In every possible sense, this game pioneered the gameplay and themes of Death Stranding. With their environmental messages, quiet yet persistent protagonist, walking-simulator/goods-delivery gameplay, and tactile interfaces, they truly share the same DNA. There are superficial examples too, of course. Smoglings = BTs. Sergeant Smogglor = Higgs. Toys = people with DOOMS. Chet = Die Hardman. Monkey Burgers/Chocolate/Leaves = Smart Drugs/Optical Media/Action Figures. Think about it, man. Think about how you have to mash through dialogue every time you return to the terminal. Early on you're just running around like an asshole before you find a bike across a river. So you unlock the ability to repair bridges (seriously). Then after riding the bike for a bit it breaks. Then you unlock the ability to create a better bike, and eventually a four wheeled electric vehicle. There are windmills you can place to recharge your batteries at. You even use happiness points to build roads that make traveling across the vast landscape smoother. As you deliver items to the NPCs who already know you by reputation they slowly reveal more to you about their hopes and dreams, and shower you with appreciation. You probably think this is a fucking joke, don't you? That I'm making this all up for attention? Well you're wrong, kiddo. Somebody needs to hold Kojima accountable for this thievery. These are the same guys that made bit Generations and Art Style for fuck's sake, I will not see their works lost to time in favor of AAA kinogames!

Short, simple, rewarding puzzle game that is both conceptually very cool and that also has a great difficulty curve; the early game tests basic concepts and things gradually ramp up from there. I found the final two puzzles to be particularly challenging and an appropriate pay-off for all the groundwork covered up until that point, making me have to really sit and rethink the situation several times over but leaving me feeling very good when I finally understood what those puzzles were trying to communicate and got to the desired solution.

Took a little over an hour to complete, with about a third of that time being spent on the final two puzzles.

I've returned to Sayonara Wild Hearts twice now since my original playthrough. It's hard not to; the game is incredibly beautiful, has a wonderful, kinetic energy to it, and is bursting with creativity mechanically, visually and musically. I think over time my feelings on the game have calmed quite a bit however, as much as I want to remain in the high of that first playthrough.

Most notably, I kind of wish this game was less dutybound to being, well, a game. Colliding with obstacles or projectiles resets you back several seconds in the song to before that happened, which makes a lot of sense as a way for a game to conventionally work, but on repeat playthroughs has felt very disruptive both to the flow of what is happening and to the immersion of the experience. I want to just get lost in all of this, let it all wash over me, but the way the death mechanic works here makes it hard to achieve that in the way I'd like.

There are other complaints I have too, but they're all fairly minor in comparison and I have no real interest in making it seem like I'm tearing into this game. It's a lovely and fairly unique experience, has a lot of heart, and I don't know that its best moments will ever stop being wonderful for me as I inevitably return to Sayonara Wild Hearts later on down the road.

"You know it's a good game when I finish it at 2:30 in the morning, completely sleep-deprived!" was the original review of this. Since then, I thought a lot about this game. Disco Elysium has had a profound impact on me. The writing is striking and brilliant, so full of sadness, so full of hoplessness - yet it manages to cath sparks of hope inbetween. There's so much humanity in the characters, so much sorrow in the world, haunted by the past resurfacing, or burying itself. Over and over again, Revachol, the city of ghosts. A Hauntology of pasts long gone. I love this game so, so much. There's more here than I could've ever wished for. And it takes the player seriously. It's actually art. And that cannot be said for most of the current gaming landscape. At least for my definition: something with precise theming, profoundly striking in its impact.

this isn't a review, this post is just spreading awareness of the fact that the director of this game and head of Ice-Pick Lodge has been outed as a predator of minors.

details and evidence in link below. obvs heavy content warnings apply. info has been out there for a week and a half but i didn't find out myself until this morning.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathologic/comments/mlu6u8/nikolay_dybwoski_lead_of_icepick_lodge_and/

If there's anything out there, it's not going to be something we understand. We already have enough trouble at home defining ourselves, constantly pushed and pulled by gravitational forces we can't free ourselves from. A society crafted around making sure our culture is rigidly defined so that we can understand ourselves for what is human. But what is humanity, really? We keep pushing the ceiling of what that can be, and we project what is "alien" on things that are certainly human-like, because we have nothing else to draw from.

These are esoteric and difficult questions to answer, and even harder to do so when we're still stuck here shifting through our job yearning to free ourselves. Heaven Will Be Mine is queer, in every sense of the word. Queer in that it breaks me from my shell, liberating me and driving me to tears as it helps me understand my own way of expression and why I refuse to be circumvented by this "gravity." Queer in that it breaks between the line of reality to understand what seems strange, and help us transcend the grounded narratives we spin to keep us center. It's deeply personal too, with characters that each deal with their own traumas and flimsily work to try to understand each other in relationships that draw between romantic, heartfelt, and deeply serious.

For hours after I finished the route of Saturn I was in tears, and the route itself took me more time than it should've because I had to take a break to sit there in silence. I had to wrestle with phantoms of if I truly felt liberated, or if I really have grown out of the cage and pull of culture that people craft for me so that I may live. Am I really living my life here?

The discordant thoughts cross around for a while, and Pluto brings me back to center.
Saturn: "And you'd like that, right? Cutting loose with no gravity to tie you down?"
Pluto: "I think about that every day. It's so tempting.
You've got to be ginger with the universe, you know, Saturn.
Now that you're this strong, you've got to be careful. So much can go wrong."
Saturn: "I'll make sure to be very careful with the universe you love."

In another excerpt, Mercury asks "That's just it. Are we too attached? I want to be something new, and share it with everyone. Am I too heavy for this apple?"

The reading is dense, and it might not have to be. But it enraptures me and brings me close. I feel lost and I'm being given the proper guide to truly learn, even if I have to take every paragraph at a time, slowly. I'm shivering by the ending as I feel like I'm reaching a true understanding of why I'm queer, why I identify in the way I do. Why I WANT to live in the way I CHOOSE.

Saturn: "I don't owe them anything but, there's one more thing I can't stand.
Not being seen for what I am.
So, choose to come with us, or choose to stay.
But I won't be happy without them knowing what they're missing out on.
Look up in the sky, and see all the weird stuff we get to do with each other!"

And then I ascend, too.

------------------------LUNA-TERRA------------------------

Soaringly, defiantly, almost certainly the best prose I've ever seen in a Visual Novel. In what is so often an insular, overwritten form that constantly fails to leverage the advantages of, y'know, visuals in order to trim their ludicrously overwritten manuscripts (feel confident in saying Umineko's much-memed length could be halved if you cut out the explanations of things we can see with our eyes and repeating the same descriptions over and over again), the density and gravitational weight of HWBM's beautifully poetic prose shines like a star about to go supernova.

Each line says something important, something meaningful, and it's central metaphors are so perfectly pitched and utilized that the clarity of the text is never in question, even deep into an in-universe e-mail about the metaphysics of generating miniature black holes in the ruins of Side 3. I know not everyone gets on with the writing here, but for me, this was so frequently beautiful and impactful that it blows most traditional novels I've read in the past few years out of the water. The incredible music doesn't exactly hurt, either.

Weighty and important yet flippant and understated. As heady and political as it is emotional and introspective. It's everything I want to be able to write like.

------------------------PLUTO------------------------

As pointedly political as the best of Gundam and as nakedly personal as the highest highs of Evangelion, Heaven Will Be Mine is remarkable in its understanding of what Mecha means, an understanding that eclipses much of the work that so visibly inspires it.

Heaven Will Be Mine is about bodies, and takes a transhumanist perspective of our own bodies to discuss both broad, heady concepts of imperialism, as well as how we ourselves characterise, well, our selves.

Who am I? Am I these hands, these eyes, this flesh, or am I less, just the thoughts that exist behind my AT Field. Is everything else is just an endless layer of shells built to protect it? Or am I more than that, the words you read now, the voice I speak and the things I create? The reviews I write, edited and carefully constructed to present a meaning I want to present, the videos I make, a series of images that tell the narrative I want to tell, all of these things are as true a Me as exists. When I take a selfie, and edit it, erasing beard shadow and smoothing out the bags under my eyes, I'm not creating an inauthentic self, I'm showing you a truer me than a simple photo could, a picture that shows you what I value, what I want you to see and what I want you to Not See.

Is Earth the ground we walk on? Or is it everything we look up to and crave, the planets we've named, the stars we've numbered and categorized the heavens that we want to be ours? Our culture is an udurgh - a thing that contains many things - expanding beyond its borders imperceptibly, imperialism of thought and metaphysics that claims all that exists as territory that belongs to it or will belong to it.

Heaven Will Be Mine gets it. At almost every turn, it understands. It knows that mechs are guns. It knows that the Gundam is the White Devil. It knows that we could have made them look like anything, but we made them look like us. And it knows that we love them anyway.

There's a lot to think about, and a lot to say when it comes to this game. But more than anything else, Heaven Will Be Mine stands as absolute proof of the necessity of diverse voices telling diverse stories. Neither Tomino nor Anno could have told this story, and asking them to is ridiculous. It's a story we have to make for ourselves, using what the things they created told us to say something new.

Eternally glad there are other queers who think about Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack as much as I do.

------------------------SATURN------------------------

at the time of writing, well. it's a bad time to be writing. the uk's systemic pervasive transphobia has reached a fever pitch, and currently both the party in government and their supposed opposition trade in barely-concealed terf ideology designed to dehumanize trans people and make us inverse. in the part of the uk's earth where I live - ireland's terra, uk's earth - there is literally no hope for trans people, as we have exactly one gender clinic in the entire country, and they aren't taking consultations. it is impossible to transition right now without obscene wealth and stability that the vast majority of trans people do not possess.

and don't even get me fucking started on the wave of nakedly evil anti-trans legislation that is hitting the USA right now. fuck me.

we live eternally reminded of how much they hate us. how much they hate what we are, and what we want to be. and the few of us that do become accepted, that let themselves fall into the gravity well of their expectations, prostrating themselves before their culture, only highlights how inhuman they think of us.

and in art, in fiction, time and time again, they tell us about the way queer people should exist, hidden in the margins, their queerness incidental rather than defining, something that just exists.

the message is clear. either we be who we are on their terms, or we aren't allowed to be here at all.

Fuck. That.

they think we're not like them? that we're something else, something inverse, inhuman?

fine. let's be "inhuman". let's be new genders and pronouns and names. let's change into new angles, new shapes. let's be loud and obnoxious and screamingly gay.

let's find out just how inverse we can be.

------------------------TRUE-END------------------------

I cannot tell you how much I love this. But I tried my best. A new all-time favourite.

Morte (reading the Nameless One's back): "says here you died of ligma"

Nameless One: "what's death"

Morte: "ligma balls"

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i skimmed the abstract of like 5 different philosophy books and arthur c clarke novels and i'm here to just vomit all that back at you for 70 hours without saying anything meaningful about any of it"

Me: "sounds bad"

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i've also included kung-fu and robots"

Me: "sounds sick"

Yoko Taro: (furiously taking notes)