A very hard, windingly long for the genre, story-based precision platformer with lots of celebrity cameos and a singular artistic vision from its one-man team Paul Helman, former developer on PS1 PAL-exclusive game Terracon, who describes Horace as "his life's work"
Said vision comes off as that of a British Gen X Dad whose sense of humor consists of quotes from 80s movies and who will share his weed with you, his beloved child, even though you're a year or two underage because "it's better you get it here than from some stranger"
Sounds obnoxious I know but it's a lot more endearing if you have people with some or all of those attributes in your life, give some respect to Gen X they only created the entirety of the cancelled future eternal present pop cultural landscape in which you inhabit, therefore it's okay if their sense of humor is mostly composed of "do you remember That Guy from That Movie"

It's Celeste if it was about a robot trying to attain personhood and if you accept the game on its own pretenses and check your cynicism at the door it's just as likely to make you cry, worked on me at least, yeah I said it this game made me cry, it really goes to faraway places from where it starts and achieves its objective of setting out to be a grand journey encompassing the whole spectrum of human emotion, whether it's grief at the inevitability of death, comedy at the way the main character's unshakable morality and robotic bluntness clash with the world around him, and inconsolable rage at some of these level designs, this game truly has every emotion contained within its couple gigabytes
Inspired by the 1979 film Being There, if that means anything to you, it's a coming-of-age story that starts out feeling a little childish at the start because you follow Horace over his entire life with all the ups and downs that entails, as he learns the ropes of the world like an inquisitive child would, and by the end of the game you truly feel like you were right there with him through an entire lifetime of victories and traumas
Maybe Celeste is selling the game's unique approach a bit short, its edge in this genre is that of employing lots of walking on ceilings and walls and spheres with your magical grandfatherly loafer shoes, which is always something that appeals to me, joining the small-but-honorable pantheon of such famous ceiling-walker platformers as Gravity Armor MetalStorm, VVVVVV, and of course Super Mario Galaxy, especially that game's 2D side-scrolling segments
It's also somewhat of a collectathon, with a big open-ended map focused around maximizing the fun factor of the main character's quest to cleanse the world by collecting one million pieces of junk (don't worry, there's not exactly one million item pickups)
Some people might think this game too difficult, with an obvious case of "the programmer mastered the game" difficulty, but games where you're not in a life-or-death struggle all the time bore me, so I really liked this game's difficulty curve

I think what makes this game work so much on me is the way nobody can accuse it of not swinging for the fences, it earns its characters, endears them to you despite the difficulty in taking seriously its Newgrounds-ass sprite comics-ass cutscenes and the monotone text-to-speech delivery
Everyone is given ample amounts of screentime and plenty of chronological years to grow over and when someone betrays you it genuinely hurts despite being understandable from their perspective

Some people (myself?) have interpreted the "critically mixed" (according to Normal People) film Bicentennial Man as being a trans and/or autistic analogy, whether or not that was the initial intention of the writer, and I think the same can be said for Horace
The both of them are about a character who is built different, singled-out for not looking and acting the same way as others, and an uphill decades-long battle to assert personhood in a normative society that keeps telling you you're not good enough to have that, in the process being very straightforward in how the titular android endures and is alienated by brutal systemic oppression from being part of a group that is legally designated to be less human than those making the rules

It's been a couple years since I played it (ignore where it says completed again, just wanted to leave a real review this time) otherwise I'd quote the game itself or something, but if you want a memorable existential treatise on how horrifying it would be to exist as an artificial humanoid who cannot die in a world suffused by the stench of your flesh-based loved ones' deaths, AND you want to humiliate Twin Galaxies former world record holder Billy Mitchell, then have I got the game for you

I am contractually obligated to inform you that if you take a look at the dumped prototype's name, this game was originally entitled Bioplaything Cop

Gaelco is perhaps one of the most underrated arcade game manufacturers because they'd make these weird games that feel like they dropped out of a parallel reality, and they don't even feel like arcade games, they feel like arcade-exclusive console games, or perhaps Amiga Eurojank
This would've been pretty successful as a 1995 PS1 longbox release standing along the likes of Rayman or Gex or Johnny Bazookatone, it's better than a lot of the second-stringers like that last one, but that's not how Gaelco rolls, if their games released on console then they wouldn't have that "hazy, half-remembered in a dream, easy to forget until some encyclopedic dork like me reminds you that they existed" quality

Four stars out of five, fun-run-and-gun, weird, wild and memorable art direction that's just fun to look at in a Rayman 1 or Yoshi's Island sort of way, shmup-like enemy placement that demands you force your way through hitstun invincibility frames like a quarterback, protagonist has that iconic era-appropriate Sketch Turner from Comix Zone greasy ponytail, you think this is SLICKED back??? This is PUSHED back.

Play Smashing Drive or I'll smash your nuts

It's so easy to squint and imagine how earlier Platinum would've knocked this out of the park, how it was probably pitched as a full-fat spiritual sequel to Okami, but they didn't, their worst instincts activated and they put annoying gacha grinding and gear leveling and stripped it down until there was nothing left, superb character/enemy design and music wasted on a nothing game, like a case study on how exactly my favorite studio has fell off
Not a terrible game though, there's things to like here despite its best efforts to make you dislike it, you guys would've been all over this if it came out on the Vita, or the Wii, oh wait it did it was called Muramasa: The Demon Blade and it was boring and without actual meaningful level design that time too
The most exciting moment in World of Demons is when you get to fight Ninetails and she has her own boss theme and your heart swells because you are remembering that sick as fuck boss fight in Okami, and then you are brought crashing back down to reality
Thank god I was able to return my Apple TV to Walmart just in the nick of time, playing this before it shut down didn't cost me a cent

I archive the history of the Orb. Games are my specialty.
Have you ever felt like you're playing the same game, over and over again, year after year? That, despite the newness, you're playing the same thing?
It's so easy to be consumed by this cycle, only to find years of your life gone. Staring at your reflection, scrambling to justify your past. Is it possible for all of the hours to mean nothing?
I was once that way...but through the field of game history, I found personal growth. Detecting trends and following artistic movements...it's beautiful.