In the middle of two much larger projects I'm working on, I decided to take a little time to write down my experience with this game. For context, I enjoy Journey quite a bit. I also enjoyed Abzu despite its lack of originality. It was like eating the same really good meal for lunch and dinner. If The Pathless was "Journey in a forest" in the same way Abzu with "Journey in the ocean" I would have been satisfied. Unfortunately, The Pathless is a study in maximalist game design, and minimal originality. In a misguided attempt at adding new gameplay mechanics, Giant Squid walks a terrible line between not being mechanically interesting or allowing you to fall into that "Journey Feeling". While Journey was never a mechanic heavy game, it submerged you in a world that never took you out by throwing a million red targets all over the landscape. It all feels like the developers had an okay concept, but began adding things to it to make it more “full featured”. In many ways, it’s a very bad attempt at mimicking Breath of the Wild’s success. Someone should have told Giant Squid that Breath of the Wild was not great because it added a hundred tepid puzzles around the world, it was in spite of that. Speaking of those puzzles, if you thought they were boring in Breath of the Wild, you have a tall glass of lukewarm water to sip on here. The only concrete reward you get from most of these puzzles are essentially keys to unlock the next level. I nearly wrote that that was the only reward you got from these puzzles, because the other reward is a miniscule amount of progress on a bar. This bar, when filled up all the way, increases your run meter. I believe many of this game’s issues all lead back to this meter. Its existence pushed the developers into adding so much unnecessary filler to the world. One of the game’s main draws is its movement, and this meter just puts a limit on how much fun you can have with it. Well, it would have if the movement was any good at all. It’s not even as fun as pressing R2 in the Insomniac Spider-Man games. At least in those games there was some sense of momentum, that every swing would bleed fluidly into the next and (pardon my cliche) make you feel like Spider-Man. If you let go of the run button in this game, your character grinds to a halt. In fact, doing anything except holding forward, holding the run button, and pressing R2 over and over again to hit targets ends any semblance of inertia. I feel like this is a step backwards from the simplicity of Journey and Abzu. In the process of trying to make the movement more of a mechanical interaction, Giant Squid removed any overlooking I can do in favor of aesthetic.
It goes without saying that The Pathless also rips Team Ico off at many turns. Its bosses are big forces of nature that have an attempt at seizing empathy in their death. While its narrative isn’t wordless, it certainly feels like it should be. It’s the desolate world that evokes Ueda’s output the most though. It’s no surprise that The Pathless doesn’t do a good job with its Team Ico inspiration (I can’t really think of a game that does), but its attempts at replicating the smaller moments really irked me. In all of Team Ico’s games you would happen upon little interactions with your NPC companion. These range from dialogue to animations to physical input from the player. It’s a little time for you to grow closer to the person/animal you’re journeying with. They have no pretensions, and just give some humanity to digital creatures. I almost put my controller down and shut off my console when The Pathless directed me to press square to pet my eagle. This was, of course, after a forced stealth segment where I had to turn my brain off lest I lose my mind of boredom. The way it all plays out is downright insulting, down to the miniscule patches of darkness that you have to go back and rub before you proceed. This game is just so passe. I don’t remember the last time I’ve played a game this bankrupt on fresh ideas or simple fun. I’ve also never played a game whose title reflects the developers much better than the product itself.
Edit: Out of morbid curiosity I finished the game. I can't believe how bad the ending is. I thought that the ending would lift the game up in a similar fashion as Journey and Abzu, but I was wrong. I knew that they would assume that I cared at all about the eagle, but I didn't know that that was going to be the main conceit of the ending. My review also neglected to mention the lack of a health bar, which worked in Giant Squid's previous game, but it siphons any stakes from the boss fights in this game. It's not like simply placing a health bar into the game would make it any better though, as every boss is insultingly easy after you learn their patterns. For some reason, the final boss has the most evergreen patterns in the game. Once you beat his first phase, you will have a hard time failing. This is probably the worst game I've played since Outlast 2. It's a Frankenstein's Monster of good ideas from other people, but with none of the tact to bring it back to life.

Everything I said about price and presentation in my previous review of The Girl Who Stands Behind applies here too. The Missing Heir still sounds and looks amazing, but it is still overpriced. What I want to touch on in this review are the story and gameplay, which are vastly different from the second game.

I found the story in The Missing Heir to be fantastic. In the second game, the event you're investigating happens right at the start, meaning you're following in its trail the whole time and not much new is happening, you're just slowly uncovering the mysteries of that event. I wouldn't have chalked that down as a bad thing if this one didn't play out so differently. In The Missing Heir, things are constantly happening around you in the midst of the investigation, persistently alternating your course of action, and making things way more exciting. It weaves many more threads into the story, posing a lot of questions that kept me on the edge of my seat for all of my six hour sitting, and all of these threads tie up well. One of my complaints about the The Girl Who Stands Behind was that there was no character building for the protagonist. He felt like an empty vessel for the player, and I didn't think this one would be any different, but I'm pleased to announce that I was wrong. This game sets a great foundation for the main character, as this is a story that would not have worked without him, so it's disappointing that the second game didn't take that development anywhere. I described the second game as feeling like a one-off Ace Attorney case, but I'm now realising that that's not a good thing.

So the story is really good and much better than the second game's, now what's different about the gameplay? It's terrible. Every complaint I had about the second game's outdated adventure gameplay is amplified here tenfold. It's so incredibly frustrating, and I'd recommend that anyone playing this one keeps a guide on hand at all times. There were a couple of redeeming qualities about it though. Rather than have you pick from a list of potential answers when making deductions, this game pulls up a keyboard and asks you to type your answer instead. I found that this was a clever little way of making me feel like I was piecing things together myself, even if it only happened twice. The other noteworthy gameplay element is that there's a minor first person dungeon crawling section at the end, which was nothing to write home about, but it was a welcome surprise and a nice change of pace.

If you absolutely have to try one of the Famicom Detective Club games at full price, get this one. While its adventure gameplay made me want to rip my hair out, its excellent story and presentation kept me engaged the entire time. Both of these games plus maybe two or three more cases of equal length would have made a great package for $60/£50, but if that happened back on the Famicom, the Ace Attorney series we know and love may not exist today. Famicom Detective Club will always be the older brother in the shadow of the Ace Attorney series, but these remakes will ensure that its influence will never be forgotten.

This is NieR with new content, looking and playing better than ever, making one of the best stories in the medium an even better overall package. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound better than ever with the new soundtrack lacking the soul that made the original's music the best I've ever heard in a game. It's still fairly good, so I won't let it stain what is otherwise a masterpiece, but it was sometimes hard to listen to having heard the perfection that is the original's OST.

All in all, they made a game that I criticised for looking and playing like shit look super pretty and play noticeably better. I can only hope that a music restoration mod makes this the absolute definitive way to experience NieR.

On a superficial level, this game is very similar to Sly 2 and 3. However, any look deeper into the intricacies of this game reveal that it could not be more different. It lacks any of the soul, charm, or love that was put into those games. Everything about it is just wrong. The redesigns are disgusting, the story feels like filler, the humor feels way more kid oriented. Think about the worst gimmick from Sly 2 or 3. Every gimmick in this game is as bad or worse than that one. Also everything in this game is a gimmick. The whole point of this game is traveling around time collecting boring gimmicks that serve to pad out two or three missions. I'm not really sure how they ruined such a banger concept. This game feels like what Sly 2 would have been if Sucker Punch forgot that they covered the basics in 1. It's so sad that the series has to end on this note, and it's even worse that people think this is acceptable.

don't care that the frame rate is awful; don't care that the combat is asinine; don't care that the game is unpolished, janky, ugly, and poorly considered in every respect; don't care that it was subject to predatory dlc; don't care that accord's requests are emblematic of some of the worst there is in side quest design; don't care don't care don't care

what i do care about is that this is the ultimate manifestation of YT's disinclination to work in games juxtaposed with his earnest belief in the medium as a vessel for greater things. in his grimmest failure, he finds light at the end of the tunnel. an astonishing exercise in empathy generation, one of the best finales in a game, and the only one of yoko taro's works that makes great use of backwards scripting + sequential playthroughs

There’s a deep seeded vulnerability to every significant character in The House of Fata Morgana, a vulnerability that is festering behind a thin shield of various defense mechanisms and a facade of the person they purport to be among others. “You instinctively accept as truth the events unfolding before you”, the title crawl declares. This could be taken at face value of course, one must accept the magical element of the story for it to hold any weight, but I also took it as a challenge of premise. The game entreats the reader to investigate the real people trapping themselves behind this fata morgana (a term for a type of mirage I embarrassingly only learned about after completing the game so if you also didn’t know, well, there you go) and observe them for the holistic human beings they are, beyond what they want or are compelled to portray themselves to be. Beyond this, I can say that narratively the game succeeds at interrogating themes of victimhood, cyclical abuse, vengeance, hatred, and personal identity with strokes of deftness and occasionally nuance as needed and that is the greatest praise I could shoulder upon it. Light spoilers for The House in Fata Morgana follow so if you're interested in reading this VN completely blind, be warned.

Now I just said that Fata Morgana’s thematic strength in relation to its fully realized characters is its greatest strength but I can’t help but contradict myself just to express how enthusiastically I have to celebrate its character art, background art, and music. These components alone are what I imagine most immediately captures every person who even mildly likes this VN so I cannot stress enough how much I would understand the argument that these are its greatest accomplishments. Every piece of background art, at least for the PC version, expresses these rough impressionistic outlines of indoor and outdoor environments that can be equally as crude and grimy and stark in visual texture and color as they can be soft and dream-like and enigmatic. There's an appreciable contrast between these dappled, almost amorphous background shapes and the beautifully detailed, porcelain-like character art realized by Moyataro. In the landscape of visual novels the character art is immediately distinct, sure, but even more than that it often allows for the oft-unsettling atmosphere to permeate through characters such as The Maid, The White Haired Girl, the Beast, and the Witch whose entire physical existences reek of uncanniness or horror or both. The CGs must bear mention here as well because the painterly quality of the facially expressive character art as well as their posing and framing within stark backgrounds is unforgettable.

Now, perhaps the most pivotal element in contributing to Fata Morgana’s atmosphere, which is equal parts dour, chaotic, dreadful, ethereal and occasionally euphoric, is the music. It's also the aspect of the game I was immediately enamored by the moment the eponymous title track coincided with the opening title crawl. The most apparent strength of the soundtrack of this VN is its willingness to let the reader steep in despairing moods accompanied with discordant tracks that can at times grate against the ear or overwhelm with a sense of discomfort and eeriness. Not every song is appreciable outside of its game context but given the eclectic variety and the distinct place that every song has in the soundtrack, I wouldn’t have it any other way. There is an abundance of vocal tracks, most of which are sung in Portuguese by Japanese singers, with different affects and vocal effects placed on them. This is certainly an oddity within the space of VNs as I understand it, but it's one I welcome given the sheer ability of the singer(s) in every song. Speaking of song placement, I cannot neglect to mention that in the case of the first half of the game wherein the reader explores four different doors in varying locations and time periods, the soundtrack is curated in a way that each door to each setting also opens a portal to a distinct sonic palate that makes each one have a greater sense of identity both within the world and in my memory. Altogether, the entire soundtrack is worthwhile and one of my new favorites in a game; I revisit at least a portion of it nearly every day.

There’s an anthological vignette structure to the first half of the narrative that is ostensibly only loosely tied by the mystery of the player character’s identity. It’s within this framework that I think Fata Morgana is most consistently impressive in its effective creation of small period pieces reflecting on sort of tangential themes like class disparity, avarice, relationships and their need for communication, the nature of man, race and gender identity. Many of these themes, while carrying over between vignettes, don’t exactly get fully realized explorations unfortunately (such as class disparity and race), but they do serve to unflatteringly portray the blemishes of the people and period in a manner that is coherent and establishes societal systems as being quite influential in the production of discriminatory and heinous acts that take place later in the story. The second door that explores the reality of a nebulous and foreboding beast that the Maid is catering to in 1707 was an immediate highlight following a tonally and atmospherically successful first vignette that played a little too close into reader expectations without much characterization of the brother and sister beyond their roles as tragic figures. This is a criticism I have of the first door, albeit one that did not impede my enjoyment of the first few hours, but it's also a purposeful trend in the first four vignettes (called doors) that pays off fantastically by the end of the fourth door as the realization that these tales curated by the Maid with tragic tones and cruel ends and all too poetic finales serve a dual purpose in punishing the characters within and obfuscating the truth from the player character.

Around the halfway mark of the narrative, the game asks the player to make an almost superficial, inevitable choice, one with a much deeper emotional resonance that I only realized much later. Without leveraging spoilers to entice any potential future readers of The House in Fata Morgana, I want to make it explicitly clear that this game is queer. I obviously cannot speak for the writer themselves, but Fata Morgana itself is a story very much predicated on the experience and themes of gender nonconformity that speaks in equal parts to intersex people and transgender people; the narrative crux pivots around this as a core element and it can’t be ignored, especially because of how empathetic and surprisingly delicately the writer handles the topic. The distinction has to be made, of course, between intersex and transgender people but with the understanding that intersex people can also be transgender, it is through this lens that Fata Morgana explores gender identity and it acknowledges this difference. There is of course some discussion to be had about the portrayal of intersex and transgender peoples in situations of despair and suffering and oppression in media, and I as neither cannot speak to it genuinely so I leave that in the hands of actual intersex and transgender people to unpack. In my limited judgement though, I think Fata Morgana takes a few missteps of language and drags out some sequences of suffering in a way that mirrors some sluggish pacing in the second half of the story in general, but ultimately affirms and celebrates these identities in a way that is some of the most respectful I have seen in media.

Briefly, I want to touch on the core themes of abuse, victimhood, hatred, and forgiveness. These are all inextricably tied together but what I found most compelling about their implementation in Fata Morgana, specifically near the end, is that the game never relents to a strict “cycles of abuse perpetuate hatred and violence and ill will and thus everyone is equally culpable and in the end nobody is really at fault(or everybody is at fault)” sort of mentality. Many of the characters in the game are fully realized in ways that often don't make them agreeable or even tangentially good people by the game’s judgement. The reader is asked to accept these characters not for their cumulative goodness or likeability, but for the human beings who have done good, bad, and everything in between that they are. All that being said, the VN also makes sure to emphasize that it is always in the hands of the victim to weigh the heinousness of the acts done upon them and determine whether they can forgive or cast off their abuser entirely. Several characters offer several different perspectives and decisions when presented with this query but it never creates a situation wherein the victim is beholden to meet their abuser(s) halfway. I can’t speak for others obviously but this was an intensely gratifying stance to me that the game reinforced constantly.

A lot of the elements of the game were similarly gratifying to me in a way that coalesced into a whole that consistently affected me. Yes, I teared up and cried on more than one occasion. I have some minor misgivings with the pacing and overly grave tone of the second half of the story, the relatively safe ending even though I somewhat made peace with it, underutilization of several key characters who could have used more fleshing out, and with some details of its exploration of gender and sexuality. All that being said, none of these came together in a way that meaningfully detracted from The House In Fata Morgana’s messaging, its characters or thematic weight. Perhaps the biggest tragedy surrounding The House in Fata Morgana, despite its notoriety in visual novel circles, is how little its merits and (relatively minor, in my view) failings are discussed or dissected, even among those who have played it, outside of overt characteristics like its art and music. Considering that I produced this review as a passionate, spoiler-skirting entreaty to play this visual novel, I am perhaps no one to talk as well. Maybe this will foster more discussion from new and old readers, maybe it won’t. So long as I contribute to the dialogue and even one person picks up this wonderful game, I can’t really complain.

Thumper's moniker of "rhythm violence game" fits really well; I can't remember the last time I played a game that is quite so violent towards its players. A barrage of lights and sound, hurtling obstacles towards you only to then hurl you around even as you successfully navigate them. The game really makes you feel what's happening every moment of the way; it is exhilarating, exhausting and intensely visceral.

Thumper gets very difficult as it proceeds, which I can imagine putting off a number of people who are otherwise very into the aesthetic. Personally I found the increasingly harsh difficulty perfectly suited the game's feeling of being a descent into some hellish void, and the way the game pushed me to tackle increasingly harder and harder patterns leads to beating those final levels feeling very rewarding. The things the game trains you to eventually be capable of are kind of absurd.

I would like to try this out in VR some day.

update two years later: i ripped into this game for no reason it was a lot of fun and the vibes were immaculate and i still find myself humming the soundtrack to this day

Persona 5 Strikers feels like a dumbed-down retrace of Persona 5 Royal in the body of a musou game. The story here is very formulaic, which may already ring bells for P5 players. The Phantom Thieves go on a road trip changing hearts of shitty adults that control the desires of the masses using an artificial intelligence called EMMA. It sounds different enough, but the premise is essentially the same as the original game. The slight bit of nuance added is that the villains are eventually portrayed as good people who went through traumatic events that made them the evil mind-controlling monarchs we see. Each of the first three villains sees one of the Phantom Thieves resonate with them and lift them back on their feet after they have been defeated, and the desires of the public have been freed. Except for the first one, the villains do not get enough screen time as they should (ringing any bells?). My 22-hour playthrough would have greatly benefited from an extra five hours to flesh out the earlier story arcs. The final third of the game retreads the same themes as the new P5R story, almost to a comical extent. Atlus were heavily involved in the development of this game, so it was impossible for them to be unaware of the similarities. There must have been no communication between the Royal and Strikers teams. The theme of utopianism is what is shared here, and the villains end up feeling too similar. The Phantom Thieves even repeat their same “we should be able to pave our own path” and “suffering can be good too” shtick. I came out of this game feeling like I had just played P5R but it’s a road trip this time.

Despite my gripes about the story, there is still stuff to like here. The previously mentioned road trip across seven Japanese cities is blissful. Each location is small and restricted, but they have their own aesthetics, music and, atmosphere that captures the feeling of a road trip excellently. The new characters are decent, Sophie is an artificial intelligence amnesiac who lives in the protagonist’s phone and becomes a vital member of the Phantom Thieves. Much of her story about learning about humanity is shallow, but enjoyable nonetheless, and her conclusion in the closing acts of the game is rewardingly satisfying. Zenkichi is the other new character, a Public Security officer who strikes a deal with the Phantom Thieves. His chemistry with the group is charming, but his own story arc suffers from show, don’t tell. His story does have a conclusion, but since most of it was behind the scenes, there is no real feeling of gratification to come from it. The music here is outstanding, showcasing what Atlus’ composers can do without Shoji Meguro. The presentation is stellar too, emulating the original P5 experience with flair and style, but maintaining its own personality.

P5S swaps out the traditional turn-based combat from the main series for a musou-style combat system. Although the combat itself will be familiar for Warriors players, the tower defence and management systems are absent. This is a plus for me, as that part of the few Warriors games I’ve played never grabbed me. Instead of that, the combat takes place in “Jails” which are metaverse versions of the various cities you visit, each themed after the villain ruling it. There are eight of these in total, but half of them are much shorter than the other half. The smaller ones lack the scale and formula of the larger ones, making them feel half-baked. The combat itself is enjoyable and surprisingly challenging at times. You'll find it hard to mash your way through, as the strengths and weaknesses from the main series are applied here too meaning you'll be forced to think about how to tackle every encounter. You make use of your Persona's abilities intuitively during battle, so the flow of combat is never broken. All-out attacks and 1 more are present too, as well as a new showtime move that charges up as you use a character. Phantom Dashes are new contextual moves that make use of the environment, like dropping a chandelier or swinging around a lamppost, and they make for a cute addition to your options. Each character feels varied with their own gimmick and playstyle, making all of them viable options and you're able to switch between four of them on the fly with the protagonist being a mainstay in the party. All of this is used in conjunction to make the combat exciting as you string combos together using all the mechanics.

Overall, Persona 5 Strikers is a decent spin-off that takes too much from its original game. There is still a lot to enjoy here, and big P5 fans will undoubtedly love it, so give it a shot if you were on the fence. The music and presentation are fantastic, and the new characters are likeable, but the repeat of the same story I've grown to dislike is frustrating and lazy.

Playing Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus recently taught me an important lesson on the value of historical context in videogames. Exoddus was the first Oddworld game I played as a kid, and it fascinated me like no other videogame at the time. The creepy and oppressive industrial setting, the incredible sound design, the beautiful detailed pre rendered backgrounds, and the tense and frightning enemy encounters provided a unique immersive experience that wasn't available on the regular cheeerful and colorful games I was drawn to as a kid.

Eventually I did get around to trying out the first entry in the franchise, Abe's Oddysse, and quickly dropped it due to its lesser user friendly QoL features, like the lack of a quicksave or not being able to control more than one Mudokon at once. For years Exoddus was the game I kept in my mind as the superior game of the two, and it wasn't until very recently when I played both games again from beginning to end when that perception changed.

While Exoddus is the more "enjoyable" of the two, letting you quickave at will and polishing a bunch of mechanics that made Oddysee more frustrating, it doesn't manage to capture the tone, pacing, and atmosphere of the first game as best as it could. While Exoddus is more than eager to introduce a wide variety of new challenges, obstacles, enemies and puzzles, it isn't able to build on the strengths of Oddysee that made it a landmark of cinematic platformers, deciding instead to center its focus on providing a selection of new levels and ideas for the gameplay loop established previously.

Which isn't to say that Exoddus is a bad game. It's not. But the fact that it's described by it's team itself as a "bonus game", does indicate the nature of it's development. Exoddus is very much a "level pack" disguised as a sequel, moving the player from room to room in order to solve the next platforming puzzle, without the level of detail and thought that was put into the first game's presentation and storytelling. There's a vast number of repeated assets and entities that were simply plucked out from the first game in order to expedise the development process. And that's fine.

Exoddus is incredibly fun, pushing the player into solving increasingly more challenging problems that are built on top of simple to understand concepts and mechanics, making one feel very smart for overcoming said challenges. It has a firmer grasp on game design and it is a much more confident puzzle experience than Oddysee. Exoddus is also a much more humorous and cartoony sequel, going so far as to letting you control your own explosive farts, and lending the sequel a sense of levity that distinguishes it from the predecessor's more somber tone.

It's just that Exoddus came after Oddysee. And Oddysee managed to be wholly unique on it's first try, while Exoddus never had the chance to. The things I found to be so captivating and inspiring in Exoddus as a young kid, I now realize exist in Oddysee in a much more cohesive and impactful experience. Cool game tho.