Sometimes you’re playing a game and the gears start turning on themes and allegory and you start thinking about things like wholesome discourse and the responsibility queer people are pressured to have when talking about themselves and their communities and how that sucks and you hate it and then you think about the couple of weeks where there was a flyer in the lobby of your apartment building letting everyone know that a couple of trans people in the neighborhood had been assaulted by a guy who had just gotten out of prison for targeting and beating trans people in particular and how you don’t pass at all and how your assigned parking space is literally the furthest one from the building and sometimes you just want to play a game by someone who gets you featuring people who get you hanging out and being cool and maybe that’s fine once in a while? I don’t know.

I think npckc has been somewhat unfairly defined as a creator who makes games that are treacly and unchallenging when their most famous work, the year of springs trilogy, I think strives to be educational and affirming without shying away from stresses and difficulties and hardships that go along with various aspects of queerness and allyship. I think the things that makes this maybe hard to identify are that exactly how much of the toughest stuff in those games you see is up to you the player via choices, and that they DO focus on positivity and affirmation over tragedy, melodrama, and the more brutal realities a lot of queer people do live. Which is cool with me! I think there’s room for this. There’s gotta be a line between criticizing games that infantilize us and try to iron out everything that is scary and abnormal and challenging to the hegemony about queerness and ones that just like, don’t want to be bummers all the time, and I think these games generally err closer to the latter camp than the former.

I don’t PARTICULARLY want to organize my thoughts and make this a whole thing because I find wholesome discourse generally annoying so I’m gonna cut myself off before I start really thinking about this and feel the need to reorganize the earlier paragraphs (EDITING IS FOR NERDS), just recommend everybody read Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Muñoz and leave it at that haha.

Tomato Clinic certainly leans MORE in the direction of cutesy edutainment than other works by this creator, but I think it’s a testament to kc’s skill as a writer that the allegory works as well as it does. In a very brief window of time they create a couple of really well-sketched characters, a fun spin on commonly found urban fantasy tropes, and juuuuust enough depth in both to impress me considering the whole thing is over in twenty minutes. I would do anything Marie told me to. I want her and I want to be her, mission accomplished, and Gakuto is my friend. I will come back to the Tomato Clinic and hang out with these guys. They are cute, and they are sweet. The whole game is. I like it!

I had an anxiety attack for 5 minutes after reading something past an hour and a half down what i imagine is a multi-route story idk.

There's too much to it that's disturbingly close, I was reminded of the relationships I've personally left behind and the estrangement and my own mental well being. The poisonous toxic nature of the clear asshole in the group revealing all of the pent up frustrations and completely strung relationships, their inability to really let their feelings known to each other due to the way their lives has moved coming to an emotional head that I imagine, is going to whittle down on all of the barriers I have left that keeps me coolheaded.

This is not a condemning of the novel, but it needs to be understood that the content warning on the itch.io page does not lie. Or at least, it certainly wasn't lying to me. These people all have living fractures and the text is glass, whether or not you have good feet for it doesn't matter.

I do hope to return to it when I'm of better self control. Who knows I may end up reading it again soon in almost perfunctory self-flagellation either from stubbornness or in the hopes that there is a light at the end of that that brings peace to those anxieties for me.

Shockingly worse than the base game; a story that takes the only chapter in Fata Morgana one might describe as "a little too long" and then retells it from the beginning with even MORE repetition and unnecessary detail.

Also the game attempts to justify a romance between a 13 year old and a 30 year old on at least 5 separate occasions, and not just one character. This isn't like the parts of the base game where characters occasionally have horrible moral lapses and commit taboos; the most relatable characters will often voice their approval in their most lucid states. The game goes absurdly far out of its way to tell you this age gap is okay, actually.

About as bad as a sequel can be in that it makes the original look worse in comparison.

Base game is fantastic but this port is very typical of ports made in the early era of VR. It doesn't add any tactile interation with the world, your hands pass through everything which breaks immersion and means you don't pick up objects by grabbing them but just by pointing and pressing a button gmod physgun style. At least barebones FPS VR ports have the inherent enhancement of using and aiming a gun with your hands but the Talos Principle is a lot of walking around and moving objects so it makes playing in VR feel very redundant. The major attraction though is that the enviroments look stunning in VR.

there's a moment in moon where the "HERO" is drunk at a restaurant, doesn't knowing how to advance. after killing all those "Bad Monsters", "helping" all those people, entering without invite in all those houses and taking possession of all those objects, he's lost. he is at the maximum level that he can obtain, but what then?

the "HERO" lacks of love.

in fact, everyone in moon's world is searching for love: consciously or not; for know what it is, what is for and who can possess it. love is a mystery and everyone wants to know how to discover it. you, the protagonist, is the one who help those thirsty for love by... living your life. you see, There Is Someone(s) that indeed knows what love is and want you to collect it - but i won't tell who! you do it by helping people in different ways: fishing, listening, catching their souls, telling that they actually are a robot (do technopolis habitants dreams about MOON: REMIX RPG ADVENTURE?) and all sort of different things.

they say you find love in small things, and perhaps someone would say that moon is a game about finding love in the minor aspects of our day. i wouldn't say they are incorrect, but a letter of love is A Big Deal to the one who sent it, as well to the one who received it. the size of what we love is measure by our heart perspective.

moon: remix rpg adventure is a small, old, indie game, but in my heart, is a gigantic thing that i love.