215 Reviews liked by NightDuck


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

More than anything, Forspoken is a very strange game and I'm down for strange. Massive peaks and valleys, but those peaks are delightful.

well I finally went and finished it. I've started this game probably a dozen times in my life, as far back as borrowing a friend's copy to play on my psone (the lil round one, not the big original kind) in 2001. And to no one's surprise: it's really fucking good! It's a classic for a reason.

Over the years I had already had a lot of major story moments spoiled and so I was expecting the game to not quite land or not really hit as hard as it did but it turns out that the execution is so strong that it didn't really matter that I went into a scene and said "Oh, this is the part where [redacted] dies" because that scene still Fuckin Hits!!

And there was still stuff I hadn't heard about! The submarine! Playing as Tifa! So there was still fun surprises for me here, too. And that moment when I finally got Cloud back after he's gone for a while? Hit so fuckin' hard!! The boy!!! He's back!!! Love him. Love it. Love it all.

I don't have many complaints about this game but one of them is all the little minigames you have to play. I think it is an interesting/cool idea to say "your character is going to perform an action that we can't really make work with turn-based combat so instead we'll do a lil bespoke minigame so the player isn't just watching a cutscene". I do, generally, like that idea. But so many of the minigames it has you do feel like unresponsive shit-garbage to control and frequently have little to no feedback to if you're even doing them correctly (or if you are doing things wrong, what it is you're doing wrong). So many frustrating moments that really feel like they should just make them more lenient. Just let me get through your story!! Don't be super strict about making sure I perform CPR correctly or am good enough at a military parade or raced a dumb bird or whatever else. I think the only one I really liked was the snowboarding but even that was kinda fucked up because of the Steam version's love/hate relationship with my controller.

My only other big complaint is Cid because, wow, that dude sucks ass. No wonder I've never heard anyone really talk about him when they talk about the characters in this game. His whole thing is really just he's an angry misogynist and I guess I'm supposed to think he's... cool? Because at the end he realizes he was mad about something he was wrong about? Fuck off into the sun, Cid. This is maybe the only FF I've played where I disliked a party member to the degree that I found him actually repellent. When I got to the section where I had to play as him I looked up a walkthrough to figure out how long I was stuck in that hell and what the quickest way through it was. Luckily, it was blessedly short.

Red XIII's line "It's hard to stand on your own two legs" has really stuck with me, maybe more than any other individual line of dialogue has in a long time. It's just such a succinct summation of part of this game's theme, y'know? You can't do it on your own, you have to be ready and willing to not just ask for help but also to accept it. You need people around you because life is hard and we can't make it on our own. Also, if you're an alien dog in disguise pretending to be a human solider it is literally difficult to stand on your own two feet.

At the start of the game I was a staunch Aerti shipper but the relationship that builds between Cloud and Tifa throughout this is so sweet it got me dangerously close to becoming a Cloti shipper. Although in my heart of hearts I know the real answer here is Claerti.

One last thing: like I alluded to above, the Steam version is super fucked! It didn't properly recognize my controller and had no way to rebind them so my only option would've been to do it via Steam's controller shit but that would've messed it up for every other game I play! It sucks! And if you use a controller the button prompts don't update correctly so you have to the keyboard binds and how those map to your controller! It sucks! Bad port! I think the only advantage this has is that it's easier to plug into a cheat engine table if you want that for any particular reason, y'know.


Music highlight. Estimated read time: 3~ minutes for OpenRCT2, 3~ minutes for venting. lol.

"Do I put my review on RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 or RollerCoaster Tycoon 2? And which version..." I don't know why I fretted over this when I played the entirety of both base games via OpenRCT2. It's also with this that I break my oldest "running gag" (implying it's funny) with this account, which is that I'm always playing RollerCoaster Tycoon 2; by unmarking it as "playing" and replacing that status with this. More on this later.

I could gush endlessly about RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2; they're in my mind the best jumping-off point for getting into management games, which in turn would make the entry into things like RTS easier for many. They're not without their flaws, though; I'll knock those out immediately. The most obvious one is that many things aren't explained to the player, but 95% of the time they are shown; the remaining 5% can ruin your scenario play, though, such as guest weight or ride requirements to avoid stat penalties... wait, hold on, don't go anywhere, I know that sounded like nerd shit... okay, it kind of is, but it's not that involved, I swear. "Learning" these games is incredibly easy if you observe interactions; though one plugin/mod I see people use is automatic price manager, and I personally think it takes a lot out of the game; you can find out how much you can sell something for by simply raising the price until people stop buying, or the inverse by lowering until people start buying. I mention this interaction specifically because this is how most things go with the game; if you're not sure, just do something and observe; it's not a particularly obtuse game except in some edge cases. That said, I'll recommend some very basic plugins for OpenRCT2 that help immensely with onboarding; they do not make the game easier, they just integrate relevant information that you would be wiki diving for in the first place.

Where these games shine is in the sheer player expression they allow for completing the scenarios, or in ride recreation, or scenery/decor, just general theming. The scenario difficulty scales fairly linearly in RCT1 with enough wiggle room to allow most players to not only learn but also express themselves (reasonably; don't spam too much or you'll go broke!). RCT2 had the problem of inexplicably ordering scenarios within each difficulty category alphabetically, meaning for many, they had an arduous first scenario in the form of Crazy Castle, which more experienced players almost unanimously agree should’ve been placed in Intermediate rather than Beginner anyways. OpenRCT2 now defaults to a difficulty sorting for RCT2's scenarios I believe, which essentially everyone recommends. Of course, this is mostly irrelevant if you played one or the other to completion and then started on the others' scenarios, as you'd already be accustomed to it, but it's yet another tweak OpenRCT2 makes that improves the experience for everyone.

...

"More on this later.": There is a weird fetishism from the more.. "niche" side of game review/criticism/analysis, a patriotic sense of obligation and pride in always playing, reviewing, and talking about The Original Version of something, often knowing full well that better versions of the game exist, and to not just make it a matter of preference but to actively disregard or dissuade playing games or such projects. To a degree, I felt this rub off on me from about 2015-2018 when I started collecting retro consoles like the PlayStation 3 and my dozens-long list of CRTs (essay on this some other time)
This isn't wholly unjustified, however, as for years and still going, many gamers will wholesale write off anything older than them as being outdated and not worth playing. In the case of OpenRCT2 all it really does is make the game playable on modern operating systems with the utmost basic quality-of-life changes (such as raising and lowering single tile placements without having to adjust the terrain first; things people far more into the game back in the day would enable tile editor for anyways, or one more significant, immensely helpful thing; but I'll let you see if you can figure out what that is in my playthrough of Micro Park. (timestamped to nudge you closer to it)

Somewhere along the way, I feel like the relatively young medium of video games skipped from being underbaked to overcooked in their analyses; a lack of brevity and/or concision, often over-analyzing every minute gameplay interaction for seemingly no reason other than to point out that they notice these things exist. It really shouldn't be warranted as a baseline component to a review unless you're clarifying something in active debate; most of it comes off as petulant bickering for little reason other than wilful disengagement.
To make matters worse, it's often coated with almost twice as much wordage trying to justify its position in the first place, as if the opinion piece of a cold, pessimistic burnout─the alphabet soup concocted in a flurry with more passion than any second given to the actual piece being discussed─ever needed one to begin with. It's just an opinion, after all. But maybe that's what's most upsetting from that perspective? That it is just that, and even if influential to a degree most can only dream of, still ultimately means little towards swaying the perception of the object of discussion.

O hypocrite that I am, for herein lies borderline word salad lamenting such an angle in the first place; oh well. It all wraps around to being fetishistic about things deemed historically significant, assigning them prestige and sacrality to be both immune from criticism and ammunition against that which deviates even a little.
Perhaps a more concentrated example is the inconsistency in perception around Minecraft (2009), specifically ""old"" Minecraft, where a very loud minority decry the game as having fallen off, being altered too much, etc.; the inconsistency of when it fell off would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing and laden with real-time demonstrations of parroting and a density of nostalgia bias so immense it makes Ocarina of Time look like a contrarian's pick. A defense of the old does not need to be propped up with slander of the new; that's just conservatism for video game art hoes.

Video games died in 1999, they'll say, which is news to me, but if that's true, then I'm pretty happy playing whatever this software is called from 2002, 2012, and 2022 as well.


Where to buy RollerCoaster Tycoon 1: GOG or Steam
Where to buy RollerCoaster Tycoon 2: GOG or Steam
OpenRCT2 project, for playing the games on modern operating systems: OpenRCT2
Launcher/updater for OpenRCT2/OpenLoco: OpenLauncher
Recommended OpenRCT2 plugins: Stat Requirement Checklist, Live Ride Measurements, Park Rating Inspector.

Saw the trailer for this on PlayStation's YouTube channel and gave it a fair shake since it was free!

I dig using games themselves as a kind of meaningful essay format to display and exemplify your points about design and really show the player a better idea of what is being discussed. I especially like this as a more intimate way to try to connect with someone via direct interfacing with mechanics and ideas.

I dug how this played with examples from different games and the creator wasn't afraid to just like call out very explicit specific examples from games though I kinda felt the whole point fell apart in the end by just kinda being like "this is all just to say that Shadow of the Colossus is the best" and it's like yeah but I felt like it kinda deflated a lot of the work and buildup that it was working with beforehand and all to take constant little jabs at fairly interesting games. I also feel like claiming that "that's where the industry peaked" is an insanely reductive statement but opinions!

I heavily disagreed with the entire FF16 point and felt like it could be a bit reductive with how it was engaging with and critiquing some of the games it was but that could also be some of my own implicit biases speaking.

I will say enemies within this are so hard to see given the visual style. I dig the aesthetics but at points it genuinely hurt my eyes to play through it was so difficult to look at at points and the options left a bit to be desired.

An interesting study/experiment even if I feel like it falls a little flat. Interested to see more things like this cause it's really an interesting way to do something like this!

Quick go play this game while you can before it gets shut down to evade taxes

Such a shame that Konami didn't do more with this IP. Think of all we could have gotten: pachinko machines, Grog Drinkwater NFTs, a remake made by Lockheed Martin that causes stupid people to insist the original game was never good. The possibilities are truly endless.