206 Reviews liked by NightDuck


The cultural context section of the translation readme mentions how two of the bands this game references broke up the exact year the original version released, and that's the sort of "sans killing the queen" energy I gotta respect.

Guys please make a fighting game or something you can't just drop such a cool premise and character designs on a shitty gacha game guys please.

Behold! The thing that singlehandedly ended the golden age of gaming, apparently. Don't look into things like executives that want literally infinite money or bigger studios causing lack of cohesion between overworked Devs or things getting more expensive in general. Some guy paying 2.50 for horse cosmetics in 2006 led to every practise you don't like in gaming ever because that's how trends work

YES the third person shooting is kinda mid and YES the later levels get some pretty mean design choices that almost force you into grinding earlier levels for xp and gil and YES the first three-quarters of the game have very little meaningful or interesting story and YES everything with Omega and the Protomateria raises a lot of Big Lore questions about things going on in FF7.

BUT.

That last bit of the game! The last, like, three levels or something! It's all kinda sick as hell! The Rosso and Azul boss fights are just so damn cool. And basically everything once you get to the Weiss fight?? It's all anime bullshit and I love it. Vincent is great. What a cool guy. Yuffie is fun to have around sometimes! The little bit of Cloud/Tifa/Barret you get rules! Reeve sucks! And I guess Cid is there, too!

And I think the choice at the end of each level to convert your points into either XP or Gil is genuinely cool! And having your RPG stats to level up helps set this apart from the majority of shooters, which is neat!

I think I'm going to be rotating Rosso the Crimson in my mind for a long time.

If you don't like the edgy goth twink game then, I dunno, try letting joy into your heart or something.

When they announced this in a Direct, I got really excited for what it could be, seeing the theater aesthetic combined with a little bit of mahou shoujo energy, and also being a brand-new Peach game, so it felt like it was made for me. Then it came out, and after playing all the 1F levels, I honestly already gave up.

Lots of people point out that this game is "too easy" or "just made for kids" (I could go on a rant about this one part for hours, but I just want to keep things short), but I think that none of these have to do with the main problem. The thing is, this game is just built in a way that you are never really engaging with it. Everything is already solved, and the game is just waiting for you to press a button to conclude the "puzzle." All the cool ideas it has last so shortly or are affected by the previously mentioned principle that plagues it. All the stages are decorated in a way that tries to please you from a visual point, but they are no different from an empty one when you walk around them. It just kinda makes all of it worse with the fact that I played Ape Escape 3 this year, and it's kinda just the exact opposite of all of this? They share some motifs when building levels (a ninja-themed one, a cowboy one, etc.), but everything there is more tactile and feels alive. The monkeys around the stage are all doing their own thing relevant to the theme chosen for the level, while also changing how they respond to the player, be it with their attacks or positioning. So, while there it feels like you're actually playing a role and being a part of the show, in Peach Showtime, it just all feels like I'm watching things unfold and that's it.

Reviews of other games: The deckbuilder combat is certainly enthralling, but I'm not sure if it synergizes with the roguelike structure or if it's just a cheap and trendy cash-in, similar to yesteryear's Soulslikes...

Reviews of P3R: When I was fourteen years old I would lay in bed with my eyes open and ask for God to kill me. My brother left behind a beat-up PS2 after he went off to college where he would later die of an OD

First of all, the elephant in the room: the game really tries to have its cake and eat it too with the H-scenes, trying to convey sexual anxiety via psychological horror but also sometimes being clearly intended to be jack-off material. I do believe there are some stories that could only be told with sex and all its complexities, but Everyday took my willingness for good faith too far at times. Frankly, you have to have a pretty strong tolerance to all sorts of problematic BS in eroge to be able to appreciate the good, and I’m not saying that to diminish the opinions of those who don’t have that tolerance. I always roll my eyes at people who call this a “kamige” and gatekeep people who can’t appreciate the “genius” of this masterpiece when it’s for a very particular audience.

I wish more discussion was put on the resemblances to Cyrano de Bergerac. At its heart, Wonderful Everyday is a compelling twist on the classic story. That fear of saying what you mean, saying what you want in your own words, is relatable to me and while I had mostly learned my lesson by the time I played this game, I could still recognize how profound that component is for someone who is still afraid to express themselves. That’s what the real wonderful everyday is: being able to live true to one’s self with people who love you for you. Miss me with all the philosophy quotes and namedrops, I’m not a fan of philosophy just for pontification’s sake and instead appreciate how it manages to translate to the human condition in practice even while being draped in surreality and metaphor. It’s this surprisingly soft, tender side that I think of the most whenever I reflect on the game, a lone point on this thorny rose with which it can be held and admired.

I can see how this title would have caught eroge players by surprise with its very contemplative nature as it gradually broke down certain tropes of the medium until sex became one of the less remarkable (and prevalent) aspects in the later chapters. I would never recommend this to anybody who isn’t comfortable with eroge, as there are certainly better-told stories with fewer caveats to be found elsewhere, but I also can’t understate the power to pierce through its target audience’s defenses and maybe that’s why it’s so special to some people.

One of the first games I played that showed me you could have fun in this world without killing. After playing every call of duty and assassins creed known to mankind, my mind had experienced several lifetimes worth of trauma and decided it was time to retire on the farm. Genuinely a beautiful and serene experience

I don't feel it's controversial to say this - we are living in the worst era of video games in the medium’s history. In this post-creative type age, AAA games are designed by corporate committees, the bleeding hearts and artists chained to their whim. Here's $10 billion dollars, make a game. Your livelihoods are threatened if it falls beneath our expectations, except not really because we're going to lay off 60% of your team anyway after launch. We want a remake of an old classic of yours now that we've bought the rights from your old publisher - we'll give you no more than five years to finish regurgitating the same game you made in a fifth of the time two decades ago but your game will still come out unpolished, unappreciated, your bloody hands and dried tear ducts for naught. We're your new publishers, we're looking for a change of pace from your streak of critically acclaimed titles - we feel a live service game will be more beneficial to us. We’ll be looking into layoffs and a potential merger if the Metacritic score doesn’t meet our expectations. It cannot be understated or made any clearer - the bubble is not about to burst; the bubble is bursting.

It goes without saying, and there is no exception in this day and age, that if a AAA game is good, it is good in spite of any grievous sins it commits. LEGO 2K Drive is a fun arcade racer. LEGO 2K Drive also costs $60 USD, has five consecutive battle passes each locked behind their own purchase, and in-game currency is drip-fed at a consistency I’ve seen more generous in Korean F2P mobile games.

What is the point of sending obviously hardworking, dedicated game developers to this critical death? Why must creative teams have to be chained to the ankles of executives uninterested in art form - merging, dissolving, firing developers at will off the weights of failures not their own? 2K Drive is fun. Undoubtedly. The divide between the joy of its loving arcadey gameplay and creative spirit to the horror of its fleshy, bleeding abscess of finance-leeching rotting flesh is too palpable. Though leeching it does, because after some time the imbalance grows too great.

User-made custom car creations are downloadable in-game in its current state, but I distinctly remember why publisher 2K had to announce this wasn’t planned to be before release, much to the chagrin of, well, everyone. What’s the point in creating if you can’t share with the world? The answer became obvious almost immediately when looking within. Why do I get 10 Brickbux for getting a gold medal in a challenge, and 50 when winning a race, when a fucking cosmetic car costs 10,000? Oh, that’s an easy answer, because you’d have no reason to be pressed to pay real money to boost your in-game currency if you could just download the cool user-created stuff online. This isn’t counting the five consecutive battle passes. This game also costs $60.

2K Drive’s progression is, by design, torturous, but its gameplay is at a clear odds from it. Cars handle well, its challenge missions engaging and varied, its races variably frantic and exciting, its story a cute and charming melting parody pot of racing story tropes. Despite finding myself growing more and more averse to the tired trend of open world games, this is where the divide is drawn with mile-wide crayon - it’s fun. The plainness of its formula is upended by the sheer joy of absurdity it relishes in - barreling through structures, rocketing through explosions of thousands of LEGO pieces both structural and minifigure (yes, you can just mow down pedestrians in this, it’s hilarious), pun-riddled dialogue both confident as it is surprisingly more endearing than annoying (something I think the LEGO games have always been good at). Unfortunately, its wholehearted spirit is progressively crushed the more time you invest, because you're expected to invest as much money as you do your own time into 2K Drive. Progression stagnates, incentives are diminished, and the only joy you can wring out after you feel closed off completely is just enjoying the online races yourself, outside of the story mode. Oh wait, no you can't, because the online also barely works.

You don’t need to stretch your neck out very far to see the state of the way multimedia is being curated today, and you don’t need a third eye and an all-encompassing andromedatic galaxy brain to see how much art today is dictated by committee - this is just the most obvious its ever looked. Underneath its Financial Terror Shield is a game that’s struggling to exist - an honest core, crying by itself, to just be a game. We’re undoubtedly worse off now, but this game wouldn’t even be much different 10 years ago. Its future also feels all too certain, being under the reins of many alike a publisher more eager to kill off a game’s entire service before they’ll let it live indefinitely without profit. It’s not just developers who’ve been demoralized and dehumanized throughout this process - you are also no longer a fan. You are a demographic, a consumer, a target market, complicit either way you look at it. If you need any further proof of the post-post times we live in, 7 companies have laid off their employees in the week I spent writing this on and off, and it’s only a matter of time before every brick in this failing structure is put back in its box. The most radical action a consumer can perform today is to download a user-made LEGO rendition of the Flintstone's Flintmobile off the content shop and not spend their actual Brickbux on the corporate-mandated seasonal coupes, and hope that when the last brick falls, we can all put a hand towards rebuilding.

You say 6-8 hours for the average person playin this game
well *i* say im anything but average....
i SUCK AT THIS GAME! AND THATS WHY I HAVE 33 HOURS IN IT! BUT I ALSO HAVE 33 HOURS IN IT BECAUSE IT JUST KEPT HAVIN SHIT I LOVE FINDIN !!!!
i love this game but ill crack down on why

I love this game's art style! I heard somebody actually compare it to invader zim and at the time I didn't really See any jhonen vasquez in this game but as I got a little further n thought a bit more about it... it totally does have that influence and i think that helped me piece together why i like it so much
THOUGH i think the art direction isnt TOOOOOTALLY paying homage to Jhonen and that the dev managed to give it its own identity going on
but I can absolutely imagine Seve with Richard Horvitz' voice.. but for Alexis im not sure if i imagine moreof a Mabel Gravity Falls voice or a more jovial Mandy from Billy And Mandy going on
It's actually really funny how this has early 00s cartoon inspiration when this is also directly inspired by n64 graphic visuals and 3d platformer feel(ala your mario 64 or banjo kazooie type experience but not as long or with as much active level booty fanfare)...despite both of those things HARDLY havin any overlap yk wht im sayin? but enough abt the art, hows the G A M E?

well the kit you have going on with Seve is rlly cool! I love how heavy he feels while also having a little bit of endlag slip going on to really give you those "OH SHIT!" moments when youre tryin to be precise, and precise is the name of the game because this game will totally not baby you with some jumps
you get everything you could need right at the start

save for another ability youll get later on thatll open more options and opportunities required to beat the game and do some junk on the way there

the sound design SHOULD get annoying after a bit, flailing around and all the cartoon crashes and thunks to do things.. but it rly doesnt LMAO infact it became satisfying just smacking seve's head into shit just to hear the noise
i got so use to this infact, i would fuckup even basic platforming moments later on because id be doing the air headbutt so often i forgot i could just JUMP NORMALLY LIKE A NORMAL GOAT THING

but in spite of my hubris, i! thanks to the encouragement of my girl and also others and also rummaging through steam help threads... did it! i beat it and do you wanna know somethin? i cant blame you for this not being your thing if it doesnt sound like it!
I mean it's a cheap game! only runnin for like 7 bucks to maybe 8 or 9 depending on where you live!..

But a weighty non-overpowered platforming main character in a platformer thts gonna require some precision, interacting with setpieces in ways not spelled out to you, figuring out a lot of things not spelled out to you despite hints being up and around through NPCs(watch for things like tiles offcolor or your groundpound or even usin the camera buttons to get a good scope on shit!).. its not a For Everyone thing even though I totally think its so rewarding getting good at it that the difficulty is really just bent around direction and understanding the controls rather than there being superhard bosses going on
though sometimes that walljump or latchin onto somethin will be rlly scary and seem like sometimes it wont work even though its really nice feeling.. i partially blame my own kinda jank xbox controller i did all this with(there's n64 controller support along with other controller support if thats your jam too!, you can play this game with a keyboard as well... if u hate yaself!!!)

but yeah about 3 main areas (technically theres... more!! but-)
i think a sequel would be totally cool, like some people are clappin for, to really write some of the felt wrongs with the game to perfect it

but alsoooooooo likeeeeeeeeeeeee idk i feel like im almost nitpicking with things i dont like about the game the more i rack my head around this you guys, its such a nice time its just a really fun platformer thats gonna be a lil difficult for those that aint all that good at platformers and be rewarding for those that are good at platformers in the way of how much more content you can get for 100%ing or even doing shit real quick
one thing that even gets me about this is it gave me that weird nostalgic frustration i felt as a kid with some games where id be stuck on some shit and get kinda frustrated and think to maybe look it up but im not finding shit, but then i figure it out on my own w/o a guide or nothing and my eyes get all big and sparkly LMAO

if that sounds like itd be your thing then go for it, play seve gets trolled 64

The gimmick behind Quilts and Cats of Calico is that it's the video game adaptation of the board-game Calico but they added a feature where cats will walk all over the board and be cute and distracting while you're trying to focus.

Imagine my look of surprise when I kept getting distracted by cats walking over the board while trying to focus.

One of them even hissed at me when I tried to put a piece down.

Cats.

no idea if this is good or not because it runs like absolute shit and when I tried to go online to get some second opinions I experienced acute larp exposure and passed out

the doctors tell me I'm lucky to still be alive

This game awakened in me an obsession with Erasure for about one month and then I never listened to that band ever again.

Bitter Companion

It's surprisingly less perverted than the title would lead you to believe. Basically its a short story about a cisgirl falling for a stealth transgirl on the bus after finding out shes a huge fan of her NSFW social media drawings. Eventually she is led back to her home and lewdness ensues. There's a lot of games that play into this more simple queer sexual romance, for instance Demon Dash (2022), Housewarming Gift (2018) both by Nadia Nova. Along with a lot of the releases by Aria such as Ignored and Humiliated by Gamer Girls (2022). The fundamental interaction here is where desire meets respect of the other.

I like to think of these types of games as fairly wholesome LGBT power fantasies, because everything is simplified down to just the erotic desire. Power fantasies are fine and compelling, and I think there can be a bit too much moralizing when it comes to this stuff. If it's not appealing to you specifically or making some shortcuts to keep the story simple and focused, suddenly its wildly offensive, perverted, or otherwise needlessly fetishistic. I condemn this way of thinking and would draw a direct line between this criticism and the conservatives that try to outlaw library books. We need wholesome desire for our bodies out in the world, and I don't think taking undue scrutiny to already obscure texts is that fair. Imagine if you went and wrote some smutty fanfiction, uploaded it, and then found out a lot of people were poking fun at it one day. In a lot of these cases people are not being mindful that teams dont make art like this, but a single person does. At some point so called constructive criticism runs closer to bullying than it does to being anything helpful. I think the difference here is that I've actually had some of the people's works I criticized reach out and thank me or give feedback to what I said and it grounded me to realizing that at the end of the day I'm paroling somebodies creative drive. Like sure, death of the author and all, but it's only fair that people are going to feel hurt. I've had some of my posts on here get reposted to twitter before by big accounts to be mocked (particularly the Vampire Suvivor post) and I have to be honest it kind of stings to just see a bunch of people tell you you're wasting your time and doing nothing.

With that all said though, this doesn't mean I or you have to force ourselves to enjoy these works. Whether it be because the prose isnt effective or it cut a corner you're not fond of (in this case talking smut on the bus is not something im into as I like to keep my bus travel quiet, and the power fantasy of the 1 date girlfriend is something thats a little too fast for my tastes). You can even express that if you want. You can say a work is a bit too fetishistic or plain etc, but at the end of the day its just a preference. You don't get any points for gloating over how bad it is and in general doing so for works this small makes one come off meanspirited and demotivating people from making games you might enjoy in the future. This is a pervasive way of speaking about works that I've seen on RYM and is slowly creeping its way onto here. Almost none of these games were constructed to sustain this kind of mockery. It's likely you could be contributing quite directly to somebodies despair.

There's one other sentiment I want to demystify because it frustrates me deeply. Many people that are trans and most that aren't are way too open with their use of the word chaser to describe something or someones behavior. Again, we trans people like to be desired, and this relegation of everyone wanting for us or writing about our bodies as chasers is harmful. A chaser is somebody who usually wants to meet us on the downlow away from a crowd, that see us mainly as a porn fetish (a ladyboy or a shemale), that are only interested in hitting and quitting. Chasers tend to have no interests in our kinks or getting to know us or seeing us as people. Alex Jones, who was found to be looking at trans porn is a chaser. The person who wrote this story is almost definitively not a chaser. On top of that, while trans people can be uncomfortably perverted they can't be chasers. Chasers are only a term that apply (for the most part) only to cis people, and so saying that a trans person for one reason or another is being a chaser is transphobic rhetoric and should not be done so wantonly. We have other terms to describe perverted behaviour we dont like: Leering, objectifying, etc. Accusing everyone and everything of being a chaser robs that notion of its actual meaning and function. Which if you don't know, is to keep us personally safe since chasers don't respect us and thus can't be trusted to have good motivations.

There's lots of art like this running around, and every time people crowd together to make fun of it, it creates a quicksand pit of resentment and discontent. Every time people do that for art like this, it makes the people that even brought it to attention not want to anymore. It hits our morale a bit. God forbid the people just want to make games to practice and have fun with their desires in the process. It's exactly this attitude why I have my comments turned off. I don't want to argue with the types of prudes that would've tried to hang DeSade.

Alright World of Goo; you asked for the truth, now here it is.

I love you: you're beautiful, you're charming, and I can't fucking stand you.

Some may look at your art style and see it as derivative, the amalgamation of Invader Zim-ian quirky-and-edgy joy through the scope of Newgrounds circa 2007, but I love it all the same; It reminds me of the best of times and the worst of times all same.

Even your music, simple and stylistically homogenous as it is, still brought a smile to my face...

No, I'll tell you the reason I truly can't stand you anymore.

I wish there was a nicer way to say it, but... It's your physics. Uncooperative, clunky, grueling, by any other name the word is just as true: My time with you was one of constant struggle. I would labor on marvelous constructions, towers to symbolize all you stood for, and a meager misplacement would have minutes of work, as many as five, or ten even, crumbling to the floor.

First, I blamed God, for forsaking me once more; then, my crosshairs were directed at gravity, the loathsome force; but eventually, I knew the true patron of my patronization.

It was you, World of Goo.

My towers, my creations, meant nothing to you. You would scoff at my attempts, laugh at my failure, and refuse to even glance my way at my myriad victories. It was you -- It was always you.

So knowing this, I have no choice but to part ways with you, wistful World, glorious Goo, Opulent of. You give me no choice, and your bitter banter at my behest broke my brain. Our time was short, but a single second longer in your company could only spell disaster...

Farewell,
Roxy S. Gaming