Ico is the type of game I dread to play, critically acclaimed, landmark classic of the medium, influenced various games and designers I love. I dread playing those because of a fear I have, a fear that's come true : I don't like ICO, in fact, I think I might hate ICO. And now I will have to carry that like a millstone around my neck, "that asshole who doesn't like ICO". Its not even really that external disapproval I dread, its the very reputation that causes me to second guess my own sincerely held opinions. I thought I liked minimalism in game design, and cut-scene light storytelling and relationships explored through mechanics but I guess I don't. There's some kinda dissonance, cognitive or otherwise reading reviews by friends and writers I respect and wondering if there's something wrong with me or if I didnt get it or played it wrong or any other similar foolishness that gets bandied around in Internet discussions. "I wish we could have played the same game" I think, reading my mutuals' reviews of ICO. Not in a dismissive asshole way of accusing them of having a warped perception, but moreso in frustration that I didnt have the experience that has clearly touched them and countless others.

But enough feeling sorry for myself/being insecure, what is my problem with ICO exactly? I don't really know. Genuinely. I wasnt even planning on writing a review originally because all it would come down to as my original unfiltered reaction would be "Playing it made me miserable". Thankfully the upside of minimalism in game design is that its easier to identify which elements didnt work for me because there are few in the game. I think the people who got the most out of ICO developed some kind of emotional connection to Yorda, and thats one aspect which absolutely didn't work for me. As nakedly "gamey" and transparently artificial as Fallout New Vegas' NPCs (and Skyrim and F3 etc) locking the camera to have a dialogue tree, they read to me as infinitely more human than the more realistic Yorda; for a few reasons. Chief among them is that despite some hiccups and bugs the game is known for, you are not asked to manage them as a gameplay mechanic beyond your companions and well, my main interaction with Yorda was holding down R1 to repeatedly yell "ONG VA!" so she'd climb down the fucking ladder. She'd climb down, get halfway through and then decide this was a bad idea and ascend again.

ICO has been to me a game of all these little frustrations piling up. Due to the nature of the puzzles and platforming, failing them was aggravating and solving them first try was merely unremarkable. It makes me question again, what is the value of minimalism genuinely? There was a point at which I had to use a chain to jump across a gap and I couldnt quite make it, I thought "well, maybe theres a way to jump farther" and started pressing buttons randomly until the circle button achieved the result of letting me use momentum to swing accross. Now, if instead a non-diegetic diagram of the face buttons had shown up on the HUD instead what would have been lost? To me, very little. Sure, excessive direction can be annoying and take me out of the game, but pressing buttons randomly did the same, personally. Nor did "figuring it out for myself" feel particularly fulfilling. Thats again what I meant, victories are unremarkable and failures are frustrating. The same can be said for the combat which, honestly I liked at first. I liked how clumsy and childish the stick flailing fighting style was, but ultimately it involved hitting the enemies over and over and over and over again until they stopped spawning. Thankfully you can run away at times and rush to the exit to make the enemies blow up but the game's habit of spawning them when you're far from Yorda or maybe when she's on a different platform meant that I had to rely on her stupid pathfinding to quickly respond (which is just not going to happen, she needs like 3 business days to execute the same thing we've done 5k times already, I guess the language barrier applies to pattern recognition as well somehow) and when it inevitably failed I would have to jump down and mash square until they fucked off.

I can see the argument that this is meant to be disempowering somehow but I don't really buy it. Your strikes knock these fuckers down well enough, they just keep getting back up. Ico isnt strong, he shouldnt be able to smite these wizard of oz monkeys with a single swing, but then why can they do no damage to ICO and get knocked down flat with a couple swings? Either they are weak as hell but keep getting remotely CPRd by the antagonist or they're strong but have really poor balance. In the end, all I could really feel from ICO was being miserable. I finished the game in 5 hours but it felt twice that. All I can think of now is that Im glad its done and I can tick it off the bucket list. I am now dreading playing shadow of the colossus even harder, and I don't think I ever want to play The Last Guardian, it just looks like ICO but even more miserable. I'm sure I've outed myself as an uncultured swine who didnt get the genius of the experience and will lose all my followers but I'm too deflated to care. If there is one positive to this experience is that I kept procrastinating on finishing the game that I got back into reading. I read The Name of the Rose and Rumble Fish, pretty good reads. Im going to read Winesburg Ohio next I think.

All games are products of their time, even ones which "bucked trends" or "were ahead of their time" are only so in comparison with their contemporaries. RE5 is interesting historically because it definitely screams 7th gen : the color grading pejoratively described as the "piss filter" of brown environments assaulted with bloom, the co-op multiplayer focus of the days where such things were starting to become mainstream in the console market, the mowing down of hundreds of racist caricatures by a buff white guy, the fact that Albert Wesker's tailor discovered normal maps and is really excited to absolutely plaster them on his jacket etc.

Its hard to avoid noticing the main two things which jump at you when playing re5, namely that its RE4 but not as good and more racist. Asset reuse is fine, honestly, even mechanics recycled from re4 arent unwelcome but its the rehashing of re4 set pieces whilst doing them worse that lets re5 down. Similarly, the ingenious inventory management mechanic of the RE4 attache case : equal parts survival horror resource management and tetris space allocation is replaced by a dull 3×3 grid whose ultimate depth involves exchanging shit to your ai partner to reload a weapon before exchanging it right back.

The multiplayer aspect makes re5 have kind of an absurd difficulty curve based on your luck in finding partners. Some sections with the Ai partner were a bit patience testing, given their passive nature and limited commands, but then Id get randomly paired up with a god on their fifth playthrough who'd hand me 300 bullets for the machine gun and absolutely tear mfers up with endgame weapons. Very funny to me as well, how certain doors and weights and stuff require the cooperation of chris and sheva because of course its too heavy for a guy whos built like a brick shithouse, he needs help from a small framed spinning instructor to move it.

That being said, its got its bright moments and thankfully the multiplayer aspect made the use of QTEs for custcenes impossible so it does have that over RE4. In all honesty, its not an AWFUL game gameplay wise. There are a few levels which are quite striking visually, namely the temple areas and the faster arcadey nature of it all makes it not better but different to the pace of RE4. The implementation of a cover system and gun wielding zombies is as stupid and unwelcome as you'd expect, and the smoking gun for me that the island in RE4 is not only the worst part of that game but an incredibly ill omen of things to come for the franchise.

I suppose I should mention the elephant in the room : the game is set in "Africa". Not very specific where in Africa except the locals speak French so theres about 20 countries that could apply to. The spectre of the war on terror looms large as the intro depicts an american leading a counter terrorism operation and soon we see Akihiko from Persona 3 doing an arab accent get executed by frenzied locals riled up by a preacher. And sure, like in re4 the reason for it all is a parasitic infestation but the visual language of the game borrows a lot from contemporary wars that its hard to miss. There are heroic black characters like Sheva and her captain buddy but they seem there more as a pre emptive defense at criticism.
Admittedly, considering the state of AAA games at the time, RE5 is not THAT much more racist that the other shooters about doing imperialism in thr global south; that is until you get to the chapter where the enemies are all black people wearing grass skirts and chucking spears at you. And im sorry but zombie or no zombie, that sequence made me surprised to find out that Rudyard Kipling's ghost didnt have a writing credit in the game.

Smarter and more personally invested people than me have already talked about this aspect so I won't go much deeper into it except to say that its an odd obsession with studios who thrive on schlock and silliness to try to delve into more serious or thorny subjects that they are not equipped to handle.

Finished my replay of this game on hard mode. There wasn't much of a difference with normal except that obviously you take fewer hits before you go down. Perhaps one day I'll play on realistic but something tells me that will cross the line into being annoying for my playstyle.

If you've followed me for a while or even if you've been in the same room as me for more than 15 minutes you might now that I despise stealth games. I've tried, but I genuinely hate them all. MGS, Thief, Dishonored, even stealth sections in games I like (shenmue, max payne, disaster report 4). I've had bad luck with so called Immersive Sims because of it, as most of them are essentially stealth arpg hybrids like Deus Ex, but so far its basically only the OG (and consortium by virtue of not having stealth) that I mess with. Its not exactly a mystery why, and consider this a plea for other games to follow suit : let me murder everyone. Give me an actual choice between stealth and combat and not just stealth and "you fucked up the stealth you idiot! you might as well reload a save"

Importantly, Deus Ex's combat is deceptively fun to get to grips with. Its so simple but really effective the way that you start out as someone who takes 2 business days to line up a pistol shot to being able to run around with the gep gun blowing people up like nothing. I'm surprised no one else has tried emulating the system, with your RPG esque weapon stats determining how fast your crosshair takes to narrow and become fully accurate, presumably imitating how it takes someone to aim down the sights and prepare to fire a shot.

Now, obviously for this kind of game there has to be push back, and even with a combat build your ass is not going to last if you're trying to play the game like half life, which is precisely why its satisfying to completely forgo stealth and murder everyone through traps, ambushes etc. This playthrough I discovered how useful the non lethal gas grenades are for murder runs (ironically) cause it makes enemies freeze up to rub their eyes, lining up to get headshot with the pistol for maximum murder efficiency.

The playthrough did however highlight Deus Ex's biggest flaw : the save system. Its one of those systems which is simultaneously too annoying and too forgiving. Its annoying because I am forgetful, and losing 15 mins of progress because I forgot to save is just... frustrating. On the other hand, there is basically nothing stopping you from hardcore save scumming every 5 seconds. Ironically, there is nothing more appropriately "mean" for a choice based rpg than an aggressive auto save, as it is, you can basically game most of the big decisions and encounters. Maybe even a save room system like RE4 might be appropriate? Could even lock them behind doors with an interesting weighing up of resources if its worth risking a loss of progress for a lockpick or multitool? Idk now Im playing armchair designer but either way.

Area 51 is still kinda annoying, I didnt use console commands to noclip through it this time but I still fused with Helios because it was the fastest way to complete the level, the later bits of the game are kind of a downgrade from the initial half of the game.

Harold Halibut is a very technically impressive (when its not bugging out or dropping frames) feat, which unfortunately puts its gorgeous claymation style and cinematography in service of an overwritten, overindulgent miserable slog which might have been refreshing were it a fifth of its length instead of the overbearing wank we got instead.

Wank is the operative word here, the game is spiritually similar to jerking off. It takes inspiration from various sources, wes anderson films chief among them, but from what few films I have seen of those, they were much more entertaining and well written. The sheer nothingness of the gameplay even for narrative focused adventure games and amount of dialogue that was 3 lines too long for what it needed to be really fits together when you learn about the game's 10 year development time. This is someone's baby, presumably a labour of love, but thats the thing, sometimes you need to detach yourself emotionally from your work and cut things when they don't actually add anything. The most damning thing of all, after all that, 8 goddamned hours (it felt twice that) I feel nothing. The game is nothing. I am nothing. We're all nothing. And I have 8 fewer hours now before I return to the nothingness of oblivion with little to show for it.

As galling as delisting a game is when such things as licenses lapsing or developers going bankrupt slash any other quirks of the fucked up nightmare that is intellectual property law which also reminds us of how precarious our "ownership" of digital products are, at the very least there is a resignation of "well, what can you do?". The developers might be as upset by it than we are. Not so the case with consortium 2014, a messy, janky, rough gem of a talky imsim-lite and time capsule for the source engine's popularity during the 2010s, which you CANNOT have anymore (piracy and steam codes notwithstanding, of course) because its been delisted.

Not for legal reasons, its been delisted because the game is being remade in Unreal Engine 5 as "Consortium Remastered" and presumably they thought having the original compete with the new one would be bad for sales. Personally, I think such a thing should be punishable through some kind of public humiliation, like putting the CEO in medieval stocks in the public squares so little kids can point and laugh and others may righfully throw produce at em.

So much of consortium's charm lay in its janky source engine rough edges that this attempt at erasing history is as ill-advised as it immoral. I don't even hate Unreal Engine 5, hell, I use it for work all the time (both uni work and currently in an internship), its a great piece of software and has helped to further democratize development and lower costs. But well, opening up the remastered Beta Playtest given to every consortium 2014 owner and seeing the interior of the iconic Zenlil lit up in the obvious lumen light engine with its characteristic bloom, compared to the more grounded and lived in lighting of the original, well, its tiring.

At time of writing, consortium remastered is still in Beta, but seemingly close to release (though given this dev, their promises of release dates are hard to take seriously). There are few things I can say about this particular version of the game, given that its just consortium 2014 but shinier, basically; so if you'll indulge me I'll spend the rest of the review eulogizing the original and the rest of the "franchise" that never was.

Consortium 2014 is an im-sim lite / adventure game. Its close to the idea of the "one block city rpg" that figures such as Warren Spector have theorized in the past, with density and variation of gameplay approaches and world expanded through compressing the scope to a tightly designed small play area. Rather than a city block, consortium takes place exclusively with the Zenlil, a plane/spaceship of the 2040s. It starts in medias res with you taking control of bishop 6 through the metanarrative of IGDI, essentially a contemporary company which uses a sci-fi satellite to transfer the consciousness of its "players" to the future (yeah, you're playing a game within a game, it gets meta). If there is one strength of consortium, its mysteries : not in a JJAbrams sense, as they actually get somewhat satisfyingly resolved, but in the sense that you're the classic fish-out-of-water piloting the body of an existing person in an unfamiliar setting, hence there is much about the world and plot which is thrown at you without explanation and its up to you to find out. You CAN ask people about things, but they'll also be weirded out if you don't know about basic shit, because, well, its like someone today asking you who Joe Biden is and what a constitutional republic is etc. The Voice acting is pretty mixed in quality, admittedly.

Choosing how and if you want to share your REAL identity is great, and though none of you will be able to legally obtain this game until the remaster comes out, I'd feel bad about spoiling how it all unfolds. The bite-sized nature of the game allows for a pretty nice level of divergence, with multiple playthroughs yielding pretty different results. At the same time, the game was originally supposed to be much bigger and divided into 2 parts only for easier development/getting money in to finish the rest of the game, and you can tell. The combat is... not great, its like half life 2 combat but somehow even more weightless, and even the little that exists is basically completely optional. Arguably this is a good thing, both because of its mediocrity and also because an Im-sim allowing for completely pacifist solutions is a sign of good design, but it does feel like a waste. There's a high jump module you can equip, but its basically useless aboard the tightly packed Zenlil.

Its sort of the contradiction of Consortium, with the tight scope being much to its benefit, but also leaving a lot of room for expansion, its a game that definitely leaves you itching for more; especially given the cliffhanger. Spoilers I suppose, though I don't think it matters much: The game ends really abruptly with the player's death and a message from the fictional in-game development team saying "okay we can fix this and let you play the climactic mission the game's entire narrative has been building towards through some handwavey bullshit". Osama Bin Laden's 80s Ski Instructor son has taken over Churchill Tower (incidentally, of the game's various predictions its funny how they got the CRT nostalgia right but thought that Al Qaeda was still going to be relevant all the way to 2042) in London and its up to Bishop 6 to stop it through a combination of first person shooting and dialogue choices.

In real life, this lead to the sequel Consortium : The Tower, which at the time of writing sits in Early Access with a "mixed" reception on Steam. It has not been updated in years. From what I can gather, the game is on the level of quality and divergence of the original, but is equally buggy and only about 1/3rd of the final vision of the game's full scope. As morbidly curious as I am about the game's current state, especially given that it may one day be delisted or updated into a completely different state like its predecessor was, giving the studio money for it at this point feels irresponsible for me. Now, in fairness, as per the game's steam page, the developers claim that shifiting to UE5 and making a VR port (which they were working on for years instead of working on the Tower, though they say that they were doing it during their free time as a passion project) is all to make the development costs affordable enough to finish The Tower, that consortium 2014's bugginess prevented the game from taking off beyond its niche cult status and thus making the cost of the Tower (which admittedly had a failed kickstarter) prohibitively expensive without more funding or reducing the size of the dev team. I can sympathize with some of that, game dev is a nightmare pain in the ass and capitalism is a bitch to the niche products without major backing, but that doesnt excuse delisting consortium or even working on the remaster instead of The Tower. I can sort of buy the latter as "practice" on UE5 to make the Tower's eventual development smoother, but that all depends on whether or not that shit get's actually released at some point.

I don't know, I don't have much of a conclusion here, other than to thank you if you read the whole thing and excuse my rambling. If you can get a steam key or "gifted" copy of the original, that's great, I hope more people get to play the game in it's original janky glory.

Edit : Okay I thought of something I wanted to mention for a closer. There's a bit in the game where a grumpy injured crewmember is taken to the medical bay to be put in the futuristic scanner machine and he says "if you find cancer or something, I don't want to know" and even though I'd heard the line before it still made me laugh.

January 2022 I played Dark Souls 2 : Scholar of the first sin for the first time, it took a while to click but eventually I fell in love with it and the series as a whole.

April 2024 It is with a heavy heart that I must face facts : I cannot play these games anymore. A similar thing has happened to me before, in 2022 I had the same realization about the total war games, but I have since been able to replay them a few years later. So I'd like to say its not "goodbye souls" but "see you later souls". I've simply grown too used to them, as replayable as they are, there is just nothing to excite me anymore. I will note however, that demons' souls was the last holdout.

Admittedly, this is probably less due to Demons' Souls' qualities than it is to the fact that I have done fewer runs of it than DS1 and 2 which I have played to death, by virtue of having to get my ps3 out of storage to play it, but nevertheless I find myself thinking about IT in particular lately.

Spoilers for Demons Souls I guess

The last time I played it I felt like the protagonist of Shadows over Insmouth or even 1984 when the cosmic horror hit as I made my way through the swamp of sorrows and thought to myself "oh god, I'm actually enjoying this". Miyazaki's psy-op finally got to me, whichever pheromone infused miasma the swamps emanate has made it into my head. Are these thoughts my own anymore? Am I but a vessel for the sacrifice to the great god of toxic swamp water that From Software has built an altar to?

Before any of the Demon Souls superfans get too pleased with their new convert, I think my overall enjoyment of DeS has stayed about the same; case in point I think I fucking hate 1-3 and 1-4. I think DeS strengths lie in atmosphere, in novel challenge revolving around environmental traversal, elemental match-ups, slow, methodical exploration and puzzle bossfights. In terms of straight up combat gauntlets its been utterly left in the dust by later entries, and its my least favourite aspect of the game. My ass also got killed because I accidentally climbed over a railing my rubbing too close to it and jumped into a 3 enemy gank, which felt less like punishing poor awareness and more getting fucked by weird controls. How hard is it to add a button press for mantling over obstacles? Either way, FromSoft abandoned that shit almost inmediately so its nice to know they agree with me.

The Blue dragon fucking sucks. The red dragon as an obstacle in 1-1 and 1-2 works perfectly, thematically and mechanically it serves its role of pseudoboss/setpiece wonderfully. The blue dragon sucks, whether or not you get past his second phase seems more luck to me than anything else given the disconnect between the visual outline and hitbox of his fire breath (especially if you rescue the knight dude) and given he guards the false king, as a player you're going to be seeing him a lot, leaving you to either absolutely master his bullshit timing or do the slow, tedious process of killing him with arrows. I have only ever fought King Allant "honourably" like 2 times maybe, because by the time I get to 1-4 my enthusiasm for DeS has grown thin and the tedium of the dragon and runback occupy such a space in my mind, that I usually just pull out the thief ring + poison cloud cheese combo, and I admit that with 0 shame. Its unfortunate, because the first time I fought King Allant I was legitimately sweating by the end of it, it was an incredible rush of adrenaline, but that fucking dumbass dragon had to fuck it up.

That's kind of DeS' double edged sword. It fucks with you, and dares you to fuck with it back, which is great when you max out health regen items so you can tank the poison and absolutely breeze through the swamp, but less great when you realize the optimum interaction with the world tendency system is to act in such a way that you dont have to engage with it at all i.e kill yourself in the nexus and always go in soul form. I get the logic in body form having the supposed risk/reward of extra health vs the chance to make the entire area harder if you die with it, but the usual obtuseness added to the fact that 25% extra health isn't particularly helpful compared to potentially getting into black world tendency, there isn't much of a choice. The added mechanic of item drop rates going up with black world tendency is also kind of pointless because pure white levels with sub-optimally upgraded weapons are infinitely easier than pure black with maxed out weapons. There's just not much of a choice here. You could argue that maybe there wasnt intended to BE a choice, given that the NPC which explained this mechanic was removed during development, but even as an opaque mechanic it cannot help but incentivise not bothering with it at all. Especially given the focus on cooperation I think they had to have realized people would crack the code on it eventually.

The poise system is weird, in that its an example of a system that is both too punishing and way too forgiving for the player, which is weird. Compared to the later souls games (though admittedly DS1 maybe went a bit too far in making poise OP) it fucks with the usual dynamic of the combat wherein you commit to every attack, both yours and the enemies' being slow and interruptable leading to tense back and forths. In DeS though, there is no poise, just hyper armor given by attacks. This leads to some weirdness. Take the scale miners in world 2. They are extremely tough skinned mindless workers in the mines of boletaria, they are very resistant to slashing damage but vulnerable to magic and pierce (and maybe blunt I think). So you'd think then that they would be able to shrug off any attacks from you and attack uninterrupted. This isnt really the case though, because hyper armor only kicks in during certain frames of attacks, hence if they start their pickaxe attack they are absolutely impossible to interrupt by quick thinking, as the attack has basically 0 windup before it enters the hyper armor phase, but if you hit em before they attack you can absolutely stunlock em into oblivion. The same is true of the blue and red-eyed knights who are way easier than they were likely intended to be because they don't have poise. This is what I mean, its both too punishing (doesnt seem to follow the dynamic of the rest of the combat) and too easy to abuse. The red eye knights in 1-3 are absolute dickheads for this, their charging spear attack can get spammed ad infinitum, with basically 0 cooldown and grants hyper armor. Thankfully I have a bow, but the amount of enemies in 1-3 is one reason why I hate it so much.

But nowhere is this poise problem demonstrated more than with Garl Vinland. Poor garl, serving a corrupt demon without poise. For some reason, of the heavy weapons which get hyper armor in DeS, seemingly the ultra greatswords and his fuck off hammer were excluded, and even if it wasnt easy as hell to parry him / get his hammer to smack the wall harmlessly, his dumbass heavy armor grants him 0 resistance to being stunlocked into oblivion. Compare him to Havel, who can also be cheesed, but at least he shrugs off attacks with a toothpick and hits you with his fuck off hammer regardless.

All that said, I love worlds 2,3 and to a lesser extent 4 and 5. 1-1 and 1-2 are great. Atmosphere and visual design wise they are great treats. I read an article I'll link here which brought up an interesting point I've been thinking about lately, which speaks to DeS' longstanding cult status. In the article they compare the flamelurker design in DeS and its remake, and how the latter looks like "artstation fire demon", which is harsh but kind of true. Its what you make when a director asks you for a fire demon, and if there is something that defines DeS I think, its that it embodies the opposite, for good and for ill. The vanguard demon, the storm king, maiden astraea, phalanx even, these all subvert usual genre expectations and give something rather unique without feeling try-hard. Everything else about its design from its mechanics to the art all seem to follow the rule of not just doing the obvious, the easy, the straightforward.

Think about the tutorial, where after maybe defeating the vanguard demon (which again, is not the type of enemy one would usually put as a beginner boss, both in its lethality and slight goofiness of the design) you are taken to an area with some loot and then are put in front of a giant humanoid dragon, who kills you not by breathing fire and melting you (i.e what you would expect) but by hitting you with a big old punch.

So all my complaints aside, I have to respect Demons' Souls, and if I manage to get back into souls at some point in the future, I hope I get to enjoy being brainwashed into liking 5-2 again. And despising that fucking dragon asshole.

Replayed RE4, this time using the "real" version with controller rather than mouse and keyboard. The argument I had heard was that re4 wasn't properly balanced for mouselook, which makes the broken headshot + kick combo for crowd control a lot easier. And after playing it, yeah that's definitely the case, especially at first.This WAS my second playthrough though, and after getting used to the stiffness (and the added clunkiness of playing on a handheld switch with default joycons) I found it to not be that much harder than the PC version.

Its a credit to RE4 that even when I was playing horrendously, getting my ass handed to me by that initial village siege and even running out of ammo a few times in the beginning, I was still having a blast. Its also probably indicative of RE4's dynamic difficulty system, that I struggled the most with the early game, so I'm guessing it took pity on me. I admit I haven't played the other RE games other than a bit of Revelations 2, mainly because they seem more horror-y and less action-y.

I played through RE4 during a weeklong trip to london where I was away from my PC. Unfortunately that meant I had to interrupt my playthrough of Killer 7 (which does share some surface similarities to RE4, both part of the capcom 5, both made by mikami, both combine puzzles and shooting at slow enemies, etc) which due to my ADHD almost always murders my motivation/interest for a game. It proved to be the case here as well, I'll have to complete the second half of that game at some other point in the future.

I also attempted pro-mode for re4 but quite frankly, it's beyond my abilities. I made it to stage 3-2 or so and I just couldn't play well enough to not be stomped on by the onslaught of cultists. Supporting my theory that RE4's dynamic difficulty was going easy on me, as pro mode simply locks you to the highest difficulty the whole way through. Its a shame, because for the first few levels, it actually increased my enjoyment of RE4, by forcing me to play "better", exploiting every advantage and learning new strats to overcome the insane odds.

I still think the island is lame, as long as the castle goes on for, I think its the high point for the game. Its also insane to me that the Del Lago bossfight is the first bossfight in the game. First of all, because it sucks, the worst bossfight in the game imo, but also because you'd think the gimmick boss fight using different-ish mechanics to the core gameplay would be put in around the middle or something, to shake things up, but no. Its especially weird cause almost inmediately you have El Gigante which is both a better bossfight and would make a much better first boss.

I still had to laugh during the cutscene before Del Lago, when the castillian peasant says "andale". To those who don't know about spanish dialects, thats like making a game set in rural australia and seeing a random bogan say in his best Larry the Cable guy impression : git er dun! Or something along those lines. Its not even just that the NPCs sound mexican or whatever, cause some of them sound like spanish isn't their first language, others sound plausibly from mainland spain but their dialogue was seemingly machine translated from english? And okay, they kinda get the benefit of the doubt cause the location within spain is never specified, but their pronunciation of "imbecil" indicates they use "seseo" which would mean they are either in southern spain or the canary islands, neither of which sound likely. The real answer is "who gives a shit? They grabbed whomever around the office who knew some spanish and put em in the recording booth" and It doesn't actually bother me, hell, Ive heard the remake replaces the VO with more accurate, professional voices and that sounds lame as hell.

So yeah, RE4 is still good, and now I can say I beat it "properly".

When playing RDR2, the main comparison that kept popping into my head was with Shenmue. Its not a 1-to-1 comparison, but there are parallels that kept becoming more apparent the more I played it, and maybe serve to help explain why I didn't quite connect to RDR2 in the way that seemingly lots of people have. Superficially, they're both highly acclaimed open world games with very high production values, maybe even too high, given their famously insane development costs. They're both steeped in a sort of simulated immersive realism, with a scattershot approach to their mechanics providing a toybox for the player to experiment outside the critical path. They both borrow from other mediums for inspiration, namely film and television, and both outstayed their welcome with me. They both gesture at some rather grand ideas related to family, revenge, greed but never quite managed to emotionally connect in the way I think they wanted me to, though perhaps for quite different reasons. They both have stealth sections I wish weren't in the game.

On its own, RDR2 leaves me with pretty ambivalent feelings. The most obvious place to start is with the technical aspects. RDR2 is probably one of the most impressive technical achievements of the medium when it comes to photorealism. Especially as I start to learn more about photography and lighting in my own game dev career knowing all that goes into it, I could genuinely spend hours just standing in the middle of a field looking at the clouds and the beautifully rendered rays of sunlight. This is especially impressive because for the most part I'm really not that obsessed with this sort of thing as I think the average gamer is, considering the rave reviews it received aided in large part by this technical marvel. Really, I think photorealism is a fool's game, and later on I'll explain how RDR2 kinda proves me right in that sense, but its so disarmingly beautiful that I'll forgive its too high cost and relatively unimaginative art direction. As Joseph Stalin once said : "the boundless beauty of planet earth has an art direction all of its own".

As I walk through a meticulously researched, faithful recreation of NOT New Orleans full of fully modeled, textured and lit representatives of the era overhearing conversations in different languages, greeting strangers who I can at any point stick up and start a micro story of my own with a high speed chase with the law ending with me blowing them all up with dynamite, well I start to understand why people of 1998 would poop their pants when they realized they could open up their grandma's cupboard and pick up an orange and rotate freely about Ryo Hazuki's hands. I'm actually working on a game set in a similar-ish time period and a week or so ago I was struggling to figure out how to model a particular victorian street lamp, whose exact model I found in the game in one of the towns and went "ohh so thats how they did it". It was not even the last time I saw something in the game which I had done something similar to, which was pretty cool to see.

Spoilers for RDR2

The problem though, with the world of RDR2, is that I don't think it wants to BE an open world. I think maybe this type of thing made more sense in GTA, from 3 onwards where seemingly the campaign was there to both tutorialise all of the toys but also to provide a break from the unstructured mayhem to a more structured set of goals. This might work better when the sandbox is the focus, and the story mostly taking the piss with its tongue-in-cheek satirical tone. In RDR2 though, this structure is at odds with itself. For all the meticulously crafted, reactive playset being created here, it cannot be allowed to mess with the critical path on the one hand, with a lot of the games' progression gated off (like the guns) by story missions and conversely the story is undercut by the freedom allowed by the open world. It makes me feel as if every chapter was at one point supposed to be a contained open world section before moving to the next, but was simply stitched together into one big mess. "Here's Saint Denis Arthur, a monument to the current transition to industrialised capitalism and urbanisation in the wake of manifest destiny having been fully realized, this world of technological wonders contrasted with the poverty, pollution and discrimination of the Jim Crow era". "Yeah I know Dutch, I was here last week". A police chief greeted me in the game's epilogue and told me "Welcome to Town" even though I had just completed like 2 main story missions where he hired me to hunt a bounty.

There was a bit during the game's 2nd chapter (which is incidentally the chapter with the highest drop off in players on Steam on account of its length most likely) where I was getting inmersed in the camp, greeting the well realized colourful cast of characters interacting with each other when one of them said something along the lines of "well this sure beats being in those mountains" and "yeah it feels like we're getting back on our feet" and it stuck out to me because this was at a time where I was still doing sidequests and exploring for its own sake, added to the fact that this was a torturously long chapter of the game, it felt so incongruous. This is something you say when its been a week since we left the mountains, but it felt like it would have been like 3 months. Maybe this is just my own fucked up perception of time, but its hard not to notice how drawn out a lot of the chapters are. There is also the matter of the mission structure, which involves mostly riding back and forth with another character and then getting into a token shootout. Its almost comical considering how much of the narrative seems to focus on the grey morality of the gang and their seeming downward spiral from semi robin hood figures (criminals with a heart of gold maybe) into common thugs, when just in the cause of regular gameplay Arthur has killed enough people to populate a small country. Its another point at which the open world and missions clash, getting roped into a massacre in a mission leaves me with a massive bounty in a particular part of the map, but no worries, I can just pay off the bounty that came from me murdering 30 peoplein cold blood! Not the bounty from the inciting incident that kickstarts the game's plot mind you. It even undermines the thematic arc of the game of the days of the old west being over, the land now "tamed" (a nice detail being that there are several tourist attractions with the owners speaking of their clients from new york coming to "Experience the wild west" as the sanitized version of myth which was quickly capitalised upon by the likes of Buffalo Bill irl) with Arthur remarking that back in the old days one could simply escape trouble by moving to the next town, but in the logic of the bounty system, thats still the case! And for all that the gang is chased across america, this seems mostly to come from their continued attempts at killing and robbing people, rather than the law catching up with them all that much. The pinkertons show up once in a while but even then.

The game's story, whilst compelling, feels unsure of whether or not it wants a player, given how closely choreographed and railroaded the mission structures are. Much of the game feels like a designer trying to figure out how to cram in character dialogue whilst the player is actually doing something. Its another case where a game borrows so many cues from television that you start to wonder, what is the point of it all? Why make this and not just a season of HBO Presents : Arthur Morgan. What is it the game adds beyond the need to have token shootouts every 5 seconds, undermining the realism the game's systems and aesthetics are trying so hard to achieve? Well, for the most part the answer lies in the camp. If there is one thing that has kept me coming back to RDR2 for a whole 50 goddamned hours its the camp, the home base that the game is built around. The opportunities for roleplaying and really getting inmersed into this world, with a dozen or so well rounded, well realized characters interacting with the player and each other, catching glimpses of their lives and hopes and fears. Its great. As much as the game is far too long and the gameplay uninspired, the excellent dialogue and the roleplaying aspect where enough to keep me going to the finish line. So much so I reread Arthur's journal at the end and genuinely caught myself reading it in his particular cadence and voice in my head. He's a compelling character and if there had been more of the moments where Arthur interacts with Mary Linton, or walking around helping Rains Falls, maybe this would be the best game ever, but for everyone of those there are missions where you go a place and shoot a bunch of people, and another submission where a passerby begs you to help them and it involves riding on your horse for 10 minutes as they verbally explain their entire life's story and personality to you. Understandable that the quality of the game's writing would vary this much considering that by the look of the credits, more people worked on this game than on the Pyramids.

So much of the game's story feels like token, unfocused filler, a means to an end with the end being "Arthur gets closer to realising that Dutch is a complete fuckhead who doesn't know what he's doing". The Epilogue especially feels unnecessary except for perhaps the final confrontation but even then. I admit that I haven't played 1, but I am almost sure that all that bullshit in building the ranch and going clean and reconciling with Marston's wife ends with his wife and kid getting murdered within the first 15 minutes of that game. Its the prequel issue I suppose, like how much of BCS is spent on building the superlab even though its entire purpose is to exist for Walter to cook in and then destroy. At the end of it all though, I think the biggest failing for me is that after all that, despite Arthur Morgan's compelling character arc as he tries to do some good with what little time he has left, he died and I didn't really feel all that sad, nor did I cry, which is rather embarassing because I'm very easy to get to cry with sad stories. Added to that 6 hours of a goddamned epilogue have dampened even that. Idk man, Shenmue I felt disconnected to because I fundamentally couldn't really understand or relate to Ryo Hazuki or give much of a shit for his quest, but with RDR2 I just don't even know what to make of it. Maybe that's okay.

I love Half-Life 1, but up until this week I had never actually seen it through to the end. Am I a Hypocrite? Yes, but not because of that. I think Half Life 1 has a lot of peaks and valleys in terms of levels, but in all honesty I'd rather an excellent game which is occassionally bad than an overall ok or mediocre game; which incidentally gives away my opinion on its sequel.

The paradox of action games, is that they all live or die by their answer to one single question : "what happens when you're NOT shooting/stabbing/bludgeoning/rollerskating etc?". No great action game that I can think of can be ALL action ALL the time because it gets mind numbing. That doesn't mean that you need to load up your stylish action game with ancillary mechanics or a hybrid model until the store page can describe you as "action-adventure" but it means you need to think of something. RE4 to me is one of the most brilliant action games of all time precisely because it understood this : down time is important, in between harrowing, skin-of-your-teeth encounters with cultists and oddly accented spanish peasants there are quiet moments of both relieving and building back up the tension, scavenging for supplies, talking to the pirate merchant, a few odd puzzles.

Doom, the OG FPS (yeah yeah I know about Wolfenstein 3D but Doom was the real smash hit) knew this as well, for all its reputation would suggest, its not just an unending onslaught of cacodemons; there is hunting for secrets, an old id favourite and key hunting. Half Life kind of marks the evolutionary split in shooter design in this respect, both in the attempt at a new sort of immersive storytelling through following a single character without cutting away or through text dumps, and an emphasis on a more grounded take on similar material (i.e earth is invaded by fearsome creatures).

It owes a lot to its predecessors; one can hardly forget that its built on a heavily modified quake engine, but it goes for a decidedly different feel. It also answers the question mentioned at the beginning less with key card hunting or secrets, but with platforming sections and set pieces, as well as the odd puzzle and general ammo and health scavenging. There is an argument to be made, among those who would see the upcoming shift during 6th and 7th gen towards "realistic" shooters heralded by the likes of Halo and Medal of Honor as the death of the traditional subgenre now known as the "boomer shooter" until its eventual renaissance in the mid 2010s, that Half Life marks the turning point in that.

Spoilers for HL1 from here on out I guess, but c'mon, who hasnt played half life yet

Its kind of the missing link between those two currents, its both an attempt at realism, which starts with an unskippable non-combat section akin to most sci-fi B-Movies of old where 1 hour of scientists talking preceded any kind of monster/alien showing up, but you can bunny-hop through most of it. As much as silent protagonists seem to be out of fashion nowadays, it fit perfectly with the immersive narrative of Half-Life 1, where Gordon becomes an avatar of the player, both getting into the character of a scientist going to work at NOT area 51 but also how they react to the unfolding drama. Seeing the soldiers gunning down the scientists from my uninterrupted first person view was a lot more impactful that any amount of similar dramatic turning points in other games where they would have cut to a dramatic shot in a different aspect ration of Gordon looking shocked so you know to be shocked as well. Its half life 2 where this starts to become more incongruous, with a more fully characterised Gordon who apparently has seen the error of his ways and no longer shoots scientists in the head because its funny.

I suppose I should confess that the reason Half-Life 1's middle ground is appealing to me precisely because Im not much of a fan of its predecessors or successors. With both Doom and Quake I can appreciate their place in history but again, whenever the action stops in those I kind of lose interest.

Half Life 1 is definitely frontloaded in quality, which IMO is kind of common in games. I don't hate On a Rail like most people, and even Residue Processing I think is fine. Blast Pit is, well I respect the idea more than the execution, frankly. Whilst I consider Half Life to be a timeless classic, if there is one aspect that has aged horribly its the physics, ironic considering its follow-up being almost defined by its adoption of real time physics, for all of its faults, the havok engine is such an improvement upon the non-physics of pre-HL2 3D games (okay I know HL2 didn't invent physics engines). My kingdom for the stupid seesaw puzzles of half life 2 when the alternative is this system wherein pushing crates in place feels like trying to move a magnet across an ice rink by repelling it across the ground with an oppositely charged magnet. It also seems weird how much of an emphasis HL1 puts on precision platforming ( a certain infamous section in Surface Tension springs to mind ) when you're essentially piloting a Fridge on Rollerskates, which is great for combat as you bunnyhop around shooting at monsters in the face, but even the function to slowdown by holding shift still feels kinda programmed for a different game. Deus Ex has the same issue with its non-physics, and its also the one thing I don't like about it (well, that and its shit tutorial).

On this last and most recent playthrough, I finally decided to finish the game. I'd left a previous playthrough on surface tension but I made my way through the rest of the game including the infamous Xen. I wish I could sit here and join the seeming re-evaluation of Xen being "good, actually" but I think the haters are kind of right this time. Xen isn't awful, in particular though people are referring to the whole of the last part of the game set in the Xen portal world, I think the level called Xen is pretty alright. Gonarch's lair is godawful, however, a buggy, ill-conceived set piece boss fight of the worst kind. Interloper is okay, if a bit haphazard in its design, just sending an insane amount of enemies at you but also having the slow healing chambers at every step feels rushed as hell compared to the measured encounter design of the rest of the game, probably victim of the famously short development time of Xen. Nihilanth sucks, and I will take no argument against this point, its really bad.

The thing with Xen is, it almost works. Its weirdness and shitter level design arguably helps in making it feel more alien, less designed for a human to navigate it, but in practice it never really committs to this aspect enough, with the constant ammo drops around (left by previous scientists I know, still doesn't make it feel not cheap) and the health showers which heal you as well because reasons. And well, a lot of the times its not all that alien, the confusion arising less from the geiger inspired hive being made for other creatures, and moreso that the level design has communicated or implied a path forward through its structure, only to intend a different one. That bit with the holes opening intermittently in the ground springs to mind.
Aesthetically the design is great, with a combination of industrial and biologic flavour to the architecture.

The main issue though for Xen is that it feels like a climax for a different game. Through the unfolding drama of Half Life's Black Mesa incident involving government coverups, desperate escapes, scientists playing god etc. Xen doesn't really feel like a conclusion to all of that. Indeed, the game's ending, whilst a genius sequel-hook, doesn't answer much of anything. Intentionally-so, but Valve has pulled this bullshit so many times its hard to believe they'll ever provide any kind of narratively satisfying conclusion to a half life game ever (ironically, the shittest half life game Blue Shift is the only one which does this, with Barney getting to go home, although undermined by the knowledge that almost inmediately earth got invaded by an all powerful genocidal space empire). I haven't played Black Mesa, because a fan Half Life remake sounds dumb, but I have heard they make Xen last like twice as long, which seems like it would be torturous. For all my complaints I will say, Xen is mercifully short.

At the end of the day, Half Life's later half being not as good isn't really a problem for me, I'd rather have its peaks and valleys as opposed to overall ok games that I'll forget as soon as I play it. In a way, I'd argue Xen's questionable quality has helped HL1 more than hindered it, the flaws make the good aspects shine by contrast.

I'm a big fan of genre mashups. For a while now, the best way to get my attention and stand out from within the neverending tide of new releases is to do "genre 1 + genre 2" to make combinations I haven't seen before. Sometimes these result in great new games that do something innovative, and sometimes they produce an incoherent mess, or just an underwhelming experience. And whilst I associate most of this school of design with modern indie games, I knew that they certainly weren't the inventors of this approach; and I thought I had to pay my respects to the OG weird genre mashup : Actraiser (and yeah I know there were weird genre mixes even further back depending on what you count but remember that video game genres are bullshit anyways so its fine)

The strength of a hybrid gameplay model is 2 fold. One is that its an in-built tool for pacing wherein one mode is a nice change of pace/a break from the other. Though more conventional, games like Persona (3 onwards), XCOM, Recettear etc keep the line going up and down with their respective gameplay models. When I'm tired of hanging out in P5 I can do a dungeon and when Im tired of that I can go back and eat a giant burger in Shibuya. The other is that the gameplay modes can feed into each other and make what might be two vastly different mechanical exercises integrate more closely through these connections like getting weapon fragments from killed aliens in missions in XCOM to build laser rifles back in the base to kill aliens more efficiently to get more fragments etc.

That last part is usually the make or break for the genre hybrid in my experience. At best, the two tie seamlessly together in a way that it makes you wonder how no one thought about this before, at worst both become a slog or one feels bolted to the other unnaturally, you resent one mode from keeping you away from the other. There is also a third approach, where you simply don't try all that hard to integrate the two modes or even at all, which can also work.

Actraiser kinda tries to integrate its city building with its castlevania-esque action platforming, but not super hard. And I think it works in that respect. You play as an avatar of "the NOT Christian God" helping various settlements to grow in population by directing them to build towards available land, clearing swamps and foliage, killing demons who respawn until the towns grow close enough to their lairs to close them etc. You do this so more people can worship you, which makes you more powerful and therefore more able to foil the plans of "NOT Satan". Its a cool (and you'll forgive me for using this word) ludonarrative, wherein a symbiotic relationship exists between god and those who worship him, God protects his flock from evil who in turn make him stronger. It also pre empts the usual narrative question of "how can there be an antagonist to an omnipotent being?" by making the battle between good and evil also a battle for the hearts and minds of people, the will of the creator being realized through their work.

This is brought up more explicitly during the Maranha Arc, an island with a pretty substantial presence of monsters, leaving you to constantly kill the demons in the overworld lest they get 5 seconds to burn the peoples' crops. The narrative of that particular episode involves the people being seduced by the dark forces and eventually even the temple priests who communicate with you go over to the demons' side. After you defeat the evil demons they explain that they were deceived by the demons due to the hardship they suffered, their faith wavering when faced with hunger and violence. This reminds a bit of the story of Job from the bible, who was tested at the behest of "the adversary" to prove to God that his faith was only due to his blessed circumstances. Ultimately Job endures great suffering without turning his back on God which leads him to be greatly rewarded.

There is also the matter of the "demons" being based on figures from other religions like the minotaur, pharaohs (who were the gods' representatives on earth in egyptian mythology) , various others from nordic and hindu mythology etc. The master is a jealous god, angered by these "false idols", its no surprise the game was subject to censorship when being localised in the west to avoid the more overt references to christianity and religion in general. As much as the game is a metaphor for monotheism I think there's also a hint of Buddhism, possibly due to Quintet(the studio which made Actraiser) being a japanese studio. There is mention in the epilogue of reincarnation and whilst in keeping with Christian lore, the idea of humans being straying from righteousness by the allure of demons who keep them in suffering on this earthly realm through violence smacks a bit of Mara, the demonic representative of death, rebirth and pleasure, who tried to stop Siddharta Gautama from achieving enlightenment.

Actraiser does a lot with very little, in this respect, and I kind of wish there was more to this, the game is rather brief and most of the "point" is relayed right at the end after the final boss rush, at which time I'm a bit too high off of the victory to meditate on human's tendencies to abandon religion when their living standards rise. Actraiser is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. The menuing and UX of the city building is a bit clunky, not being able to do anything whilst a town is being constructed is ok, but can you just let me use my powers without having to show me the slow text box explaining its use every single time I use them? The platforming is good, has that weighty movement reminiscent of a Castlevania 1 but the hitboxes can be a bit dodgy, sometimes in the enemy's favour, sometimes in the player's. Hitting enemies at floor height remains kind of a crap shoot all the way to the final boss. I am pretty shit at the game but thankfully Actraiser is a lot more generous with the wall chicken than CV1 is. And hell, worst case scenario you can go back and increase the population to upgrade your max health. Not a big fan of the final boss gauntlet, its always a gut punch reading a guide for a game who says "yeah this boss is bullshit, just use your fuck you spell to kill him quickly, the other bosses can be fought normally".

In the end though, I enjoyed Actraiser, I think its rightfully seen as a classic and will rank highly if I ever make a list of my favourite genre hybrid games. I have heard that the sequel abandons the god game aspect entirely, and that sounds like kind of a waste... I'll play it eventually but not anytime soon.

Whats funny about this game is that presentation aside, its fairly straightforward mechanically. Its a level based 3d platformer based on alternating forms with different traversal powers to reach the next objective or set of upgrades to your max stamina(or mana or genes or whatever).

I found it to be quite engrossing, even getting some of that "tetris effect" after finishing it, lying in bed with an image of a toy ball rolling up a series of 'oil slick as seen through a kaleidoscope'-ass platforms. If I were to coin a stupid genre name for it it would be a "cheese-em-up" because it hits that primal urge in every attempt to go out of bounds or exploit a physics bug to cheese an annoying puzzle in a more conventional action game. Not all the levels or powers are winners of course, but finally getting up a big tower by some stupid scheme or walking along a line of pixels to reach a nee power through what feels like an "unintended" route; well it feels great. Thankfully I was home alone so no one could hear me cackling maniacally like a supervillain after my victory.

With all that being said, its a hard game to recommend, given that I think that the art direction will kill you if you have any sort of photosensitivity or history of epilepsy, but also that the game's appeal is quite specific.

But you know, thats kinda why its good. More games should be made to cater to a specific idea or urge rather than try to please everyone with the broadest possible sensibilities. Extreme Evolution kind of starts to lose steam after a certain point towards the climax cause you end up unlocking a few OP powers that just invalidate everything else and make the climax more of a formality, but thankfully the weirdness of the story had me interested enough to make it to the end? (I havent gotten all of the endings, but I think I got the "important ones"). Its one of those games where thematically and mechanically it feels like any kind of detail feels like a spoiler, given its intention seems to be to piece something for yourself in both cases, so I wont go too much into it. I will say however, that I was sold on the game when the first level of all was called "birth" and involved you as an "egg" rolling down a big tube to essentially be born.

As for the story, its like that scene at the end of 2001 : a space odyssey but for an entire game, idk what the fuck is going on beyond some vague ideas and interpretations about what it means, Id probably need to replay through the whole thing with a team or archaeologists to make heads or tails of it, but then I am kinda dumb so idk.

A pleasant surprise to be sure, a nice change of pace that has some interesting ideas in design

Edit : Got all the endings, including the canon ending, pretty cool

The steam discovery queue is a bit like staring at an endless stream of runoff, but sometimes you get to look at something interesting. Cipher Monk caught my attention with the mention of it being based on a number system made by monks in the 13th century (and its 1 euro price tag).

Its definitely a low budget production, a very deliberately minimalistic puzzle game which still manages to control a bit stiff-ly but its otherwise well executed I'd say. Its method of tutorialisation could be accused of laziness, given its literally just a contextless cheat sheet of several numbers in the cistercian system and their arabic numeral equivalents, but I like how it makes the act of understanding the system into a puzzle of its own. Obviously if you have previous knowledge of the cistercian numerals this aspect will fall flat but if not (like I did(n't)) its a good time extrapolating and trying to use pattern recognition to work out the rules of the system.

Of course once you are comfortable with it the game actually throws you the curveball its based around (as otherwise the game would be little more than a rote converter from arabic to cistercian numerals) with a limited number of "characters" being needed to form each number and a few negative numbers thrown in to make you have to think about how to combine these additions and subtractions to make the target number within the logic of the cistercian numerals. They're not the greatest brain teasers ever, and I finished the whole thing in about 45 minutes, but it was a nice 45 minutes.

I do have to laugh, when Steam warned me that the game wasn't available in spanish. The game is in portuguese and english but all the language changes are the word "current" and "target" above the (no prizes for guessing) current and target number, everything else is pictographic, I'm pretty sure everyone on earth can play this regardless of what their mother tongue is.

I find myself more intrigued by Infinite Craft's inner workings than the actual act of playing it. My first thought when I saw a screenshot of its mechanics via social media was "isn't that just that one mobile game from when those were new?" and sure enough after wracking my brain trying to remember the name I found that I was thinking of Doodle God, an iphone game from the first wave of popular mobile titles like angry birds, fruit ninja, etc

The concept is similar but Infinite Craft is much more an unstructured sandbox than DG. Its concept is simplicity itself, you combine words with other words to make new ones via some method of semantic association and formula for determining combinations through generative AI. The claim is that this collection of words and sentences is truly infinite and I believe it. As silly as the game is in concept, under the surface its essentially an application of natural language processing, which is an absolutely mindmelting field where computer science, linguistics and philosophy all meet to make the most impenetrable theoretic framework to describe how a system can be devised to make unicorn + death = dead unicorn.

I should preface the rest of this review by saying that I am very much not an expert by any means and that you should look into this yourself. In fact, NLP was the subject which made me drop out of my Computer Science Degree because I hated it so much (well, it also didn't help that this was during Covid so we had to learn this shit remotely), but I know a little bit more than most.

The main problem that NLP needs to "solve" is that a computer doesn't know natural languages (i.e english, mandarin, russian etc) but we do. Hence in order to analyse anything relating to natural language we need to make systems to make it parseable by an algorithm. Its one of those things where its such an integral and unconscious part of human cognition that you don't realize how complex of a task it is to understand words and phrases. One task we got early on was analysing a corpus of Amazon Reviews and determining which reviews were positive and which were negative. Even before any kind of analysis of the review as a whole can be performed you need to parse the whole thing and tokenise the individual words (easy in english admittedly, its just spaces) but then you also need to analyse the individual words and perform Word Sense Disambiguation i.e if the word smith appears in the review you need to determine using adjacent words if it means the name smith or the profession smith or the act of smithing. Even further you have stuff like entity linking, where certain words form part of a broader entity for e.g Duke of Parma refers to a single thing rather than 3 separate unrelated words. It was quite frankly, a nightmare which was nevertheless pretty interesting to learn about. Thankfully we had plenty of resources to tackle these issues (computer science is one of the most "standing on the shoulders of giants" discipline there is) and one resource I was reminded of when playing Infinite Craft was WordNet.

Wordnet is a lexical database, which is a fancy way of saying essentially a beefed up dictionary. Containing not only words and their meanings but also its relations in terms of hypernyms and hyponyms. I.e Amphibian is a Hypernym for Frog, and Oak is a Hyponym of Tree. You can also then make connections between words if they share Hypernyms (i.e we can tell the system that Crocodile, Alligator and Komodo dragon are all "coordinate terms" because they share the hypernym Reptile) and a whole bunch of other things that would take forever to fully explain. In essence, its a database that helps us determine semantic fields for words by essentially outsourcing the work to pre-made materials by humans. Another example would be SimLex-999 which asked people to rank word-pairs between 0-10 in terms of how related they were to each other and produced a dataset with these word pairs.

This is all to say, analysing language such as english is a herculean task, and I hope one day we get a peek behind the curtain at how the language model used by infinite craft works, because it really is quite interesting. The technology is still nevertheless quite rough at times; which can be forgiven mostly because the freeform sandbox nature of its mechanics makes its imprecision and unknowability kind of a non-issue. Hence, all the screenshots of funny combinations of pop culture properties and not the more banal or incoherent combinations that are swiftly forgotten as a new possibility occurs. If it were a more structured set of challenges like Doodle God you would swiftly get blocked by the eternal "point and click" problem of having to think about the one solitary solution and combination which made sense to the designer of combining glue + mummy to make papier maché. So what if most combinations are not particularly engaging or don't produce progress, the more words you make the more words you CAN make through combining previous words with older ones. Sometimes this runs into the issue that certain strings of words presumably associated by the game as part of the same semantic field seem to chain back into themselves. I.e fire + ash makes lava, lava + mud = volcano, volcano + fire makes ash etc. Another issue is, some combinations simply didnt make sense, but of course no system could ever produce infinitely many combinations which would seem reasonable to all people, especially when getting to more abstract concepts. Idk what a dead unicorn + candy would make if they were magically sealed together, but I guess "zombie unicorn" is as good an answer as any.

Some words cannot be combined at all, I guess we really are stuck with the "I don't know how to do that" problem of adventure games once more.

Infinite Craft is more of a novelty than a game one would feasibly dedicate themselves to, by a developer who seems quite married to the idea of short, communal browser based experiences. Their website is definitely worth a look beyond IC, its a lovely collection of experiments.

There is one aspect of the game I appreciated, despite the simplicity, Infinite Craft provides a sort of word based micro-storytelling, similar to other implementations of generative AI based on user input. I remember reading an interview given by Gareth Damian Martin, the Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters dev where they said about their work on "procedural poetry" that even seemingly random or computer generated sequences form a broader sequence (like a story) by Humans' tendencies to fill in the blanks and assign patterns to those which seemingly have none. I think we've all extrapolated seemingly human charcteristics and motivations to NPCs based on certain intended and unintended behaviours. Or even simpler than that, ask a pet owner what their dog/cat's personality is, they will go wild anthropomorphising the animal's thought process to explain their every action.

Tree of Life + Tree of Death = Tree of Knowledge
Tree of Knowledge + Party = Adam and Eve

2 Equations to summarise one of the key episodes of Genesis in christian lore which would not be nearly as impressive if a human had manually come up with such a combination, nor if I hadn't spent most of my time getting much more pedestrian or nonsensical combinations like candy + fisherman = sugar daddy.

Playing the House of Asterion highlights the importance of context in art. One could certainly go in blindly(literally) and let the game speak for itself, that was probably the intention given the extremely spartan ReadMe file included with the game and itch.io page description. Its also a common feature of Gareth Damian Martin's games (Citizen Sleeper, In Other Waters) to seemingly drop the player in the setting and encourage them to hit the ground running, narratively. So whilst I would encourage you to play the game and see what you make of it, I can provide the equivalent of the little art piece placards in museums that let you in on part of the creative process.

The House of Asterion is a game based on the short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges. The story is further based on the story of Theseus of Greek Myth, wherein our hero Theseus volunteers to be sent to the labyrinth of Minos to slay the Minotaur Asterion, a half man half bull seemingly born of some terrible act by the Queen of Minos. The labyrinth is described as a truly impossible structure built by the famed inventor Daedalus, with near endless twists and turns and one way paths to confound the beast and prevent its escape.

Its perhaps fitting then, that Borges would adapt this story, given so much of his works center the idea of infinity (garden of forking paths, library of babel, funes the memorious etc). The story of the House of Asterion tells the story of the minotaur from the first person perspective of the "monster", who becomes less a monster and more a pitiable creature, its upbringing isolated within an torturous infinity resulting in a sort Lenny from Of Mice and Men type. Through changing the perspective of the story even Theseus becomes less of a hero and more of the villain of the story, as the final lines of the tale reveal that Asterion let himself be killed, presumably to escape his cruel fate. Its a well told tale that plays with the idea of the inherent connection of the reader to the main character in a story, how our perspectives and lack thereof affect how we perceive character motivations, an idea that Borges was seemingly interested with, given another of the stories in Ficciones Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius starts with Borges discussing a possible story with a first person narrator who would present a relatively innocent story but which eagle eyed readers could decipher as revealing an atrocity committed by the Main Character.

House of Asterion the game plays a similar card by putting us in the shoes of the titular Asterion, blindly (literally) wandering around the infinite labyrinth whilst hearing voices narrate parts of the short story. Presumably being spoke aloud by Theseus? As the direction of the voices seems to be from above the Labyrinth, though given the story it might make more sense to be simply a product of Asterion's jumbled memories, endlessly tortured by fragments of others speaking of him but not with him. In another common feature of Gareth Damian Martin's games, House of Asterion tries to compensate for its faults, though less successfully here. Given the blindness of Asterion and difficulty in a solo developer in building a whole ass detailed labyrinth, the game limits what you can see with a listening mechanic; you can press a button to "see" for a second, mainly to tell where you're going through a maze of basic lambert shaded default unity cubes stretched out into semi convincing architecture. It feels like a Game Jam game, though I can find no confirmation that this is the case.

And well, as a tool to make us empathise with the plight of Asterion its effective, certainly. I too, would wish to be killed by Theseus is this was the extent of my existence, slowly wandering about blind an infinite expanse of repeating, endless corridors with nothing else to see or do. I can respect it in that sense, but without the context of the story it just falls flat and even as a companion piece it cannot help but be one note. I do not even know if its actually ends. Because I had read the story and wandered around for ages with no end in sight (going in circles even) I assumed that the game simply does not end, much like Asterion's life before Theseus shows up. But maybe it does? There are no documented let's plays or even comments on the itch.io page so who knows. Imo it almost works better if there isn't one, but on the off chance someone figures out how to finish the game, let me know.

Much better the second time around. I was originally quite disappointed in Fading Afternoon compared to its predecessor (Stone Buddha not withstanding) The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa. I felt it leaned too much into the combat at the expense of what I most liked about Ringo, namely the character interactions between deeply human shitheads, the true roleplaying in the roleplaying game, the great soundtrack and existential angst. Those were still in the game but I felt as if they were drowned out by the endless button mashing combat.

I guess I should mention Spoilers from here on out

On a second run through, I liked the game quite a bit more. Now, I've never really subscribed to the notion of "playing a game wrong" but I think I was approaching Fading Afternoon with a somewhat unhelpful mindset, though I think it was somewhat of the game's doing that set me in that path. You see, in Fading Afternoon you play as Seiji Maruyama, a Yakuza enforcer recently released from prison (for what I assume was decades) who is also suffering from a terminal illness. Hence, given the mechanics of taking over territory from other Yakuza families through combat being an excellent way to make money (and necessary to advance the game's storyline) and my interpretation of Seiji's character I decided to fight the other families to leave Azuma a decent territory from what pitiful remains he has left.

Seiji and by extension the player's time is limited, as his illness is simulated through a decreasing max health stat constantly ticking down day (or week rather) after day. And given how much the game seemingly punishes dilly dallying (first time I did the first story mission I got slapped by Azuma cause I went to a place at the wrong time and couldnt go back the same day) well, It wasn't the best mindset to enjoy the game.

On a second time around however, I can see the perspective better. Whilst having to constantly go around defending/attacking places is still a thing, time seems to move when you transition from area to area rather than necessarily just time spent. And after discovering I could hire more thugs to defend my territories I started to enjoy seeing more of what the game had to offer whenever I went to an area with some kind of activity to do. I hit a stride much faster knowing what to do, buying a car, getting enough money to buy a house so I wouldnt have to pay the hotel every week, delegating the detective work to Seiji's protege Kato (and incidentally my favourite character in the game). I found some memorable interactions I wasn't aware of, like getting drunk and punching a dude at a bar and then flirting with his girlfriend, helping out a gambler at a casino and then having to pay off the loan sharks, sucking ass at baseball etc.

In the end though, my playthrough followed a similar path to last time, except now I didn't slap Kato, which led to me having to kill him. Thankfully I put enough cash to buy the house from the real estate office and then some into a bag and gave it to Kodama: Seiji's friend and reincarnation wizard. I then dispatched Ando, a Yakuza boss on behalf of Tanaka, another boss who had Seiji's Boss hostage and then I was forced to flee to what looked like Walter White's cabin from Breaking Bad. In character I decided Seiji would have taken up alcoholism, and went to the town bar to get drunk. Seiji must have overdone it though, because after stumbling drunk through the town he collapsed in the snow (incidentally I'm starting to think that the game's trigger to kill Seiji if he's knocked out is the snowfall) and unceremoniously died.

It's a deliberate anticlimax certainly, although I wonder if that was "the intended ending" or if I held out long enough Azuma would have called me to go bowling after that but as usual its hard to tell. Of course now its a bit more clear that pursuing each of the families will yield different endings and presumably also going after all of them, as well as deciding to slap Kato or not amongst other key choices. I do now know, that Seiji is trapped in the cycle of reincarnation described in Buddhism and will receive as much money as he put in the previous loop when Kodama hands him his bag. I also discovered you can kill yourself in this game pretty much at any point. That plus the yakuza loan sharks loaning up to 14m yen at a time gives me an idea for a funny exploit by just constantly looping and getting rich enough to just buy the Yakuza world outright.

The highlight of this playthrough was Kato, for good and for ill, given his ultimate fate. I enjoy the thematic and mechanical convergence of Seiji and his' relationship. Seiji is a yakuza legend slowly dying, so in combat he is an absolute beast but his illness makes him quite fragile, with the whole depleting max health thing, whereas Kato is a young hothead, his combat style is ungraceful and energetic, he levels up fast if you use him in combat. Seiji is sometimes referred as "Gozuki", a demon general from Buddhism who prevents sinners from escaping their penance. Early on, when Seiji is roughing up the streets Azuma mentions new youngsters are being inspired by his actions, including Kato most likely. I didn't reach the climax of that storyline but seemingly in one of them Kato was being set up to share Seiji's exact fate, being forced to spend most of his youth and life in prison in service to a band of thugs. Its not hard to see the parallels. You wonder then if thats the alusion to Gozuki, Seiji being a keeper of doomed souls to be trapped into a life of crime and violence. Though as we see in both the mechanics of the game and Seiji's own circumstances, he might be the one that's truly trapped here.

This is kind of where Fading Afternoon's weakness comes into play for me. I still think FA compared to Ringo punishes first time players beyond the usual obtuseness of Yeo's design simply by nature of the game's multiple endings and seeming ease with which Seiji meets an untimely end. I think I'll enjoy my third playthrough even more, but that first playthrough was rough, not only that but I find it hard to judge the story on a thematic level when so much of it I simply haven't seen. Thats on top of the fact that I still don't like Seiji much. Ringo was just, a lot more sympathetic and resonated with me more. Ultimately though, Yeo's games always give me something to talk about, I love em AND hate em but they're always kind of interesting.

I'd also like to apologize again to @Zoda, I was way out of line in that original exchange.

Also if anyone has played through all the endings, where the hell is Chiba? I picked him up from prison but by the time I found out where his bar was I could never find him. Do you have to just hang out with him inmediately before anything else? Does he just go there at specific times or what?