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.

-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

I think movies have gotten to the point where they are reflective about the inherent danger and evilness of the camera. reflective about the bad shit they’ve been responsible for and the evil they’ve brought into this world. I saw it this year with pearl and nope and fabelmans, I don’t think any of those necessarily are intentionally about the evils of the celluloid camera, but maybe being so in love with film is the same as kind of despising both the medium and the industry. and I really don’t care about movies anymore, I used to watch about a hundred new releases per year and hundreds of older movies every year but tastes change and so does the medium. for a while it was disheartening to see the a24fication of indie films and the marvelfication of blockbusters, everything has became one homogenous blob of certain tropes and certain beats to hit, it’s easier to just not care. it’s easier to just hang up ur hat and accept that after a hundred years this medium died, it was inevitable wasn’t it? it died a sad and uneventful death. I guess that comes off as very cynical which I really don’t think I am nor am I trying to be. I’m just trying to be realistic, that something I once cared about and was passionate about is more or less dead. I’m fine with that, I still saw several new releases I really really loved, saw some older stuff like 1981’s possession and 1985’s smooth talk. this review is all over the place but mostly my thoughts boil down to the fact that Sam Barlow is as in love with the medium of film as he is critical and hateful of it. more than any other movie I’ve seen since maybe 2002’s autofocus and reflections of evil, immortality understands the destruction that films have left in the wake of people who worked on them. it’s impossible to not think of weinstein or spacey or baldwin or morrow or lee when playing through this. how many lives have ultimately been fucked over by this monolith of an industry. whether or not intentional the ‘22 movies I mentioned understand this. pearl with both its exploration of exploitation of young women in the industry and how ultimately escapism via movies is some of the most dangerous escapism. nope with its commentary on how most every movie ever made is built on the suffering of minorities, how it’s an industry built upon this that works every day to put people down. fabelmans is directly about how movies stop people from coping directly with their trauma, a very expensive distraction. immortality is all of this, it’s every piece of criticism on the film industry that’s ever existed, condensed into one of the most beautifully dense things I’ve ever experienced. doing things that are only possible in this medium, not the medium of film but the medium of games, because ultimately this does not work as anything but a game. maybe it’s really cynical of where movies are at and where they’ve always kinda been but at the same time it’s ridiculously hopeful of where games are and where they can go.

(scattered thoughts because I just slugged down a fig apple redbull and wrote all of this in my hour before work lol.
crazy that Barlow actually wrote a competent and not fetishistic portrayal of women here, the story here almost comes off as an apology for how he wrote and treated femininity in her story and most likely everything else he ever worked on.
just insane to see the wide range of influences that Barlow cops from here, I have no real issue with this as it’s just as much an exploration of the problematic themes that the directors he’s borrowing from exhibited as it is a homage to rollin and friedkin, etc.
fucking love how truly skeletal this is, ripped away from anything complete makes this feel much more realistic than her story which worked almost entirely on the gotcha of the plot. stripped away from trying to be cinematic and showing the bones of film production makes this more cinematic in the long run.
I like the costumes ^_^)

chulip if chulip was more concerned about like traumacore aesthetics and the sins of the father/mother as narrative propulsion instead of like chibi aesthetics and sins of the business conglomerate as narrative propulsion.
idk maybe I’m like really wrong about chulip but what it’s going for just didn’t grab me like this did, both are equally confusing and confounding and like in some ways basically unplayable, but idk feel like I go into smth like this expecting unplayable. also this just deeply reminded me of my hometown and my mindset from when I lived there. I’m not like that anymore and this really reminded me of just how hopeless that feels and it also made me very happy that life is good. some of the endings feel incredibly hopeful especially when juxtaposed w the game world, would love to know if the more hopeful endings correspond to the nicer (not killing the fox/raccoon and killing the skeleton) you act. same vibes as like any 2010s prog-midwestemo album or establishing shots in flcl or the mysterious voyage of our homer, made me so happy I’m living a different life now. would definitely have liked this more if I hadn’t played lsd dream emulator like a year and a half ago but so it goes. tbh I just think it rocks that there’s a dev room in this and the hidden ending for finding that is just getting a commentary on the making of the game, smth I definitely won’t watch but absolutely appreciate. hope the guy that made this is doing okay.