Suggested by Tatsky!

I've tried to get into this game four times. Over the span of umm,, 3-4 years? Honestly maybe even since release I don't fully remember anymore. I keep putting in about two to three hours on a whim, finding quick fun and satisfaction, plateauing quickly, then putting it away, never to return. I don't think I can still tangibly explain 'why' that is, Rivals of Aether doesn't really have anything particularly wrong with it.

In some ways the problem is me. The hyperaggressive no-rest-only-rushdown is already largely how I played Melee and smashlikes for the longest time. I grew up on Smash, found a huge group of friends in college playing Smash, only stopping by the time of graduation. I never really unlearned my tactics, I didn't understand dashdancing or neutral game until the very end of my time in university. So this ends up with many many years of a rushdown idea, hit first don't space ask questions later. Bad habits I've since unlearned in fighters through the years. Well maybe unlearned isn't exactly the proper term, as much as I understood my errors and learned to play differently. Execute different gameplans. This puts Rivals of Aether at a major disadvantage to me, I've already found many many different ways of playing, I've found things that now make rushdown feel not interesting on its own. But aggressive playstyle IS Rivals of Aether, for good or bad, and that makes the act of playing it largely rote to me.

To make matters worse, Rivals of Aether is extremely accessible. I don't mean to sound like this is a bad thing for the game as again, it's a bad thing for me. Everything is so fluid and seamless to pull off that the general majority of actions are a complete non-challenge for me. The tech, the staples, they're all stuff I'm hard-wired for. Melee's bullshit is basically metaphorical weights I'm throwing off and playing at full speed, and in that surge of power I feel,,, bored lol.

There's still a lot of elements to love. The character diversity is really strong, there's nothing really fundamentally off with its mechanics, everyone has a good proper toolset and even under the guise of "everyone can rushdown" there's still unique styles of play. I do have a bit of mixed feelings on its aesthetic. The pseudo-16-bit style is really not to my taste, and it gives it too soft and frictionless a texture to something that's already extraordinarily comfortable. Honestly not enough sauce under the surface for me. The singleplayer being really a dead end and incomplete in its current form years and years later (I know it's not 'technically' incomplete, but it fucking feels incomplete) hurts too.

This isn't the end of Rivals of Aether's story here, there's another side of the mirror here, blissfully.
It's the fucking STEAM WORKSHOP MOTEHRFUCKERSSSSS.
It's Mugen with a lot of the internet-sectional rust removed but even with that loss it doesn't matter, just absolutely hilariously insane shenanigans you can get up to here. While RoA may not be a vehicle for greatness I personally enjoy, its excess comfort lends itself perfectly to mod infusion in spades. I honestly do not know which workshop character i had the most fun with, it's so ridiculous. I played a multi-set chess piece in the background of lsd dream simulator while fighting someone's furry OC. And I also slam dunked skullgirls Annie of the Stars at the top of the No More Heroes Motel while playing Vergil-sitting-in-a-chair, sounds and all.

So like yeah, Rivals of Aether can still slap. Mods of Aether really. It turns it straight into fast food but like fuck it it can be a really good time like that vs. what I feel is an uncomfortably narrow-for-me base game. Give it a shot!

Yes, I played the whole thing. All 4 endings. Having played it now, I'm totally unsurprised at the positive reception here (and on the broader internet) due to being written halfway-decently moment to moment, but man, y'all got fuckin psyopped into thinking a game about “fixing" an enby into being your doting submissive wife was good!

Ok, short review out of the way: Snoot Game is a parody/anti-fan-game of Goodbye Volcano High, a game which, as I am writing this review, is still a month or two off from release. GVH looks to be a story-driven graphic adventure game in the same indie niche as games like Night in the Woods and Life is Strange, and despite not being out, has earned quite a lot of ire from places on the net like 4chan. This revulsion is due to the fact... that it's a queer, furry, narrative-heavy game that showed up for a mere 1 minute and 35 seconds in some livestreamed PS5 showcase event. This bitter outrage and derision at something so mundane is nothing out of the ordinary for chanboards, but what followed was, at least in terms of scale.

Enter: Snoot Game. I’m not sure at what point in the development process they decided to focus on the de-transing and courting of Fang over making a “based” version of GVH, but in terms of playtime, this switch seems to happen somewhere about an hour or two into the game. This first section is pretty obviously terrible in a multitude of ways that’re impossible to ignore: the first line of text is a January 6th joke, which is followed up within a minute by the MC (named “Anon”) attempting to troll on a chanboard on his phone, there’s a teacher who speaks with a “comically” over the top Japanese accent (not pictured: the protagonist being like “huh? I can’t understand a single word this guy is saying…”). There is also a lot of blatant trans and enby-phobia on display in this section, from the protagonist accusing Fang of identifying as NB for attention to the constant mental misgendering of Fang with she/her pronouns (a trend which carries across pretty much the entire game, except for a short stint in one of the bad endings). Fang is shown as being short-tempered, rebellious, and is part of a band that sucks at playing music. Their bandmates and Fang’s only other friends at the school are a fentanyl addict, and a manipulative (rolls eyes) SJW Feminazi girl who goes around beating people up to let off her anger. This section also contains probably the single best “gotcha” moment against the writers of this game that I have ever seen within the span of only two textboxes, in the form of the MC complaining about the grammar of using singular “they” while also making two grammatical errors themselves within a single sentence.

But this section is just the opener and is, for the most part, the most spectacularly (read: obviously) bad Snoot Game gets. I think a lot of the people who shit on this game played or saw someone play this section, threw up their hands, and moved on. But not me! However, contrary to popular opinion that the rest of this game is “actually surprisingly heartwarming”, It’s also really bad, but in a much subtler and more insidious way.

There are lots of little things in which the game attempts to force you to accept its worldview to function. I already mentioned the internal monologue only referring to Fang with she/her, but as the story progresses, basically everyone in the game except the most "harmful influences" (Fang's 2 friends I mentioned earlier) switches to using she/her with no fanfare, including Fang's own brother. By the time you meet Fang’s parents everyone’s already switched to it, but they throw in the caveat of deadnaming Fang as well and reiterating that Fang is “just going through a phase” (something that the game later just tells you outright is true).

The sole SJW character from earlier, Trish, is probably the most blatantly propaganda-ish—she is also the only black-coded character, you know, just by happenstance (also Anon says she texts in “ebonics” in ending 1? which just doesn’t make any sense under the worldbuilding here, where species is just a substitute for race mostly? Very odd to fuck up your worldbuilding just to have your MC call something “ebonics”). In a particularly telling sequence of events, she pulls off a heist to embarrass Anon in front of everyone at school for the sole purpose of outcasting him from the band’s friend group, a tactic which succeeds at embarrassing Anon but fails at cleanly removing him from the friend group, as he takes Fang with him, something that Trish is shown at multiple points to be extremely angry about. This cements her (again, probably the only vaguely actively queer-positive main character left in the story at this point) as the “villain”, or at least, the single worst influence on Fang as a person.

There are 4 endings in Snoot Game (Spoilers from here on out! If you care about that, which you shouldn’t.), and only 2 in which Fang remains nonbinary. Of these endings, there is one where Fang shoots up the school, and the other leaves Fang (presumably) depressed, “looking like a junkie”, and with (gasp) tattoos, black lipstick, and a shaved head. During this second ending, which takes place 4 or 5 years after the events of most of the game, Anon thinks to himself that “I couldn’t save her (sic). Why would I save her? In her infinite talent can’t she see she’s a dump?”. Aside from the fact that all of Anon’s conclusions in ending 2 about Fang’s mental state are assumed to be true despite him having only seen them in passing at a restaurant (maybe Fang was just having a bad day or something, you never know), the only 2 endings which allow Fang to be nonbinary are also shown to be the “worst”. Take note of this!

In the other 2 endings, Fang switches back to using their old name (again, this is 4chan-written, so despite everyone else having birthnames like “Naser” and “Trish”, Fang’s birth name is “Lucy”. Real creative.) In these endings, Fang tells you something between that they were pretending to be nonbinary for attention, or that Trish drove them into it. (sidenote: Anon is able to switch almost instantly to calling Fang “Lucy” in both of these endings, despite only ever having known them as Fang. And yet switching names is simultaneously shown as something too confusing and hard for Fang’s parents to do. Interesting.) These are also the “best” endings. In one, Anon reunites with Fang years later and they have settled into a “motherly but still available” role helping out kids at the local church, so basically, the tradwife ending. And in the other one, and also the “best” ending in the game, Anon and Fang date for the rest of the year, break things off temporarily when Anon attends college, reunite after a time-skip and get married. Also, Fang is a schoolteacher in this one, which further reinforces the idea that for Fang to be happy, they need to not only detransition, but they need to take up the “traditionally female” role of being a caretaker. (Also, in one of the endings, you get the context that before Fang “started this whole non-binary deal” they were happier then too, so there’s another data point to correlate, I guess.)

Look—there’s nothing inherently wrong about writing a wish fulfillment romance story about a dominant and self-confident white guy finding his submissive caretaker white wife and living happily ever after. You do you bro. But there is something pretty fucky about presenting a traditional lifestyle as the ONLY path to happiness. And there’s something Extremely fucky about doing this by taking a queer character from someone else’s story, making your story about how de-transing them is the only way they can achieve happiness, and then releasing your story early in the hopes that your fanon interpretation supersedes whatever actually happens in the original source material.

But probably the most fucky is that a lot of this is subtextual and clearly is easily ignored by most, which allows its ideas to spread. Do not take me lightly by my saying that Snoot Game is propaganda, because it is. By word count, most of this game is just standard faire SoL wish fulfillment fantasy. Anon goes stargazing with Fang in one route, he goes to an aquarium with them in another. Normal shit. It’s just coupled with the added caveat of, you know, the whole arc of the game being dependent on the presumption of many of its characters that Fang’s trans-ness is just a phase, and that this presumption is ultimately proven correct. The shot is, (really, any number of bigotries, but most predominantly) transphobia and NB erasure, with SoL romance as a chaser. Again, really insidious shit.

This is why I feel uncomfortable giving this anything more than a 1/10. Snoot Game is generally paced well, has a lot of surprisingly decent music, and a lot of very well-done illustrations, but in service of what? Of fulfilling a delusional fantasy of “solving” someone’s trans-ness? Of spreading the idea that “if I just get them to fall in love with me, I can save them from their wicked ways (being queer)!” And of also spreading the idea that queer people are mentally ill and doomed to loneliness, lest they renounce their ways? Fuck riiiight off.