Lindo, lindo, maravilhoso. Em questão de mensagem da narrativa além de história ou da gameplay, esse é o melhor shmup, sem dúvida. Ele tem algo que eu admiro muito, e acho incrivel, que é a vontade do autor de homenagear os clássicos shmups, não só para parte da evolução, com claras referências, de cada um de suas respectivas eras, mas também em design de bosses, até alerta de estágio, e etc, que mostra claramente como o jogo é um atestado de amor do criador pelo gênero. Foi com Genetos, que comecei a me aprofundar nos shmups, que venho a se tornar o meu gênero favorito.

Depois de passar por um bom tempo conhecendo o mundo dos “jogos de navinha”, voltar a Genetos e zerar novamente me fez ter uma experiência ainda melhor, e posso dizer que ainda mais divertida. Além do meu amadurecimento pessoal deis da última vez, que com algumas situações nesse período de tempo deis do ano passado em que joguei pela primeira vez, me fez entender um pouco mais a mensagem do jogo, por mim mesmo, que as vezes passa em minha mente em épocas e momentos ruins, sempre tentando evoluir, mesmo quando as coisas parecem acabadas…

Hoje em dia eu cultuo a ideia de criar meu próprio Shmup, que meio que se tornou um sonho de vida pessoal, eu espero conseguir realizar, e também, que ele seja algo belo e que me satisfaça, como eu imagino que agradou ao criador de Genetos em ter colocar suas ideias de uma forma linda, em um jogo de um gênero que ele tanto ama. Enquanto apenas planejo, escrevo, e desenho, com uma esperança do futuro, irei continuar me divertindo com esse gênero, aprendendo cada vez, não só sobre esquivar de balas e zerar sem continues, mas também sobre as histórias e ideias que estão nesses jogos. Então tenho muito a agradecer por esse jogo, que é um dos mais influentes, não só sobre o que eu gosto de jogar, mas também pelos vários desejos que ele despertou em mim, me trazendo ao meu de agora, com um sonho, e também me mantendo acreditando nele. Obrigado, Genetos, obrigado, Tetsuya Koyama

E obrigado ao Frost51 pelo vídeo comentando sobre o jogo que me fez conhecer essa obra prima

Playing this game is a process of gradually tuning your mind to its frequency like a radio station, learning the languages it speaks as well as the gaps in what it says, until it feels like your whole body is resonating in harmony with it. It's a constant dance between fascinations: as soon as your mind is wholly absorbed with the first-order tile puzzles, the game zooms out and gets you thinking about the world it takes place in. The moment you start to really dig into the lore, it crashes back in close and reminds you that it's really about the deeply personal love and loss of each of the characters. And to see more of those characters, of course, you must do more sokoban.

It's hard to talk in detail about the game without spoilers, but I'll say this: I filled four pages with notes about this game, spilling over into a spreadsheet, a screenshot folder, and a large collection of video recordings. The expertise with which its layered puzzles are assembled is extraordinary, hitting a perfect difficulty point where you feel like a genius for each solve but (almost) everything feels like it's using the same design language that you can become fluent with. It stands with Riven as one of the best puzzle games I've ever played.

But that's not even the thing I'll remember most about Void Stranger. What will stay with me long after I forget the trick to B213 or the best way to route bulls is the love the characters hold for one another and the fucked up beautiful lengths they'll go to enact it. In the end, the heart of the game is summed up in the words uttered by Eus's statue... which I'll let you discover for yourself.

"I wonder whether knowing the truth would have helped me overcome the grief or not. Maybe if I'd known, I wouldn't be forced to live the life I do now."

Beautiful. Amazing. So glad I managed to finish this before closing out the year, the Kyle Hyde duology is a must play during December. Didn't manage to play a chapter a day to go with the chronological events but it's still a dazzling atmosphere nontheless.

There's always a melancholy associated with the end of the year for some. You think about what you've done all year round and what you failed to do, you try to put a smile to your friends and family at get togethers while hoping the future won't weigh you down as much as your past has, and that's pretty much the main theme which both of Kyle's games work with.

Aside from the great quality of life additions (I love how this game has a novelized version of itself to read along with the backlog in case you're a dumbass like me and forget what you're supposed to do every 10 seconds), you can really tell that this is an expanded version of Hotel Dusk. This time being a lot more personal given it's about Kyle's father and him trying to have closure with the ghosts of his pasts that have been literally living under his roof.

While some might feel it's contrived that for the second time in his life, every single character in this game is directly tied with each other's past to help Kyle out in the mystery, there's a sence of mundanity to it all that makes you realize that truth is stranger than fiction. We're all sulking about the past in one way or another, having a larger, unsolved problem in our lives that we tend to put on the backburner indefinitely because we need to function in our day to day, distracting ourselves with either work, our social life or even with lesser problems, there are things we can't process and make peace with because all in all, we're just trying to get through the day.

While the anticlimax in Hotel Dusk works because you can't expect all the character's life problems be solved in just a single meeting, there is a feeling that everyone can and hopes to move on from what happened which feels even more powerful here given what we know about Kyle, while being bitter in his own way, he still unconsciously finds himself helping tenants he barely exchanged a word with off of sheer circumstance, but also because he knows no one else will do it.

R.I.P Cing. You went out too early but you shone with the brightest of supernovas. Hopefully the Another Code duology sells well enough for us to see a remake for these games too. Happy New Year, folks.

"There are so many people around the world forced to keep burdens on their own. And one thing's for sure: I'm one of them."