In the year 2001, something new was birthed.

A good video game.

The apex of an era. Of a franchise. Of a hedgehog. Cowards will tell you the game "aged poorly" becauase they are fundamentally weak. It's only gotten better with age as we've through the era of Shadow the Hedgehog being a cool guy to the era of Shadow the Hedgehog being a cringe guy and now into the golden age of Shadow the Hedgehog being the Best Guy.

The masses will hate me because I tell the truth. They'll say shit like "all the levels that aren't Sonic and Shadow suck" because they have failed to reached the zen state of running around them like a maniac racking up points and getting it faster. I'm right and I won't be stopped from saying it any more. It's the best Sonic.

Chao are cute too tbh

Platinum fans are the Jojos fans of games, and I say this with as much derision as possible. Really, what fandom would be complete without hoards of incessant blabbermouths, who appear out of nowhere to tell you how much you’re missing out? I am certain it is a vocal minority, but it’s hard not to notice. There is a certain brand of fan that wants to make it very clear to you at every chance they can that the thing they like is both wacky and good. It’s a brand of fan I greatly dislike.

But the more I meditate on all this, the less I am able to convince myself that any of this is a bad thing. Why is people being excited about a thing, even incessantly, a bad thing? Logically, I know that being annoying is, well, annoying, but I’m not sure that the annoyance is the only thing that’s annoying me. I dislike that brand of fan, but I worry it’s pettier than that. I think I might resent them simply for being so enthusiastic. Why should I resent someone for being passionate about something they enjoy?

Through the later years of high school, I basically only had one friend. I had switched schools, and most of my human contact disappeared with it. It was an extremely dark time. That one friend really liked fighting games, (part of my apprehension around fighters starts here, too) and in that vein, really liked Platinum games. He eventually felt obligated and did dive into Jojos, too. Once, I asked if he could lend me his copy of Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 for the Wii U. But he declined, saying, “I treasure them too much” or something of that ilk. That friendship ended quite ugly. They completely stopped talking to me one day. I would occasionally bump into them at college, but they didn’t seem to want to talk to me. One day they reached out to me, asked if I wanted to meet up for some food or something. I didn’t really know how to follow up. I sort of regret not doing anything about that.

Anyway, I started playing Bayonetta, and all I could think about were the annoying Platinum fans. I try to ignore them, but it just keeps nagging at me, this blight of contrarian twinges. I write a tweet.

Platinum game fans: yeah i love Platinum games, every game they make is great! oh except that one is bad, it sucked. oh and i heard that one was trash, i didn't even play it. oh and--

This post had been in my head for a long time, months actually, and I finally just let myself post it. And you know, it’s true, it’s a pretty good goof, but I also know it was fueled a bit by spite. I hate that about me. It was a good post, but I hate that. It got a hair of attention, including from known Platinum enjoyers, so at the very least some of them took it in good sport. But what I found was that, after I had finally let the sass out, I was able to enjoy Bayonetta a lot more.

Why? Is this small act of pettiness really enough to relieve the anxiety? Is that really a healthy relationship with discourse and art? Should I vent my spite for my own good? I try to avoid being sassy and rude online. I don’t try to target people for their taste, and I try not to dunk on anything. Everytime I do, I usually feel bad. I spend so much energy repressing it. I have no shortage of snark and spite inside me. But I bottle them up like pickles, let them lactoferment in my gyri. Does that make me seem all snooty and holier-than-thou? I dunno, I just feel like I ought not. The scruples are stuck in my teeth. Do I deserve to be a little snarky? I don’t know.

I would say its similar to my response to hype, which it is, and hype has ruined so many things for me, but this has its own dimension, too. For example, it even goes backwards. I had played Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance a long time ago, and I had enjoyed it. I had fun with it. But as time passed, and I was exposed to more and more of that certain breed of fan, I began to resent the game. How dumb is that? I liked the game, now I feel worse about it because other people I don’t like also liked it. Is that really healthy?

Some years ago, on a forum, we were discussing Astral Chain. This was before it was out, during an E3. I commented that I was weary about the theming of cops. But a Platinum fan dissuaded me. Surely, Platinum, the beloved studio, would not screw this up! I said I wasn’t optimistic, given their other games. Another Platinum fan, who from now on we will call “The Vigilante”, rode in. “Um, actually, you see, Platinum games are actually the most progressive and leftist. Actually, the trailer makes it look like the cops are the bad guys. And actually, it is your ignorance on display here.” I’m of course paraphrasing, editorializing, and reading into it. But the condescension was palpable. I recognized The Vigilante as a poster who tended to roll into threads, tell people they’re wrong and dumb, and then leave. Later on in that thread, someone shared an interview with the director who said “maybe people will come away from this game with a better perspective on the police.” But The Vigilante was gone, a shadow in the night, their duty to condescend fulfilled.

Now, Astral Chain has come out, and of course I was fucking right. The game was not some scalding critique of the cops. And all I’m really able to feel is a smug sense of satisfaction at The Vigilante being full of shit. Why are they even on my mind? The Vigilante is the same reason I couldn’t stomach to enjoy any of Utena, along with, well, trying to watch it in the presence of someone much similar to them. I was told with insistence that Utena is simply the best, and to not recognize it as such is, of course, my failing. It’s the best, most queer, most philosophical, and most best anime that there ever was. And that’s all I was ever able to think about the entire time. Trying to figure out where I’m wrong, or they are. Trying to figure out if they were right to cast judgement.

You know, I literally have to excuse myself from conversations about Jojos these days. I find myself increasingly exasperated every time it comes up. And of course it will always come up, Jojo fans love letting you know that they like Jojo, that it’s so wacky and good, and that you should really understand their references. But why should I fucking care? Seeing a thousand comments on prog rock videos will things to a person, I guess. But it’s probably more likely that it’s this… weird impulse I can’t shake, that I want to rid myself of but it just clings on me like a deertick. The sad thing is that I’d probably like Jojos if I had gotten to it before I met the fans. It seems extremely stupid and sort of bad, but I like things that are stupid and bad. But I have sworn off it to spite… I don’t know who. The incessant fans? My old friend? Maybe. I don’t know.

Have you noticed I haven’t said a word about Bayonetta? About the game this is ostensibly about? Probably. It’s because I cannot rid myself of the infection of spite.

As for the game, I mostly like Bayonetta. There’s not a lot to say in one way or the other that probably hasn’t been said. There’s almost no point in me saying anything, but whatever. I thought the combat loop was slick. I enjoyed hammering out flashy combos. I think Bayonetta is a fun character. I think she’s a bit much and very obviously one man’s fetish doll, but I’m also not above admiring her sass and her ass. I legitimately enjoy this game. I probably like it more than I’m letting on. Of course, there are things I don’t like, too. I don’t like its shitty motorcycle sections, or its shitty shmup section, either. I don’t like that it asks me to dodge attacks I can’t predict right out of a cutscene. I don’t like Luka. I don’t like its shitty quicktime events. And I dont like its awkward camera either. But all this is relatively small, right? I’ve loved games despite worse. And when I think about what I don’t like about Bayonetta (or Revengeance, for that matter), the first things that come in to my head are people like The Vigilante. Nothing to do with the game itself. Just things about discourse, people talking about how superior it is, about how the game is secretly feminist, how it’s secretly queer, how everyone says its simply the best combat in the universe, how Platinum fans are convinced these are some obscure niche kino, and… well, you get it.

These things aren’t that complicated. Sometimes the thing you like is not so transcendental. So much stuff has been pitched to me as the best, and I wish people would just tell me what it is without the effusive hyperbole. I don’t want hype, I don’t want to be told “you cannot predict what will happen” or that “you cannot oversell this”. You can, and you will. Maybe it’s my fault for taking people at their word, or my fault for getting so obsessive. I’m sure I’ve done the same. But fuck, man. Just let them be the things they are, whether they’re corny magical girl anime or sunshine pop or a wacky martial arts movie or a campy and horny hack’n’slash. Sometimes that’s all they are, and that is why they’re good. Platinum games are dumb action games, and that’s why they’re fun. It’s not complicated. I just wish people told me this stuff.

It’s so dumb. I know it’s dumb, but it just won’t go away. I felt judged, and I want to judge back. But I hate judging people. It makes me feel sick. So instead I just have this festering mass in my noggin, glowering down. I have so many examples of things like this in my life. Is this what people think about me when I talk about the things I love? Is that why I’m so afraid to do it? Is it because I can find so little in my life to enjoy enthusiastically that I feel envious? Or am I just being a snob? Am I really so petty? Am I so contrarian? Am I still upset about my old friend? Am I envious of the fans? Why do I have to obsess over what The Vigilante and other jerks think? Why do I let things be ruined by people I don’t respect? And why do I care so much about what they think about me?

There’s no moral to this. I just wish my brain wasn’t like this.

As the only clown on this website who has played the whole game (in one sitting right at release to secure a free Pickle Rick back bling in Fortnite), I can say with confidence High on Life is dreadfully weak. And that's a bit of a shame since it theoretically has good bones.

The most glaring problem is, of course, the dialogue. The pre-release comparison to Borderlands 3 is apt as characters literally do not cease their oral spew, and you are forced to listen to them before you can progress at key points. Borderlands has ameliorated this in part with the ECHOnet transmissions, keeping you apprised of plot elements as you messed about on Pandora. Save for key story moments, the dialogue therein is accompanied by your mad dash for loot and slaughter. High on Life quivers in its boots at the mere thought that you might miss a single phoneme. There is no means to skip dialogue. There is no opportunity to play the game when characters are talking. If you are not physically glued in place, you are locked in a distraction-less room. And should you dare to break from the tedium of a suburban hardwood floor and off-white walls by heading upstairs, you are scolded by your guns to pay attention. In a properly written, compelling narrative this would be fine, but a substantial chunk of the game is NPCs yammering incessantly. Fake arguments become auditory static, the white noise penetrated only by mention of racism, misogyny, or a cavalcade of 'fuck's. Does a holstered gun have something to say? Worry not, they'll speak to you over radio. That there is so much dialogue is rather interesting in and of itself, particularly seeing how your different weaponry will engage in conversations with NPCs, but there is not a moment where speech is not occurring. The only moment of respite is if you stay in place.

And some of the writing is passable, some even bordering on good. But it never comes out of Justin Roiland's many mouths. The closest I came to cracking a smile was when Zach Hadel, Michael Cusack, Rich Evans, Jay Bauman, Mike Stoklasa, or Tom Kenny was the focus. In a vacuum, some of their witticisms might have earned a chuckle or at least a considered exhale, but these moments are paltry oases after being duped by an infinitude of mirages. You know in your bones that a joke will not be allowed to stand on its own, and that Roiland or his other hack voice 'actors' will need to get their own two cents in. It is a Reddit comment thread not only in content, but in presentation, someone always retelling the above poster's joke but worse. In Roiland's world, stuttering is a feature, not a bug. His stammering makes Porky Pig seem eloquent. A one-take wonder.

"Is the gameplay good?" This question was asked more times than I can count during my marathon. As I emphatically repeated there, "no." There's a weightlessness to every second of combat that betrays the animations and premise of your guns being living things. There is more weight, more oomph, more impact to Spore's creature stage combat than there is to this gunplay. Your bullets genuinely feel as if they are lobbed foam balls. The only times at which there is some punch is when detonating sigh Sweezy's crystals with her charge shot. I can't tell if it's all a consequence of your enemies being shrouded in goop or not. Your shots take away the goop to expose their regular flesh, but this somehow imparts little feedback. Is it because there is so much flash and bedlam occurring that I can't even tell where and when my shots are landing? I have no idea. At the very least the juggling of enemies is semi-novel (even if it comes after Kenny begs lustfully for me to use his 'Trickhole'), and Creature is semi-satisfying if only because you can launch his children and go find a quiet[er] corner to recuperate mentally in. You get some basic manoeuvrability upgrade which makes this a Metr- Search Action game in some sense when coupled with returning to planets to find extra cash. You can upgrade your weapons and unlock modifiers for them but the changes are so minute I couldn't really tell how much of an impact they were having. What the mods do do is change the colour of your weapons. Given that so much of your screen real estate is occupied by their "beautiful dick-sucking lip" visages, this is the most substantial alteration you can make.

The music is like Temporary Secretary by Paul McCartney but bad.

Visually there is something of value here (in theory). While many of the alien inhabitants blend together with their amorphous sausage anatomies, the unique NPCs typically bear striking designs. Sweezy notwithstanding, the guns are cute as well, even if I feel Kenny is perpetually doing the Dreamworks smirk. Kenny and Gus' iron sights are adorable, and the way Gus clamps onto your hand indoors melts my heart. Creature reminds me of that Skylander that had the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Inoffensive! Until you see his actual full model and you realise he has three tits and a prolapsed anus for a barrel. And Gus looks like he has a turtle's cock.

Errant thoughts:

Boy howdy is there a lot of mpreg talk.

One of the scenes you can warp in is a movie theatre where you can watch all of Demon Wind with the RLM crew. That would be okay but I don't think the MST3K style commentary works for a film that belongs in a Best of the Worst episode. There's a reason why they show you fragments of them watching it, and why their film commentaries are for more compelling films.

There is so much overlapping of dialogue that I genuinely got a headache that intensified over the game. A horror during a Tylenol shortage in Canada.

I put more effort into gathering my thoughts than they did making this shit.

I wish that I had always been in a grave.

imagine paying a monthly fee to work for the opportunity to pull a slot machine with the hope it lets you do the stuff you're actually paying for. would say this couldn't be me but alas, once again

i always thought i was an outlier here, in that i never enjoyed the gear grind that mmo players assume is there to "get your money's worth" (i could not believe my eyes when i saw people clamoring for the return of daily quests over weeklies,) but i'm realizing these people are broken and this design is prohibiting a different audience from forming, for reasons that anyone who's been turned off from playing one already understands

these games feature genuinely interesting blends of cooperative puzzle solving and choreography you can't get elsewhere, and it's all locked behind the most bloated tedium you could possibly imagine. it's so frustrating to not be able to share this kind of experience with others. once again asking for a saint to prove you can do it without the trappings of this garbage

God Hand sets out to answer a question that I was perfectly happy not knowing the answer to. "Is the Danganronpa soundtrack good to beat people up to?" And while it answered that, and then some (to sum things up: don't trust chihuahuas, do trust a mysterious girl when she shows up with some dead dude's arm, gambling will solve all of your money problems quickly and efficiently), I was left feeling pretty empty at the end. Where is God Foot? Where is God Head? If this game had sold more and gotten sequels, I would've been able to form Exodia. Fucked up that the powers that be are preventing me from doing that, but I see why they deemed this game too powerful and sought to undermine its influence.

I’d call myself the most casual of Pokémon fans; big into it as a kid who was the perfect age to get in on the ground floor of this Whole Thing, but after gen 3 and bar a brief but frenetic romhack phase in my late teens, I’ve settled into the kind of distantly pleasant relationship with the series where I pick up each new game and have a good time playing through to credits but then never touch or think about them again, and repeat every two years. I couldn’t tell you the names of most new guys, but I CAN see a picture of them and go damn, that’s a cute critter. Casual. So no one was more surprised than me when Pokémon Violet turned out to be not only my favorite Pokémon game easily and by far, but one of my favorite games this year?? I play a lot of games man, and mostly bangers too.

A big big part of this accomplishment is that Pokémon has finally cracked the code on writing, like really for real this time. I know Pokémon guys like to talk about gen V and I am even a gen Whatever Sun and Moon Were liker for the stuff those go for at the end but there is simply nothing as consistently and thoroughly well done in this series before now and certainly not on the scale we see here. Every single person pops with huge personality, and for the first time those personalities are supported by like, stories that while not REVOLUTIONARY are certainly a tier above the stock standard baby anime tropes we’ve seen in the past. Hearing that Team Star were like the what, third antagonist group in a row who were a spin on Misunderstood Waylaid Youths had me groaning at first but their stories and motivations land! There is nuance in the laying out of their situation, there is acknowledgment that institutions in power and authority, especially over children, can and do fail to care for them and also are able to accept responsibility. Arven is a great little guy, firmly in the “wanna stick him in a little glass bottle and shake it up” tier. A potent blend of condescending and pathetic with a genuinely deserved chip on his shoulder at the way his life has turned out. And I’ll acknowledge that it’s because I have a chronically (and someday probably sooner than later it will become terminally) ill cat who has been having a really bad month, but his scenes really hit for me and I extremely cried near the resolution of his story.

The idea that a Pokémon game can have that power over me is only possible because Game Freak’s writers have subtley but definitely expanded the scope of maturity in how they treat the world of Paldea compared to previous games. Arven’s story fundamentally cannot work without acknowledgment of violence, real violence outside of the context of Pokémon battles – of death and dying, active dying that is happening now and happening TO us rather than in abstract stories of ancient struggles. This sort of thing is evident everywhere you look in Paldea. The Pokémon League isn’t the centerpiece of your life or anyone else’s, even the people who work for it; and they DO work for it, in an employment capacity. But there’s a distinct feeling that it’s not in its heyday even if it’s still a Big Deal. Almost every single gym leader does this as more of a side gig than their whole thing, and sometimes they’re not around or there’s an implication that these events have to be scheduled around their availability to some degree. Gym tests are based on the local town culture more often that they are on hard battle prowess and those cultures are a much greater and more foregrounded part of the town identities. When you get to the Elite Four finally, the building has two rooms that you get to see, a sort of lobby foyer where you’re interviewed with a classic gray office carpet floor pattern that every American desk drone knows intimately, and the single battle arena that everyone shares. It’s a much more realistic take on the idea than everyone having a giant customized zone within a huge tower or something. Everyone stays to watch after you beat them. It’s more informal but it’s been formalized. Even though you can’t walk into everyone’s houses anymore Paldea feels so much more like a real place where people live than any other region.

In keeping with this new emphasis on storytelling both explicit and implicit, Violet rewards role playing. Sure, you’re a kid in a magical world on a fantasy school assignment with completely free reign to stop about the country at your leisure, but you’re allowed and encouraged to like, go to class also! And if you’re pacing them out you unlock a handful of classes as you hit major milestones in the game’s three concurrent storylines. These vary in usefulness and the degree of information you learn from them is extremely fucked up lmao, like this is the first time I can think of that Pokémon explicitly explains a LOT of the underlying mechanics that are going on beneath the simple surface of the menus but these explanations are meted out mostly in a math class that you won’t see all of for 80% of the game it’s very funny. I don’t know that these are for actually learning anything, they’re all flavor, and I think it was incredibly brave of Game Freak to ferret away like eight or nine completely fleshed out unique NPCs in the school, only two of whom you would ever even see after the tutorial if you weren’t coming back for all this completely optional shit. There’s even a social link system separate from the classroom stuff! The school nurse has a series of social link cutscenes and she doesn’t even TEACH a class! There’s your math teacher, right, and via some hints in dialogue and her character design you can figure out that she is a retired gym leader and she used rock type Pokémon and she is the sister of the current gym type leader before any of this is told to you and you can DO THIS because she has geometric shaped hair, geode-themed jewelry, her name scheme fits her sister’s, and in one of her classes she name drops specific moves in her examples. There is simply a degree of care here that may not be particularly DEEP but is deeply REWARDING to engage with, if you’re willing to engage with it.

I also find Violet to be a quite beautiful game, beyond the way it stylishly makes use of a lot of smart 2D assets and cleverly implemented recycled animations to paper over places where it’s clear development was rushed and there wasn’t time to finish or polish everything (the food eating cutscenes are charming and incredible I don’t make the rules!). If the Galar region felt a little generic in the styles of the environments, Paldea has it beat in two important ways: first by having a more creative set of locales to trudge through, including things like wildflower rich stream beds, misty lakes, spindly cliffs, and bamboo groves among others. These unique little treat areas do a lot to separate out the expected plains and deserts and snowy mountains and make things feel less monotonous. It’s always a treat to wander into somewhere pretty and special, and to see which Pokémon are thoughtfully placed to live in them. The second way Paldea marks itself as the better of Game Freaks 3D environment outings is that the terrain is just generally more varied. I was a little worried to hear about “entire game world wild area” because frankly the wild areas kind of sucked ass??? Like it was cool to run around and catch guys at will but I found the more authored routes in Sword and Shield ultimately more compelling even if I couldn’t just go catch a Flapple or whatever anytime. Here though, even when you are just running up the grassy plains there’s always a LOT going on in terms of mountains and trees and elevation – no two areas feel truly the same even when they’re the same biome. This makes the game world feel more like a place even as it cleverly routes the player roughly along only a few pathways to see most of the leveled content in a more or less proper order without compromising the ultimately nonlinear nature of the game.

I wanna give a special shoutout to Area Zero, the secret fucked up super big crater that occupies the center of the map and is where the last bit of story content in the game takes place after you’ve finished your initial three threads. It ties everything that’s cool about this game together really well. As you descend into this harsh and dangerous zone you may quickly realize that it’s the only place in the game where your minimap isn’t active and why would it be, Area Zero isn’t mapped. The music is sedate and uncanny, and when it breaks for battle it’s weird and anxious. The Pokémon here are weird ones, or rare ones, or fully evolved ones, or, at least on the very top levels, ones that can fly in and out of the crater’s rim. The Pokémon you find will become stranger the deeper you go. There’s an otherworldly shimmer in the air, and the twinkles mimic the ones that outside the crater indicate an item to pick up on the ground; here they trick and disorient you. It’s the only place in the game where your constant companion, the legendary on your box cover, won’t come out of their ball, which leaves you without a mount, so no bike, no jump, no glide, no easy way out of the crater. The distance feels huge when you have to hoof it. You bring the protagonists of each of the other three stories in the game with you on the trip and while it’s delightful to see them all interact with each other (it would have been TRAGIC for this to have not happened) it also reveals more about them even this late in the game; Nemona, my favorite character in the game for being a fucking freak ass weirdo who loves blood more than anything, in unimpeachably cheerful and energetic but when you see her out of her element in the Pokémon League circuit she’s revealed to have a hard time relating to other people outside of her one interest, and kind of generally rude and thoughtless with their feelings. Penny gets to show herself to be deeply empathetic towards and protective of others in a more proactive way than in her own story but she’s also harsh and quick to anger in doing so. Arven is the true protagonist of the game and its emotional burden rests with him, and his mask cracks the most. So ultimately you get a small sad story about the ways families can fail each other and these three awkward kids who bond through one pretty fuckin bad day and it’s like, y’know it’s good! There is a lot of cool stuff here.

Nobody is more surprised than me! Truly! I have always basically liked Pokémon but I’ve never been ENTHUSIASTIC. It’s just that this one did a lot of inacore stuff, gave me a bone with a lot of meat to chew on just to my tastes, and when you slap that on top of Pokémon's general play which is rock solid as ever, and what I feel is a real nailing down of the open world side of things this time? I dunno man, I think they really knocked this one out of the park.

Fuck it, I don't care, I don't have reasons, nor do I want them. I am capable of emotion, believe it or not, despite my scrawls of pontification. And I get feelings from these games. The first came out in 2017 (age of political awakening and steady decline) and this came out in 2022 (deep in the age of "it") and I needed it both times. Romance is dangerous for me; I avoid it because I get all up in my lonely feelings. This is my rare chance to curl up in it. There's no logical reason why this works for me so much and other things like it simply don't. I can dissect it or make a nuanced pitch, but it's a waste of words. This is not a recommendation or a review. I'm just saying things. I'm not going to compare one entry to the other; I don't much remember the first one other than adoring it deeply. Sure, maybe some of it is hamfisted this time around, and sure, there are anachronistic memes, but I literally don't care. I just like it. It makes me smile and I get warm fuzzies and I like it. It is so rare that I can just smile authentically and earnestly at art. Vulnerability can be embarrassing but it's liberating. Earnestness will set me free. And if you think it's cringe to find joy in something so vulnerable, then you can leave me the fuck alone

Took a little break from editing the Covenant video and have been in the mood for a Far Cry game so booted up Blood Dragon cause I've never played it and I've now owned it for years at this point.

I don't really see what others see in this to be completely honest. The jokes didn't really land for me at all, the aesthetic is cool but honestly this is just such a slog of an experience. I think if the writing wasn't dipped in such a boring 2013 era 80's "reverential" irony quoting 2008 memes and refusing to shut the fuck up to let the few kinda funny quips at least sit with you I think this could've maybe worked. But as is it's just annoying.

Michael Biehn's performance is kinda fun but it sounds like he's drunkedly sleepwalking through this entire thing which does at least lend itself as a little funny to some of the jokes/quips presented.

The fairly boring gameplay loop doesn't help at all with little enemy variety and guns that feel like shit due to the enemies all feeling like massive bullet sponges until you get the chain gun.

I couldn't even fully enjoy the final setpiece all that much, though it was the best part of the game, because the game was just smugly being ironic about how stupid it was being instead of just being stupid and endearing first and quitting the constant camera winking it couldn't stop itself from doing.

Instead of playing this I'd just recommend going and watching some actual goofy ass 80's films or something for 4 hours. You'll probably have a better time with that but people seem to love the shit out of this so who knows. If you're anything like me you'll probably have more fun watching the American Ninja films instead of wasting time on this.

A very short but tragic look at the author's transition and all the complications surrounding this very sensitive subject. I can never ever even come close to understanding what it is like to go through a process like this, especially at a time when it was even less accepting than it is now.

The game's simple pixel art style is used to great effect as a lot of the uncomfortable moments in the story are made more impactful through the crude depictions of the characters and telling more than showing with certain scenes. The vile nature of people viewing others as only objects of sex was one of the strongest themes. The scene where you are given the choice to browse the internet and witness peoples unfiltered wants and desires made me really sick.

Stories like this definitely open my eyes more to the thoughts and feelings of people who transition. I couldn’t imagine how hard it was to talk about something like this, especially with how terrifying it gets. The game was only 20 minutes but it is one I will be thinking about for a while.

While I have never been in the experiences that Taylor McCue has, which make up the semi-autobiographical narrative of this game, I can definitely relate to the sheer level of trauma and pain that is conveyed.

The visuals express a form of terror and horror that only such experiences could create, and it allows the situation to really sink in deep as you read through these nightmarish scenarios.

My chest feels tight, I want to throw up, the game did it's job at showing me Taylor's pain and sadness of being a sex worker when you don't want to.

The part that I really relate to the most is the feeling that nobody will ever love you because of your past decisions, it's something I've also coped with over these past four agonizing years of adulthood as I've felt entirely alone and unloved because of my failings as a person.

But I think that He Fucked The Girl Out of Me makes the argument that even though that feeling may be there, we should never give into it. Love will find a way, it always has.

I definitely recommend reading this, though do be advised the themes get very intense very quickly, so make sure to check the triggers before you truly get into it.