huge bmx xxx fan excited to play it for the first time. no but fr this game has lived inside my brain since i was like 13 bc some youtubers i was into at the time played it. that video introduced me to taking back sunday bc cute without the e is in this games soundtrack and i think that's ruined my brain permanently bc 70 percent of everything i listen to is some flavor of shitty emo music.

anyhow this is like rlly good and rlly fun but also so incredibly cruel and nasty in a way that i understand anyone turned off by this. but idk i grew up on like jackass and stuff like that and i think what captured my eye even as a child watching shows like that is seeing smth similar to the town i grew up in on the television screen in a pre youtube getting rlly big type of world. and bc i grew up on stuff like that i'm naturally very into the aesthetics and vibe this game is going for. but it's like genuinely such a mean fucking game, like the soundtrack is rlly rlly good and i'm big into most of the songs on it but they're such small minded and petty AND misogynistic ass songs. even the stuff that's a little bit more fun and not emo/alt metal are like rude songs, that sublime song is actually so gross. there's a weird system at play here that i haven't seen in similar games, this completely ditches the time limit type restrictions in favor of a real health system, when ur health goes all the way down by failing a trick u get kicked out of the level. reminds me of like the fascination america had on young people getting hurt, this was present in news at the time of course but it's also how mtv and similar channels managed to stay afloat for the better part of a decade.

this rlly wants to be a satire of corporate greed in a post 9/11 world and tbh often i was charmed by how heightened everything felt, like a less biting gta but still way more than like the underground tony hawk games. occasionally there's rlly smart stuff here, the ramps made out of rockets w american flags painted on them is a nice little touch. the world the game inhabits is very often cold and hostile and i think that makes a lot of sense for where the culture was at the moment and where it would end up going. npcs are like fucking mean in this, everyone hates u and maybe they should lol. often though the game is kind of just racist and sexist and filled w gross out humor which yeah it is a shame.

levels feel rlly wide and expansive and every ramp and rail connects in a way that's kind of rhythmic? but mostly i'm just rlly impressed by the locales they picked. usually in stuff like this you get major metropolitan cities or fake ones loosely based on one that don't rlly have any thematic tissue, but this goes for either smaller cities like syracuse or tourist trap cities like vegas. and they all have their own visual identity even the skate parks or vague ideas of places like a dam. when i was a teenager and i watched the video of this game i always thought the layout of the bronx level looked similar to my hometown, i didn't live anywhere close to ny but the feeling of it rang true. it looked like my city and that resonated w me and i do think stuff like that is rlly important.

late last summer I took a trip with my boyfriend, his younger sister and their extended family to an island. A very small island with basically nothing to do, just beaches and small tourist shops. Me and my boyfriend slept at the bottom of a bunk bed and his sister at the top. The three of us spent virtually every day together for a little over a week, we played mario party on my switch every night and every day we swam in the pool, we’d walk to grocery stores or dollar stores and buy candy or ice cream. It was such a beautiful place and I fell into a true routine there but eventually all things end and so I brought my paradise back with me. I had to get a job for the first time since the pandemic upon coming back from that vacation and I’ve fallen into a routine with that, replacing a warm sunny beach town with the cold artificial lights of working for a mega corporation. I’ve learned to live with that, with being fine working at a place like that, because ultimately it’s all work to provide myself with the future I want. A future that is a paradise I’ve carved out for myself, something like that sleepy beach town, replacing one routine with another.

I think FSR is a really special experience and reminded me every time I played it of how fleeting it all is. To not get caught up with stuff that does not matter to you, to make sure you don’t fall into patterns or routines that make you unhappy. I loved this perfect tiny handcrafted village and I enjoyed my entire time with it, walking from the beginning of the map to the end most days reminded me of how special and precious this life we have is. Ultimately I came away from this game with a very privileged outlook, no one is able to achieve true paradise and so the best we can hope for and the best we can do for ourselves is make our own idea of paradise with what we have and what we’ve been given.

just about as good as everyone says, mostly just have scattered thoughts on this one
-me and my bf kept commenting every like half hour on how fucking good and iconic heather’s outfit is
-this whole game but especially the ending give me the same vibe as the suspiria remake from a few years ago
-my only other experience w this series is playing about half of 2 (very good but didn’t at all hook me like this one did) and watching the 2006 movie like five years ago, was pretty good from what I remember. I’ll probably play all of them aside from 1 and the vita game, will probably just read through the play novel as it seems pretty cool.
-vincent literally on his huey emmerich wave. funny guy, why is he 24 and why does sexy kit harrington play him in the second movie
-tbh only really played this bc for the last year I’ve been absolutely obsessed with akira yamaoka’s scores for the series. Got introduced to them via the boyfriend of a girl me and my boyfriend were friends with, he played sissy hypno one time while drunk and then proceeded to spend the entire night puking in my bathroom. Good times. You’re not here goated song.
-played this on easy action level easy riddle level bc fuck that this game is like a little archaic and I was pretty much entirely here for the story and the atmosphere. Only time I really had a hard time with the game was in the haunted mansion with the red light chasing you. Think that bit and it’s difficulty works for the best given the fact that up till that point red lights are almost seen as something comforting for the player and now the thing that’s helped u out sm through ur play through kills u almost instantaneously.

-really reminds me of the jim strensum/mook animation scooby doo quadrilogy. Japanese productions aimed squarely at American audiences but like heavily inspired by European imagery and folklore. both kind of walking a very fine tightrope between just all out camp and melodrama. the fucking bats on the home screen just kinda drive these similarities in for me.
-think I finally understand why people like dark souls because of this game. I definitely enjoy the aesthetics of souls games but the unbeatable seeming bosses and far away save states kind of ruin the experience for me. I’ve tried to finish several of them and never can get all the way through for one reason or another. had a moment here fighting death where I was very close to giving up fully, replaying his boss battle again and again on a bus commute, each time getting closer to throwing in the towel. but I was very enamored by this games world and wanted to see it through to the end and so I did, i just kept grinding and learning better attack patterns so I could continue progress. didn’t feel very rewarding or satisfying to actually beat him and I think that’s because it’s not an actually unfair boss and is instead just something you kinda have to learn inside and out. anyhow fuck death, dude sucks.
-game looks so gooooood. beautiful gorgeous sprite work and I love the designs of the monsters and the castle itself. I really like all the main cast, all very charming. fucking yoko one of my all time favorite designs I think and julius is on that revolver ocelot wave. game over screen just so beautiful. everything looks so ornate and this really cool mixture of medieval and modern.
-story is good and cute!! doesn’t take itself too seriously or impose on the player, just cool like background stuff you learn about the characters every once in a while. I saw the menu a couple of nights ago and beyond it’s commentary on class disparity and r slash antiwork type stuff there’s like a real case it’s making for vulgar auteurism as something that’s just pure, something without pretension or irony. I think this is like the video game equivalent of that, no frills just straightforward, I appreciate that.
-also I got reminded of this fucking gba game I played as an infant called rugrats castle capers, baby’s first metroidvania I s2g Lmaoo

feel like you either completely get what this game is going for when it opens up with an ariana song or you don’t and you hate it. it’s so light and airy and campy while still managing to be tense and cinematic and that feeling doesn’t stop till the credits roll with a monkees needledrop. whole thing is very of the mid 00s american horror film scene, most stuff from that era has this beautiful corporate gloss and sheen to it that just doesn’t exist in modern film much less so modern horror films. everything now has to be obliquely “about” something and has to be dark and depressing, they want you to feel clever about getting the twist ending. horror movies of the aughts were much less so trying to do anything like this, they were trying to be dynamic with the lens not the pen. and a lot of them managed to say something important about the times we were living in but you could also wholly enjoy them purely as campy escapism. think the quarry is much more so of that era of filmmaking than its creators probably want to admit, deeper themes exist here but it’s not at the forefront nor does the game ever try to make you feel smart for picking up on something like that.
idk played this every night with my boyfriend when I came home from work and for a solid week it has completely replaced tv as a medium in our house which is like unheard of. also was reading david kushner’s masters of doom book while playing this and that kind of just got into my head like the idea of being at the beginning of something not the end. I truly do think film has just been completely replaced with games and television, anyone who might have anything interesting to show or say is doing better work in mediums that are actually constantly progressing and moving forward and doing actually impressive things and not just regurgitating the same values in the same ways.
this whole thing probably comes across as more of an incoherent rant than anything else but I do just wholeheartedly love this and I think it’s coming from a very genuine and real place. this thing is just very impressive and dense I love it and I love CW shows lol