity and gifts. Your well spoken woodworking friend Salvador will over the course of the story send you a table. Other people send posters as mentioned earlier, and one even a cake.

This speaks to another part of economic powerlessness that people don't really like to address, which is the power imbalance found in gift giving. I'm incredibly poor and for the most part of my life young as I am, many people around me were getting me gifts and nice things. Even in my current state now, close friends and family often send me money, clothes, etc. Some will send me steam games and it goes on like this. Yet I can almost never repay in kind, I just watch as people send me things and have life issues. Sometimes I do something particularly wrong by a friend, and stop being friends. Only to then be left by myself with the present remains. After a certain point in the game, not only do you feel overwhelmed by all of the gifts from the various benefactors, some who you care for more than others, but you can't do anything in return either. This is actually the most direct and specific the depressive function gets and even then its economic, you just literally can't because you're in jail in the confines of the game. More interesting than that, the ones that care the most are equally hurting themselves the most when trying to help. Whereas the evil Doctor Money is the only one who expects repayment for his 'gift' of a jail cell (your organs). Still, eventually there's a physical feeling to the gifts, they don't feel good, they feel like the only vestiges of memory of others as it attaches to the outside. The imbalance of the world of gifts and how it can reinforce a person's sense of looming inadequacy is told brilliantly by your player character having no voice at all.

Finally I think it's worth mentioning where the game falls short. There are 3 characters aside from Dr. Money, who all try to be your friend. One is Salvador, your old friend who ventures across to a different land, who has known you for a long time. Yet, it's not ever explained how he knows to send letters to you since the course of your understanding of the confines of the jail cell exists purely for you, and how they don't get screened out entirely means his feuding for your attention exists only for thinly held narrative reasons. He also electrocutes himself to death via the generator. Then you have of course your buddy who is mostly well written but, his hysterical laughing over text uses a throttling of capitalization and lowercase which combined with a creepy poster makes him feel like way too gimmicky, although breaking character by pleading with you quietly to be happy is neat, they didn't need to write him so psychotically. The worst of them all however, is how they treat Charlotte. Charlotte is the lonely baker girl who lives near the prison and sells cakes. She's sweet and plays you music at one point. The problem however is that she commits suicide and tells you right after you escape 'sorry I couldnt be more patient but anyway'. The other issue here is that she is only bonded to your silent protagonist out of a random knowledge she has that you and her are both the only people not hit by the virus in town. For her to be this lonely yearning flowery girl who commits suicide just before you can get to her, even though she knows you're in there is very twee and offensively exploitative of women for a cheap narrative trick. Which sucks because the rest of the game runs completely fine on suicide. It's not the most offensive thing in the world or anything but it's far from narratively ideal.

Even then, there's other smaller issues too. For example, the Triangle game which meant as a geometry dash clone takes input of several jumps when you press the button, allowing you to fly and even go outside the screen, there's no way to play it without this flying glitch happening since a press takes several jump inputs at once. Another is how Salvador, who does not know the confines of your room is able to build you a table that is perfectly aligned in the room, in fact I think it being too big or small would have encouraged the points being made more.

END OF SPOILERS

The final thing I will say is I don't think it's reasonable to discard difficult art about despair as inherently harmful. This is an instinct I completely get since I found the depiction of despair and futility in Omori and Danganronpa so upsetting I could not actually finish the games. I get the desire to either condemn these titles or at least make them inferior. But self deprecation, despair, depression, etc. are all deep emotions in our real life, and to repress our relationship to their depictions in art is to fall into the same maniacal trap of forced hostage happiness that this game criticizes. The more we repress ourselves from the misanthropic parts of life, the harder it becomes to accept things like Global Warming, Genocides, War, Depression, etc as the violent realities they are. That all being said I will again reassert that this game is not far the faint of heart, its an abrasive experience of powerlessness that counters the typical designs of why people want to play videogames.

That all being said, I know that even after writing all of this I still haven't gotten rid of my own feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. The game didn't give me them, just clarified them in nice ways. I feel kind of bad that as minimalist and simple as this, I couldn't accurately address the various other more nuanced depressions and discomforts in the game. Then there's the dearth in being able to make this a compelling piece to read, it's rather dour and unexciting. Honestly, this is likely because I'm still quite new to writing on games but I also try to put a lot of myself and knowledge into my writing as well. At the end of the day, maybe the fact that I abstracted depression to larger socio political issues means that I'm a bit of a death whisperer. For me, struggling with those feelings are just another part of the disappointments and degradations of life and to that effect perhaps that's also why I find a serious appreciation for art like this as well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a. From Luna's insight on the game link. I do end up somewhat critical of this text in this piece, but I only do so out of respect to the original writer as a peer I hold great respect for on the website. Not to mention she was who originally spurned me to give this one a try in the 1st place.

1. Although besides my cautiously positive praise on this game, there's a few other games on similar notes I think are worth prioritizing first, Little Inferno, Static End, and Trash the Planet, along with Exoptable Money itself. You could consider this game a much rougher hard mode to the themes and focuses of these games. Consider those other games just general recommendations in any other case.

2.Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase, sorry no page number on this one its an EPUB

3. I mean "Seems" here quite strictly. I don't believe in Predictive Programming and even if you did, a primary plot point in the story that is revealed is that Dr. Money manufactured the virus into existence, which makes him more similar to Bob Paige from Deus Ex than real life COVID. The pandemic connections are well meaning but not bringing up these facts can accidentally play into the hands of ludicrous conspiracies like that COVID-19 was lab grown. Which leads to other conspiracies like that the elite can just manufacture a deadly virus and various other bioweapons, a sorry conspiracy theory that even my highly liberal facebook dad seems to believe in. There's definitely some responsibility to be had to not just reference where games anticipate the future but also where they don't and probably don't even try to.

4.The Rise In the Party of Death link. For what it's worth, the leftism is not a politics I'm trying to push on you in this reading so much as a general understanding that the world we live in is slipping quickly towards apocalypse.

5. "We found that intervening with either Tetris or Word games four days after the trauma film was effective: participants in both Tetris and Word games conditions had relatively fewer intrusions after the intervention than participants without a task. The evidence for this finding was strong. " Tetris and Word games lead to fewer intrusive memories when applied several days after analogue trauma link

6. "But Colder Carras emphasizes that the genre or specific game isn’t what necessarily helped with recovery. The benefits, she says, stemmed more from the connections the Veterans made with other video game players; the distractions they created for themselves by playing the games and removing their focus, for example, from alcohol or drugs; and the meaning they derived from the games." Study: Video games can help Veterans recover from mental health challenges link

7. My thoughts on Content Warning or the uncharitably termed 'Trigger Warnings' is complicated, because they can be spoilers in themselves in the sense they tip off what a piece of art is about. For some, knowing the exact confines of them all may be unwanted and take away from the 'surprise' of the experience even if having 1 or 2 mental blocks around certain content would make you want to air on the side of caution in all cases anyway. Personally, I'm rather indifferent to spoilers but it's something I think about a lot. I hope one day backloggd allows you to spoiler tag specific sections of text because I definitely would like to make it opt in :/

Est. Reading Time 20 minutes.

CW: Ableism, Mental Illness, Drug Addiction

There are some mild 'plot spoilers' but I don't spoil the ending of the game, and most of what I do spoil is incredibly mundane, so feel free to read with that in mind.

Policy

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Milk outside is a sequel psychological horror short VN, where you explore the apartment bedroom of a schizophrenic young girl and attempt to assist her over the course of the night in her dirty room, in making sense of her mind as a disembodied part of her own brain. The game is a short VN, in part riffing on the dating genre with an point and click adventure portion wedged within. With compelling visual animations and sound work to boot.

Lets be honest here, Null (I choose to refer to her as Null because of her shirt) is very difficult to chat with. Shes incredibly self loathing and tedious to deal with, there's even an achievement you get from pestering her about her last day of school called 'youre annoying' which from outside reading I did seems to imply her dad said that... What I find so beautiful about this portrayal is it talks to something real about neurodivergence or in the disorderly cases mental illness: It kind of makes you come off like an insensitive jerk.

First I want to mention something about Null I don't think people picked up on, I think this text reflects a less 'well masked' form of autism than what people are used to seeing. It's easy to read the speaking repetitions for instance or the non desire to clean her room as just 'quirky' if you don't recognize these as legitimate life complications autistic people deal with. Echolalia, stimming, unusual organizational strategies, its all there. I don't know if I am personally autistic but I know people who've exhibited those traits who are.

On another note we discover, yet not right away, her room being a right fucking mess. It's very relatable. Even from a matter of logistics, there's often a problem for neurodivergent people, where more stuff is imported into the domestic space, primarily trash, than exported. This goes beyond just neurodivergence into a bigger issue for anybody who is being socially shamed by their society. The beat writer and opium addict William Burroughs played with this idea of 'junk'¹ in this way to drawing on his own experiences with addiction

""Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the purpose unless your purpose be to keep the junk virus in operation. And junk in a big industry. ""

While I couldn't find a direct quotation and depiction, Burroughs himself also lived surrounded by piles and bags of trash going to the ceilings. All while alienated from his friends during his time in Morrocco. Compare the aggressive quote with the physical junk in the room, and the fact its maintained by milk packets blocking her off and you find a stunning picture and perhaps you can see what I'm saying.

This is a far more sympathetic portrayal of mental illness because it's honestly more pessimistic about how poorly a lot of people like us are actually cared for by a larger oppressive system that can only be called ableist. This really is somebody so constitutionally trapped in loneliness and social disarray. Even her perception of time is exaggerated and all she can think about is the many ways she can die. Once you get into a point of frankly rather valid persecution and neglect its hard to pull yourself out on your own, if not impossible. Just as the inability to export trash reflects social neglect, so to does psychological self shaming reflect an inability to export violence done upon someone. One point about this I thought was particularly revealing is not only in the parental neglect surrounding her, but also in smaller moments like how when she was having issues in school other kids would call her a 'schizo'. Pretty much using ableist insults of non normative action to ostracize people and put them down.

This is also extremely relatable for me, and, I would imagine a lot of people. Even if you are able to function for the most part you've probably had your thoughts and actions dismissed as 'crazy' or 'spergy' before. Recently I found a very compelling dictionary on reverting from ableist language², here's what it has to say on 'schizo'

""This is ableist when used as a substitute for "switching rapidly" or "acting without regard for others" or otherwise implying a person seems mentally ill simply because they are unpredictable or make someone uncomfortable. The words "schizophrenic," "schizoaffective," and "schizotypal" are not ableist when actually referring to a person with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or schizotypal personality disorder.
Consider instead: wild, confusing, unpredictable, impulsive, reckless, fearless, lives on the edge, thrill-seeker, risk-taker, out of control, scary, lacks empathy, toxic, manipulative, egotistical, abusive, unpredictable""

It's a useful tool, but the fact of the matter is imagining these alternative phrases being used in public school, at least when I used to go, seems highly utopian. On top of this there's a lot of mockery around this as 'language policing' which is sad because in reality it means people are trying to ignore the potential pains of their callous speaking norms as 'freeing' when the very opposite is the case. People used to use the word 'retard' all the time in school and in gaming communities in the 2010s, but its very much out of vogue and offensive now. That being said I think the text of Milk Outside balances this well by pointing out the many other ways language can perpetuate it outlined in this dictionary as well. For example, early on you can tell her to 'act normal' which has to be a phrase almost everyone's frustrated parents have said at least once. It's one of the reasons I recommend giving this source a read.

The primary issue is using almost any phrase as a matter of derision but also as a matter of intentionality to be so. It's the 'schizo's job to 'stop being a schizo' and its their fault when they fail. As somebody who has screwed up a lot due to panic attacks and then had the people get upset at me for it, its something I deeply relate to. People often see when I panic and leave places and yell that people don't understand me as me being toxic, and of course its not something I desire to do, but in reality I have about as much control of it as a fish out of water once its gotten to that point, most of the time it can only be controlled by preventative measures in advance. Once they happen, its already too late. We can similarly read mental hangups like this a similar issue of that import/export analogy, if you have more negative perspective coming in than positive self perceptions (often encouraged by others) going out, the mind will become a junkyard of self loathing. Ultimately, you can't really control how you feel, at best you can nudge it a little. Ligotti describes this well in his deeply discomforting text Conspiracy Against the Human Race

"But we do not control what we think or feel about being alive, or about anything else. If we did
have this degree of mastery over our internal lives, then we would be spared an assortment of sufferings. Psychiatrists would be out of a job as depressives chose to stop being depressed and schizophrenics chose to silence unwanted voices in their heads."³

So then it follows well that the 'protagonist' does not have all that much control or feel like they are piercing the 'heart' of the problems shes dealing with. It's supposed to feel that way and you're supposed to be frustrated by it. Instead neurodivergence is repaired by a series of, often quite tiring upkeep of negotiations and preventative care. Not just with others but with yourself as well.

Let's talk about how well this works as a sequel. It's important to play the prior game first to get yourself acquainted with some important pieces of information, like for example her dad committing suicide. In fact I would say a better relationship with the character would be playing them back to back. This is meant to be a sort of meditational space away from the terrifying and blunt messaging in the first game, within which she can unwind and try and think about the difficulties of her life. The point being mental illness is not always something so easy for people on the outside to follow or sympathize with. Sometimes it consists of hard to untangle phrasing, and difficult moments of trying and failing to connect with them. It would be absolutely foolish to think this game didn't do its research either, because the main symbol on her shirt is the null symbol from Lacan used to explain the concept of the big other.

This game is a literary work which means you really have to play with it and be patient in order to appreciate it if you don't have these experiences. But trust me this is not a bad or 'toxic' reflection of mental illness. The neurodivergent require respect, accommodation, and patience. Through what you can pick up, this girl has been robbed of all of those. We all express being on edge in different ways, whether you find them endearing enough or you want to be closer to them, or want nothing to do with someone like this, fine. But this is a completely legitimate reflection of the stigmatization of mental illness and how they produce traumas the victims try to ignore. Ironically everyone referring to her as a lain clone or 'Milk Girl' is, I believe, missing that very point. After playing this game, if you have difficulty unraveling the complexity of its psychological portrayal check out this plot synopsis inquiry and this insight on the academic psychoanalysis work. Needless to say there's a lot of literary and technical depth in the game, especially in comparison to a lot of other VN's who are just going to show their characters at their most chipper with you and only get upset with you during the bad ending. This text throws those sort of dichotomies out the window.

I would urge my fellow gamers to not play games they in advance think they wont like. And not to publicly talk haven't been patient with, if you just kept fast clicking through all the dialogue prompts and reading as fast as possible then your inexperience will be negative out of impatience. I haven't continued to play Omori because of the dichotomous segmentation of 'pleasant fantasy worlds' vs. 'horrific apartment' and how much I felt locked off from the personality of my main character. But I'm not out to shit on it because I literally have not interacted with the text deeply enough to try and explain any sort of opinion on it, nor do I know where it goes. I'm not going to feel comfortable just saying 'bad vibes' on a text that is bearing such difficult and painful trauma like this. It's telling however that other people are so willing to do so. I think in a way this game made a brilliant commentary on a type of gaming experience that gets dismissed and ignored without even having to resort to meta. Intense word heavy games (VNs, Interactive fiction, etc) that discuss rough subject matter more pessimistically have been the laughing stock of gamers for a good while now.

That said, I do think there's legitimate reasons not to like this game. Even if its as simple as 'this just reminds me of how bad the intersection of poverty and mental illness is and makes me sad' or 'I sympathize with the character but the despondency doesn't make for a great game experience'. Or even more technical issues like the lack of skip or save functions (which for me don't matter at all and as I've laid out in my No One Can Ever Know writeup can actually enhance an experience for me). These disconnects are perfectly fine, but throwing the game away for its annoying aesthetics and circuitous dialogue is I think more than a little dismissive, and as a result playing exactly into the hands of the ableist prejudice it so accurately critiques.

That all being said, I feel like I haven't yet addressed any of the specifics. Most of my insight is more on other people's prejudices and an explanation of mental health, rather than highlighting why I enjoy this game so much. So here's a few more specific reasons I like it:

-The game was gifted to me by a girl who is incredibly similar to this character, who deals with a lot of ambiguous mental hurdles, and is also just starting to come to terms with her 'plurality' recently. This is something I'll speak about more in another text soon, but all that means for the moment is she, just like this girl, has personality issues that she is just starting to unravel. The similarities between her and this girl are to such an extent it goes beyond just a vacuous representation. In my experience there are people like this, and despite being difficult to speak to sometimes they have truly brilliant minds. It's funny because the masculine version of this type of character is found in the movie A Beautiful Mind, which I found insufferable to watch. That was because I couldn't really feel like I was 'interacting' with the paranoid delusions so much as being a specter. It made it seem like people really don't even try to intervene, this text makes it clear: they do but poorly. A lot of the mathematical fixations between her, for example squaring pyramids and such, seems similar to John Nash's thinking patterns.

-The music OST is 4 hours long apparently, most of it to do with the radio you can put on. This is longer than the expected length of a playthrough game, this is crazy considering most of the tracks seemed pretty good, if only about Yume Nikki length (like a minute long).

-The color palettes are soothing, using reds to display a sort of mistlike feeling, moving away from the oppressive use of purples and such in the first game.

-The text doesn't try to get you to 'date' the character but puts your protagonist in a similar engagement of inquiry you would find in those dating VNs. This is in itself a sort of micro genre, there's a list on this very site about it. However, its a microgenre that i'm fond of, since I see the ubiquity of the visual novel as a 'dating simulation' unfortunately. It also feels like a nod to how if it had been a more 'moe' human relationship with the character, it would have been more vapid and possibly offensive.

-The sound effect work on this one is just as brilliant as the visuals. Those little 'dings' whenever it's your turn to speak feels very satisfying and prevent you from accidentally hitting a choice on the screen without meaning to.

-I always love this eastern European architecture. It's so stalwart and gloomy, yet functional. I love how it makes the room look disorganized but not immediately 'gross' since its through her perception this stuff is happening.

-The opening with the horrific creature giving her a shot was incredibly well written and shows the text is not choosing more airy 'obnoxious' dialogue out of inability.

-A lot of the visual representations throughout the game have a mystical quality to them, falling down a hole or looking in a twisted funhouse mirror. A lot of the quiet visual representations are killer, wallpaper worthy, and absolutely worth the price of entry.

-On top of the clear literary thoughtfulness and understanding of psychology mentioned earlier. I'm impressed that the dev was able to construct a text with a convincing female lead. Even if he had to use a patriarchal gaze through the players role in order to connect. The dev here is Nikita Kryukov, who dons large gauges, a baseball cap, and a seemingly quiet demeanor and social presence. Primarily focused on appreciating the fan art put out and talking about various stuff around the game. From my cursory glance he's not even a comparatively active or political twitter user which is honestly quite rare and appreciated. And so, for a demure Russian dude, who you would probably seem more at home on the front of a nu-jazz record to so effectively write a vibrant story about the ableist oppression of women as it relates to imperial countries. It fills me with hope. For me, it means that if you try hard enough you can escape the biases of your own positionality to write about what you arent and capture the heart of that pain. This is a struggle and insecurity that plagues a lot of writers, with it being so in vogue for academics to tear apart 'poor representation'.

This all works to convince me the text has added something fundamentally unique to add to the VN form. I think perhaps my own experiences with girls that act like this and aren't doing it as a 'tumblr core' thing makes me a bit more sympathetic to them. But regardless, there's enough going on here for it to actually touch people who aren't on the inside of these struggles.

Mostly I felt I should just let people know there's more going on here. And on the charge of any sort of 'ableism' I will note that the people who call her 'Milk-chan' are also doing a huge disservice and seeing right past the character as well. So ultimately its not just the naysayers that are at fault here. Milk Outside asks us all to be more patient across the board and for that I consider it a masterwork of the visual novel short story. Quite honestly, it seems to me a lot of yall just got filtered by a Visual Novel, and thats pretty damn funny to me.

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1. DEPOSITION: Testimony Concerning A Sickness.

2. Ableism/Language

3. p.15, not for the faint of heart. I found a copy of it on Libgen but I wont link it here for obvious reasons.

Policy

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It's not without merit, I'm all for geek games and if you're interested in geometry its worth a shot, but only if you have a video walk through handy. But it's incredibly frustrating and not really worth the effort as an edutainment game, as it suffers from some fairly ease of access related issues. I will now try to 'prove' why.

Well, it's literally just a geometry tool, I got tricked into 'playing' geometry the puzzle game. Finding angle degrees, making parallel lines, making squared inside squares, etc. Expect the issue is I was constantly running into issues where I quite literally did not know the theory behind the questions being asked of me, and there's no hint button in the game besides 'explore' mode. Since all the answers have to be incredibly precise this 'explore' mode of seeing the otherwise obvious answer is quite useless. Another problem is you can't 'label' anything in the game. In geometry usually a side of a triangle will be labeled, after all this sort of abstraction is how we got proofs like A + B = C. Without the ability to mark anything in game you have to 'instill your own markers onto the game, which is ok for early puzzles but gets quickly overwhelming when the game wants you to make, say, a hexagon and you have a couple dozen indistinguishable circles and lines on the screen. This is probably in the justice of making the game artificially harder, which in theory puzzle experts would enjoy, what it really does though is people are using outside tools to solve puzzles, rendering it as an educational tool fruitless. Even when I was using a visual tutorial, I had problems following along, because it would use the abstraction as proof.

The other thing is you can't skip levels on the web version, so you just get to sit there feeling stumped until you look up the solution and find out how alien it is.

But the issue goes 1 piece forward more than that even. Because unless your geometry textbook introduces these theories in a conducive order, you're going to hit a wall where you 'cant come back'. Puzzle experts explain it as bad on ramping, and this game certainly suffers from it in the browser version, because there is no clean introduction to how the systems really work or what they do, more particularly that you have to input the intersections and vertices points yourself.

There's an even bigger problem: you cant play future levels unless you solved the current one your on. Which means you're always trapped in a dungeon of what feels like stupidity but is more often than not just a theoretical limit of average geometric in understanding. You will be solving the angles of a triangle, and then out of nowhere the concept of finding the 'cosign' of a line length the next.

And the worst part of it all is it doesn't keep you're puzzle solved so you can go back and look at it, if you missed it, oh well! You better solve it again, its good practice right? Except I'm trying to have fun here, not stress myself out slipping backwards. It really is quite tragic because the issues are genuinely quite easy to ameliorate: let people skip levels (or at least a certain number, like 4 or 5), and let people label things.

Honestly, from the perspective of integration tools this almost comes as a strong recommendation for what NOT to do as puzzle game design. The difficulty would constantly throttle, 4 levels that are generally easy followed by one I wouldn't have known without reading a textbook, this issue existed throughout the entire game, and not just later on as you might expect. I was stumped figuring out a bunch in the alpha stages!

It's ironic because these same issues of not being able to functionally label or simplify mechanisms is a haunting that follows a lot of puzzle games, including for example a lot of Zachtronics game, for example its what made me drop stuff that is inifinitely lauded in hardcore puzzle communities like spacechem and factorio. The reality is, I have trouble keeping track of things, which is why I can only try to play these pure puzzlers narrating my contemplation out to others. Intriguingly, this is why point and click games tend to thrive for me, no worries if you're having troubles with this problem, there's usually plenty to look at and figure out in the meantime, and the puzzle may just be BS anyway and so not worth kicking yourself mentally. Meanwhile, this is fucking geometry, even if the answer is extremely alien, you might get a nudging feeling that its on you for not getting it, which is exacerbated really hard by that lack of skip function.

Perhaps that's what's standing between me and good puzzle games, a label system. Honestly, the ability to skip around in a relaxing moodsetting games like Golf Peaks or Spring Falls highlight those a lot more in my mind even if they are more casual. The amount of levels you can skip for a long time and the 'self labeling' of objects is also probably what makes games like Baba is You exemplary in the genre.

Regardless, there's still a solid 4+ hours to be had with this if you're down for something a bit different, more if you break out the scratch paper or took a class before. It's a fascinating experiment in the sense that you really do feel on the edge of actually learning something more tangible, and it did make me realize that mathematics at large is basically an endless puzzle game for the mad. Also, a lot of the quotes at the end of each level have a lot of contextual flavor, its surprising how durable mathematical quotes are, my favorite one was from pascal:

"Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth."

Logicians might hate it, and it may not have aged well considering how his wager got overturned, but I think there's still a scientific beauty in it both on the matter of the virtues of individuals you meet (who are often filled with contradictions in their preferences and taste, etc.) and the world which has contradictions imbedded from what we don't yet know about its operations. The fact it was able to uplift quotes like this to the forefront means it didn't completely fail on imparting neat gems of knowledge into the core of my functions.

Honestly, I got really far with relatively minimal use in comparison to what I expected, I was constantly belaboring my stupidity and she was like 'babe, this is ADVANCED GEOMETRY and you didn't even know signs and cosigns, what youre doing is far above what most people would even try to do', which is honestly probably true. To a degree it's funny because I got the special treatment of knowing that in this game I'm not actually an idiot*, its all relative and it soothed my negative self talk. But if you don't have people around informing you this you might feel more than a bit insecure, especially if you never actually took geometry like me so fair warning there. You and I imagine most people are a lot more smart on geometry than they might think since unless you have spatial issues its usually considered the most intuitive of all the maths (Ever cut through grass on a triangle shaped walkpath to get somewhere faster? That's geometry.)

That's pretty much all I have to say on this one. It's not often I leave a game abandoned because I'm under the impression I always might come back. So why not mark it as shelved. See, the reality is I would be cheating on all the answers at this point anyway since I've hit end game and its all trigonometry now, so I don't think it would 'count' as finished with this much content remaining anyway. I wouldn't feel fulfilled doing it and I dont even know how much a fundemental education would matter without the ability to label things anyway. I read this fascinating blogpost where a guy who cares a lot about common core and sees this as a great stepping tool for teaching the increasingly abandoned field of geometry, however, "I was not always able to find optimal solutions." which is fine but he hit the wall early on in stage 1.7 and then said "And yet, I was not able to crack Euclidea 10.6. I did it in GeoGebra" (an external open source free geometry program). Then he mentioned that one of the devs tipped him off with a big hint later. I'm sorry but if you are having to give hints to even the smartest players on external websites one on one, even after they are trying with external softwares, then you have not done a great job in making an accessible and easy to use modeling software for geometry. As a teaching tool or as a game.

Side note one the phone version then, trying to make precision connections on a phone is horrible since your finger is in the way, don't bother! I recommended it to my family since they help teach test taking skills and, as such, long for impossibly difficult puzzlers. But they couldn't even get past the UI and the later levels I'm stuck on would be painful on the tiny phone screen anyways. So if you do try it, play the web version.
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*This is foreshadowing for the next write up. Stay tuned. 👁️

Policy

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My girlfriend sent me a message before Easter started only saying in bold letters HEX. I didn't know what that meant so knowing she has talked positively on this game in the past I figured I should check this out while shes gone. Miss you!

This game is one where you see the past adventures of various fictionalized characters who have had their IPs warped historically, exploring the different games they were tossed through, using a whodunit style mystery as the main plot conceit. With a motley of small subgames from different genres to play throughout to try and keep an engaging experience. All housed in an dilapidated bar at the end of the earth. Despite its novelty I do not reccomend playing this game unless you are obsessed with the shared universe of Mullin's games, which in my opinion you probably shouldn't be since its as much a marketing gimmick to get you to play them all as much as it is a narrative through point. It's kind of annoying and unfun. If you're really interested you can go watch your favorite youtuber play it or at the very least, have a walk through handy. Now for those interested in a nuanced discussion of the game, read on...

One of the most prominent things that sticks out to me is the culture mashing a generic game and a meta version of it in order to make its point on the thin distinction between meta games and homage (the Legends game being a mix of Final Fantasy & Undertale, or the Shooting game being a mix of Halo/Warhammer/Gears of War & Hotline Miami).

Still, I can't help but think this games strongest moments are nothing in comparison to Travis Strikes again giving cynical homage to Hotline Miami 2 openly in order to make a counterargument to it. In that game, Travis is shown throughout completely addicted to all of these various indie games which you can wear as shirts, all given to the player without commentary besides the origin of the game it came from.

Throughout the game, Suda uses TSA mostly as a vehicle of commentary on some of his older titles, often riffing on them. Only towards the end does it bring Hotline Miami 2 in, it does it with a purpose. Both games hint at an almost unfathomably larger than life apocalypse, one that seems inevitable in the face of life. Why even acknowledge it, why not just cramp up in your shack and ignore it all? By directly using it as intertextuality in the final act, it enhances the whole story about futility and the meaning of fighting in despite it all. It had to use the text of that game as a clear and concise negation point, it also shows Travis sort of waking up from his Walden-esque slumber from a plot position to which makes it doubly effective (interestingly enough, Inscryption here, does obey this open final act negation in its game to).

Compared to that (admittedly niche) example, this game feels a bit trite and hollow. For example, the game will use stuff like streamer spam (which is admittedly the most amusing part of the game and had me laughing a storm in surprise) and shitty mods in order to show how our relationship to games can become warped by the ways we interface with them. This focus on externalities that affect our treatment of a work and their financial trajectory is interesting, but of course the negative feedback needs to seem heart breaking and the mods need to be shitty right? Cheating in the Fallout Tactics clone game needs to be a bit frowned upon.

The problem is all of these micro games felt just awful to play, not just after being warped but right from the beginning to, and whenever they challenged me I just found myself more annoyed than enjoying the experience on any sort of meta level. For example the first game it has you play is a mario clone (which riffs off this little known game Eversion). The base game everyone supposedly likes is ass to play. Why anybody would map their jump to a click is beyond me considering the playerbase and I find it doubtful taken as its own happy go lucky first game people really 'enjoyed' it and that the game was degenerated from steam reviews or that they would express their opinion so simply. In reality I would have probably found this portion both more believable and more amusing had it been on newgrounds, since the flash game community has shorter sentiments as shown there and lower standards. I feel the steam interface was only there instead in order to shock you when your 'friends' leave the negative feedback on the 2nd game, which functions more as gimmick than realistic storytelling. Some of the later sections feel slightly more effective in their cynicism, ie the girl in Legends disliking the game so much she actively seeks its destruction.

While there are certainly amusing moments I can't help but feel a lot of the main messaging of this game (dont sell IPs, dont hoard Gamedevs, dont use money as a power move, don't parade an antagonistic relationship with your fans) kind of comes in conflict with framing those out groups in simplistic ways. The mod community has to be making bad mods that completely undo the actual vision of the Fallout clone. There can't be a fun mod on this abandoned project that increases the games quality it all has to be foolish shit like a texture mod that adds flowers in a wasteland. In reality, the mod community for something like Stardew Valley is so strong they have been able to make expansion packs and stress test it. The mod community of Dark Souls was able to help make the game run on PC when it came out. It kind of makes the point far more murky, regardless of how much you can rationalize it as 'its the main developer who thinks these things' it just feels hollow by conflating targets as way bigger issues than they are. Convenient how the twitch messages grind to a halt so you can actually cheat and bug the game by a person messaging in the chat. The game really only makes clear the artifice of its own gimmicks when it does stuff like this. To be clear here the problem does have a sort of 'both sides' quality to it. Yes corporate capture is going to create buggier messes that don't really capture the charm of the original but using a fattened mole in a wife beater who doesn't care is not only a lazy fat shaming stereotype but also just not what the megacorp would have done. Where you could have had a legitimate point about how not all IP capture is in the main mascot character, and how warping the assets and atmosphere into something still friendly but entirely off, is instead just an easy joke at their expense, there's no punch to any of it!

The game seems to be a fairly concerted meditation on the importance of IP preservation in the face of corporate capture, and how selling out can cause you to become the cycle of hubris in those same corporations you hate. It's certainly interesting as a conversation piece on that and the meaning of meta games as a genre. Whereas I think it only goes to cliches and seems to imply the best IP is the one only held by the original author (something both completely wrong and curiously, effectively overturned in Mullins next game Inscryption what with the technical 'original author' of that one being Hitler and all). The conversation on meta games and their merit as games often being squandered by their own mechanics is actually quite fascinating.

I was able to note the forms of satire and the nods of what meta game was given respect to for almost all of the subgames, Hotline Miami, Eversion, Undertale, ProjectM/Mugen (on the 'making this character overpowered on purpose' stuff). It's interesting because it didn't make the game I was actually playing any better, and now it actually has got me thinking if maybe we are being a little too nice on these other games just because of their 'meta' quality.

It's been mentioned before that metacommentary is probably one of narratively the easiest things a person can do. Compare your text to another text, riff on that text in order to enforce your own. Anybody who sticks around to see it through will by design be an audience in on and amused by the 'injoke'. In that sense not only does meta work as an easy girder for storytelling, but it also works as a filter. We have to assume those people who are not amused by the effect are simply going to leave early. Not much thought is given to them though because they are not 'in' on the joke. They don't get it.

Here's the rub with that sort of dichotomy: While there are obviously people who would leave enjoy due to ignorance with the intertextual jokes at play, it also assumes that the reason somebody would stop playing the game is out of ignorance rather than out of unamusement with the game. Allow me for a moment to try and explain what I mean by this through a comparison point.

Let's use Undertale. Undertale is a game where being in on the 'ingroup' from the outset at least is not at all difficult. If you've played even 1 RPG turnbased game your set. And if your willing to go broad enough, if you played 1 game where you kill monsters at all you're probably fine. As the games purpose is to subvert your expectations on how the game will react to stuff like XP, saving, attacking enemies, tutorialization, etc. So then we can assume that this is a game with a metacommentary so ubiquitous it amuses a broad audience. This is all true but what do we do with the people outside this base audience? Like how in the hell would they have missed the riffing and amusement? That's kind of where our relationship with these games as them being great just because of their meta-referentiality starts to break down.

Almost nobody is going to play this game and get far at all if they don't get the metacommentary. Those people have to be unamused either for how the metacommentary itself plays out as a distracting writing trick or the fundamental game design around it. When we strip back the specific meta elements we find a game that is very boisterous and friendly, with and exceptionally easy difficulty curve, and a lot more distracting spectacle and chatting than actual combat. Personally I found the amount of talking going on in the game vs. the combat actually kind of irritating. I'm not going to pretend I didn't enjoy Undertale at all, obviously its a very flashy game with a lot of evocative moments, but it should be telling that the only time I or most anybody else I know legitimately felt challenged was locked behind content I wasn't supposed to play (being vague here with respect to spoiler). Also while I personally was not so openly bothered by it at the time, man are a lot of these characters invasive as hell. The idea of friendliness for most of them seemed to be some degree of screaming right in your face and pulling your shirt over to something they want to show you. Papyrus whole gimmick is doing this and obviously he is meant to irritate you, but the gimmick is kept for pretty much every character you meet in the game. Obviously the game is trying to egg you to violence, but in a sort of twisted way I couldn't help but feel sorry for the protagonist, who is by design made mute. I only wish I could have them write on a piece of paper 'personal space please!'. Most of the humor and jokes in the game are milked off of this primary interaction with its world, a world so intent on doing dance numbers in front of you that it's telling the only place I legitimately remember fondly is the waterfall for how hands off it felt.

Yet I was and still am a bit timid to point this out because any sort of ingroup can just clammor this is 'the point' and suddenly the exchange is either folded into either you missing an obscure piece of lore or just generally a stress test of how much of an idiot you are. It feels BAD to be in an outgroup on a metatext, you are passively shamed for having such a bewildering and contrarian stance. This is also true in terms of expressing your experiences on passions in a personal sense to.

But like, what if the combat difficulty is just lackluster, what if the writing just gets on your nerves, what if the level design feels like a bunch of meaningless gimmicks? What about the game experience? Do we just sacrifice our in the moment experience with a game in service of an (arguably false) sense of community around having a comparible experience with a fandom? These quiet reservations I have I just buried because look, there's a lot about Undertale to like and it did a great job, but I think I was betraying myself a bit by playing it and assuming it was just about the best this kind of game can get. I guess I must like it because I've yet to experience anything so 'meta' on rpg games. I feel I should have seen it as a test to push forward rather than accept our Undertale overlord with now further questioning. So why haven't I? Far be it from me to make it sound like a problem, but this ingroup/outgroup dynamic functions equally for insights as well. Short simple insights that reflect general consensus are going to be amplified by general appreciation more than longer ones. Despite it feeling kind of bad to be in this outgroup to, I swallowed my envy and stuck to what I want to do anyway simply because I write with the purpose of self discovery, practice, and game experience memory. If I already choose to take the path less traveled here, I can suck it up and start having a more critical relationship with metagames as well, and if you've read this far you probably can to, I believe in you! For me, keeping the comments turned off is maybe just my personal bandaid against people trying to scare me off from doing it.

But having the gameplay in The Hex be so unambiguously fucking terrible it actually got me thinking about it. Genuinely like do not play this game for the gameplay, this game plays like a freeware meme game at the best of times and a schoolyard flash game at the worst. Not even the rpg or fighting sections are that good because the fighting section is a bunch of obnoxious puzzles and the main character of the RPG portion does not want to be in the game, does not want sequels. And a primary plot point is how a lot of these characters in the bar dont want to be paraded in infinite sequels anyway. I think by having the game actually be bad to play it woke me up to this fact though: Meta commentary can not be an excuse for weak game design or a mask for decent criticism. The fact that the game so openly jabs at those sort of metagames makes me rethink my perception on how to approach this fact and whether I was 'tricked' into liking some of those games more than I actually do. To its credit this game does try to mask each subgame by having so many for its short run, but the novelty of a bunch of small bad games doesn't avoid the issue of it then making the overall game bad. Although granted the point and click portions were well designed and appealing, it was nice being able to walk around the area and consort with the other customers as each character, but in a great twist of irony this point and click portion is also by far its shortest part, only barely cushioning my increasing irritation with each part. Each subgame getting longer as it goes on certainly not helping. You could say the text itself gets more cynical with this interaction except the 2 who most desire to escape their IP hells are bookended by the Fallout Tactics game which has probably the most authentic and genuine relationship and character belief this is their game out of all of them so it doesn't really work on that level either. It might have been more effective that way had they moved his chapter right before the chef one oddly enough but that's ultimately not what happened.

The most petty point though is that Mullins decided to rehash the stupid line connection puzzles from pony island and somehow do them even worse. Nobody played Pony Island and missed those puzzles because they are literally everywhere anyway. If I want to play line logic puzzles I'll go play the Witness of something. Move on bro.

Policy

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In No One Can Ever know, you play as a depressed dysphoric, and overweight, closeted transgirl in 11th grade, and you go through the journey of a crucially important day in her otherwise normal life. In the process learning her dysfunctional family dynamics and becoming attuned with the various struggles and fears she has to deal with. It's a simplified 'dungeneering' survival game, which lets the text do most of the talking, the aesthetic is similar to old 1st person rudimentary DOS era adventure games, like Rogue. It's simple, and mainly uses text to express the imagery you would expect to see on screen. It's one of the best games I've played in a long time, but let's readjust the discussion to elephants in the room before I continue beating this ivory drum.

The main myth I want to dispel out the gate is the idea that trans people actually need to expose their own suffering/dysphoria/etc. to the world in order for their art and existence to be validated. I know on the surface everyone with any real sensibility 'agrees' with this initial premise, considering this is an incredibly LGBT friendly website with many of the top voices being quite open about their gender or sexuality (ex. Woodaba is the #1 most popular reviewer on here and they are trans). But we would be fools to think this matter 'goes without saying, in that in the rise of ghauling anti trans rhetoric and legislation, one of the primary ways in which people have bothered to interact with them is as traumatized victims, possibly even . Yet this is by design an exploitative and brutal way to gain sympathy with a minority group, anybody who is familiar with the term 'trauma porn' probably also knows that this sort of wound bearing can. When you have people running around using the most tragic young adult memoirs and the fear of young trans people, you run the risk of using them as trauma advertisements for rights not that much different from pushing famished african children on TV for a food drive where only like 30% go to feeding and the rest to 'raising awareness' (anybody remember KONY2012)? Therefore its better to treat the art as made by an artist rather than from an infantilized pat on the head of simple commandeering of emotional validity (which honestly just goes without saying anyway on matters like this). This is one of the reasons I stan Bagenzo's work as mentioned in my other review on the subject, her reflections are much softer and told through indie game nostalgia. In general I find it hard not to see trauma porn art is not that different from tourture porn, in fact all you have to do is look at something like the Saw series and see maybe they aren't so distinct.

So allow me to then say that even though the game itself is about the experience of being not out but trans in high school, it doesn't fall to the concerns of self exploitation I signposted before. The theme of the day here that carries why here, is paranoia.
In the Cave Story Review I said the following:

'The narrator is a snippet on childhood forgiveness and, I think, not losing your memories of joy to the pain flooding and surrounding them.'

If Cave Story Sex RPG is a short poem on self forgiveness, No One Can Ever Know is an arduous painful reflection on dysphoria as paranoia, on trying to forgive the present. They both share a genre of the 'memoir game' . Every line seeps with an internal dread that everyone would hate you and is out to get you, but there's a universal element to this point, most of peoples experiences with public high school was pretending to be something you arent and being paranoid that everyone will find out. Constant vies for status and personhood, but the worries that you don't really have friends or that if you changed a little nobody would care are consistent, because think about it, the purpose of schools are to assign roles to people. Not just in terms of intellectual capacity but socially and interpersonally. Of course youre not allowed in the girl's bathroom its not your social role, just as its not the social role of a cisgender woman to be a football player. This feeling of general paranoia is so strong due to the double life most people run on the internet now that it even further intensifies it as ubiquity to the point it became a major theme in the award winning film Eighth Grade).

The only difference between the LGBT form of role based paranoia and others is that trans people have incredibly justifiable reasons to feel persecuted and dehumanized for the potentialities. One line that really stuck with me was when reflecting on the few people she was out to that 'You told everyone you came out to to still refer to you with he/him pronouns'. The idea of pronouns as a form a function of self repression is a conversation people want to tread lightly usually, but I can't help but think for example of tory member Jamie Wallis coming out as trans, but then tweeting about how he's still figuring this stuff out and to remain using He/Him [for now] (https://twitter.com/JamieWallisMP/status/1509122636810440709 ). This is fine and all but it doesn't take a tinfoil hat to think 'hm, the reason he probably is using those pronouns is because his voter base would be even more uncomfortable with voting for a minister they might misgender, on top of that Boris Johnson who supported him would probably also feel more 'embarrassed' if he had to worry about actually misgendering Jamie. But note this is a voter base and a party who would for the most part want to lock out immigration from the UK and pursue tax cuts for the rich. Like Boris was actually straight up caught saying he doesn't care if the bodies start piling up from covid, at the same time attempting to embezzle public funds these are not people you should even be trying to appeal to in the first place. While this is true, I apologize for this wording here, but this doesn't mean that we should try and misgender Jamie with she/her pronouns in some attempt to territorialize Jamie's sense of gender for himself and/or ask him to take 'gender accountability for himself'. Ask him about the contradictory gender policies his cabinet pushes and hold him and the rest of his party accountable for the policies they enact. There's no reason to actually get bogged down in the Idpol in this particular way but my point is even if its not Jamie himself, we can very easily imagine the repressive element pronouns can play even for the person choosing them.

I would know because I do this, on here I insist on she/her pronouns (and 3rd person occasional they/them) but at the University I'm so deeply separated from my gendered flesh and mixed perceptions I just ask for they/them. That way I can still retain a small trans identity while ultimately not revealing a pandora's box of truth in how I actually want to be seen that due to my incapacities to perform the gender I feel I'd never be able to get back. People would be calling me she/her pronouns while I have scrappy facial hair that day, and in that moment I would feel far worse.

At least..thats the theory. The game allows a more honest conversation that can begin to be processed, do I use these pronouns because they make me slightly more comfortable or is it to avoid the ire and shame from everyone else? Am I playing a substantial role in my own repression because I think I haven't 'earned' my gender or is it more complicated a paranoia than that? Personally at least it feels like people always have to fucking grovel after they misgender you, theres something a little funny about it if it wasn't so irritating and alienating about it, because it feels like really what they are doing is apologizing for the social wall they just kind of put up. I don't have any friends at this university, I don't have many meatspace friends in general aside from 1 family in the suburbs I'm not out to, and 1 childhood friend after a few years of fallout I still haven't met in person. See, paranoia is a complex emotional animal. Hopefully this reflects even just an incredibly small moment of how impactful that theme has been.

By the way, that's not even the most brutal antagonism and distrust I have with social order, I'll leave that for another review in the future, you know, stay tuned for more in the life of my glowing torments.

Also yes, I'm transgender to, anybody who read my biography. Or if your particularly attentive to strange authority im speaking with on this subject matter, you probably picked up on it, it's not really a huge reveal because my most popular review is the Cave Story Sex RPG on also being trans and I don't exactly have the audience to be 'leading people on' that I'm somebody or not, you kind of need a large following for it to be a reveal in the first place. However, I didn't outright state 'Im a transgirl so I can say this' in the opening line. And, as of the time of writing this, I dont have the trans flag emoji next to my name, I dont have my comments for any of my insights turned on, I don't have a cute/cool girl as my profile picture but a writhing mass of lovecraftian squidflesh.

Originally I was going to be antagonistic towards the reader at the point, asking them 'why do you think I'm like this'. But that's not on you, its not on you to quietly motivate me away from my own vulnerabilities when you dont even know me and for me to make you do that would be hideously parasocial and self loathing to ask that of you. Instead I'll explain why to the best of my ability, I do it because by not making my identity a clear subject, I'm not asking the reader to understand what I'm saying through the journey of my origins. They can agree or disagree with me without feeling like in the process the reason why is something core to do with my identity. This subject is so hefty and complicated it threatens to collapse in on me, but I'm not going to sit here and bullshit to you some amount of repression or extremely questionable set of motives doesn't play into this. Repression is not something you simply 'overcome' you know, its a set of interlocking things you do to try and contain and share your thoughts without feeling like a burden. In a less fundamentally unhealthy world we wouldn't do that, and I certainly think there's quite a lot of people on her that actually are better at not having self repression issues. Overtime as I get more comfortable with this place I might try and express those other parts of myself and not hide them, for now though a distancing effect has provided some stability for speaking as boldly as I do. My point of mentioning this is that there's a very unconscious aspect to the desire to conceal certain things, the trick is in figuring out personally how justified or not they are.

Not just addresses and government names, but the divulging of total perspectives and familiarities with the audience. Do I tell you my politics, my eating habits, what experiential details threaten to get in the way? I had my twitter up on here linked for a bit but then took it down because I realized people knowing who I am there might threaten the pathos of my arguments here. Paranoia is not always justified or mentally stable, but hopefully you can see what I mean when I say sometimes it is.

One other way paranoia is reflected is the brutal difficulty of the mechanics. See, in the game you constantly have to deal with the dysphoria status effect through the use of music from your phone to block the bad thoughts out, having a voice speak that isn't your own helps to disembody you from the prison of your racing mind. But the game seems incredibly intent on making you work for the experience. At the very beginning of the game, if you examine your own bed your character will literally decide to sleep for 10 minutes. The 2nd level alone is you having to wander around in school, but you have to wait for the classes to start. You don't know which rooms the classes are because you have to walk into a door to find out what the room is, you have to last 4 different class periods in a row with the dysphoria attacks happening randomly and no reliable way to 'savescum' since it takes 10% of your battery life to even save the game. It's not so much survival horror so much as survival tedium. Seriously, this games difficulty is way higher than it lets on, even though the mechanics are simple there's a deceptive amount of focus needed to get through the labyrinthine 2nd level. The game actively stands in the way of your progression through it, is the text itself not paranoid of you? I couldn't help thinking for example how an easy and simple way to make the 2nd level easier would be by having the names of the rooms you go towards marked on the minimap, instead you just have to wander the halls a lot and get your bearings, fumbling with doors to figuring out whats inside. The game even lampshades this at some point when you try and open the photography room the narrator goes something along the lines of 'This is the photography room, or is it? You don't even know anymore.'

Of course it doesn't take a scientist to see how this sort of difficulty functions as a narrative enhancement, yall are smart and are familiar with games like Pathologic, you get this part. But it's still worth pointing out how minimalism actually becomes a new type of threat to player experience. At the same time despite the game engaging in such openly cruel design traps, it functionally causes the player to feel some kind of 'reward' for making it through the shit, we were able to make it through the next checkpoint so we get another lore dump of experience by the author, more character context. We are becoming an ally in support of her paranoid concerns, regardless of our own identity. And seeing as there's a precise simplicity to everything being said we are allowed to dwell more on the taboo thoughts themselves rather than trying to untangle what the game is saying.

The other reason this game can be identified as non exploitative, is through humor, via the reflection of objects and their placement, despite this game being nothing but halls of walls and doors with text boxes, a lot of focus is given on object representation, early on in the adventure the protagonist mentions how there are 6 placemats on the table despite there being on average only 2 people. Throughout the journey, it seems just as much focus is given to objects as people: guitars, computers, lord of the rings, etc. This care given for object placement fills in each room without you actually needing to visually see it. Which is why its themes on grief work so well, the game primes you for a conversation with loss through these observations as for example you have the family photo or the guitar, objects with clear memory. But also knows objects exist primarily to be fiddled with, your character plays a pinball machine for funny highscores, or playing notes on a random grand piano.

Theres a serious chance of what I'm going to refer to as 'observational runaway effect' happening, when you want to be so comprehensive about a work that touched you personally you scramble to speak about every small nuance or theme you can muster, and as much as I really try not to care about doing that sort of thing, there's two reasons I should probably think twice on doing that:
1. I do actually want people to try the game and read this essay, and the more loquacious I get the less likely people will do either. (Hell I probably already failed, but still..)

2. I think the game again 'speaks for itself' in a lot of ways on the subject matter and trying to reprocess the grief comes off voyeuristic after a certain point. Sure I can start listing off psychological terms or read into the authors voice but its a bit prying.

So instead I'll just focus on 2 other design touches I find substantial to the overall experience. For one, you have the retro font. The font used in this game is from research called MultiType Pixel, an all caps font intended to call back to arcade games of the past. With all the focus given to gaming throughout the piece it makes sense, but this is a story heavy game so this nostalgia actually accentuates the experience as a sort of scar. The text will go on for unbroken paragraphs at a time as giant brutal text crawls, an assault on the eyes and the mind. It takes the process of memory and makes it as exhausting as humanly possible by twisting something intended for arcade glamor, and personally I think it's such a cool thing to do! After a while, you can sort of get used to and be charmed by the font itself and as you can see it's designed in such a way it only really feels overwhelming during the chapter portions.

The other one may cause a bit of quibble but there's the design choice of what music to choose. The game opens up with a quote of a popular Death Grips song 'I break mirrors with my face in the united states'. Theres constant talk of absolutely blasting noise-punk of the highest caliber. Strumming on guitars, making noise with your friends, using ear destroying music to 'tune out' the dysphoria. So to have this be so ingeniously juxtaposed with the ambient pieces from various albums by Patricia Taxxon is a brilliant decision. For one, it allows you on a literal level to just focus on what the game is telling you but also adds an eerie melancholy, you can understand this memory, but this is a facsimile of the experience, the real thing is the rambunctious youthful outbursts almost nobody can handle for too awful long. It's also a smart choice because of the fact Patricia Taxxon is a copywrite abolitionist and just tells people to use her variety of tracks wherever and however, to monetize, remix, whatever. Patricia Taxxon herself is a bit smug about this abolitionism, putting herself in the line of fire of doing unabashed remixes of pop music, writing manifestos against it, and once quite literally putting her name on a song she literally just took from another band to show that even title name changes is all it takes to make something transformative. Again, I refuse to play diplomat, this is fucking awesome and I'm also a copywright abolitionist, down with intellectual property rights. Yadda yadda. But beyond just making logical sense, Patricia also gave a gigantic gift to the world by doing this, every song in this game is from a different album. The girl puts out a shitload of music it enhanced the musical 'creative commons' by an absurd amount, for example this banger by Summoning Salt in a lot of his speedrun videos, you probably heard it before, the girl has a shitload of genre variety in her music. Bless her.

Still, there's a degree where from a practical perspective airing on the side of caution and also having good music to boot takes a degree of self preservation and while I dont expect people to recognize this and add it directly into the interpretation of the text, nor am I doing so. I think it's a charming thing to do. For one it literally is external music you might have heard before reinforcing the musical theme, its from a trans musician, and it operates as a useful 'recycling' of the external world. No need to hire a big band orchestra if you have an MP3 file already that gets the job done and arguably sends a stronger message in the process. These are also really good uses of the music in themselves because the ambience used gives the game an empty atmosphere and allows me to actually focus on the words. I don't know about anybody else but I have a peculiar tick where hearing music and trying to read clash with each other distracting me from what I'm reading especially if the songs have long verbal ballads. So from just a physiological position it allows me to feel more focus and confidence in reading which is absolutely necessary if you're going to use music as a cooling mechanic. If the music was giving me more anxiety then I would feel far too divorced from the experience of the character doing it.

The creator has written her own post on the game here. I've tried not to source that too much in this insight, because making empty appeals to the authorial reasoning is not particularly stellar writing. But even at the time of writing this, this point she made is still unambiguously true:

'Plus I think it's extremely funny to post it here considering I'm the only person who's actually rated the game on this site. It's not called No One Can Ever Know for nothing'.

Until today, when I decided to publish this. You've got Known. But why am I the only one? Despite the game being free, on itchio, and having a fond endorsement by the author even after 2 years of making it read by 2 and a half dozen people, it seems nobody else on the website has admitted openly to playing the game. I don't see literally any reason for that to all remain the case XD

But there is one thing I should warn you about, towards the end of the game the author mentions using computer games as an unhealthy coping mechanism 'Games are great at taking the pain away. But their ability to keep that pain from coming back leaves a lot to be desired.' More then anything else this game seems to exist as a manifesto to the opposite, its an incredibly upsetting and distressing experience. As far as a rush back of pain goes, I've been off hormones for ever since covid originally broke out, this is one of the few times I could think of where I was successfully physiologically brought to tears, a part of my femininity on hormones I miss dearly. I think it's an incredibly effective replication of pain processing, but make sure you're in an emotionally safe enough situation to break open this game, really I think that is the more important point than any sort of set of content warnings. This game is painful and vulnerable in a way you really can't find elsewhere, and on the other hand makes a very clear argument through its own production that we should have more of this sort of experience in games. Only more brilliant is the fact that this game was built with such a minimalism and simplicity that it rebukes the sentiment you 'need to know' how to draw or animate in order to design an emotionally compelling experience. While the main ending of the game is ineffably brutal, this is the silver lining, there is a possibility for expression that doesn't require you to overcome every inadequacy all at once. There's a double meaning there for me because just like in developing works of art developing one's expression of gender is similar. Sometimes you can feel so crushed and burdened down by your incompleteness and inadequacy that it barely even makes sense to try, hell I know I'm dealing with that just in the process of trying to write about games but there's still hope merely just in pushing forward and taking the first step anyway. At the end of the day self forgiveness can't just happen in the past, it has to happen in the present to…

This review is dedicated to not only Heather's' great work and the many excellent insights shes contributed to my growth, but to the many wonderful outspoken and passionate dolls of Backloggd whose insights inspire me everyday:
The warm and compassionate [Whom], (https://www.backloggd.com/u/Whom/)
The horror enthusiast with a voice of gold Venus ThighTrap
The lovely indie landfill surveyor AlexaLily ,
The coolly persuasive Squigglydot
And of course, my stalker gamedev GF BloodMachine who made an account pretty much just to stalk me but gives so much insight behind the scenes on games and life. Also big ups Woodaba, buccaneer nb ready to take on the world, not everything they say spurs me on, but I'm glad they stick to their guns and put pressure on the flames, plus an anodyne 2 enjoyer is just a sign of somebody who knows impeccable taste.

There are probably another half dozen others I'm following. I could celebrate here, but I don't want to out anybody who doesn't wear it as a badge of honor via either their linked twitter or probably don't desire the unwanted attention. Thank you all for inspiring me so much and helping me get through life one day at a time, and thank you for all the great game recommendations in the process.

Policy

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The manual mechanic is amazing but this game really falls apart in the 3rd act (the ghost arc) because they nerf your character, but the issue is the first pickup you get after beating the cathedral is stamina, when I think it probably should have been health or defense since the enemies on other areas kill you in like 2 hits and might give you a false sense of confidence you can kill the final boss, wasting all your materials in the process. The poison mechanic also sapping max health is silly, but it's especially silly they through it on the final boss' second phase as well. Meaning if you don't have gas mask equip you are just going to be brutalized, which sucks especially hard if you waste all your resources on the 1st phase only to go grinding for more. There's other issues to like the stamina UI being too small and out of the way, when the penalty for running out is you cant dodge until it refills to full. The sword hitbox feels too small so you can't really get close on enemies either. So you're probably going to die a bunch, but I don't know why they bothered with the currency loss death mechanic if they were going to have the numbers be so small. It just feels like its there to be trendy and try and build arbitrary tension when me losing 20 Bits means literally nothing to me. In fact at any point you could just grind and I imagine if you just grinded for 10 minutes you would make as many bits back as you lost throughout the whole game without pickups. Its just a strange choice, though I do appreciate it staggers enemies and bosses on pick up so it has some utility there. But as a result of the messy and unappealing combat design I turned No Fail mode on a few times without feeling too bad about it, and honestly I would urge you to do the same if you're feeling worn out.

The music is also strangely exhausting for progressive ambient most of the songs seem to be fighting and distracting themselves from pacing piano jittering back and forth like a keychain. There's exactly 1 song I feel nailed it and its the most intense song in the game, The Siege because the piano interludes actually feel more threatening, you have no clue what this giant machine is about to do next, so your holding your breath and the music halts with you. In general they nailed the Siege fight to such an extent that it's almost worth playing for that moment alone, but the music outside of it is just irritating. There's no intensity or sense of direction. Imagine somebody blasts Satie's Gymnopédies in your ear while your trying to play Zelda. The confusion and general inability to focus because of the twinkling aimless chords is kind of a sinkhole on my patience with the entire game. Other people may like it, but it just left me fatigued.

It's funny seeing people refer to all the 'puzzles' in the game, because sure there are puzzles in the post game (most of them amount to Konami Code gimmicks from my understanding). But there isn't really many before that at least I would probably refer to them more as environment gimmicks than puzzles. Not in a negative sense, just the fact that exploring an area to flip 1 way switches is not really my idea of a puzzle. Although you could refer to the map interpretation and general book as well as a meta puzzle for the practicalities of the game, in my case that primarily just boiled down to reading maps and figuring out what spot in the dark corner I missed to go forwards.

I thought the book manual itself being in a different language was incredibly unique, I like that the book is so incredibly useful at every phase in the game and its really nice to look at and see as your protagonist starts scribbling stuff in as you play. As a central gimmick of the game this in particular is EXACTLY what is going to keep me somewhat fond on it despite all my drawbacks. This manual was so intricately designed because it feels exactly like one of those incredibly useful instruction manuals you would find inside a box of your favorite games, but with nintendo magazine style secrets already there. It takes a lot of the design philosophies of these often discarded and ignored pieces of gaming and embellishes the memory of it. Not to mention how brilliantly to scale the maps are, this game somehow didn't have to 'cheat' on your location in a 2D rendering of the 3D space. I feel like it's worth dwelling on just why this is so beautiful, for one it actively reminds you that the world is a game in a way that engages you further, it becomes a toy, something to play around with. The nostalgia trigger here is also great because this is exactly how this would have worked for somebody playing through the first zelda game, flip from screen to book back and forth SHOULD dissuade you from the game as an immersive space but for some reason it doesnt. In a way just playing a game without any physical intervention can be draining and create ennui poisoned tunnel vision. When you treat a computer game as a primary object to get lost in it can be something that weakens or frusterates you. An in game manual gives attention to that and I think comments on an incredibly valid nostalgia of that. I don't think this is an accidental piece of the puzzle, overtime our relationship with games have turned more into digital product for consumption, getting a key instead a running a disc, having it in a systematized inventory steam folder or itchio page with your dozens or hundreds of other purchases, etc. With this small central gimmick, Tunic dares to comment on all of that, and how it can in a sense be preserved by having a utilizable 'guidebook' within the confines of the game. But it does it through doing the concept justice through its tactile pleasantry rather than condemning digitization outright (although it does do this through the quarry energy enslavement reveal, I doubt people are going to pick up on the metaphor outright). Overall I don't think Tunic as a text hates digitization so much as it simply ask what is missing or what is sacrificed in the process, and how do we go about trying to get it back? Encrypting the book with a second language is the touch it needed to keep it balanced between this childlike memory and not just making the whole game easy/disenchanting the memory (after all we never read ALL of those instruction manuals anyway we just liked how they looked).

The main drawback I have about the language mechanic is that when you go to pick something up a non diagetic popup is asking you if you want to pick the thing up in its language, but I feel like you could just replace this popup with the phrase 'pick up/buy?' in our language and lose nothing. It's really more distracting because when I see that sort of popup I assume the protagonist is the one having the thought, and I also assume we interpret the same language by the design. So why is there this other language obscuring the characters own mind?

The lack of dialogue works highly in the games favor because how ultimately simple the story it was trying to tell is. Had the merchant I ran into said DID YOU KNOW THIS LAND IS LOCKED IN RUIN FOR 1000 YEARS BY A GREAT KING I would have been annoyed. Instead the merchant is an eldrich dragon skeleton who says nothing.

I mentioned in my Hollow Knight insight I wouldn't have a great time combing that game for secrets, but I'd much rather comb that game than this one. Some of the puzzles seem dense and a lot of secret chest being hidden in dark corridors is even less engaging in a 3d space. There's no way to mentally just mark off in your head you searched an area already in 3d space because there could just be a prompt you missed, it would be like losing your keys in your house, no matter where you think you looked its possible its still there, its a very sickly feeling combined with the lack of indication. Like, there are a bunch of dark staircases I missed in front of me trying to progress the game normal, no way am I going to be asked to uncover all the secrets.

The only other thing I have to say is this games post game content unpleasantly feels like its begging you to play it, you finish and get after an incredibly grueling bossfight an ending where you get chained up, only to tease you that you 'missed X pages' after. I get the general mood of the game is somber but it feels way too cute to leave you on that kind of note. Maybe I would have felt better just having my character be able to walk away as the world crumbles or something...

Wait, why do I feel that way? Oh yeah, it's because it's exactly what Hyper Light Drifter did! That game handles its cozy ambience and moments of severe melancholy way better than this one, and also has a world with no talking. Let me end on a good note, I'll throw a few more recs out:

If you would like a difficult game with a challenging but fun puzzlecore post game, try Environment Station Alpha or go play an actual puzzle game that develops concepts like Baba is You or The Witness.

If you want to try and play an emotionally difficult but artistically beautiful experience with much better dodge functionality try Lucah: Born of a Dream (I also have to finish this one).

If you're a furry try Dust an Elysian Tail, a fairly easy but incredibly cute voice acted experience.

Hope those suggestions balance out my curmudgeon attitude towards Backloggd indie darling of the month :3

Policy

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I'll get this out of the way first, this game unquestionably flounders in many places: the bosses while impressive setpieces are incredibly unintuitave, the unlocking of cards (upgrades) from doing weird level objectives is a unique mechanic but ultimately unsatisfying to go out of your way to actually fulfill, it has a beyond moronic story where a guy decides to basically cheat on his wife halfway through with both hell and eve rendered through unbearably rendered cutscenes acted out with those FOV porn models, and it uses you playing on a lower difficulty to maliciously taunt you out of being able to play some of its levels. By all metrics these should be damning enough issues to make the game nearly unplayable, yet this is the furthest possible from the truth. What this game fails at in terms of its big moments, it makes up for in the nuances of combat flow and simplicity, allow me to elaborate.

First bit of attention to give is to the autosave system. You can go, gun down hordes of enemies while always feeling there's a potential to make it out a difficult spot, which will then reheal you and autosave the game for you after you clear the area out. Considering each level lasts around 15 to 20 minutes, you get about 5 to 8 of them a level, theres plenty of room for error without having to start from the very beginning. This solves one of the main tensions that I have with usually older shooters: no autosaving system (Max Payne, Deus Ex, and Serious Sam come to mind because they are the most recent games I've played), see I'm an incredibly stubborn person and I often take getting to the end of the level as the 'save' because something feels a bit cheap about saving on my own as an intended functional mechanic. I feel bad doing it, like I'm creating an 'easy mode' through trial and error rather than playing with the function of the mechanics in mind (dodging, posisioning, etc.) This game subtlely takes all the mental exercise and self sabatoge that comes from dealing with this process. Not only that but it cleans up how physically slow and disruptive saving a game is, sometimes you have to open a menu and hit the button to do so. You can hotsave in some of these games, regarding but even then it takes a stable mentalwork not to accidentally hotsave in a place where you will automatically die. This system gloriously and cooly takes all the mental work out of that system while still allowing you to manual it anyway if you're feeling desperate.

Another plus is, ironically, how limited the weapon roster is, you have 4 different weapons and your base weapon, and called the painkiller and right off the bat they made a really smart choice to let the Painkiller actually be an incredibly strong base weapon, it wont save you in a horde but it can take you far. More interestingly they main the subweapon on each of the weapons feel completely distinct. For example, theres a grenade launcher subattack, attached to the stake gun (meant to staple enemies away), which means you can use the main attack to clamp specific enemies away and use the grenade with distance from the horde, all of the weapons have neat unexpected combos like this. It also means they can build levels with the ammo for the weapon types in mind. If they want to, they can make it so theres enough ammo across all of them, but forcing you to oscillate your playstyle and not get too comfortable with just 1 weapon. This allows the pickups to always feel valuable in a way other games might flounder at. It's a quality over quantity approach, and I can appreciate this in particular when compared to other games. Max Payne for example will have you picking up around 10 to 13 weapons in its campaign, but the issue is that you're going to be in a bind in a fire fight if you run out of ammo for one weapon only to then have to frantically scroll through the baseball bat, the beretta, etc. just to get to the shotgun. Either that or you run your finger up from the keys hoping you hit the right number, impairing you capacity to move unless you're just really good at keyboard gaming/memory mapping. By comparison in Painkiller, you run the scroll wheel once, maybe twice, and you have a good weapon, dont even have to think about it. It also just allows for more creative enemy design since by design some of the weapons will be better to use against certain enemies than others, and since new enemies are constantly introduced in every round, with very little enemy reuse, you are forced to experiment and figure out what works.

Now lets say you just got done gunning a room, you realize the door wont open until you kill all the enemies but you don't know where it is. Guess again! You can look at a compass which will show you where the last enemy is, usually perched on some sort of tower. Then, after you dispatch them, you can waltz over to the checkpoint and heal up, which is also shown the direction on the compass! The one other great thing is that during boss fights, the health bar is indicated on the compass rather than bloating up original visual space on the bottom or the top of the screen, with the circular indicator of health being a lot easier to look up at and guess how much there is left then a giant bar like you might see in the likes of say borderlands, or even worse no bar at all which may make you wonder if you're even making progress.

One last thing I want to note is how speed jumping is also incredibly simple, I've never been good at bunnyhopping which means you have to do diagonal jumps for extra movement, this game just allows you to get that movement from regular constant jumping in a direction, which takes attention and skill while still feeling incredibly satisfying to do.

The other thing I really like is how the 'Demon Mode' works, Demon Mode is a mode you activate where after eating enough soul drops from enemies you can just start screaming and ragdolling enemies far away. A lot of games have these sort of contingent 'beast modes' and they always feel great to activate, but in other games the activation is ambiguous, hard to pull off when theres actually enemies etc. Well in this one, beast mode is activated when you pick up exactly 66 souls, and theres warning shots on the like 4 or 5 in a sort of phase in 'windup' (not to mention you can check in the cornor how many you have). This means that if used correctly this mechanic never suprises you, and therefore means you can hold on until you pick up the last soul(s) in a populated area, meaning you dont unleash the attack on wasted breath.

With all these tiny effects stacked up at once, there's no way to put it other than saying it gives the arena fights a beautiful sense of velocity and simplicity I tend to find lacking in these older shooter titles. And the fact the game has a great gloomy lighting effect and lovely architecture often retrofitting real life places into level design means there's not a breath wasted. The quality of life in the action of the gunplay and the assurance that, at least for this brief moment, you are done fighting, means you can take in the scenery and in the process check for items & ammo that much more.

The irony of writing all this stuff about gameplay velocity in several paragraphs is not lost to me, but the reason I feel like bringing attention to it is because I've been seeing people compare this game to Serious Sam, but I'm sorry they dont play anything alike. Serious Sam is a lot slower, illiciting you to focus on positioning, have a save file handy, and just generally your character and the enemies feel a lot slower. I remember I ran into a bull in that game and could only barely dodge it by circle strafing. Often the game would be walk forward, kite a few enemies in aggro and walk back, usually in a hallway if you can, your character moves like a tank in that game. On the contrary, Painkiller is like a roadrunner, leaving games like Serious Sam in the dust. To the extent people can even say the two are comparable, in which the only real comparison point seems to be the level statistics page which give you clarity into how many secrets and enemies are left, there's not much they seem to have in common. I will note though I find this a much appreciated 'cheat sheet' in both games but this is where comparisons begin and end for me. Regardless, if we are assessing game quality here on how fair and cathartic is is to play, its not even a contest, I think Painkiller wins out by a high mile.

Assessed on it own of course I believe it's worth trying this game out if tenatively. Even if you only get through the first 3 chapters, there's more fun gunplay there than I've found anywhere else in a long while. If that's not enough to convince you of the game design value, then at least check it out for the hilarious ragdoll death physics, this engine uses the same engine Dark Souls did, and so anybody deeply amused by how it works in that game wont be let down in this one. Expect to get frusterated, keep a boss guide handy in particular, but otherwise have fun tearing the denizens of hell a new one!

Policy

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In case you're just wondering if this game is good and worth checking out, the answer is yes, this is one of the most enjoyable platformers for how short it is, and its free. If thats enough to convince you feel free to download it here. For everyone else, and for my own mind, let me try to dig into the meat of this thing.

Yo! Noid 2 presents itself as a play on the Lost Videogame Media horror trope, this particular case being an old PS1 game. The plot going on here is a tad bit more esoteric than one might originally expect. The game opens with a kitchty abandoned carton pizza mascot who enters and smashes a pizza to bits, the title screen is repeated by an emotionless choir of voices saying his name. Then after fiddling with the start button the game begins with a voiceless FOV scene introducing the smiling bastard, explaining that Yo! Noid lost his yo yo and has to retrieve it. Then, you are dropped into a 3D recreation of the first level in the which is a remake of the first game. A harbor with billboards cascading off into the distance planted in the water and a homogeneity of town houses lining a shoreline long away from you. Thus you platform over lost Domino's cargo and retrieve your yoyo, to then be dropped into the world proper.

Your real task in Yo! Noid 2 is obscured throughout the early point of the game by the sudden introductory level, to such an extent you have to be paying a bit of attention past the blase puns of the protagonist to recognize the divine horror waiting inside.

You are dropped into a vacuum called Noid Void, this is the main hub of the game. As you look around, you'll see sharp brambled blue roads, strange shapeless monuments, and a shattering of glass littering the sky. Several pizza toppings passively inform you of the wasteland the shattered Noid Void has become. They note that the pizza has been 'taken away', a divine sanctuary for the lost topping. Then you search around and find entrances to each of the 3 levels and retrieve the pie back and unravel the mystery of the core of the world.

Right, perhaps it's useful to provide some context to the circumstances. Yo! Noid is an unpopular TV commercial mascot circulating all throughout the 90s, with the idea supposedly being that he represents the tribulations of getting a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less. There's a decent video on the background of this fucker. I'll do my best to summarize the most relevant bits here, he was abandoned due to a confluence of this type of advertising not being so effective anymore, a hostage situation led by somebody of the same name thinking Noid was made to 'make fun' of him, and most telling of all a series of litigations against Domino's for the reckless driving issues caused by their 30 minutes or free guarantee policy. The mascot and the policy was both quietly shelved as a result. He had 2 tie in games, 1 where hes a jerk, and 1 extremely hard game (the one Yo! Noid 2 riffs off of). He was a product of catchy child TV advertising and theres a few comparison points to other commercials of the era.

We will come back to the implications of this history in a bit, but let me start with the most shallow praise: In many ways, riffing off an abandoned corporate mascot and their sparse 90s commercials and tie-in games, is an incredibly smart concept for a small game. The game was made for a small indie game jam in 1 month, hosted by some website called Waypoint, with the gimmick being that 'Your game title should be a title from Waypoint Radio'. According to an interview the developers had the main inspiration point being that these old retro marketing games, like Pepsiman and Yo! Noid were ahead of their time in terms of realizing that most people do want to actually interact with the brands they see on TV. Therefore, 'hes dabbing because hes SO ahead of his time!' 1 The game revels in this sort of comedic irony born out of both unstable self importance and our often anachronistic relationship with the presumed disposable artifacts of the past.

The main melancholia that comes across throughout the memetic nature of the game then, is an overwhelming sense of abandonment. This is colored even further knowing the game jam itself floundered, actively not calling attention to itself (only getting 4 entries) and according to the interview, they don't even think the people even played it: 'I dont think even to this day the people who run the website have even played our game, they mention it but i dont think theyve ever played it'. The reason to bring this up is this is where the core of the social commentary bites. At one point in one of the earliest stages of the game, you find an 'abandoned miner' at the core of the planet who laments that people probably dont even know he's down there. This is a setup for a joke, he can just leave via the grappling hook, but the fact of the matter is almost all of the characters you talk to are in a state of pure distress about their feelings of abandonment. One rather obvious point to be made about this in a literal sense is that they are the 'unused' toppings on pizza. This is a difficult point to fairly leverage, but when you beat each of the stages, you get large pepperoni pizzas toppling the center, with more characters coming along to reify the pizzas as a sort of religious moment. But the rub is, you don't meet any pepperoni, or in fact any meat characters at all. You meet mushrooms, olives, pineapples, the 'ignored' toppings. You meet a dipping sauce, but the art style rendering the top of it is not from the dominos of our time its from the dominos of the 90s. There's a curious hauntology at work here, as mentioned, the Noid Void hubworld is a bizarre esher like looney toon hellworld, but some guy with a mad trapped imagination, made it up for literally 1 commercial. I'm reminded of the utterly chaotic and ambitious blueprints for pepsi branding, it was shelved before even making it.

We like to assume these dumb mascot and old commercials are 'not art', they are disposable and not worth our memory. And yet at the same time the authors of the game remember this bastard and probably a lot of other commercials from the 90s, even despite some of our best efforts, the garbage art of yore can stick with us and play in our minds. This ability to dismiss consciously as critics and then be nonetheless by these corporate tunes and slogans is one of the main things this game likes to mess with you on.

Today, dominos pizza cardboard coverings are absolutely littered in text and blurbs franticly justifying its own existence as a sales pitch in fevered psychosis, but the cardboard boxes of old just had a domino on them, here's a comparison. This is made even more blatantly funny when you realize that getting all the collectibles on a level make the old box types literally make them golden, the least considered part of pizza is the trash, which is turned to gold. You get no other reward for your troubles, that's it. It's fun to do if you want to, but this lack of reward feels taunting in a way that's glib but not entirely at your expense, if anything it feels like an inside joke based on how trash is treated.

On top of that there's a curious subtheme of labor insecurity hidden in there as well. The examples are endless: the warehouse has a tomato bragging about being from old money, another tomato shirks their job, or the implications of the mining accident, or even the constant dominos cargo boxes littered everywhere. In a roundabout way, they are bringing attention to the slowdown of the world, those workers and their art of the past quietly disposed of, something these corporations urge you not to think about how this was able to happen in the first place. Therefore, people don't want to clean up, they don't want to keep going. This humor and melancholy tension runs the course of the game, with admittedly the humor cropping higher up so not to bum the whole thing out, yet it gives a strange parodic undertone so rare within the medium, the parody leads to a quiet satire biting through, and makes for one of the most impressive final bosses I've ever experienced, which I feel is more worth experiencing than speaking about here.

The other irony embodied by the compulsive puns and general ennui towards the suffering of the inhabitants by our protagonist is as a reflection of a sort of cultural question: Have we moved away from this? The puns all have a strong and discerning wit to them, but this attitude has been around for pretty much half the game protagonists we can count nowadays and several comic book movies (Guardian of the Galaxy comes to mind, or pretty much anything James Gunn has been a part of). You can trade out the smiling face of a middle aged man in a red rabbit suit with a hip young nostalgia gazing youth, but the expectations come off equally hollow, no matter who pilots. Everyone around the protagonist is a joke to riff off of.

With the intellectual bit of it aside, what is there to enjoy in terms of the gameplay? Put simply, the most satisfying and tight precision platforming in almost any 3D game ever. To keep it simple, using a grappling mechanic solves a huge number of issues precision platforming games in a 3D space have difficulty with, that being the inability to know when you should time a jump when coming off a ledge. This is because in 2D space, ideally the camera lets you see how close to a ledge you are, whereas cameras in 3D space are obviously placed behind you by default, and turning the camera to see from the side is not usually too useful in these games since you tend not to be able to zoom out. In this case the issue is dealt with kindly by making it so you don't have to worry as much about being right at the edge for the grappling sections, along with a friction to the wall run that gives you plenty of time to try and time your jumps. On top of all that, the death system really makes it fun and noncommittal, if you mess up a jump it will literally spawn you as close to the last place you fell from where its safe to do so, there's no death system, the only punishment for dying is having to listen to Yo! Noid's horrific twisted scream, before being respawned again nearby anyway. This lienancy helps make the suprisingly high difficulty as non tedious up until the dungeon (which the Pineapple informs you to try last). As for the dab itself, its analog dabbing and you can do it at any time. What's important to understand about this besides just being a dated meme, is that it serves an invisible purpose for those of the figdety nature. You see in a lot of games, people like me often have the impulse of just jumping out of boredom, but this is a way to have a button be pressed without messing up your run, the catharsis of having a button you can press that does nothing functionally is hard to describe to people who dont have this tick. Yet after experiencing it in this game I cant help but wonder why they dont have a fidget noise making button in all games like this.

Beyond that, the audio visual design is stellar. There's so many small effects that I could sit here all day listing them off. The music is all amazing casio piano midi's which sell a funky experience and keep you from losing your cool. The dungeon song in particular has stuck with me for years, but whats even more impressive is that it transitions the music layers based on how high you are, when you start in the area you only hear drums, and you only hear the whole song near the middle of the area if I recall correctly. The sound effects of running are quiet enough not to get on your nerves, theres a small friction and squeak of the shoe and your off running the other direction. The textures for most of the stuff you run and jump on is satisfying, with some spectacle thrown in for good measure to keep things interesting, like a rocket. Each of the 3 levels is also completely distinct, one is a doom-fueled dungeon key puzzler (one of the best designed dungeons ever made, but feel free to look stuff up if you get stuck here). One is an exploratory spectacle harkening back to Mario Galaxy with the may sub worlds you orbit travel and explore, and one is a slow linear platformer through an old warehouse. The real art is that it feeds you just enough of the world before stopping. Had this game gone any longer than its short 2-5 hour experience, I can see myself becoming incredibly exhausted and impatient with it. Instead the short time frame was just enough to tell the short story it wanted to without overstaying its welcome. That said, I hope the developers build a game like this with a slightly less annoying protagonist, because they have the foundation for a exceptional long form 3D platformer here.

I just finished the normal ending of hollow knight with 88% completion marked. I have some boss rush content and a few small sidequests to finish up but otherwise I think I'm perfectly comfortable with where I'm at with the game.

This game is amazing honestly! I don't play a lot of metriodvanias so coming back to this was refreshing. But you're mileage on this one may vary, so let's dig into why that may be the case.

Firstly, I say coming back, because at one point a couple years ago I put a solid 20 hours into this game and hated it, but I've almost certainly warmed up to it because in a sense I think my priorities and sense of appreciation for ambient story telling has changed.

I'll return to the ambient exellence in a moment, allow a short tangent on my past perceptions. You see, back then I think I was annoyed, in part because I found the game far too simple and easy, none of the music or art stuck out, and I think I quickly had picked up on the lack of diagonal platforms or general lack of collision platform complexity.

It's also a very slow experience. When you start playing, there's no functional way to put it, the game is boring you can only jump, you walk absurdly slow, and your not bound to pick up a dash for around the first couple hours or so. When you start, you're coming out of a cave, reading some esoteric plaques about the Pale King, etc. And every area to the west of the starting place is fairly unexceptional until you get to the Lost City (which is absolutely breathtaking).

So what kept me hooked this time? Certainly it wasnt my attention span, if anything its gotten worse. The main thing, aside from some company to keep me comfortable during downtime, is actually something that would be a bit invisible to a lot of people. For one, opening up the map and finding secret areas is extremely satisfying in itself. Almost every room has a cove that connects and a lot of the time that sense of exploration actually gives you something better than just the material benefit of saving the Grubs or a Pendant, but instead shortcuts back through and around areas your in. Connecting the map is an incredible gameplay loop, because they seemed to have gone out of their way to make the game as compact and interconnected as possible for this type of game. By comparison a lot of other Metriodvanias, like say axiom verge try to tire you by giving you a giant planetary world, Hollow Knight feels appropriately scaled down, the tram stations, stag stations, and elevators eventually make you realize getting to almost anywhere on the map takes about at most 2 minutes, which is not something you can say about most of these games.

The other reason is far more invisible. The developers were incredibly mindful about the rumble effects in this game. I play a lot of my games on an xbox controller because the rumble effects can be tactile and satisfying, and would usually rather exchange it over better aim or higher button variety in most games, especially since I play a lot of my games lazy from my bed. In this case, whenever you dash a faint small rumble is emitted. Whenever you get hit a very large rumble input is let out, and whenever you are attacking an object a slightly medium sized rumble is released on impact. What this means is, combined with a soothing orchestral ambience, with notably no percussive or juttering beats in the tracks, a lot of being outside combat is not necessarily to avoid dying, since it's fairly easy to get your currency back but instead keeping the percussion as quiet as the music and tone of the game, whenever you get hit its loud and disruptive. In the meantime the very small non attention seeking rumble set off by a dash is so incredibly enjoyable you could simply dash around for hours exploring and have that carry the quiet moments on its own. You're playing as a small bug, so of course your job should be to keep a low profile and not cause too much disruption all at once and your own presence would be bold but quiet. Meanwhile, when you get hit back to back it feels like a small earthquake is happening. In this way the core mechanics of the game build in with the environment and character you are actually playing.

Now I could sit here and gush about how amazing all of the areas of the game are, but this wouldn't provide much utility as a review or memoir of the experience to my later self, not only because it would be far harder to actually read back and reminisce on, but also because I could simply look up a video or open the game in 3 minutes and simply see this to be the case, so instead I'll bring attention to one of my favourite encounters in the game. Underneath the City of Tears, the main City region of the game, is the sewers area referred to as the 'Royal Waterways'. The area is shrouded in darkness and dew, most of the time you hear creatures far before you come into contact with them, and a lot of stuff is toppled over, with your bench in the area being tilted sideways. It's supposed to be messy. Ominous, and foreboding. This all comes to a head when you meet the little bugger asshole called in game a 'Flugenon', a small worm that lets out this nasty frenzied gutteral sound like nothing else in the game, and on sight with you chases right after you as a turret. Once you realize what is happening of course you smack it down, only to then moments later have 2 smaller pieces chase after you, one in the sky and the other on ground. Both making smaller and slightly distinct sounds from the larger version. These zombie worms cover a lot of the darker regions of the sewers, they impress me both because of their enemy movement and attack pattern design feeling so disorienting in how smooth it is, but it also filled me with dread, despite the fact I didn't die to them even once! It just added so much to my experience that these little guys were there.

The reason I thought to highlight these incredibly small pleasantries is that I quite honestly think it's this, and not how difficult or complex a game is, that matters to me more these days. If I were to assess this game on its difficulty I would of course feel disappointed, as even though I did die a lot, I only felt 'challenged' by the Prince Zote level 4+ fight, and some of the Dreamer fights. This is absolutely because the Souls series has warped my perception of how long I should be spending on a boss. I'm generally of the impression if I didn't spend over 20 minutes on a boss, it wasn't a very good boss, this is definitely a sentiment I'd do best to get away from, as by that metric almost all games are going to disappoint. But I hope you can understand its a sentiment that was not consciously cultivated by any means. I should note however this was quite the game to do it, as I felt my encounter with none of the bosses this time around were wasted, I particularly want to give notice to the Lost Kin and Prince Zote fights. Along with a wonderful final boss. These fights were absolutely brilliant with the zoning and focus it requires to take on Prince Zote, and the story that goes along with him, making him likely one of my favorite boss encounters in a videogame in recent memory.

Zote's story and his 62 precepts alone were worth the experience, but a lot of the small cast in this game are great in terms of offering both functional and storytelling purpose. I love the fact that when you hit up many of them with the mind reading device, you find out most of their thoughts are actually as equally mundane as what they express aloud a lot of the time. It's a nice touch, because you could have easily made for example the map makers wife Iselda have a mind completely panicing about her surroundings, but I think it makes a lot more sense that shes actually still just brooding about her husband and giving a small insight into her past life through that, rather than something contradictory. It's very easy to write a lot of thinking dialogue as contradictory or histrionic, and occasionally that is the case, but in reality I think a lot of peoples thoughts tend to reflect their outward presence. There's a charming realism about it. Plus its not exactly like there would be much point to putting on social masks for most of these characters at this point anyway. And the relationship between Bretta and Zote, the 2 most primary in their attention seeking behaviours reflect how futile doing so actually is.

Unfortunately, what stops the game from really being stellar, is when the small pleasantries clash with equally small frustrations. To its effect there's not as many, but they still stick out in a way that takes from the experience rather than adding to it.

For one, the economy of the game is understandably stagnant, so after you get to around the distant village or so, you'll stop having money to actively spend on. Perhaps earlier or later, depending on how mercurial you are, but I cant really see people getting more than halfway through the game without having most of the charms and upgrades bought out or at least the money to do so when they get around to it. This on its own is completely fine, you dont want to ramp the difficulty of the game too hard on grinding and, pairing that in with an economic depression from there being no population and therefore almost no shops left is great storytelling. But there is one exception: Divine. Divine takes your strongest charms (basically the build modifiers) and asks for huge sums of money to make them unbreakable. The issue is she asks for 10,000+ Geo per charm, and you cant get the breakable version back once you gave it to her. But, there's functionally no place to get that much geo that doesnt require large amounts of grinding. I understand shes a greedy prying mantis insect, but it would take me probably about an hour and a half of straight grinding one area to do this effectively, and farming has a lot of narrative issues because I start to treat the game as a calculator rather than as an experience, I know this enemy spawns here therefore I can farm it.

On top of this, the only real purpose of doing this is to exchange one tedium for another, since the character who can repair them is just in a slightly annoying spot on the map you have to go back to every time you die. It doesn't help that the charms in question also are just objectively better than most of the other charms in the game making it no question that unless you're not in the mood you make the run back anyway. I personally almost think this breakable charm mechanic would have been better off not being in the game despite its obvious narrative flourishes around it. Not to mention it makes choosing which charms to equip rather juvenile, you always equip Fragile Strength because it makes you do 50% more damage, making the possibility and build choice space that much smaller ultimately.

Following this, theres also the fact that one of the main powerups you get allow you to go through black laser doors but never mention this to you. It mentions you can shadow dash, but not through the door. I spent quite a few hours not doing much of anything because I assumed I had to do something else first. It seems primarily like a playtesting oversight; they didn't mention this in the blurb on pickup. After recognizing this I played the rest of it with a walkthrough armed. There are also giant coin pouches you have to hit over and over again for Geo, and seperate from the other considerations on geo drops, you usually only get about 30 Geo from each, as an external reward, the benefits of this are so incredibly low its almost not worth doing, I think for some of the later sections of the game they could have increased the coin drop rate from this to about 300, but they remain this same drop rate throughout the whole game.

One last complaint I have is that while the game is great in terms of boss designs, only knowing to top off moves at around 5 or 6 and knowing when to challenge the player with appropriate gap closers on most fights, the game really falls short in terms of its platforming. There's one section of the game in particular that attempts to test your platforming skills called the White Palace. Here, the game tests you by offering several difficult to navigate platforming sections, but the issue is that your vertical fall is not quite floaty or precise enough to support this. I think that your character accelerates vertical speed in the air, which is fine, but it also hits maximum velocity incredibly quickly. This maximum speed is frankly far to difficult to comfortable control. On top of this, most of the platforming involves buzzsaws. My girlfriend joked this was the 'super meat boy section' just because of how many buzzsaws there are. It makes sense in meat boy, a game hostile and arcadelike enough to get away with moving buzzsaws, but it doesnt make sense in a giant palace, even if it is a dream! I think they just ran out of ideas for what an appropriate obstacle to overcome would be.

And to be frank this is an issue I have with metriodvanias in general, but especially this one with the way the art direction is in particular: there is absolutely no way I'm going to passively explore the world for more secrets. The secrets are often hidden behind invisible walls in this game, making the assumed function of doing a full clear for the grubs or random missed goodies and charms, absurd. They make it slightly easier with the limited markers, which I admit are also quite fun to use to chart the map and note difficult/interesting areas to return to. However when it comes to finding grubs and charms, you would be doing quite a bit more wall hugging than you would probably like. I cant imagine pushing up to 97% and then trying to till the whole world for the last 2 relics or Grubs or whatever. They easily could have added a post game charm that makes the process of a clean sweep easier, as it is, this game could never convince me to 100% it, especially not without a guide. Now to be fair, a guide and simply not choosing to elect myself into stupid platforming sections in a game that doesnt support it that well solves both these problems. I also personally don't need the best charms anyway by the end of the game, and they are 'unbreakable' in the dream sections by default anyway, so the lack of external rewards make the difference for divine is not a big deal, but I cant really see myself doing a replay of the game anytime soon.

One last thing before I let you go, there's a justifiable amount of comparisons to be made between the story thematics and general gameplay of this game in relationship to Dark Souls. I don't want to overstate it, but the base ending of Hollow Knight read quite literally as a 'linking of the fire' rehash of Dark Souls. The story being esoteric and told mostly through descriptions and random hidden notes. The general gothic quality and themes of infection and decay. The futility of resurrecting kingdoms, etc. Also, the fact that it uses a checkpoint mechanic similar to the Souls series.

Personally, I think the only part where it drops the ball a bit is on the main ending Hollow Knight fight, I'm not really sure the game gives a proper send off of him as an antagonist despite it being the name of the game, a couple characters in town timid about the guy might have helped, since a lot of the commentary was about the Pale King! It just left me scratching my head. On every other front, I think it's okay to ape the influences of Dark Souls. It shouldn't really disrupt your experience all that much, and personally I just think calling antagonists and areas things like 'Lost Kin' or 'Royal Waterways' just has a certain gothic allure to it you don't see elsewhere. I wish well to more games taking advantage of what Dark Souls brought forward, especially on the point of environmental storytelling, which is monumentally well done in this case as well.
High props to the devs for also making all the DLC free as well! I'm comfortable considering all this DLC content along in my perception of the main game. Despite the game not being mechanically or emotionally challenging, this experience will stick with me for a long time and it ticks off a lot of the boxes for what I tend to be drawn to in terms of game design and atmosphere building in games as an artistic medium. Thumbs up all around!