Normally if I enjoy a game I'd either try to have fun with my writing and do something corny like roleplaying as a character or go insanely heavy on the showmanship, but for the sake of this I'm actually going to be really vanilla and bore everyone to death.

Before I heel out, I'd like to let it be known that I was rooting for this game. When it was originally revealed in one of the Directs, I clapped, I hooted, and I hollered, for she deserves the universe and everything in it. She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment. I heard it get compared to Wario World, which made me bounce off walls like Spring Wario from the classic Game Boy games. I could imagine it now, Peach womanhandling every bad guy in sight and going on an exciting journey through every genre of artistic theater known by Mushroomy Kingdom history. Unfortunately, comparing Good-Feel to even one of Treasure's lesser developments is essentially like putting silly putty next to an unpolished diamond.

"Engagement" and "difficulty" are two separate things, and it really needs to be stressed that the latter means little in the grand stage of what makes a game do what a game does, which is engage the player and take their mind off life, with the "fun yeah woo" energy replacing all their other thought processes. Spyro the Dragon and Ninja Gaiden are on opposite ends of the spectrum and still manage to be a few of my favorites to ever do it. Just a few days ago, I played Bugs Bunny Lost in Time on stream in a Discord call with one of my friends as she did some programming, and that is a game "made for children" with very little punishment dealt out for mistakes. For how jank and lower budget it was, it was fun with decent puzzles, cool ship combat, car chase segments, and even pretty good boss fights! It's something I enjoyed when I was eight, and still do now as an adult.

Peach Showtime for all of it's poor performing extravagance doesn't even use a lot of the joycon's controls, and many segments are very linear and on-rails with one of the Detective Peach puzzles quite literally having the solution put up on the wall for you. Using a simple control scheme is never a bad thing in itself, I enjoy an Atari game now and then, but the fine art of utilizing that simple control scheme demands creativity that extends beyond auto-scrolling sections that make 100%'ing the game annoying. It would also ask for enemies to master the very tricky art of "moving the fuck around a little" to justify having the world's most lenient parry window. It's frustrating, because for every half-decent powergaming moment that involves throwing hitboxes around enemies that are less threatening than beginner mode Musou soldiers it's spliced between very uninteresting unskippable dialogue, uneventful non-combat plays, auto-scrolling/auto-running sections, and "puzzle" segments that are more trivial than microwave cooking. It makes me drowsy! I've played stuff like Toy Story Activity Center off the Collection Chamber and Number Munchers last year, and that stuff was pretty fun despite the target audience! Hell, I still come back to Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio on Sega Genesis just to screw around with the music maker! It stimulates my imagination, unlike Peach Showtime!

Give kids some respect, or even better give Peach some respect. A little bit of both I feel would go a long way.

....Also, I know I'm preaching to the choir on this subject, but why does the game run so goddamn bad? The loading screen and results screen run worse than a bunch of Atari Jaguar games I've played, was it a bad style choice? It would check out I guess, I may as well be playing a movie game.

A dull direct-to-VHS Disney movie game.

As part of Landfall Game's yearly April-Fools-Shadow-Drop-Game tradition comes a genuinely refreshing take on the "Coop-Horror-Quota" game! (trying not to just blatanly call it a "Lethal-Company-like" here) Embracing the horror and chaos by trying to film as much as possible of it with the camera while your squad acts and screams through the proximity voice works pretty damn well, especially since you get rewarded (if you make it out alive) with the recording of your spooky romp, with audio and everything. A goofy game that excels if you can b goofy wit tha homies.

Okay, yes, this game is cringey. No one is questioning that, lmao. It’s a gamer themed dating game based around real living people. You really don’t need to go much further than that to understand why everyone makes fun of it. But don’t worry, I’ll keep talking about it and make it all your problem too 🖤🖤🖤


First of all, I just want to say I realize that they clearly went into this game thinking this would be a funny joke of “hey, let’s make a game about ourselves.” “Yeah, hahaha you know what would be funny? If it were a dating game, you know how cheesy those can get.” “Oh, that’s perfect! We can totally poke fun at each other and the game genre at the same time!” And yes, there’s nothing wrong with that in theory. But then you actually sit down and play the game and realize you’re playing a high school dating simulator where you play as a high school girl who is interested in the other high school boys. Except they’re based on 30-year old men, still acting and looking like the 30-year old men they’re based off of, and the cherry on top is one eventually getting into a scandal about whether or not he was sexting with high school aged girls. So yeah, I’m going to find this game incredibly creepy. It’s like watching Grease, where all the high schoolers are so clearly adult men and women, but you have to sit and pretend they’re all 17. Except in addition to that, they’re all epic gamers, a few of which you can argue have some pretty questionable morals. (Though I won’t act like any of the actors in Grease didn’t either lol)

The game still has the qualities that dating visual novels have, and there’s a clear talent put into the UI and art. I don’t want the idea of the game being “cringe” to be anything involving the art or music department or anything like that, it's just when you decide to make a dating game about real people, even if it’s supposed to be a joke, it’s going to be freaking weird. It’s especially going to be weird when the game ends up focusing on specifically Normal Boots people. So bluntly put, that’s what I think about the game. It’s a weird and uncomfortable premise for a game, so as a result I think that the game is weird and uncomfortable.

The game ended amazingly for me though, with it crashing hours in: perfectly encapsulating the spirit of the whole experience.

A meticulous on-going negotiation between space, architecture, self-doubt, and the rigidity of systems real and imagined.

Go buy and play it. Equip your horse blinders because the store page sours things a bit.

ここでは
左側通行
⬅

Perfect tectonic representation of Japanese underground passageways afforded by advances in games graphics. The hyperreal supplants the original to the extent that, as in reality, it becomes visual noise, consumed without deliberate thought. Without knowing what The Exit 8 delivers, its call to pay attention to surroundings becomes an act of questioning minutiae and the necessary bounds of the game space. In quietly becoming familiar with the space itself, differences should become apparent, but the mind effectively second-guesses itself amid a sea of static. Occasionally it is blatant, more often fleeting as a wandering eye spot, impossible to catch within one's focus and definitively claim it to be actual.

Of course, if it really was that subtle it wouldn't be a very rewarding experience, but the learning experience is reinforced by the dread of seeing 0, an affirmation that you missed something or, more terrifyingly, misremembered something. Were the posters always in that configuration? Did the passerby look like that? How grungy was it last time?

By not repeating itself until the bag of tricks runs empty, The Exit 8 refuses to even give the player the opportunity to enter routine, to become acquainted with the unfamiliar. Even the security of 8 not a perfect shield until the assurance of leaving it behind.