Fluppywhiffle
The hardest thing about this game is trying to think of a single personality trait for it.
[Sorry this is a bit late]
Homefront: The Revolution gets way more fucking hate than it deserves. Given the amount of people who are likely gonna play through it just so they can play Timesplitters again, I feel it's my duty to defend the game from those who are going to hate on it for being something that it isn't, as well those who accused it of being something worse than it is.
It is NOT a Far Cry game even though it shares design elements with the series. It is NOT a AAA game even though it looks like one. It is definitely NOT a piece of imperialist propaganda about how Koreans are bad. It absolutely is NOT a Timesplitters game in any way, shape, form, or reason. And I can assure that it’s neither a Call of Duty nor Crysis game.
Homefront: The Revolution is a rugged, semi-open world game about being a guerrilla fighter for a revolution. It was developed by a medium-sized team on a medium sized budget, and it shows. It may not be a particularly polished game, and yes, there is a fair bit of jank throughout the whole thing, but that's something to be expected from a game of this scale built across such a tumultuous development cycle (we'll get to this a little later).
There are 3 different types of maps that all have slightly different styles of gameplay. Green Zones are linear set pieces, Yellow Zones are smaller-scale ghettos, and Red Zones are effectively like war zones. The set pieces might be where the game is at its weakest because the mechanics themselves are not exactly designed for that kind of gameplay. The enemy AI is not all that great and the stealth is kinda lacklustre, as well. The Red Zones are home to the more action oriented gameplay, where you’ve gotta defend ally outposts, liberate enemy outposts, and try not to get spotted by the evil, flying zeppelins. The Yellow Zones are perhaps the most interesting part of the game, though, because you are tasked with leading an uprising against the ‘oppressive regime’ in urban districts by convincing the citizens to riot against the KPA. You are initially pushed to take a subtler, more stealth-based approach in order to raise the citizens’ hearts and minds enough for them to vandalise the streets. It’s not that easy for me to explain how this works, but a lot of the time, it genuinely feels like you are responsible for a social movement in which you and the people of the district take back your streets from the oppressors. It is super interesting stuff. There are many different types of gameplay crammed into this whole package, and as such, the missions often feel a bit repetitive since they typically resort to czechlist-based design. Y’know, liberate this many outposts, defend against that many enemies, strip these many posters off the walls; that type of stuff. Ironically enough, I’m not saying that this type of design is anything revolutionary, despite the nature of the game it’s in, but it is often very solid in terms of its execution, especially in the Yellow Zones.
Homefront: The Revolution also has a really interesting weapon customisation system that’s similar to the ones found in the Crysis franchise. You can change your various weapon parts in order to gain different abilities from them. For just about every weapon, you can modify the grip, fire rate, ammo type, ironsight, and more things that I’m probably forgetting because it’s been over 2 years since I’ve played it and my memory is probably failing me. What I do remember is that it made the gunplay feel quite tactile and variable in a way that I haven’t seen in all that many games. It’s actually surprisingly well done for what it is.
On the topic of weapons, I feel that it’s necessary to talk about the gunplay itself in a little more detail because it’s one of the more misunderstood aspects of the game. As I said before, this is a game where you play as a guerilla fighter in the midst of a revolution. You are not a soldier. You are not a marksman. You aren’t a trained fighter. Hell, your character probably hasn’t even used a gun outside of the first moments of the game. You are merely someone who is fighting for a cause that they believe in, and this is reflected through the kinesthetics of the game.
Weapons aren’t precise like in Call of Duty or TimeSplitters, they are unwieldy and cumbersome to use. Guns have a ridiculous amount of recoil and bullet spread that may turn some players off from the game. You are underpowered compared to the KPA around you, and can only take a few shots before dying since they have stronger weapons than you do. However, they also wear bulletproof vests and body armour that can withstand a lot of your shots, especially on higher difficulties. If you look at the KPA’s weapons, you’ll notice that they are futuristic machines built with aerodynamic angles at mechanical precision, whereas your weapons are essentially just a bunch of worn-down, rusty parts that are clumsily held together with tape and rubber bands. The individual parts clash with each other in every way except for their ‘battle scars’ and, especially towards the beginning of the game, they reload rather slowly, too. Handling them is opposite of refined, but once you get used to them, they certainly pack a punch and a half. These barely held together pieces of machinery rattle and clamber with every shot, and keychains with faded flags on them violently jostle with every movement. Yes, the weapons feel cumbersome to use, especially at the beginning, but that’s the point. You are part of a revolution, you are fighting for what you believe in. You are not fighting because you can, but rather because you have to. Your weapons are as strong as your will to use them.
The gunplay progresses in parallel to the revolution. You start out fighting with what you’re given, and you end up fighting with what you’ve got. At the beginning, you’re shooting bullets from a clumsy shotgun, but towards the end, you’re shooting fireworks into crowds of KPA-gents. Sure, those fireworks are needlessly bombastic and overly celebratory and excessively patriotic. They’re honestly quite silly, but that doesn’t matter because they are effective nonetheless. When your voice has been suppressed, it doesn’t matter how stupid you look or sound. I mean, if your voice was taken, what would you do to get it back?
I know I’m starting to preach, but it’s because it genuinely makes me upset that people point at this game’s cutscenes and writing and laugh it off as just another shitty video game story with nothing going for it. I won’t deny that the writing is not all that great in the grand scheme of things, but the stuff that’s there says more about the topic at hand than basically any other game I’ve seen or heard of, let alone played. There are plenty of games that have ‘guerilla fighting’ and ‘revolutions’ in them (Just Cause 3, Far Cry 3-5, Watch Dogs 2, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday), but frankly, they aren’t terribly well-written either. It’s frustrating that Homefront: The Revolution’s introduction is as poor as it is, because when you stop laughing at how it initially “sounds” and listen to what it actually “says” beyond the introductory cutscenes, there is genuinely quite a lot of content to unpack. In fact, I’d argue that Homefront: The Revolution explores the very concept of revolutions and examines why people take part in them much more than most other games. Why does a pacifist take part in a war, what do people gain by joining an opposing force, at what point does violence detract from a movement-- these are just some of the questions and topics that are brought to light when you play through it. You will find notes from individuals who became KPA-gents discussing why they joined the force. You will learn the effects that an oppressive regime has on different people, as well as how they deal with it. You will learn the consequences of being part of the revolution. There is a lot to learn and read and listen to and see, and no, it’s not particularly subtle about any of it, but it’s absolutely not shallow in terms of its narrative and thematic content. I mean, tell me another game that actively explores the concept of revolutions to the extent that this one does. (Actually, don’t do that because then it’ll be yet another game on my seemingly endless backlog and I’ll feel fuckin terrible about myself lol.)
Even if you don’t like the writing itself, if you just look at the game, you will see that the environments tell more stories than any of the cutscenes or dialogue possibly can. You will walk through the battered remains of a city scarred by an invasive force. You will venture through the sickly result of a chemical atrocity. You will see slums filled with trash constricted by giant, cement walls that are plastered with propaganda and retaliatory graffiti. As you walk through city streets infested with the bright red screens and fluorescent lights of the KPA, you might notice that trash from the alleys has seeped into the pavement. Military fortresses invade the streets like tumours, and yet sofas sit in front of them in silent protest. The more thoroughly you observe the maps, the more you are rewarded with silent stories. Those aforementioned sofas may present an interesting vignette, but if you carefully observe the alleys in prior yellow zones and notice the tired civilians sitting on similar-looking couches in their garages, that simple piece of furniture becomes a narrative device that exemplifies the growing tensions between the people on the streets and those in power. All the nuance that is missing from the written story is more than prevalent in the world. I’m not just talking about the graffiti and propaganda, but rather the city beneath it. The sofa is just one example that I happen to remember; but these kinds of subtle stories are everywhere in Homefront: The Revolution.
Rather than discussing and breaking down more of those moments, though, I feel that it’s necessary to address something at the surface. Just because the “enemy” in this fictional game is Korea and the “protagonist” is the “US”, does not make this a statement against Korea and/or for the US. It is NOT a piece of imperialist propaganda, it is a story about taking part in a revolution and the effect it has on the people involved. The primary reason that Korea and the US are in this game is because their conflict is the remnant of the previous one in the franchise it softly rebooted. The KPA happens to be an oppressive force, and the revolutionists happen to be American, but these roles could’ve been filled by anyone and the narrative would be virtually identical. Hell, the roles could be switched around and it’ll still convey THE SAME THING. The game criticises both parties. Yes, it could be more critical of them, and yes, it sometimes conveys some dissonant messages--especially in its ending sequence--, but I’d argue that the game does NOT choose explicit heroes or villains, even if it may seem like it from the surface. Of course, this doesn’t invalidate the possibility that some of the creative choices were sensationalistic in nature, but that doesn’t make it a work of propaganda, let alone imperialist.
I know I’ve stressed it a lot, but this is a game about revolutions through and through. It’s about the costs and benefits of fighting against overwhelming odds for something you truly believe in. Even the game’s development parallels its subject matter. You see, it can be argued that Homefront: The Revolution is essentially the product of metaphorical guerilla fighters. Over the course of its 5 year development cycle, both the team and the game itself lived through the closure of two studios, the bankruptcy of their original publisher, the financial mismanagement of their second publisher, the ruthless deadlines of their third publisher, and the fluctuation in both size and scale of the game and its dev team. What started out as a simple, linear follow up to the first Homefront became a full open-world game, yet partway through its already troubled development, over ⅓ of the team had to leave the studio because the publisher wasn’t paying them. Several other devs--including the director himself-- quite literally went on strike after being denied the pay they were rightfully promised. Even after the studio was bought out and rebranded, and the devs were getting paid again, they were still making the same game at the same scale as before, but with ⅔ of the people they had before. It was already an ambitious game for a team of roughly 150 people to make, but then only 100 people had to take on that same workload across the same time. Yes, corners had to be cut; it’s no longer a full open world game, but even after a delay of almost an entire year, Homefront: The Revolution launched in an unplayable, unfinished state, and was bombed by both critics and consumers.
As of now, the game has a metascore of 49. Pretty much everyone hated the game. Both Dambuster Studio and Deep Silver had every reason to quit, but they didn’t. They spent the following year fixing the game, removing the vast majority of the game breaking bugs. Obviously, they missed a few of them, but enough of them were fixed to make the game playable, and they didn’t stop there. 2 expansions were released--I didn’t play either of them, but I’ve heard that they’re even better than the base game. The devs even added in a fully featured co-op mode with its own story and missions and support for up to 4 players.
I’m not saying that Homefront: The Revolution is this perfect, brilliant game that everyone must play. What I am saying is that the developers quite literally lived through the events of this game, they literally protested for it. Even though it was at the brink of extinction for years, it exists because the people who made it genuinely believed in the project. Homefront: The Revolution is the product of passionate developers who put nearly 6 years of work into something they truly cared about.
I’ve read comments from people who have proclaimed that Homefront: The Revolution would’ve been a hit if it were made by a different developer. This is just not the case. No other developer would’ve believed in the project nearly as much as Dambuster, and no other developer could’ve made this game. When you look at the world that the team has managed to create, the amount of thought and care that has gone into realising even its smallest details is nothing short of inspiring. . In some way that I cannot properly articulate, I believe in everything this game shows me. There is an unquestionable sincerity and genuineness that emanates from its every pixel. Sure, some of its aspects are poorly executed and corners were obviously cut, but the content that’s there has so much life and effort that I cannot help but love it.
With more development time and less development turmoil, I am certain that Dambuster could create something that people truly adore. If they went deeper into the intricacies of the world, fleshed out the characters and the AI, and added a little bit more variety to the mission design, a truly special and directly thought-provoking game would emerge. But as it stands now, the stuff that is present does NOT deserve the hate and vitriol it gets because this is, without question, a product of passion. That is something that cannot be said for many other games that have a metascore higher than 49 (cough cough Sniper Ghost Warrior 3).
If anything I’ve said in this enormous rant sounds interesting to you, please consider giving this game a chance. If more people gave this game a chance, at the very least, we would’ve gotten to play the Timesplitters 2 port sooner. Yeah, it’s always been in the fucking game, it has always been playable, and people would’ve known that if they actually played Homefront: The Revolution instead of laughing it off
Homefront: The Revolution gets way more fucking hate than it deserves. Given the amount of people who are likely gonna play through it just so they can play Timesplitters again, I feel it's my duty to defend the game from those who are going to hate on it for being something that it isn't, as well those who accused it of being something worse than it is.
It is NOT a Far Cry game even though it shares design elements with the series. It is NOT a AAA game even though it looks like one. It is definitely NOT a piece of imperialist propaganda about how Koreans are bad. It absolutely is NOT a Timesplitters game in any way, shape, form, or reason. And I can assure that it’s neither a Call of Duty nor Crysis game.
Homefront: The Revolution is a rugged, semi-open world game about being a guerrilla fighter for a revolution. It was developed by a medium-sized team on a medium sized budget, and it shows. It may not be a particularly polished game, and yes, there is a fair bit of jank throughout the whole thing, but that's something to be expected from a game of this scale built across such a tumultuous development cycle (we'll get to this a little later).
There are 3 different types of maps that all have slightly different styles of gameplay. Green Zones are linear set pieces, Yellow Zones are smaller-scale ghettos, and Red Zones are effectively like war zones. The set pieces might be where the game is at its weakest because the mechanics themselves are not exactly designed for that kind of gameplay. The enemy AI is not all that great and the stealth is kinda lacklustre, as well. The Red Zones are home to the more action oriented gameplay, where you’ve gotta defend ally outposts, liberate enemy outposts, and try not to get spotted by the evil, flying zeppelins. The Yellow Zones are perhaps the most interesting part of the game, though, because you are tasked with leading an uprising against the ‘oppressive regime’ in urban districts by convincing the citizens to riot against the KPA. You are initially pushed to take a subtler, more stealth-based approach in order to raise the citizens’ hearts and minds enough for them to vandalise the streets. It’s not that easy for me to explain how this works, but a lot of the time, it genuinely feels like you are responsible for a social movement in which you and the people of the district take back your streets from the oppressors. It is super interesting stuff. There are many different types of gameplay crammed into this whole package, and as such, the missions often feel a bit repetitive since they typically resort to czechlist-based design. Y’know, liberate this many outposts, defend against that many enemies, strip these many posters off the walls; that type of stuff. Ironically enough, I’m not saying that this type of design is anything revolutionary, despite the nature of the game it’s in, but it is often very solid in terms of its execution, especially in the Yellow Zones.
Homefront: The Revolution also has a really interesting weapon customisation system that’s similar to the ones found in the Crysis franchise. You can change your various weapon parts in order to gain different abilities from them. For just about every weapon, you can modify the grip, fire rate, ammo type, ironsight, and more things that I’m probably forgetting because it’s been over 2 years since I’ve played it and my memory is probably failing me. What I do remember is that it made the gunplay feel quite tactile and variable in a way that I haven’t seen in all that many games. It’s actually surprisingly well done for what it is.
On the topic of weapons, I feel that it’s necessary to talk about the gunplay itself in a little more detail because it’s one of the more misunderstood aspects of the game. As I said before, this is a game where you play as a guerilla fighter in the midst of a revolution. You are not a soldier. You are not a marksman. You aren’t a trained fighter. Hell, your character probably hasn’t even used a gun outside of the first moments of the game. You are merely someone who is fighting for a cause that they believe in, and this is reflected through the kinesthetics of the game.
Weapons aren’t precise like in Call of Duty or TimeSplitters, they are unwieldy and cumbersome to use. Guns have a ridiculous amount of recoil and bullet spread that may turn some players off from the game. You are underpowered compared to the KPA around you, and can only take a few shots before dying since they have stronger weapons than you do. However, they also wear bulletproof vests and body armour that can withstand a lot of your shots, especially on higher difficulties. If you look at the KPA’s weapons, you’ll notice that they are futuristic machines built with aerodynamic angles at mechanical precision, whereas your weapons are essentially just a bunch of worn-down, rusty parts that are clumsily held together with tape and rubber bands. The individual parts clash with each other in every way except for their ‘battle scars’ and, especially towards the beginning of the game, they reload rather slowly, too. Handling them is opposite of refined, but once you get used to them, they certainly pack a punch and a half. These barely held together pieces of machinery rattle and clamber with every shot, and keychains with faded flags on them violently jostle with every movement. Yes, the weapons feel cumbersome to use, especially at the beginning, but that’s the point. You are part of a revolution, you are fighting for what you believe in. You are not fighting because you can, but rather because you have to. Your weapons are as strong as your will to use them.
The gunplay progresses in parallel to the revolution. You start out fighting with what you’re given, and you end up fighting with what you’ve got. At the beginning, you’re shooting bullets from a clumsy shotgun, but towards the end, you’re shooting fireworks into crowds of KPA-gents. Sure, those fireworks are needlessly bombastic and overly celebratory and excessively patriotic. They’re honestly quite silly, but that doesn’t matter because they are effective nonetheless. When your voice has been suppressed, it doesn’t matter how stupid you look or sound. I mean, if your voice was taken, what would you do to get it back?
I know I’m starting to preach, but it’s because it genuinely makes me upset that people point at this game’s cutscenes and writing and laugh it off as just another shitty video game story with nothing going for it. I won’t deny that the writing is not all that great in the grand scheme of things, but the stuff that’s there says more about the topic at hand than basically any other game I’ve seen or heard of, let alone played. There are plenty of games that have ‘guerilla fighting’ and ‘revolutions’ in them (Just Cause 3, Far Cry 3-5, Watch Dogs 2, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday), but frankly, they aren’t terribly well-written either. It’s frustrating that Homefront: The Revolution’s introduction is as poor as it is, because when you stop laughing at how it initially “sounds” and listen to what it actually “says” beyond the introductory cutscenes, there is genuinely quite a lot of content to unpack. In fact, I’d argue that Homefront: The Revolution explores the very concept of revolutions and examines why people take part in them much more than most other games. Why does a pacifist take part in a war, what do people gain by joining an opposing force, at what point does violence detract from a movement-- these are just some of the questions and topics that are brought to light when you play through it. You will find notes from individuals who became KPA-gents discussing why they joined the force. You will learn the effects that an oppressive regime has on different people, as well as how they deal with it. You will learn the consequences of being part of the revolution. There is a lot to learn and read and listen to and see, and no, it’s not particularly subtle about any of it, but it’s absolutely not shallow in terms of its narrative and thematic content. I mean, tell me another game that actively explores the concept of revolutions to the extent that this one does. (Actually, don’t do that because then it’ll be yet another game on my seemingly endless backlog and I’ll feel fuckin terrible about myself lol.)
Even if you don’t like the writing itself, if you just look at the game, you will see that the environments tell more stories than any of the cutscenes or dialogue possibly can. You will walk through the battered remains of a city scarred by an invasive force. You will venture through the sickly result of a chemical atrocity. You will see slums filled with trash constricted by giant, cement walls that are plastered with propaganda and retaliatory graffiti. As you walk through city streets infested with the bright red screens and fluorescent lights of the KPA, you might notice that trash from the alleys has seeped into the pavement. Military fortresses invade the streets like tumours, and yet sofas sit in front of them in silent protest. The more thoroughly you observe the maps, the more you are rewarded with silent stories. Those aforementioned sofas may present an interesting vignette, but if you carefully observe the alleys in prior yellow zones and notice the tired civilians sitting on similar-looking couches in their garages, that simple piece of furniture becomes a narrative device that exemplifies the growing tensions between the people on the streets and those in power. All the nuance that is missing from the written story is more than prevalent in the world. I’m not just talking about the graffiti and propaganda, but rather the city beneath it. The sofa is just one example that I happen to remember; but these kinds of subtle stories are everywhere in Homefront: The Revolution.
Rather than discussing and breaking down more of those moments, though, I feel that it’s necessary to address something at the surface. Just because the “enemy” in this fictional game is Korea and the “protagonist” is the “US”, does not make this a statement against Korea and/or for the US. It is NOT a piece of imperialist propaganda, it is a story about taking part in a revolution and the effect it has on the people involved. The primary reason that Korea and the US are in this game is because their conflict is the remnant of the previous one in the franchise it softly rebooted. The KPA happens to be an oppressive force, and the revolutionists happen to be American, but these roles could’ve been filled by anyone and the narrative would be virtually identical. Hell, the roles could be switched around and it’ll still convey THE SAME THING. The game criticises both parties. Yes, it could be more critical of them, and yes, it sometimes conveys some dissonant messages--especially in its ending sequence--, but I’d argue that the game does NOT choose explicit heroes or villains, even if it may seem like it from the surface. Of course, this doesn’t invalidate the possibility that some of the creative choices were sensationalistic in nature, but that doesn’t make it a work of propaganda, let alone imperialist.
I know I’ve stressed it a lot, but this is a game about revolutions through and through. It’s about the costs and benefits of fighting against overwhelming odds for something you truly believe in. Even the game’s development parallels its subject matter. You see, it can be argued that Homefront: The Revolution is essentially the product of metaphorical guerilla fighters. Over the course of its 5 year development cycle, both the team and the game itself lived through the closure of two studios, the bankruptcy of their original publisher, the financial mismanagement of their second publisher, the ruthless deadlines of their third publisher, and the fluctuation in both size and scale of the game and its dev team. What started out as a simple, linear follow up to the first Homefront became a full open-world game, yet partway through its already troubled development, over ⅓ of the team had to leave the studio because the publisher wasn’t paying them. Several other devs--including the director himself-- quite literally went on strike after being denied the pay they were rightfully promised. Even after the studio was bought out and rebranded, and the devs were getting paid again, they were still making the same game at the same scale as before, but with ⅔ of the people they had before. It was already an ambitious game for a team of roughly 150 people to make, but then only 100 people had to take on that same workload across the same time. Yes, corners had to be cut; it’s no longer a full open world game, but even after a delay of almost an entire year, Homefront: The Revolution launched in an unplayable, unfinished state, and was bombed by both critics and consumers.
As of now, the game has a metascore of 49. Pretty much everyone hated the game. Both Dambuster Studio and Deep Silver had every reason to quit, but they didn’t. They spent the following year fixing the game, removing the vast majority of the game breaking bugs. Obviously, they missed a few of them, but enough of them were fixed to make the game playable, and they didn’t stop there. 2 expansions were released--I didn’t play either of them, but I’ve heard that they’re even better than the base game. The devs even added in a fully featured co-op mode with its own story and missions and support for up to 4 players.
I’m not saying that Homefront: The Revolution is this perfect, brilliant game that everyone must play. What I am saying is that the developers quite literally lived through the events of this game, they literally protested for it. Even though it was at the brink of extinction for years, it exists because the people who made it genuinely believed in the project. Homefront: The Revolution is the product of passionate developers who put nearly 6 years of work into something they truly cared about.
I’ve read comments from people who have proclaimed that Homefront: The Revolution would’ve been a hit if it were made by a different developer. This is just not the case. No other developer would’ve believed in the project nearly as much as Dambuster, and no other developer could’ve made this game. When you look at the world that the team has managed to create, the amount of thought and care that has gone into realising even its smallest details is nothing short of inspiring. . In some way that I cannot properly articulate, I believe in everything this game shows me. There is an unquestionable sincerity and genuineness that emanates from its every pixel. Sure, some of its aspects are poorly executed and corners were obviously cut, but the content that’s there has so much life and effort that I cannot help but love it.
With more development time and less development turmoil, I am certain that Dambuster could create something that people truly adore. If they went deeper into the intricacies of the world, fleshed out the characters and the AI, and added a little bit more variety to the mission design, a truly special and directly thought-provoking game would emerge. But as it stands now, the stuff that is present does NOT deserve the hate and vitriol it gets because this is, without question, a product of passion. That is something that cannot be said for many other games that have a metascore higher than 49 (cough cough Sniper Ghost Warrior 3).
If anything I’ve said in this enormous rant sounds interesting to you, please consider giving this game a chance. If more people gave this game a chance, at the very least, we would’ve gotten to play the Timesplitters 2 port sooner. Yeah, it’s always been in the fucking game, it has always been playable, and people would’ve known that if they actually played Homefront: The Revolution instead of laughing it off
2013
So like picture this:
You are sitting beneath an old piano in your grandmother's dingy basement. The ground is rather dirty--you can feel it with your hands-- but the lighting is subpar so you cannot see it. Upstairs, your brother is practicing piano with his piano teacher, who also happens to be your grandmother. As you sit beneath that creaky, old piano on the dusty floor in the dingy basement, you look over towards your binder and shudder at the thought of straining your eyes trying to do your maths homework. You immediately turn the other way and notice a bunch of old records. You've seen these records before, all of them are by people who died long before you were born, except for Nick Cave. As soon as you remember Nick Cave, you feel just as dusty as the floor you're sitting on, so you look the other way. Your eyes have adjusted at this point, so now you can see the stick horse in the back corner. You haven't ever noticed this stick horse before, so you attempt to stand up and walk over to get a closer look, but you hit your head on the piano you forgot you were sitting beneath. It lets out a quiet groan, and you do the same. After quickly recovering from your collision, you wonder when the piano was last tuned; when will it wake from its slumber? You worry that you might've hit the piano a little too hard because you notice that your brother stopped playing the one upstairs. As you tilt your ear toward the basement staircase, you notice that you can see the floor a little bit clearer. It is a sickly shade of beige, although it's not clear whether or not the tiles actually look like that. Suddenly, you hear the basement door open. You have no idea who it is, but you feel incredibly uneasy. Is it your brother? Is it the teacher? Is it...is it grandma? Is it your parents? You hear someone's foot meet the first creaking step and your heart starts to race. What do you do...
screeeech
You remember that you're supposed to be doing your maths homework.
creeeaaak
You haven't even started it.
screeaaak
Do run over and open your binder?
Screeeech
No wait, your binder is zipped up, they'll hear you!
Skreeek
Do you delay?
Creeeaaak
Well maybe it's-
skreeeaaak
Do you hide?
screech
Oh god.
Creak
You are panic-
Skreak
You will be-
Creak
Why are you still under the piano?!
stomp
They've reached the bottom of the staircase. The footsteps stop for a moment; you hold your breath. The silence is maddening. You look towards the sliding door and you notice that the evening has slipped away. Suddenly, the footsteps begin again....and they're getting louder...
You close your eyes.
...and louder...
You start to shudder.
...and LOUDER...
You put your head on your knees.
...until they stop right in front of you. You fear what will happen next.
In this scenario, Anodyne is the stick horse. I don't have much else to say about it.
You are sitting beneath an old piano in your grandmother's dingy basement. The ground is rather dirty--you can feel it with your hands-- but the lighting is subpar so you cannot see it. Upstairs, your brother is practicing piano with his piano teacher, who also happens to be your grandmother. As you sit beneath that creaky, old piano on the dusty floor in the dingy basement, you look over towards your binder and shudder at the thought of straining your eyes trying to do your maths homework. You immediately turn the other way and notice a bunch of old records. You've seen these records before, all of them are by people who died long before you were born, except for Nick Cave. As soon as you remember Nick Cave, you feel just as dusty as the floor you're sitting on, so you look the other way. Your eyes have adjusted at this point, so now you can see the stick horse in the back corner. You haven't ever noticed this stick horse before, so you attempt to stand up and walk over to get a closer look, but you hit your head on the piano you forgot you were sitting beneath. It lets out a quiet groan, and you do the same. After quickly recovering from your collision, you wonder when the piano was last tuned; when will it wake from its slumber? You worry that you might've hit the piano a little too hard because you notice that your brother stopped playing the one upstairs. As you tilt your ear toward the basement staircase, you notice that you can see the floor a little bit clearer. It is a sickly shade of beige, although it's not clear whether or not the tiles actually look like that. Suddenly, you hear the basement door open. You have no idea who it is, but you feel incredibly uneasy. Is it your brother? Is it the teacher? Is it...is it grandma? Is it your parents? You hear someone's foot meet the first creaking step and your heart starts to race. What do you do...
screeeech
You remember that you're supposed to be doing your maths homework.
creeeaaak
You haven't even started it.
screeaaak
Do run over and open your binder?
Screeeech
No wait, your binder is zipped up, they'll hear you!
Skreeek
Do you delay?
Creeeaaak
Well maybe it's-
skreeeaaak
Do you hide?
screech
Oh god.
Creak
You are panic-
Skreak
You will be-
Creak
Why are you still under the piano?!
stomp
They've reached the bottom of the staircase. The footsteps stop for a moment; you hold your breath. The silence is maddening. You look towards the sliding door and you notice that the evening has slipped away. Suddenly, the footsteps begin again....and they're getting louder...
You close your eyes.
...and louder...
You start to shudder.
...and LOUDER...
You put your head on your knees.
...until they stop right in front of you. You fear what will happen next.
In this scenario, Anodyne is the stick horse. I don't have much else to say about it.
This is my review for the movie. I fucking HATE Gru's stupid fucking nose. Like what the fuck is that penis-ass nose. His Doctor assistant person has an even bigger penis nose and he rides in a Scooter. Does that mean that people with physical disabilities have bigger penis noses than those who are fully capable of movement? Regardless, I am offended. Fuck you Gru. You never deserved life. I wish your stupid minions fell out of the rocket you built and got impaled on your penis nose, Gru. Fuck YOU!!!
1996
I'm including Pokemon Red as a stand-in for every single game in the franchise except for the ones that I've played and forgot the name of because they are literally all the same game with different names. The thing about these games is that I simply don't understand the fucking appeal of them. Turn based combat might not be inherently terrible on its own, but when you don't make any attempt to make the encounters interesting or streamlined in basically any way, it just becomes a tedious interaction with a temperamental interface. That is pokemon's combat. The enemies are not remotely varied or interesting enough to carry the game. The goal of pokemon is to "catch them all," but how does that differ from collecting STD's? The answer is that at least it's fun to catch STDs, whereas the pokemon games is just dealing with the paperwork. The fact of the matter is, the encounters are all grinding with no substance behind it, and when that's combined with the infuriatingly high encounter rate, it's just poorly designed in my eyes. Since they just add more grinding with each iteration, I have absolutely no reason to play any of the pokemon games more than I already have.
Hollow Knight is an excellent budget title that could serve as the framework for a truly special game. The scale of its world and its contents is simply astonishing, and the universe it all takes place in is certainly a fascinating one. Hallownest feels like the remnants of a once-thriving, underground kingdom. No matter where you go, you catch glimpses of its former glory buried beneath the scars of tragedies and conflicts that have long since passed. You walk through the fractured remnants of a society slowly being reclaimed by its broken ecosystem. The atmosphere is perpetually tinged with a nigh-palpable moroseness, but it's not so overwhelming that it blends all the different areas together.
Every biome is visually distinct from each other, and they all tell self-contained stories about the different corners and communities of Hallownest. It is no secret that Hollow Knight's greatest aspect is its world design. Even a contrarian dickass like myself cannot deny that the world design is anything short of fantastic, and I think that it's worthy of all the praise it has received. It's hard to make a game's world feel truly sprawling-- even big budget titles struggle with that-- but Hollow Knight's map feels like it goes on forever in every direction. It's not just that the map's filled with wide, empty levels with nothing to do, there's a lot to do just about everywhere. Every biome is packed with things to discover, and even if you miss some of those things, just seeing how the different levels and biomes connect together is certainly one the biggest motivators for playing the game. There's always something else to do, there's always something you haven't seen yet. A lot of love went into both building this game’s world, and making it interesting to explore.
The most impressive thing to me, though, is not its world, but rather the amount of art that’s in it. The game was made by a core team of 3 people (4 if you count the composer/sound designer), but only one person made the entirety of the art and animations. For context, there are over 150 enemies and bosses in the game, many of which have multiple unique states and poses, and one guy designed and animated all of them on top of drawing all the characters, art assets, environmental assets, visual effects, UI assets, and more. I don’t usually like giving all the credit to one person in a team, but Ari Gibson is an absolute fucking beast of an artist, and I strongly believe that his work is a key factor of why Hollow Knight captured the hearts of many. In fact, his art is what initially made Hollow Knight interesting to me. Every part of the game is filled with beautiful, screenshot-worthy material, and every screenshot shows off an enthralling universe just begging to be explored. It’s a game that obviously wants to be played; a notion that’s echoed by its incredibly low price of entry.
I’d heard nothing but praise for the game since the day of its release. I’d seen dozens of people fall in love with it. In fact, I sat next to someone who played it every day during class on her macbook. Even without the sound, I could see she was enthralled by it. At the very least, it seemed like something I'd enjoy, too. So years later, when it finally came time for me to play Hollow Knight, I wanted to give the game the best chance I possibly could to shine. I approached the game with a completely open mind and made it my mission to focus on how playing it made me feel.
However, the more I played the game, the more my priorities shifted. No longer was I “giving the game a chance,” I made it my mission to see everything it had to offer. I was determined to do the ultimate playthrough of Hollow Knight, in which I would refuse to get an ending until I memorised the entirety of Hallownest, completed everything in the game, mastered the mechanics, and accomplished absurd personal challenges.
For 9 months, I basically played nothing except for Hollow Knight. I amassed 165 hours of playtime and saw nearly everything in the game. But here's the catch– to this day, I have only done a single playthrough and have not gotten a single ending. I haven’t finished the game, and I do not ever plan to.
Before I continue, I want to explain why my playtime is so absurd. Hollow Knight is definitely a big, nonlinear game, but when you’re as immensely stubborn as I am, it becomes even longer than it was intended to be. Backtracking is a significant part of progressing through it, but the most interesting parts of the game for me were the moments I was meant to turn away from.
For example, I spent a long-ass time beating the Colosseum while vastly underlevelled. I’d say I spent nearly ⅓ of my playtime doing so because it pushed me to master the mechanics and required my undivided effort to beat the challenges. Yes, it was a serious time sink that was easily avoidable, and sure, I may have had to motivate myself to play it at times, but even though I wasn’t exploring Hallownest, I was learning how to use my arsenal to its full ability. The different layouts and enemy encounters in the Colosseum were not just interesting to discover as I progressed, they were intriguing to engage with and discover how to most effectively beat. So even though it took me a long time to beat, I didn’t regret a single second I spent there and never once lost my patience.
It’s places like the Colosseum that demonstrate the best of what Hollow Knight has to offer, gameplay-wise. When the player is pushed to improve their skill by pushing back against the friction of the world, it legitimises their actions in the world. Those moments of triumph made me feel like I was progressing just as much, if not more than when I was simply exploring the map.
There’s proper brilliance embedded throughout Hollow Knight, but its limitations hold it back from being something I’d consider to be a truly great game. It’s obviously impressive that Team Cherry was able to create something so massive out of a very simple framework, but by aiming to make the largest map possible with incredibly simple core mechanics, those peaks in gameplay are divided by increasingly large valleys of mediocre filler.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the world design is lacking or anything like that, obviously the levels are fantastically arranged. However the excellent world design is brought down by the parabolic gameplay pacing and lacklustre level design.
When I say that the level design is lacklustre, I do NOT mean the levels are poorly constructed. There isn’t a level I can think of off the top of my head with poor construction or readability (actually I technically thought of one of the levels with Loodles in them, but that’s not really worth mentioning, I say as I make mention of it). Most of them are adequately put together and relatively enjoyable to beat the first time you see them. The issue, however, is that, as I stated earlier, Hollow Knight is heavily based around backtracking, which means you will venture through most of these levels many different times. One of the most difficult aspects of designing a game like this is making levels that are interesting or enjoyable to play through multiple times, and Hollow Knight does not have many levels that are like that.
The vast majority of them are made up of the same floating platforms, spike pits, walkways, and enemy placements in slightly different arrangements. There is generally only one way to venture through them without much in the way of variation, save for the occasional shortcut or biome-specific obstacle. Although the traversal options change with the acquisition of new movement abilities, the levels themselves stay largely the same as the first time they’re discovered. The player is tested on exactly the same things regardless of how skilled or experienced they are with the mechanics. While there are some changes and rewards for backtracking through the map, they are generally incidental in nature and do little to breathe new life into the levels. For lack of better phrasing, there comes a point where Hallownest stops feeling like a world, and the moment that happens, Hollow Knight becomes a large grocery list.
See, at first it takes a while for the game to open up and become interesting from a gameplay perspective. But once it does, you really embrace that feeling of discovery, of seeing new things within this ever expanding world. Unfortunately, once you reach the endgame, that sense of discovery begins to fall off. The destinations stop being worth the journeys you have to take because you have already encountered the exact same obstacles on your previous journeys. Once you become familiar with Hallownest, you inevitably lose the feeling of excitement in its mysteries. The pursuits become mindless. You end up having to trek through the same simple levels, just to see what else is there, even if the things aren’t worth seeing. There is always something else to do, there is always something you haven’t seen, but the distance to the reward becomes further as the reward itself becomes ever smaller.
Once you’ve seen most of what Hollow Knight has to offer, it is no longer intriguing to traverse its world. You begin just chasing places for the mere sake of chasing places, and you inevitably run out of steam and motivation with that pursuit. That was the trap I fell into. At a certain point, I was just playing the game just so I could say I had completed everything, and not because I was getting anything out of it. The thrill of adventure and discovery had long since turned into a slog since the contents of the game itself was ultimately stretched way too thin.
I want to love Hollow Knight, I really do. I put so much time into it and tried as hard as I could to do so. Some would even say I tried too hard. There is a lot to love about the game and I applaud Team Cherry for what they managed to achieve with it. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in their shoes right now, given both the immense amount of hype people have for Silksong and the fact that they have to make a follow up to a game like Hollow Knight. I, myself, am looking forward to seeing how they evolve with the release of their next game. But as for Hollow Knight itself, I’m glad that I played it, but I certainly don’t have any desire to revisit it.
But nah, in conclusion, bad game by lazy dev. By the way, why do people like the OST so much, it’s really not that special smh.
Every biome is visually distinct from each other, and they all tell self-contained stories about the different corners and communities of Hallownest. It is no secret that Hollow Knight's greatest aspect is its world design. Even a contrarian dickass like myself cannot deny that the world design is anything short of fantastic, and I think that it's worthy of all the praise it has received. It's hard to make a game's world feel truly sprawling-- even big budget titles struggle with that-- but Hollow Knight's map feels like it goes on forever in every direction. It's not just that the map's filled with wide, empty levels with nothing to do, there's a lot to do just about everywhere. Every biome is packed with things to discover, and even if you miss some of those things, just seeing how the different levels and biomes connect together is certainly one the biggest motivators for playing the game. There's always something else to do, there's always something you haven't seen yet. A lot of love went into both building this game’s world, and making it interesting to explore.
The most impressive thing to me, though, is not its world, but rather the amount of art that’s in it. The game was made by a core team of 3 people (4 if you count the composer/sound designer), but only one person made the entirety of the art and animations. For context, there are over 150 enemies and bosses in the game, many of which have multiple unique states and poses, and one guy designed and animated all of them on top of drawing all the characters, art assets, environmental assets, visual effects, UI assets, and more. I don’t usually like giving all the credit to one person in a team, but Ari Gibson is an absolute fucking beast of an artist, and I strongly believe that his work is a key factor of why Hollow Knight captured the hearts of many. In fact, his art is what initially made Hollow Knight interesting to me. Every part of the game is filled with beautiful, screenshot-worthy material, and every screenshot shows off an enthralling universe just begging to be explored. It’s a game that obviously wants to be played; a notion that’s echoed by its incredibly low price of entry.
I’d heard nothing but praise for the game since the day of its release. I’d seen dozens of people fall in love with it. In fact, I sat next to someone who played it every day during class on her macbook. Even without the sound, I could see she was enthralled by it. At the very least, it seemed like something I'd enjoy, too. So years later, when it finally came time for me to play Hollow Knight, I wanted to give the game the best chance I possibly could to shine. I approached the game with a completely open mind and made it my mission to focus on how playing it made me feel.
However, the more I played the game, the more my priorities shifted. No longer was I “giving the game a chance,” I made it my mission to see everything it had to offer. I was determined to do the ultimate playthrough of Hollow Knight, in which I would refuse to get an ending until I memorised the entirety of Hallownest, completed everything in the game, mastered the mechanics, and accomplished absurd personal challenges.
For 9 months, I basically played nothing except for Hollow Knight. I amassed 165 hours of playtime and saw nearly everything in the game. But here's the catch– to this day, I have only done a single playthrough and have not gotten a single ending. I haven’t finished the game, and I do not ever plan to.
Before I continue, I want to explain why my playtime is so absurd. Hollow Knight is definitely a big, nonlinear game, but when you’re as immensely stubborn as I am, it becomes even longer than it was intended to be. Backtracking is a significant part of progressing through it, but the most interesting parts of the game for me were the moments I was meant to turn away from.
For example, I spent a long-ass time beating the Colosseum while vastly underlevelled. I’d say I spent nearly ⅓ of my playtime doing so because it pushed me to master the mechanics and required my undivided effort to beat the challenges. Yes, it was a serious time sink that was easily avoidable, and sure, I may have had to motivate myself to play it at times, but even though I wasn’t exploring Hallownest, I was learning how to use my arsenal to its full ability. The different layouts and enemy encounters in the Colosseum were not just interesting to discover as I progressed, they were intriguing to engage with and discover how to most effectively beat. So even though it took me a long time to beat, I didn’t regret a single second I spent there and never once lost my patience.
It’s places like the Colosseum that demonstrate the best of what Hollow Knight has to offer, gameplay-wise. When the player is pushed to improve their skill by pushing back against the friction of the world, it legitimises their actions in the world. Those moments of triumph made me feel like I was progressing just as much, if not more than when I was simply exploring the map.
There’s proper brilliance embedded throughout Hollow Knight, but its limitations hold it back from being something I’d consider to be a truly great game. It’s obviously impressive that Team Cherry was able to create something so massive out of a very simple framework, but by aiming to make the largest map possible with incredibly simple core mechanics, those peaks in gameplay are divided by increasingly large valleys of mediocre filler.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the world design is lacking or anything like that, obviously the levels are fantastically arranged. However the excellent world design is brought down by the parabolic gameplay pacing and lacklustre level design.
When I say that the level design is lacklustre, I do NOT mean the levels are poorly constructed. There isn’t a level I can think of off the top of my head with poor construction or readability (actually I technically thought of one of the levels with Loodles in them, but that’s not really worth mentioning, I say as I make mention of it). Most of them are adequately put together and relatively enjoyable to beat the first time you see them. The issue, however, is that, as I stated earlier, Hollow Knight is heavily based around backtracking, which means you will venture through most of these levels many different times. One of the most difficult aspects of designing a game like this is making levels that are interesting or enjoyable to play through multiple times, and Hollow Knight does not have many levels that are like that.
The vast majority of them are made up of the same floating platforms, spike pits, walkways, and enemy placements in slightly different arrangements. There is generally only one way to venture through them without much in the way of variation, save for the occasional shortcut or biome-specific obstacle. Although the traversal options change with the acquisition of new movement abilities, the levels themselves stay largely the same as the first time they’re discovered. The player is tested on exactly the same things regardless of how skilled or experienced they are with the mechanics. While there are some changes and rewards for backtracking through the map, they are generally incidental in nature and do little to breathe new life into the levels. For lack of better phrasing, there comes a point where Hallownest stops feeling like a world, and the moment that happens, Hollow Knight becomes a large grocery list.
See, at first it takes a while for the game to open up and become interesting from a gameplay perspective. But once it does, you really embrace that feeling of discovery, of seeing new things within this ever expanding world. Unfortunately, once you reach the endgame, that sense of discovery begins to fall off. The destinations stop being worth the journeys you have to take because you have already encountered the exact same obstacles on your previous journeys. Once you become familiar with Hallownest, you inevitably lose the feeling of excitement in its mysteries. The pursuits become mindless. You end up having to trek through the same simple levels, just to see what else is there, even if the things aren’t worth seeing. There is always something else to do, there is always something you haven’t seen, but the distance to the reward becomes further as the reward itself becomes ever smaller.
Once you’ve seen most of what Hollow Knight has to offer, it is no longer intriguing to traverse its world. You begin just chasing places for the mere sake of chasing places, and you inevitably run out of steam and motivation with that pursuit. That was the trap I fell into. At a certain point, I was just playing the game just so I could say I had completed everything, and not because I was getting anything out of it. The thrill of adventure and discovery had long since turned into a slog since the contents of the game itself was ultimately stretched way too thin.
I want to love Hollow Knight, I really do. I put so much time into it and tried as hard as I could to do so. Some would even say I tried too hard. There is a lot to love about the game and I applaud Team Cherry for what they managed to achieve with it. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in their shoes right now, given both the immense amount of hype people have for Silksong and the fact that they have to make a follow up to a game like Hollow Knight. I, myself, am looking forward to seeing how they evolve with the release of their next game. But as for Hollow Knight itself, I’m glad that I played it, but I certainly don’t have any desire to revisit it.
But nah, in conclusion, bad game by lazy dev. By the way, why do people like the OST so much, it’s really not that special smh.
2011
This review contains spoilers
My story with Dark Souls is a little sad. My first exposure to the game was through Pewdiepie's let's play of all places. I remember that I thought it looked like a really interesting, if a bit frustrating game to play. At that point in time, though, I didn't have much patience for games, and was very easily frustrated by them. It wasn't until around two years later that I finally picked up a copy of Dark Souls. It was after I rewatched that lets play a few more times and saw the stunning world and enemy designs of the game that I made the decision to get it. I distinctly remember that I was having a bad week when I got the game. I don't remember why that was, but I do know that holding my copy of Dark Souls felt special to me in a way that I cannot quite articulate now. Maybe my memory is embellishing that experience, but I guess that I thought it'd be a good way to test my patience and see if I'd matured since I'd first learned about the game. I was fully prepared to be frustrated, I knew I'd have to try my hardest to control my emotions in order to beat that game. I turned on my PS3 and inserted the disk, after which point I took a breath and awaited what was to come.
But something strange happened. From the moment I began the game, I felt...calm. I was entranced by what I saw, I was immersed in that world. I'd never played anything like it before, and it was super different from what I thought I was going to get. Every time I died, I was not mad, but rather, I accepted that I made a mistake and was ultimately okay with it. I remember fighting the first few bosses; the Taurus Demon was especially difficult for me to beat. I remember the placement of enemies and the secrets and shortcuts. There was a guy sitting by a bonfire in Firelink Shrine, and I slashed him with my sword to see what would happen. To my surprise, he started attacking me back and I couldn't beat him. It felt bad in a way because I knew that I'd missed the information that he had to say, but that was okay--or so I thought-- because I could just go back to the previous bonfire and everything would be okay. WRONG! When I went back to Firelink Shrine, the fucker kept attacking me. I learned that my actions had consequences at that point, and that I'd have to think before I acted. This wasn't just a video game, it was a world....
And then the Firelink guy jumped off the cliff because his AI broke, and I laughed about that for a bit. You see, throughout all of that playtime, wasn't frustrated with the game at all. I might've been frustrated by my own stupid decisions, but with every fuckup, a new lesson was learned. I felt a more instantaneous sense of comfort and familiarity with Dark Souls' world than I think I ever had with a game prior, and that was honestly pretty special to me. Don't get me wrong, I was absolutely fucking pitiful at the game-- hell, I barely understood how a bunch of its systems worked, but I enjoyed my time with it more than I think I even realised at the time.
After I beat the Capra Demon, though, I decided to take a short break from the game. I don't remember exactly why I chose to do this-- maybe I was dying a lot, maybe I had more work to slog through, I don't know. Whatever the case, I was planning to resume my journey through Dark Souls when the time was right. But that time never came. One day, a vast quantity of the games I had were stolen from me, including Dark Souls. I was never able to finish that journey I had. In fact, I blocked the journey I did have out of my memory. I didn't think about Dark Souls outside of a few short moments every now and again. It wasn't until I got really into watching video essays that the game popped back into the front of my mind. At that point, Dark Souls wasn't just a difficult, weird, one of a kind experience anymore, it was one of the most influential games ever made. It was a masterpiece of world design, a masterclass in level design, and a prodigy of narrative design. I ended up watching videos comparing it to lesser ones. I learned about the true genius of the game. I learned about the emotional impact of Great Grey Wolf Sif. I learned about the traps of Sen's Fortress and the snake people who existed within its walls. I learned about Gwyn and Nito and the parallels between hollowed souls and depression. I then learned about the rest of the games in the series, and other 'souls-likes' outside of them. I felt its influence in the other games I played. I learned a tonne about Dark Souls-- hell, I know about as much as there is to know about it at this point. The game is absolutely legendary.
Yet, when I think back on it, I never got to learn anything for myself, did I? My experience with Dark Souls is limited to the few hours of it that I got to play, and the many hundreds of hours of it I've seen through other people's perspectives. Even those mechanics and systems that I barely understood when I interacted with them firsthand have all been dissected and broken down to the point where I feel as though I can master the game with ease. I already know how the game ends, I know how to beat the 4 kings, I know that Bed of Chaos is a fucking travesty.
Yes, I had my own experience with the game, but if I ever play Dark Souls again, I've already learned someone else's lessons. I will never discover anything about Dark Souls. I will never get to experience it for myself ever again. I will never ever be able to unlearn the things that I learned about the game. All of the magic and lessons and moments I could've experienced for myself were stolen from me, and I sought out that magic, but ended up with other people's experiences instead. I will never play Dark Souls again, because I can't play Dark Souls again. As such, my Dark Souls experience is limited to an npc jumping off a cliff because its AI fucked up. My experience with its world was nothing more than the kick of a ladder. My experience with the Lord of Cinder was naught but a Capra Demon. My experience was limited, but I fucking loved it, even if that love is hidden beneath layers and layers of the knowledge of others. I love Dark Souls and I wish I could love it more.
Y'know, I was originally gonna just leave this stupid review there, but as I finished writing the last paragraph, I realised something interesting. I always seem to have really unusually specific memories of the games and media I consume. However, before I started writing this, I had a really limited memory of Dark Souls. Yet, this has been by far the easiest and most enjoyable thing I've written in a long, long, LONG time. As I said towards the beginning of this excessive ramble, when I picked up Dark Souls for the first time, I remember having a bad week. I think it's kinda poetic in a way that I'm writing about this game I haven't played in many years after having a really bad last two weeks, and for the first time in a long time, I am feeling calm and relaxed. Normally, writing is a painful process for me, and recently, it's actually been excruciating, but in this case, I feel....almost joyful in a way, almost as though I'm sitting by a bonfire. It's as though for the first time in a long time, I've torn off a bandage that has caused me to see the sun again. I don't know if this has been remotely enjoyable or engaging to read, I don't even know if anyone has read this. I don't know if I'm gonna look back at this review tomorrow and hate what I see. All I know for now is that I'm glad I played what little of Dark Souls I did.
Also Bloodborne sucks, I will not elaborate any further.
But something strange happened. From the moment I began the game, I felt...calm. I was entranced by what I saw, I was immersed in that world. I'd never played anything like it before, and it was super different from what I thought I was going to get. Every time I died, I was not mad, but rather, I accepted that I made a mistake and was ultimately okay with it. I remember fighting the first few bosses; the Taurus Demon was especially difficult for me to beat. I remember the placement of enemies and the secrets and shortcuts. There was a guy sitting by a bonfire in Firelink Shrine, and I slashed him with my sword to see what would happen. To my surprise, he started attacking me back and I couldn't beat him. It felt bad in a way because I knew that I'd missed the information that he had to say, but that was okay--or so I thought-- because I could just go back to the previous bonfire and everything would be okay. WRONG! When I went back to Firelink Shrine, the fucker kept attacking me. I learned that my actions had consequences at that point, and that I'd have to think before I acted. This wasn't just a video game, it was a world....
And then the Firelink guy jumped off the cliff because his AI broke, and I laughed about that for a bit. You see, throughout all of that playtime, wasn't frustrated with the game at all. I might've been frustrated by my own stupid decisions, but with every fuckup, a new lesson was learned. I felt a more instantaneous sense of comfort and familiarity with Dark Souls' world than I think I ever had with a game prior, and that was honestly pretty special to me. Don't get me wrong, I was absolutely fucking pitiful at the game-- hell, I barely understood how a bunch of its systems worked, but I enjoyed my time with it more than I think I even realised at the time.
After I beat the Capra Demon, though, I decided to take a short break from the game. I don't remember exactly why I chose to do this-- maybe I was dying a lot, maybe I had more work to slog through, I don't know. Whatever the case, I was planning to resume my journey through Dark Souls when the time was right. But that time never came. One day, a vast quantity of the games I had were stolen from me, including Dark Souls. I was never able to finish that journey I had. In fact, I blocked the journey I did have out of my memory. I didn't think about Dark Souls outside of a few short moments every now and again. It wasn't until I got really into watching video essays that the game popped back into the front of my mind. At that point, Dark Souls wasn't just a difficult, weird, one of a kind experience anymore, it was one of the most influential games ever made. It was a masterpiece of world design, a masterclass in level design, and a prodigy of narrative design. I ended up watching videos comparing it to lesser ones. I learned about the true genius of the game. I learned about the emotional impact of Great Grey Wolf Sif. I learned about the traps of Sen's Fortress and the snake people who existed within its walls. I learned about Gwyn and Nito and the parallels between hollowed souls and depression. I then learned about the rest of the games in the series, and other 'souls-likes' outside of them. I felt its influence in the other games I played. I learned a tonne about Dark Souls-- hell, I know about as much as there is to know about it at this point. The game is absolutely legendary.
Yet, when I think back on it, I never got to learn anything for myself, did I? My experience with Dark Souls is limited to the few hours of it that I got to play, and the many hundreds of hours of it I've seen through other people's perspectives. Even those mechanics and systems that I barely understood when I interacted with them firsthand have all been dissected and broken down to the point where I feel as though I can master the game with ease. I already know how the game ends, I know how to beat the 4 kings, I know that Bed of Chaos is a fucking travesty.
Yes, I had my own experience with the game, but if I ever play Dark Souls again, I've already learned someone else's lessons. I will never discover anything about Dark Souls. I will never get to experience it for myself ever again. I will never ever be able to unlearn the things that I learned about the game. All of the magic and lessons and moments I could've experienced for myself were stolen from me, and I sought out that magic, but ended up with other people's experiences instead. I will never play Dark Souls again, because I can't play Dark Souls again. As such, my Dark Souls experience is limited to an npc jumping off a cliff because its AI fucked up. My experience with its world was nothing more than the kick of a ladder. My experience with the Lord of Cinder was naught but a Capra Demon. My experience was limited, but I fucking loved it, even if that love is hidden beneath layers and layers of the knowledge of others. I love Dark Souls and I wish I could love it more.
Y'know, I was originally gonna just leave this stupid review there, but as I finished writing the last paragraph, I realised something interesting. I always seem to have really unusually specific memories of the games and media I consume. However, before I started writing this, I had a really limited memory of Dark Souls. Yet, this has been by far the easiest and most enjoyable thing I've written in a long, long, LONG time. As I said towards the beginning of this excessive ramble, when I picked up Dark Souls for the first time, I remember having a bad week. I think it's kinda poetic in a way that I'm writing about this game I haven't played in many years after having a really bad last two weeks, and for the first time in a long time, I am feeling calm and relaxed. Normally, writing is a painful process for me, and recently, it's actually been excruciating, but in this case, I feel....almost joyful in a way, almost as though I'm sitting by a bonfire. It's as though for the first time in a long time, I've torn off a bandage that has caused me to see the sun again. I don't know if this has been remotely enjoyable or engaging to read, I don't even know if anyone has read this. I don't know if I'm gonna look back at this review tomorrow and hate what I see. All I know for now is that I'm glad I played what little of Dark Souls I did.
Also Bloodborne sucks, I will not elaborate any further.
2007
This game makes me angry to no end because it doesn't have a single shred of humility. Actually, that's understating it. If this game were a person, I bet that would like to draw nude self-portraits with glittery pens. I bet that it frames these pictures on the walls of its home. On its birthday, it probably wears a ribbon and a crown to let everyone around them know that they should celebrate its very existence. I bet that it's a nude model because it likes it when people draw their figure. I bet that it would masturbate to its own reflection every time it looked at itself in the mirror, and then when it finishes, the first 5 seconds of this song plays. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJjYlFAFnoA
Serious version:
Think it has some neat level gimmicks, but I cannot stand how much it shoehorns a false sense of whimsy into its every pore. it feels like the game is in awe with itself a lot of the time, and it frustrates me to no end.
[I will expand on this a bit in an hour.]
Serious version:
Think it has some neat level gimmicks, but I cannot stand how much it shoehorns a false sense of whimsy into its every pore. it feels like the game is in awe with itself a lot of the time, and it frustrates me to no end.
[I will expand on this a bit in an hour.]
2010
I remember playing through this game in like 4-5 hours in a boring waiting room across 2 days. I remember nothing about the game except for the fact that it was the first time I saw the word cyan, there were a bunch of stupid colourful sperm creatures, and I was waiting until I could leave a waiting room. This is the Asphodel of Sonic games.
2017
Pyre (7/10, 7/10)
Pyre was a pretty good game. I don’t like to compare the different games I play too much for these reverys, but I think Supergiant Games’ body of work is particularly interesting to talk about, so we’re gonna do just that for this one in particular. Before I talk about Pyre, itself, I’d like to talk about the games that preceded it first.
When I played Bastion, I thought it felt like a game that was built by a competent and motivated team, albeit a rather inexperienced one. The combat was pretty enjoyable, the music was awesome, the visuals were competent- if a little stiff at times-, and the storytelling was pretty good. I especially liked the narration; the game wouldn’t be the same without Logan Cunningham. Now that I think about it, the game actually employed a mild amount of directly interactive storytelling, too, which is always a positive in my eyes. That being said, I think the game got somewhat repetitive by the time I’d reached the end. The movement felt rather slow and, although my memory could be failing me, I remember the enemy variety felt rather lacking, as well. For a first game, though, Bastion was remarkably strong.
Transistor aspired to be a more mature and intimate game than Bastion. It felt like Supergiant was trying to prove themselves as a “serious” developer. In a sense, I’d say that they succeeded at what they were trying to do. Transistor is, above all else, a game that had a clear vision behind it. It is an aesthetic masterpiece. It looks and sounds unbelievable. There are several songs from its soundtrack that I think about semi-regularly, and that is a feat given how little I tend to think about game music these days. Additionally, I cannot think of a single moment where the game looked anything less than spectacular, and I don’t say that lightly. The world of Transistor is super captivating, and I wish I could spend more time in it. I could gush about the good things this game does for full minutes, but for each thing Transistor does well, there’s something else that it lacks. I don’t wanna rant about this for too long here, but to put it simply, Transistor’s story and gameplay are not that great in practice. There are many intriguing ideas for sure, but the game merely holds its ideas out on a silver platter and expects them to carry the whole experience. The combat system is certainly interesting, but no amount of combinations of attacks make up for both the lack of enemy variety and uninteresting battle arenas. Additionally, tying the stories of various characters in Cloudbank to the different functions you pick up throughout the game is a neat concept for sure, but it effectively serves as nothing more than over-written lore that does little to branch out its world. It pushes you to interact with its world through static menus rather than through gameplay, and I personally find that to be so disappointing considering how stunning its world is. Red’s story is ultimately very simple, but since the transistor is the one who has the ability to talk, and he’s a dull- albeit well acted-character, the world is made all the more boring as a result. I apologise if none of that made sense, but I’m starting to go down a rabbit hole. The point is, Supergiant’s vision for Transistor was super strong, but its individual parts didn’t quite live up to the strength of that vision. As a result, Transistor is more interesting to talk about than it is to play, but I’d still say that there was certainly enough on the table to prove that Supergiant was not just another indie game studio. They were clearly a talented bunch, and with Transistor, they proved it.
This brings me to Pyre. Since Supergiant had proven that they were able to make a fairly tightly-knit game that could turn heads, with Pyre, they seemed keen on proving that they’d matured as a studio, and now had the ability to make a real “big” game. They took a visual novel about a band of misfits going on an adventure together and combined it with a sports-action game, and it’s topped off with an added multiplayer mode that I honestly haven’t played. It’s an ambitious game, with 8 playable characters each with their own backstories and 8 different races with their own specific cultures and backgrounds and 9 different “triumvirates” that you fight against, each with their own backstories and lore, and several different arenas, and a book full of expansive lore about the structure of the world and its history and its conflicts and...yeah, you get the picture. Pyre isn’t just a game that’s based on a strong vision like Transistor, it’s not just attempting to be a strong game like Bastion, it’s an entire world’s worth of content. Given the size of the team, the fact that they were able to build a game/world to the scale of Pyre is a testament to how much Supergiant had grown as developers at that point. What’s more impressive, though, is the consistently high quality at which they built the game. The characters are all rather well-written. I can remember the names of all of the main cast and what they do in the gameplay and story. They all have their own character arcs that are pretty well realised, too. The first 6-8 hours of the game are especially strong, and is concluded by a moment in which I actively exclaimed “holy fuck, that’s so cewl!” What follows is some rather consistent gameplay for the rest of the game.
You know, in some respects, I’d say that the gameplay was too consistent at times. The sports gameplay is quite simple, it’s like hand-ball with more magic. Once I leveled up all my characters and stuff, the game was a little too easy and easily cheesed, but I think that could partially be my fault since I played on Normal difficulty the whole time. Mind you, some of the Rites (that’s what the sports gameplay is called) could be really engaging and intense when I was matched up with opponents who I was at a similar skill level to. That being said, I was quite ready for the game to be done a few hours before it actually ended, the story beats felt rather repetitive at that point. Despite that, though, I think that the ending was pretty strong, all things considered. It was interesting to see all the outcomes my choices lead to, and how all the interwoven stories tied together in the end. Despite the fact that the game is partially a visual novel, and, as the name suggests, those tend to be more text-based than most genres, Pyre makes great use of the interactive medium to assist in it’s storytelling. Its mechanics change through the course of the story depending on the decisions you make, and while I won’t spoil how this works, I do have to say that the way it does this pushes the player to master each of the characters, regardless of how much they enjoy playing as them. The visual novel sections of the game and the extra reading in the form of the book of rites, they don’t dominate the storytelling too much. In fact, I’d say that Pyre blends its story, world, and lore MUCH better than in Transistor. It didn’t feel like I was just reading glorified text boxes in a menu, it felt like, as a reader, I was a “part” of the world by learning more about the world. It was my role to learn the lore, and lucky for me, that lore was quite interesting to read through. It was closely tied to the world of the game, itself, and it gave a whole bunch of context to a lot of the bizarre imagery in the Downside, as well as some of the more “foreign” concepts of the game’s world.
Overall, Pyre feels like a game that was made by a team who learned from their past experiences. Just about every aspect of the game feels like it had a consistent focus and was given an equal amount of attention. While the presentation is not quite as profound as Transistor’s, I think that the extra focus that was put on the story, world, and gameplay was ultimately worth it. The soundtrack, while still good, was not particularly interesting to me, save for a few songs, and the visuals, while polished and even gorgeous at times, didn’t really blow me away apart from one time in particular. Logan Cunningham’s voice acting seemed to play less of a prominent role as it did in the previous games, with his character only turning up to narrate the game’s Rites. I don’t think his character added all that much to the game’s world or story save for a few unremarkable moment, but I’m just nitpicking at this point. The game feels like a complete package, and one that I was glad that I experienced.
If anything I’ve mentioned in this Revery sounded remotely interesting to you, I’d definitely recommend picking up Pyre. If you feel you can see it through to the end despite its repetitiveness in the latter half, I think you won’t be disappointed. The game isn’t too long, and it felt to me like a game that is worthy of the praise it received. I definitely wanna czech out Hades when I can, because Supergiant is a great studio whose narrative can be see through the games that they’ve made. With all this in mind, I were to give Pyre an obligatory rating, for both its quality and my enjoyment, I’d give it a 7/10.
It was a real treat to play Pyre, especially after Bound By Flame. It’s funny actually, it was shorter than that game, but the game felt deserving of its length. I didn’t notice the time that went by until after I finished my play sessions. That, in my opinion, is a mark of a strong game.
Pyre was a pretty good game. I don’t like to compare the different games I play too much for these reverys, but I think Supergiant Games’ body of work is particularly interesting to talk about, so we’re gonna do just that for this one in particular. Before I talk about Pyre, itself, I’d like to talk about the games that preceded it first.
When I played Bastion, I thought it felt like a game that was built by a competent and motivated team, albeit a rather inexperienced one. The combat was pretty enjoyable, the music was awesome, the visuals were competent- if a little stiff at times-, and the storytelling was pretty good. I especially liked the narration; the game wouldn’t be the same without Logan Cunningham. Now that I think about it, the game actually employed a mild amount of directly interactive storytelling, too, which is always a positive in my eyes. That being said, I think the game got somewhat repetitive by the time I’d reached the end. The movement felt rather slow and, although my memory could be failing me, I remember the enemy variety felt rather lacking, as well. For a first game, though, Bastion was remarkably strong.
Transistor aspired to be a more mature and intimate game than Bastion. It felt like Supergiant was trying to prove themselves as a “serious” developer. In a sense, I’d say that they succeeded at what they were trying to do. Transistor is, above all else, a game that had a clear vision behind it. It is an aesthetic masterpiece. It looks and sounds unbelievable. There are several songs from its soundtrack that I think about semi-regularly, and that is a feat given how little I tend to think about game music these days. Additionally, I cannot think of a single moment where the game looked anything less than spectacular, and I don’t say that lightly. The world of Transistor is super captivating, and I wish I could spend more time in it. I could gush about the good things this game does for full minutes, but for each thing Transistor does well, there’s something else that it lacks. I don’t wanna rant about this for too long here, but to put it simply, Transistor’s story and gameplay are not that great in practice. There are many intriguing ideas for sure, but the game merely holds its ideas out on a silver platter and expects them to carry the whole experience. The combat system is certainly interesting, but no amount of combinations of attacks make up for both the lack of enemy variety and uninteresting battle arenas. Additionally, tying the stories of various characters in Cloudbank to the different functions you pick up throughout the game is a neat concept for sure, but it effectively serves as nothing more than over-written lore that does little to branch out its world. It pushes you to interact with its world through static menus rather than through gameplay, and I personally find that to be so disappointing considering how stunning its world is. Red’s story is ultimately very simple, but since the transistor is the one who has the ability to talk, and he’s a dull- albeit well acted-character, the world is made all the more boring as a result. I apologise if none of that made sense, but I’m starting to go down a rabbit hole. The point is, Supergiant’s vision for Transistor was super strong, but its individual parts didn’t quite live up to the strength of that vision. As a result, Transistor is more interesting to talk about than it is to play, but I’d still say that there was certainly enough on the table to prove that Supergiant was not just another indie game studio. They were clearly a talented bunch, and with Transistor, they proved it.
This brings me to Pyre. Since Supergiant had proven that they were able to make a fairly tightly-knit game that could turn heads, with Pyre, they seemed keen on proving that they’d matured as a studio, and now had the ability to make a real “big” game. They took a visual novel about a band of misfits going on an adventure together and combined it with a sports-action game, and it’s topped off with an added multiplayer mode that I honestly haven’t played. It’s an ambitious game, with 8 playable characters each with their own backstories and 8 different races with their own specific cultures and backgrounds and 9 different “triumvirates” that you fight against, each with their own backstories and lore, and several different arenas, and a book full of expansive lore about the structure of the world and its history and its conflicts and...yeah, you get the picture. Pyre isn’t just a game that’s based on a strong vision like Transistor, it’s not just attempting to be a strong game like Bastion, it’s an entire world’s worth of content. Given the size of the team, the fact that they were able to build a game/world to the scale of Pyre is a testament to how much Supergiant had grown as developers at that point. What’s more impressive, though, is the consistently high quality at which they built the game. The characters are all rather well-written. I can remember the names of all of the main cast and what they do in the gameplay and story. They all have their own character arcs that are pretty well realised, too. The first 6-8 hours of the game are especially strong, and is concluded by a moment in which I actively exclaimed “holy fuck, that’s so cewl!” What follows is some rather consistent gameplay for the rest of the game.
You know, in some respects, I’d say that the gameplay was too consistent at times. The sports gameplay is quite simple, it’s like hand-ball with more magic. Once I leveled up all my characters and stuff, the game was a little too easy and easily cheesed, but I think that could partially be my fault since I played on Normal difficulty the whole time. Mind you, some of the Rites (that’s what the sports gameplay is called) could be really engaging and intense when I was matched up with opponents who I was at a similar skill level to. That being said, I was quite ready for the game to be done a few hours before it actually ended, the story beats felt rather repetitive at that point. Despite that, though, I think that the ending was pretty strong, all things considered. It was interesting to see all the outcomes my choices lead to, and how all the interwoven stories tied together in the end. Despite the fact that the game is partially a visual novel, and, as the name suggests, those tend to be more text-based than most genres, Pyre makes great use of the interactive medium to assist in it’s storytelling. Its mechanics change through the course of the story depending on the decisions you make, and while I won’t spoil how this works, I do have to say that the way it does this pushes the player to master each of the characters, regardless of how much they enjoy playing as them. The visual novel sections of the game and the extra reading in the form of the book of rites, they don’t dominate the storytelling too much. In fact, I’d say that Pyre blends its story, world, and lore MUCH better than in Transistor. It didn’t feel like I was just reading glorified text boxes in a menu, it felt like, as a reader, I was a “part” of the world by learning more about the world. It was my role to learn the lore, and lucky for me, that lore was quite interesting to read through. It was closely tied to the world of the game, itself, and it gave a whole bunch of context to a lot of the bizarre imagery in the Downside, as well as some of the more “foreign” concepts of the game’s world.
Overall, Pyre feels like a game that was made by a team who learned from their past experiences. Just about every aspect of the game feels like it had a consistent focus and was given an equal amount of attention. While the presentation is not quite as profound as Transistor’s, I think that the extra focus that was put on the story, world, and gameplay was ultimately worth it. The soundtrack, while still good, was not particularly interesting to me, save for a few songs, and the visuals, while polished and even gorgeous at times, didn’t really blow me away apart from one time in particular. Logan Cunningham’s voice acting seemed to play less of a prominent role as it did in the previous games, with his character only turning up to narrate the game’s Rites. I don’t think his character added all that much to the game’s world or story save for a few unremarkable moment, but I’m just nitpicking at this point. The game feels like a complete package, and one that I was glad that I experienced.
If anything I’ve mentioned in this Revery sounded remotely interesting to you, I’d definitely recommend picking up Pyre. If you feel you can see it through to the end despite its repetitiveness in the latter half, I think you won’t be disappointed. The game isn’t too long, and it felt to me like a game that is worthy of the praise it received. I definitely wanna czech out Hades when I can, because Supergiant is a great studio whose narrative can be see through the games that they’ve made. With all this in mind, I were to give Pyre an obligatory rating, for both its quality and my enjoyment, I’d give it a 7/10.
It was a real treat to play Pyre, especially after Bound By Flame. It’s funny actually, it was shorter than that game, but the game felt deserving of its length. I didn’t notice the time that went by until after I finished my play sessions. That, in my opinion, is a mark of a strong game.
1991
Monopoly is just a rip-off of Florida. Hospice care is also a rip-off of Florida. Florida is basically death's waiting room, and this is the board game that you have to play while you wait. Monopoly is like listening to a terrible teacher lecture you, and that teacher is the father of the Six Flags guy. The most optimal way to play Monopoly is with an oxygen tank while Everywhere At The End Of Time is playing over a loudspeaker, and if you're really hardcore, you should try playing it while on an IV drip too. Monopoly is basically like a disappointing trip to Sea World where you have to also watch the 'trainers' abuse the animals after the show. Playing Monopoly is equivalent to starring in Dallas Buyers Club and then watching it all the way through multiple times. You just sit there and watch yourself physically waste away into nothingness over and over and over again until you're sick of watching yourself in the process of dying and just want the grim reaper grant you the sweet release of death, but instead he just gives you more fucking Monopoly money. I hate Monopoly. I hate Monopoly! I fucking hate Monopoly.
2016
Contrary to popular belief, Ubisoft is actually really good at building convincing virtual worlds that are genuinely engaging to venture through. The main problem with a lot of their games, however, is that they’re designed around extraneous sets of obligations that the player has to fulfil rather than rewarding the exploration of their worlds in any meaningful way. In short, they tend to be a set of icons on a map rather than a map with content in it, and as such, playing through a lot of these games ultimately devolves into czeching items off a list. Somehow, Ubisoft Reflections managed to take Grow Home— a short, sweet, and linear game game about climbing up to the sky— and turn it into a bloated shadow of its former self that demonstrates this fundamental design problem better than almost any other game I’ve played. Grow Up isn’t a game with nearly enough substance to foster its open world. Part of what makes Grow Home so enjoyable is that it was short enough to make its minimalistic design feel worthwhile. There weren’t any items you had to go outta your way to collect, you were climbing up to the sky and discovering creatures and locations along the way that were interesting enough to pick up and examine. Grow Up takes this same philosophy and expands it into an open world where you have to collect everything across several mostly uninteresting biomes. B.U.D’s childlike, cluttered movement isn’t ideal for exploring an entire world, yet it is put front and centre in this game just like in Grow Home, but for a much longer and wider duration. Since this game shares DNA with its predecessor, it still has a sense of infectious charm for the first several hours, but its charm wears thin once the game stops being centred around exploration and starts being focused on collecting pieces around the bland world. That’s the primary problem with Grow Up, it’s built on a backbone of exploration, but its game loop is centred around clumsily walking across a world to fulfil an extraneous set of obligations. It is a Ubisoft open world without the strengths of Ubisoft’s world design. Grow Up is just the padding of an open world game, and if I wanted to experience that, I could just go to a grocery store I’ve never been to with someone else’s shopping list.
2013
This is my review for the game. This game is fine.
I quite literally cannot understand the appeal of any Borderlands game, let alone this one.
2013
The first time I played this, I could barely even sit to play it for more than 45 mins because I was recovering from a back surgery. I enjoyed it enough to finish most of the game anyway. 2 years later, I played it again nearly all the way through with a sibling of mine. I remembered how to play it once I stopped playing as the stupid fucking teensy Gandalf cosplayer and started playing as Sir Globox. Sir Globox is the best character in the game, and I think he embodies Rayman Legends more than even Rayman himself. The character designs are absolutely ridiculous—stupid even— and I do kinda like them for that, but Sir Globox is a treasure and I adore him. He looks like he’s constantly having fun regardless of the scenario and he’s always vibing with the world around him. You know who I don’t adore, though? Murphy. Look, I consider myself to be a decent person with a decent sense of morality. I respect and appreciate people from all manner of cultural, ethnic, and sexual backgrounds. Whenever I see Murphy, though, I get a primal urge to call him slurs. I haven’t given into the urge as far as I’m aware, but I just can’t help it. My hate for Murphy extends beyond the limits of reason, I unironically believe that he is responsible for the sexual assault at Ubisoft. He just sits there with his stupid toothy grin and does nothing but laugh at how much Ubisoft lets him fucking get away with. Murphy probably supports genocide. I think I hate Murphy more than anything, he could cancel me and he literally supports genoc-
Sorry, I’m getting distracted, I started to play through this game again with my father, and I intend to continue playing it with him. I also plan to play it with my other sibling and finish almost the entire thing with him, too. Rayman Legends is without a doubt the best Rayman game since Rayman Ravin Rabbids.
Sorry, I’m getting distracted, I started to play through this game again with my father, and I intend to continue playing it with him. I also plan to play it with my other sibling and finish almost the entire thing with him, too. Rayman Legends is without a doubt the best Rayman game since Rayman Ravin Rabbids.