Gameplay note: I played through Inscryption with my wife, with her controlling the deckbuilding parts and me controlling the ARG / escape room parts. She had a better time with it than I did, as she is in general more into deckbuilding games.

Extremely mixed feelings on this game. On one hand there was a lot I really liked, but it also waaay overstayed its welcome and had some absolutely grueling parts.

Act 2 grinds the entire game to a halt, and Act 3 has some really cool stuff like Act 1..... except it makes you replay all of Act 2, basically.

Act 2 felt very rough cause i just very abruptly went from having an extremely good time to feeling like everything ground to a halt and now this ok-but-bland retro deckbuilder is in the way of an interesting mystery. And i know this is probably a more esoteric criticism but i think the UI in act two actually makes a lot of poor choices regarding low contrast monochrome for elements when a lot of the backgrounds are full colour. It basically feels like Gameboy graphics over a GBA game and the vibe is… bad? Confusing? Tiring?

The real criticism i will go Esoteric Nerd with is that when the youtuber pulls the floppy disk out of the ground the cover is open and a visible piece of dirt is stuck to the inside ring the entire time and i know it’s a haunted "ben drowned" cartridge situation but the entire time I’m just like “that disk is broken and none of these graphics would fit in that floppy”

Every time a video dump happened during act two I leapt for the controls because I was just starving for literally any interesting content.

And when act 3 hits it is MUCH stronger and really refreshes the vibes, but then it drags itself out sooooo much longer.

The worst part of it is, I think, the fact that literally nothing of the cause behind the supernaturality is even hinted at. It's just vaguely spooky, with vaguely retro aesthetics, but all so shallow that it feels deeply unsatisfying by the end.

It's very chill and kind of relaxing for a while. And then it slowly hits me, that none of this really matters does it? You buy upgrades so clicking doesn't take so long, so your stream goes a little farther, so you can use some soap that goes really fast, so you can click, and keep clicking, and slowly reveal things that look sorta nicer, but in the end its all just static.

There's sometimes some very nice environmental storytelling, mixed with clients explaining the personal details of the items you're cleaning.

But unlike the process of restoration, your actions are not intimate. You are held afar with a nozzle and a rubber suit and you blast away until the thing that was under all the muck is back to normal. But there is a lack of granularity here which slowly feels monotonous and dreadful. You wish you could run your hands over the now pristine classic car, that you could carefully inspect or articulate the parts of the bicycle, but you may not.

You are cut off from the world, alone with nothing but the cleansing power of your nozzle, in a world where other people are nothing more than text messages on your phone.

The thing this game simulates is how it feels to be stuck behind a computer.

No Man's Sky drives me insane in a particular way which no other game really has in a long while. It has two viciously opposed things it is trying to accomplish, in a slapdash way that really feels like it is just continuously adding stuff without thought.

I am playing this in the year 2023, when the game has been out for a while. It has been patched numerous times, with all sorts of content. And every single piece of that content feels like it was made for Gamers™. I don't know what I am but I don't feel like I'm the core demographic here, because every one of these things feels like a superfluous feature that obscures what must've been a hauntingly pensive game.

No Man's Sky is also one of the bleakest capitalist games I've ever played. In it, you pilot spaceships which require no more attention than mining some resources, with the ultimate goal of finding more planets to visit, to carve giant holes and canyons out with your mining laser, so you may reap more rare materials and treasures to sell to an abstract space market. Plants are treated by this game with equal care and diligence to stones. A gorgeous tree that has evolved over a hundred thousand years is carbon, and maybe oxygen! Loads of delicious carbon. You carve it down and destroy it, not even letting it be wood, not even letting it be something to shape with your hands, but evaporating its form and reducing it to a basic molecule.

And for what? So you can do this a hundred more times? In dozens of more systems full of strange personality-vacant aliens with the same mysteriously vapid dialogue? So you can "discover" planets covered in settlements and crashed ships and aliens and you never can walk more than 500 meters without finding some remnant of civilization?

What scant environmental storytelling I can pick describes that the sentinels wandering around may be the remnant of some sort of fascist apocalyptic war. What then is this resource extraction hell we now exist in? Is all of No Man's Sky in some kind of purgatory? They added pirates and pirate raids recently, and they are the most boring flavorless call-to-action unnecessary gameplay I've experienced all year.

You follow leads after some entity named Artemis, slowly figuring out that they've crashed on some strange foreign planet. They describe it being covered in darkeness or something, and being utterly alone. How I wish I empathized at all. Can you imagine the weight this would have if I wasn't assaulted with a hundred meaningless NPCs before finding my way to finally speaking with Artemis? Imagine if the fascist Sentinels and idle fauna were the only signs of life except this one distress call, and finally after a dozen hours we connect our radios and talk, and they tell me how lonely they are, and how they feel so lost. How much resonance, how much solidarity we would feel!

But instead I am caught feeling that such an exchange must be an error of some degree. Some sort of remnant of the old game. It is impossible to fly to another planet before passing a dozen ships. Artemis cannot be truly so lost.

I was minding my business once when some pirates started attacking a base I was nearby. The game encouraged me to intervene. Why though? I found myself struck with the snarkiest thought: It's called No Man's Sky, but the way they're carrying on - I don't know, must be their sky!

No Man's Sky is so terrified of letting you feel alone, and I imagine that's because gamers yelled at them about it. And that's a damn shame, because when I landed on my second planet and discovered a poison mushroom planet full of giant worms that filled the sky, I did feel awe for a second. And then the game directed me to scan, and pointed out all the fun ore deposits and things for me to pillage, and the feeling was gone.

It's definitely somebody's sky. But not mine.

Oates has been developing a fascinating little series of RPGMaker horror games with an incredibly heartwarming edge of sincerity to them. Using a consistent stack of plugins and gorgeous consistent artwork (often re-used between games, to excellent effect), a small world of surreal melancholy is slowly built out, with supernatural monsters projecting the insecurities and struggles of modern life.

Sorry We're Open is the gutpunch game released this year, a game about being a faceless manager of a retail store, carrying your crew through day after day of absurd confrontations with mundane customers and supernatural poltergeists. You gotta keep the store clean, you gotta keep your crew alive, all the while the real evil of Corporate Management hangs over you like an eldritch vampire.

The only winning move is to realize the horrors of capitalism and leave. The game uses its multiple endings in short succession to deliver its true payoff, and is absolutely worth playing through to 100%.

Its thesis is worn directly on its sleeve: Even the manager of a store has far more solidarity with the workers under them than the capitalist monsters running the show. And if you don't realize that, you will die a husk drained entirely of life.