can something be obnoxiously juvenile but also a totally unique lightning-in-a-bottle experience at the same time? because that's B3313 to me. the internet iceberg meme/creepypasta origins of this ended up leading to the creation of something that is kind of unlike anything else in existence (even if it is heavily indebted to stuff like Yume Nikki), but it is also somewhat inherently limited by its origins.

it's sort of like if Mario's castle was reimagined as Constantine's Mansion in Thief: The Dark Project, mixed with Yume Nikki and various internet memes. in your endless hours wandering through the confusing labyrinth of the castle, there are isolated moments that are unique and brilliant. and then there others that are just sort of… there. you’ll spend 15 minutes wandering through a bunch of fairly bland, indistinct rooms and corridors and then you’ll come upon something really haunting and memorable. and then, maybe, you'll be right back in the bland mazes. maybe you'll run into some creepy thing and crash the game. maybe creepy thing will be interesting and well executed, or maybe it'll just be obnoxious boilerplate creepypasta stuff.

these contradictions get more and more noticeable the further into it you are. some of the levels are really interesting/bizarre alternate universe takes that recontextualize the original Mario 64 and seem to offer greater commentary about the nature of how nostalgia shifts things into an alternate universe that is actually different from the source of the memory. "i like to remember things my own way. how i remembered them, not necessarily how they happened" says the deeply troubled Fred Madison in David Lynch's Lost Highway. but other times it feels like you wish you were spending more time in the new/more unique areas you occasionally stumble upon, and less in the 6th variation of old Mario 64 levels.

B3313 feels almost like a bigger AAA game to me in both the sheer scope of the project that's filled with a lot of internal contradictions, and in also how much it truly doesn't respect your time. that’s probably the nature of things of this size, and that a lot of people were involved contributing in what seems like a very tumultuous dev cycle after a certain point. but perhaps that explains a lot about the sometimes inconsistent/varied nature of the experience.

i will personally admit to not caring whatsoever about the personalized copy of Mario 64 meme or the numerous ways this hack borrows from different beta builds of Mario 64. i like Mario 64 a lot, but it is absolutely wild to me the way that game has been metabolized into the consciousness of videogame world. and so i do think the whole “this is a beta version of the game” thing and slavishly cobbling together any and every scrap of asset or idea that was cut from an early documented build of Mario 64 to put on this thing is a bit of a dead end artistically. most of the stuff Nintendo used in earlier builds just seemed like temp assets and doesn’t seem THAT interesting to me outside of that context. it's just not very interesting to those of us who are not 17 years old anymore and not still spooked by internet lore. it just feeds back into a lot of fan culture content machine around big franchises that just feels like this self replicating beast that never really goes anywhere and is always invariably beaten back into conformity by the big companies that are in control of these properties.

i am someone who loves strange and unique experiences. but to me, i want stuff that i guess attaches itself more to telling a specific kind of story through what it’s doing, and B3313 is a bit too much online meme-referencing for me to take that aspect of it very seriously at all. B3313 doesn’t have the narrative coherence of a MyHouse which i guess is the other big artsy creepypasta game mod of the moment. and it doesn’t have the artful direction of a Yume Nikki, which it is obviously cribbing the general kind of surreal abstract multidimensional wander maze thing from.

all of this is to say: why did i give it 4 stars and 30+ hours of my time, then? maybe it comes down to: there is an indelible, haunting Tower of Druaga-esque charm to all of it. the commitment to being cryptic and giving the player nothing and doing all these machinations behind the scenes in the game is kind of remystifying what has been lost in a lot of consumer-facing art in general. in games, with all the talk of FromSoft games or like the last couple Zeldas bringing back "old school" difficulties and design values, those are meticulously tested commercial products… not community made romhacks. they simply can’t go anywhere near as far out there as something like this. and we in general are in a moment when so much art seems paralyzed and unwilling to take chances out of risk aversion from industries that have been strip-mined by the rich and powerful. something like B3313 stands in contrast to that - completely unwilling to compromise itself.

with B3313, oftentimes there really is nothing on the other side. but that emptiness starts to feel really intentional after a certain point. as a player, what's interesting in the feeling that you want the design to follow some kind of logic that you can eventually glean so that you can understand what the designers were getting at is that it feels almost like an intentional choice to have it consistently not do that. occasionally it does hint at a deeper language/design sensibility, but mostly it doesn’t. there are times when the “story” or the progression of stages seems to be developing into something more coherent, but then the rug is pulled out from under you. and that happens over and over. because it’s all rug pulls at the end of the day. the message of the design is: whatever happens, whatever journey you go through… it’s all inevitably a way to throw you back into the maze. you’ll always be endlessly wandering the maze.

to me, that says something about Nintendo games in general - how you have these long journeys that (in the case of the newer Zelda especially) aggressively don’t respect your time and send you to all these interesting locations. and then it always just sorta ends, because there’s nothing really deeper at the core a lot of the time. it's escapist entertainment, often with some kind of crypto-conservative values and imagery in it. B3313 feels totally unafraid to unearth and make you fully experience that ugly side.

maybe a lot of our larger culture right now, especially obsessive lore-based fan culture, are just variations of that too. increasingly everything seems like it's hostile, broken down, and filled with different kind of rug pulls. the ground feels totally unstable and there is no “there” there a lot of the time, but we keep shoveling through hoping for new discoveries and hoping for it all to make sense. it’s like being in an abusive, codependent relationship. there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. it’s a disempowerment fantasy. and B3313 captures that feeling absolutely perfectly, in such a uniquely fleshed out way.

there are moments to B3313 that are genuinely unique and fun too, like some of the more creative creepypasta scenarios that i won’t spoil here. or like, occasional stages like the one when you have to climb some structures that are supposed to be some sort of bob-omb factory. you activate the “self-destruct” sequence when you enter which causes you to have to outrun rising lava until the top. and then you get to the top and there’s a little yellow bob-omb guy sitting in a little office and just complaining about how you destroyed the whole factory. it does make me wonder if there’s like some kind of commentary on the tropes of Mario games being attempted in small moments like that. like the fact that Mario is basically a cipher who everything resolves around, and none of these other characters have any agency.

of course, none of that is delved upon for very long. because invariably, you're going to get fed back into the maze. and so that's both the great strength and the great flaw of something like B3313. it doesn't try to offer a way out, it just tries to express what is there. and in doing so it captures a feeling perfectly, in a way that is inspiring. even as a memey internet romhack, it is absolutely something i would call an "art game". there are a lot of memorable areas and moments that really explores the latent strangeness and darkness of Nintendo games, and the latent surrealism of a lot ofearly 3D games in general. it’s also real testament to how far romhacking/modding community projects can really go artistically, along with MyHouse.wad. it could have an enormous impact on a lot of games stuff that comes further down the line. so it’s definitely something that demands more attention and respect outside the whole memey lore ecosystem a lot of this stuff usually occupies. it of course, comes from that however and will probably will do itself no favors in distinguishing itself from that.

i only hope in the future that people take the ambition and interesting ideas from this and run with it in a way that feels unafraid to make a larger statement about the world, and doesn't just do the cowardly thing of retreating with its tail between its legs back into insular internet memes and the online lore ecosystem fed by various content creators. whether or not you think B3313 subverts or further perpetuates that that i guess is up to you. but i still think we have a pretty far way to go.

A rhythm game spinoff of the Sylvanian family game boy games, this came out a few months after the first game. It looks like a collaboration with Natsume and Epoch - perhaps evidenced in a different and more fleshed out art style. The animals dancing during the songs are surprisingly elaborate, and each stage has a cute visual theme sort of like beatmania or something.

Weirdly though the songs seem to just be original to the game (or maybe some other mixed media related to the series), none of the songs from the first game seem to appear in this.

The game itself is simple, there's three directions to press (Down, A, B) and the songs are short. I think it took me like 15 minutes to play through the game. There's also a mode where you can record yourself 'playing drums' to other songs and save them as 'videos'. Kind of like a rudimentary wii music or something.

Overall it's cute and solid for what it is, but feels like a brand tie-in more than anything.

Review

I gave it a real shot, for 8 hours!

You can read my notes and thoughts here : https://twitter.com/han_tani2/status/1735187901296836666

Or read an essay in which I discuss TotK https://melodicambient.substack.com/p/why-ocarina-of-time-cant-be-recreated

The short version is: the game has its nice charming moments, I actually like the idea of janky physics dungeons and riding around on stuff. NPC designs are nice and some of the side quests looked interesting. But I hattteee the crafting stuff, it kind of ends up padding almost everything in the game out. There's also so much distraction, it feels like YouTube recommendations or TikTok...

Shitpost review

Zelda but if Miyamoto wasn't inspired by wandering the countryside as a kid but opening up Genshin enough times to get the 30 day login bonus

An interesting looking setting visually, but feels too much like a sci-fi manga/anime setting jammed in to the form of a game. The game section is very much functional, but the high reliance on HD art means that the levels, well, feel like HD art more than anything, with a few puzzles and enemies dropped in. The ways the levels all connect to each other underground is neat, but it's never that interesting to traverse (and confusing).

Still, as far as game worlds go, the density does feel neat. It's just a fairly lifeless feeling game world since your interactions feel limited despite the fancy art. It feels very "modern-day AAA" in that sense - expensive art but nothing much in the way of interesting interactions..

I did like the boss fights though, even if they were a bit finicky with the movement... the weird boss movesets require you to move around in some fun ways and using your egg's spin ability was pretty fun.

Great BUMP Action RPG, and a great length at about 1-2 hours! https://sylvie.itch.io/sylvie-rpg

I like how compact the world is and how that allows you to switch between modes of playing quickly - trying to open up each room's secret entrances, grinding for money, trying to survive and form a mental map of an area... the game has a lot of playfulness in its secrets designs that show lineage from older action RPGs like Golvellius, Ys. That era of games are a lot of fun, but they sometimes have moments where moon logic or difficult mapping efforts are needed to complete them. I enjoy that to an extent, but I like the way that Sylvie RPG takes some of the mystique those games achieve but presents it in a way that allows the game to stand more on its own as a whole (without requiring the need to look up a guide.) It's a hard balance to keep a game feeling mysterious and challenging without sending people off to the guides, and I think this game balances everything well. There's secrets I couldn't figure out, but I'm proud to have cleared the game on my own!

Additionally, if you pay for the game you can get bonus files, including a design analysis of the game. It was interesting to read this for a number of reasons. For one, the game cites Angeline Era as a minor influence to one aspect of the combat (opting for Angeline Era style bump-combat (you can attack an enemy from any direction), vs. Ys's "hit the enemy at an angle").

This is an interesting thing to see because Sylvie RPG was made and released while Angeline Era is still in development. There's very few bump action games out there, so being able to play Sylvie RPG and read about it was useful as a point of comparison.

In the design notes, Sylvie describes the "Three Modes of Play" idea that was a guiding principle - in this case, "Exploration", "Resource Gathering" and "Stage Clearing". It's three modes of play that many Action Adventures/RPGs tend to have in various ratios. I think the choices the game makes (de-emphasizing Stage Clearing for the other two) work well. Sylvie RPG does feature 'stages' (defeating bosses) but much of the time is spent poking around the screens and trying to uncover secret caves on each screen. These range from grottos you can buy swords in, to shortcuts, to little helper cats who will come fight with you.

There's neat decisions related to this - like how bosses respawn you near the fight entrance, but you start with the stats you initially reached the boss at.

I also found it interesting that Sylvie RPG's conclusions about defense are similar to the ones we have in Angeline Era, in that for games with more of a focus on action and smaller numbers (where enemies often take a few hits to kill), defense items are hard to balance. Because flatly making everything in the game less threatening is not always an ideal choice. I liked Sylvie RPG's solution which lets you get shields, which negate most damage, but you drop the shield if hurt (and have to pick it up, which can be dangerous.)

Anyways, above all else it's an interesting game world to explore. Go play it! Support bump combat

INASA!!! My friend made this game... I'm American, so I don't have experience with a rainy summer day stuck at my grandparents' place in Japan - but I (and I imagine many others) have similar youth experiences of being left at a relative's house, feeling like there was very little to do... this game conjured a lot up for me. I loved the choice of letting you pick 20/40/60 minute play session, I also liked slowly uncovering the moveset. After about 10 minutes you'll have an understanding of the house, so passing time becomes a matter of how you use your moves... you can crouch, sit, jump around, open doors or move stuff. As a kid, once I had a Game Boy it became easier to feel busy (perhaps to a fault), but I remember doing things like trying to 'draw' images on plush carpets my moving the fibers, sliding down staircases over and over, looking at grandparents' travel knick-knacks...

EDIT: (See bottom. Finished the post-game)
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Finished the first playthrough. There's a lot of extra story stuff in the 2nd playthrough, so I want to do that at some point.

Overall this is a pretty brilliant and personable feeling children's adventure game. You live in a place called Color town - which is a 3x3 grid of different villages, with separate themes: "Old Japan", "Modern Japan", "Future", Desert, Downtown, Jungle, etc. In order to have the carnival, the town needs a lot of power, so it needs 8 stars - which you have to get from the dieties at each of the 8 towns' shrines. To get the stars you need to give them their desired offerings (a red hat, a laptop, etc), and finding those items is the meat of the gameplay.

Finding the items involves meeting shopkeepers, doing simple minigames or tasks, and exploring the townsfolk's home pages, sometimes looking for clues on who to give what item, or how to do something (e.g. there's a minigame where you need to cook a dessert, so you need to do some reasoning to find a recipe for it in the game's internet).

Exploring characters' home pages is pretty fun - they link to each other's, so you can see who's friends with who. People even have little blogs, so you get a sense of their humor, quirks, personality in a rich but succinctly stated way.

Every NPC in the game (about 70 in the first playthrough, and about 50 more in the 2nd) can be invited to the carnival - sometimes through just speaking to them, or by doing other things first (often bringing an item, or clearing some other condition). Since every NPC is named and has a unique design, it's actually manageable to faintly remember each person's job or role.

I loved the little stores and shops - you can't buy stuff, but you get a sense of the types of places in a 70s-90s-inspired japan. Dagashi stores, shoe stores, libraries, tailors, fireworks, bakeries, etc.

Anyways I love the scope of the game - the first playthrough took me about 8-10 hours, which is a reasonable length. Some repetition does set in by the end (e.g. in each of the 8 towns you need to answer a 5-question quiz about the town in order to get the golden star - which can be kind of cute at first but eventually feels repetitive), and there start to be a lack of any interesting item puzzles, but for the most part it's a strong game, and it's fun to just poke around and read the webpages. Or to receive e-mails or BBS requests from people.

The 2nd playthrough involves a lot more puzzles relating to the webpages (e.g. finding hidden links, solving quizzes), so I'm curious about that.

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Other than that... the game features a lot of "Monpi", these monster/object humanoids. E.g. a talking eggplant. They're quite quirky and represent maybe a relation to the lives of inanimate objects? There's some 'lore' to the world of Uki-Uki regarding these natural ecosystems outside the borders of the town you never visit. Like a lush jungle, or a mountain range with no humans, or a desert that was once an ocean. They're not the focus of the game, but they give this simple depth of fantasy to the game's atmosphere that's appreciated. In some ways, the 2nd playthrough of the game can be seen as trying to 'mix' this inaccessible world of the Monpi with that of the humans.

Finally, this game was directed by Noriko Miura, older sister of famous manga artist Sakura Momoko. I wonder what she's up to now! Seems like she didn't do any games after this, unfortunately, although the studio, indieszero, did go on to make some cool games (electroplankton, sennen kazoku).

Makes me pine a bit for this era of Nintendo games, where around 40 people would make a short and unique game. Oh well!

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POST-GAME ADDENDUM

The post-game is a fairly different-feeling experience. What happens story-wise is that you are chosen, once again, as the carnival organizer. This time though the goal is to have a night carnival! Luckily everyone you invited last time is still up for it. What happens this time around are the following:

- Under-construction webpages of monpi are now open, and thus there are a couple dozen more monpi you can invite
- There are more monpi to chat with (chat works by choosing between two conversation options until you manage to invite the monpi - it's fairly trial and error to pick the right choices)
- Various new events are triggered once you've invited the correct monpi.
- These new events include interesting things like: visiting the "hidden sides" of the towns' webpages to find clues that will open up a storeroom under a statue (Which gives you confetti for the fireworks lol)
- Finding a hidden maze underneath a "stone circle" in the town square. Here you meet a queen who allows the carnival to happen at night. There's a (simple) mystery hunt to open up this area involving angel NPCs and new links on monpi's webpages
- You start to get deliveries from Monpi, which can be used in small quests. Likewise, a big sidequest involves collecting candy box stickers to mail in for prizes.
- You're free to explore all 8 towns from the start.


Despite some of the events and the newness of some monpi webpages, it's more repetitive than the first playthrough. Because you don't have the discovery of new shops and towns to balance out the simple quests, you're pretty much doing simple fetch quests in between meticulously sweeping the web for monpi pages.

The monpi have an assortment of webpage-based minigames to play - they're often luck based, stuff like, "Simple Blackjack" or solving a timed maze, or a sliding tile puzzle. There are some that even require coming back on multiple days, like planting and watering a seed. The worst require massive amounts of luck (winning blackjack 5 times in a row) while allowing you only one try per in-game-day, meaning they're missable.

Overall it's something I think I'd have liked as a kid, but I really was just grinding by the end for the sake of it.

In the end though, you're greeted with an even livelier carnival than the first round! That was kind of neat.