this is one of the primary titles on a list of childhood favorites that I've been reluctant to go back to... "heart-breaking" is too strong of a word to describe a reevaluation like that, but maybe "unpleasant" is a better one.

+a lot of what the game's riding on is general nintendo "cute" things, in the sense of them filling in little winks and flourish in appropriate places. luigi whistling the main theme, the clever remarks he makes through the game boy horror, nods and riffs upon classic mario music, the wide collection of boo pun names, among other things.
+the vacuum combat is decidedly tactile in its execution. pulling away from the ghost's wildly gesticulating escape will reduce their life at a steady rate, and entering that angle parallel and opposite to them will immediately drop their life by a point. thus, by wiggling the stick in the quadrant opposite the ghost, you can drain life very quickly. chaotic and natural once grasped. to actually expose them for capturing, you must flash them with the light first, which has a great SFX attached that really highlights their freezing animation. I totally forgot in this game you hold the flashlight off before flashing it when the ghosts are close; iirc it's like a charge you have to do in dark moon.
+one of the main draws is as a tech demo for the gamecube in an oddly unassuming way. besides generally featuring better shape fidelity and lighting effects than the flatly-lit, blocky contemporaries on dreamcast and launch-era ps2 (barring shenmue/sa2/etc.), there's also some neat cloth effects when the vacuum is used on various table coverings and drapes. not as convincing when used on toilet paper, but can't fault them for trying. fire/ice particle effects/transparencies are pretty as well.
+the main loop consists of clearing ghosts out of each room to turn the lights back on and then shaking everything down for treasure, but here and there portrait ghosts appear for you to catch. each requires a simple environment interaction puzzle in order to reveal their heart and allow you to capture them. if nothing else, getting to meet the variety of denizens of the ethereal mansion is fun in a The Haunted Mansion kinda way. personal favs to solve/fight: shivers, biff atlas, clockwork soldiers, sir weston.
+a few rooms feature specific gimmicks for how their ghost fights work that I appreciate for playing the nature of visualizing ghost location. these include the projector room where ghosts appear only as shadows on a screen behind the light of the projector bulb, and another where the ghosts can only be seen through a room-length mirror.
+love the astral chamber and its indoor balcony and miniature moon that leads to mario's star. lends the mansion a sense of abstract, amorphous space that isn't shown anywhere else.
+music is great, obv the motif is classic but there's an eclectic mix of house and other Y2K-era genres infused that make it stand out even among nintendo's other OSTs.

-was surprised upon replaying to find the game is excessively linear. in areas 1, 2, and 4 the entire order of rooms must be completed in a particular order, with a couple isolated detours for optional portrait ghosts. for me the sense that I'm actually exploring the mansion is greatly diminished when each step of the process is directly communicated to me. area 3 avoids this by having a typical RE-style "find this set of key items to unlock the next area" and the results feel much more organic in terms of discovery.
-not really a fan of all of the portrait ghost puzzles. the "shoot the ghost with a sphere you sucked up" ones like nana (yarn balls) and slim bankshot (pool balls) have some odd issues with their ball collision, specifically when luigi accidentally whacks one on the wall closest to the player, which is invisible. others like uncle grimmly or the floating whirlindas seem to have really no puzzle to them at all (other than grimmly requiring backtracking). I would say any that I haven't mentioned so far is pretty much just "ok", not standout or interesting but also not obnoxious. actually capturing the ghost is generally not the most interesting part of these mind you. using the wiggle technique I mentioned earlier I think I managed to clear about 75% of them with golden frames (though my overall rank was an E unfortunately).
-the boos are a terrible addition, especially since they constitute a significant portion of the game. they do not get trapped in your vacuum "beam" as other ghosts do and instead have more of a stunlock effect to them; a good permutation of their AI will allow them to stay within your grasp for a while, but if they manage to get away from you or don't want to stay close to you, they will happily leave the room and force you to run after them. every fight is the same other than later ones having more HP (300 is way too tedious with no gameplay changes). the game makes you capture 40 of 50 total; I captured 45 and didn't bother with the rest given how much they were aggravating me. surprisingly enough I still have a few of my old files and one of them featured 50 boos, so I'm gonna rest easy knowing I've suffered through it before.
-mansion structure is overly linear; it doesn't seem that way from the floor plan but it's basically one line from the foyer (or the basement hall) to the third floor east hall rooms. there's one shortcut one can take to skip needing to go around the back of the house every time you want to go upstairs, but it's hidden inside of an innocuous interactable that I had to look up a guide to refresh myself on. if you're messing with each object it's certainly possible you'll find it, but locking a huge time save behind that is frustrating.
-area 4 is particularly heavy on backtracking from bottom floor to top floor and vice versa. if the game had allowed the player to plan their own routes and opened up more of the mansion at once, this wouldn't be as much of an issue.
-bosses are all pretty bleh. the king boo fight is especially bad: the bombs are finicky to pick up, you can't aim them vertically, and certain attack patterns will render them pointless (if you stand too far away from the boss they'll throw the bombs and then jump immediately after, ruining your chance to hurl them back). boolossus is trivially easy to split apart and yet frustrating when it comes to freezing the individual boos. chauncy is fine for a first boss, and bogmire's fight I can barely remember even though I played it less than a week ago.
-the controls in general are a little odd: in normal cases luigi has typical 3D movement (controlling as if you were looking at him top-down on a 2D plane) but when using the vaccuum he switches to a strafing mode where turning/vertical look are handled on the C-stick. not terrible on its own, but the devs attempted to make it more palatable by adding in auto-aim, which gets hairy. sometimes it's great (particularly if you line up the boos correctly or have a chain of ghosts to flash with the light), but when there's a lot of ghosts on-screen or tiny ghosts in the fray the auto-aim wrenches away control from you in a very uncomfortable way. rather disorienting unfortunately.

did not really find this all that fun to replay to be frank. I think it plays a lot of its hand on the first playthrough, and its well of gimmicks doesn't shine quite as brightly upon a revisit. what I will give it credit for is being a great kid's introduction to the horror genre. for me as a child this met me on the level I needed, including things I listed as detriments here such as the basic puzzles or the extreme linearity. a proper survival horror game with the occasionally obtuse puzzle solutions inherited from point-and-click/ADV games would have been too much of a strain for me as a child I think given how many games I bounced off for even having slight brainteasers involved, and in that sense I can appreciate what it meant to me in terms of design when I was younger. this was the game in particular that gave me the urge to actually set out to finish games rather than tool around in their opening areas; it'll always be notable to me for that reason. I think it's unfortunate that it doesn't hold the same interest for me as an adult. whether I would've enjoyed it more had I been playing it fresh or felt the same way that I do now will remain a mystery to me.

I'm tired and didn't expect to finish this tonight so I'm going to stay terse. naughty dog is obsessed with filmic avenues for games as art. game design is entirely secondary and liberally cribbed from contemporaries. consider literally any jak game (standard collectathon for first game, same engine grafted to eyebrow-raising drab GTA world for second game) or uncharted (bog-standard cover shooter + ico-lite platforming + half-hearted turn towards horror in the back quarter). naughty dog only believes in conglomerates of design. interwoven webs of market-proven mechanics where the connective tissue is the graphical fidelity and storytelling.

this is not what I like in games. I like games that create internal logics that interact with each other in novel ways. this doesn't have to be complex. arcade-style games form tiny cores of necessary mechanics and grow their universes from exploring the facets of each element in further and further detail. surprisingly, the last of us is naughty dog's attempt at making such a game. it is meant to be a rich tapestry of survival, horror, grounded shooter, et cetera. its individual elements are evidently meant to pulsate and reprise in waves across the experience. approaches to encounters are meant to run the gamut of stealth, guns blazing, trap-oriented, and any combination of these you can conceive.

naughty dog is not a studio that has the design chops to make such a game though. instead, the end product is The third-person shooter. the third-person shooter monolith if you will. a pastiche of nearly a decade of design patterns evolving shoved into a single casserole. when in tightly constrained areas, cover is conspicuously placed for you to camp behind while you clear the room. other areas feature hidden routes to quietly crouch-walk through under the auspicious of "tense" play. others feature onslaughts of infected waves meant to be gunned down. these are discrete and easy to recognize. what makes it interconnected is that the options are bare enough to make transitioning styles required. getting caught during stealth just makes the game a cover shooter. running away from clickers far enough transitions back into stealth. remaining in cover long enough will eventually force the enemies to push and let you react aggressively. no one system ever has enough juice to invigorate the experience on its own. walking up behind someone to shiv them rarely changes outcomes over just shooting them with an arrow or walking past. shotguns sometimes barely stagger opponents so what pleasure do I attain from experimenting with the weapon when a point-blank headshot doesn't even cause them to explode into gibs. I could just use any of the multiple other weapons that have the same effect.

all you're doing at the end of the day is eliminating individual enemies with one of the options off of the a la carte weapons menu. no need to manipulate their search AI or clump them into groups or anything beyond just rotating weapons and picking off every enemy one by one. only thing that changes is if you're supposed to be playing gears-style cover tactics or far cry-style "clear the base by pressing the takedown button behind everyone" or resident evil-style horde extermination. which is potentially enough to satisfy anyone who wanted a third-person shooter buffet. none of the styles are really entertaining enough on their own to justify the whole. the universe the game design resides in is disjointed.

the rest is pushed forward by walking forward through pretty corridors pressing triangle whenever the game asks you to. none of the aforementioned mechanics lend themselves to puzzle-solving, so virtually every instance of one in the world is just moving a ladder or letting ellie float on a wood pallet. in keeping with the crash bandicoot crate methodology ie provide minute interaction between the actual tests of competancy, the game litters materials all throughout the world for you to mindlessly pick up. any semblence of creating fragments of life in these environments is shattered by this. joel and ellie's banter is mumbled as backdrop for me rumaging through lockers and piles of trash for extra bandages or ammo. representations of life pre-apocalypse decaying are bastardized as I sift through drawers looking for those telltale item symbols to pop up for me to view. this is not an insignificant portion of the game mind you. some of these segments of nothingness reach the 15-20 minute range. if they were so concerned with letting me appreciate the views, maybe they wouldn't have felt the need to breadcrumb trail me around, pointing my camera at the ground constantly in the process. which does not even begin to highlight the inauthenticity of every supposed residential area with conviently placed rubble or cars or such to create cover-based combat arenas.

with this said, its adaptability is its greatest strength as much as it is its downfall. the general workbench design and locked doors are lifted from dead space and rendered more enjoyable here thanks to a streamlined tech tree and relatively-common shivs being used as keys rather than expensive power nodes. the actual gunplay is medicore since it never matches one modality, but at the same time it is at least a better murder sim than uncharted and its sanitized pg-13 firefights. enemy AI is not exactly robust and is easy to exploit thanks to the overeemphasived distraction item mechanic (bricks and bottles are yet another endlessly available item to collect), but it is complex enough to surprise the player and force more reactive play.

there's a particular moment I really liked. in the basement of the hotel there's waterlogged storage rooms with an elevator to reach the main floors that is disabled. enabling this requires turning on a generator located on the opposite side of the area, which will attract many waves of infected along with a dangerous bloater enemy. there are many approaches to this section, including simply beelining to the exit with the keycard for the elevator, setting traps in places where the spawns become most congested, or simply fighting it out amongst the onslaught of opponents. this is identical to the style-switching I discussed earlier. however, this particular encounter is totally open-ended in a way where a particular approach isn't necessarily prescribed. in my first attempt I played cat and mouse with the bloater before I knew the keycard location because I had unwittingly turned the generator on upon seeing it. my second attempt I tried to fight back more proactively, and on my third attempt I laid down traps and planned an escape route beforehand. none of these were intended strategies to the extent that the developers felt pressed to include copious hints towards one style or another (blatant cover, passageways to crouch-walk through, etc.). the area is relatively large as well, and thus the actual tactical evaluation feels less limiting. if only more encounters in the game had attempted something higher-level like this instead of pulling from canned ideas.

all of this is in service of delivering the story. I would call it a children of men rip-off if I had ever actually watched that movie. I appreciate that joel is the anti-nathan drake. the deluge of quips is replaced by generic gruff guy behavior (not to mention ellie handles most quip duties when appropriate), but at the very least the game does a better job presenting him as a total psychopath and justifies the insane bodycount he racks up. the ending in particular I enjoyed; the "actually he did all this terrible shit because he's a terrible person!" throughline is not novel nor was it in 2013, but I rarely see a game attempt such a purposeful lack of closure. the rest is marginal. various character sketches dedicated in each chapter with predictably dour results for each. the repeated "people do terrible things under pressure" motif is wrung far too dry. makes each character's arc slight since the outcome is always known in advance. perhaps this is why I liked the ending: did not necessarily expect it given most games' predilection for riding off into a sunset.

the latter section is sort of damning because I actually played the majority of this game while dogsitting for my girlfriend months ago, and finally finished today to add another game to the halloween roster. I frankly don't remember much about the story other than the broad strokes. I at least remember more than a dozen or so particular enemy encounters, which is pretty great for a game that runs about 15 hours. what's less reassuring is how scattered my responses to said encounters were: I often remember routes I took but what guns or tactics I favored are completely absent from my memory.

a smorgasbord of opportunites for you to throw a brick somewhere and make everyone around you go "huh? what was that" and allow you to walk behind them. speaking of which: the clickers. the perfect synthesis of "scary enemy that actually is so trivial to circumvent that it's not scary" and "scary enemy that awkwardly OHKOs you and becomes more frustrating than scary". having your primary horror encounters be based around an enemy that cannot see you renders virtually every situation with them one that rewards just walking really slowly. that is when you don't have a brick, which you nearly always will because they're generously located near all clickers. finally building up the firepower to kill them more efficiently would be great if not for the OHKO, and so just walking around them still feels like the dominant strategy up through the final area. other than using the flamethrower that is, which I frankly underused outside of the final areas. also this review is more terse than my usual shit which thankfully meant I knocked it out in about an hour but still is way too long. oh well. better than my original draft from when I was more actively playing it that tried to wade into the lukewarm "games as art" discourse.

the jointed, scythe-like arms on the necromorphs stick out for multiple reasons, but there's a subtle trick the designers pull with it (intentionally or unintentionally) that fucked me up so many times playing through this game. with the camera in the traditional claustrophobic over-the-shoulder view, there's virtually no way to view what's behind the player without carefully swinging it around. when one of those necromorphs silently creeps up on you and dangles their arms right over isaac's head, letting them peek right into the frame... it elicits such a snap reaction from me anytime it happens. in an otherwise quiet situation there's a hope that hauling ass without looking back will put enough distance between you and them to turn around safely, but god forbid it happens when you're already firing off shots at enemies ahead of you. that heart-sinking feeling of realizing the crowd you had carefully herded together isn't the extent of the danger in the room and that you're actually completely flanked turns tense strategy into desperate flailing. rarely does isaac lack for available weapons or resources, but encounters like these reinforce that it's a constant struggle for survival regardless.

in many ways this is the bastard heir to the resident evil 4 throne, and it even attempts to be a "regular" survival horror game to boot. besides the perverse way bodies are reanimated and mutated into angular beasts, intestines dangling and writhing outside of the torso, there's some gesturing towards explorable environments and puzzle-solving. each chapter is located in a different wing of the ship, with each of these areas arranged in a spoked hub design with linear branches leading to key items towards some sort of general puzzle located in the center. no real brainteasers here -- most of it's either just picking up key items or manipulating interactables with the kinesis ability -- but I found the scenario escalation here surprisingly appealing. driven on by various talking heads over the diegetically-integrated hologram comms, the pace feels brisk, and the game rarely stumbles in regards to directing the player to their next location. it's certainly not organic, but this is the re4 model, not re1.

the first five chapters or so were novel but felt overly dependent on fetch objectives, and it was in the second half of the game where it seemed like the designers stretched their legs a bit. setpiece loaded areas such as the USS valor and its power outages, fiery engine interiors, and wide-open bridges ripe for combat arenas elevate what otherwise would have been dry encounters into a strained flow of ratcheting tension from room to room. much of this is helped by the disorienting zero gravity sections that open up some minor platforming and release the shackles on isaac's otherwise-lethargic movement. at their best they hinder typical combat and make ordinary enemies more threatening through spatially-foreign positioning that plays with one's typical mental layout of encounter locality; at worst they are perfunctory beyond the clunky fun of watching isaac bounce from wall to wall. the sections exploring the vacuum of space are less interesting... any attempt to constrain the player by tethering them to a countdown (in this case an oxygen meter) risks them struggling to execute within the limit or becoming anxious at the impending doom. the designers punt on these issues by introducing heavy guardrails into these sections along with frequent oxygen refills, which take what should be the threat of venturing beyond the limits of human existence into the void of space and reduce them to a dog leash.

these are just the bits of downtime between the combat, however, and each encounter feels like a proper challenge to optimize and strategize within. shooters generally use the general projectile model of impact: momentum (and thus kinetic energy) demonstrated by the jitter of firing of a clip and the repeated thud of the bullet meeting its mark. dead space sets itself apart by dispensing with this and introducing the slice. much like how simply unloading rounds into a zombie's torso is inefficient in resident evil, dead space heavily discourages aiming for the easiest targets in favor of severing appendages. the hooked arms and stubby legs of necromorphs come in a variety of configurations from wildly dangling to tucked in to swaying alongside a jaunty waddle, and learning how to properly dissect each orientation is key. this makes lining up shots less focused on quick reactions and more on careful placement, and no weapon handles this better than the handgun equivalent: the plasma cutter. it evicersates even late-game enemies with ease so long as the player properly places its linear crosshairs perpendicular to the extremity, which requires instinctual understanding of both its vertical and horizontal firing modes. the other weapons are equally as impressive: the line gun and the contact beam both hail from applications in excavations and provide extremely powerful severing power with a wide horizontal blast for the former and a focused vertical shot for the second. the ripper in theory was one of my favorites as well with its remote controlled sawblade that could easily trim opponents down to size, though its stopping/staggering potential is low and prevented it from keeping a permanent spot in my inventory. indeed, most of these extra weapons have excellent specific uses but lack that high reliability and versatility of the plasma cutter. if I did a second playthrough right now, I may as well just do a handgun-only run.

the typical crane-arm necromorph comprises most of the alien cast, but it's worth mentioning that many other enemies take advantage of your special abilities as well. where I fall regarding whether this is a good or bad thing is mixed... after all, the bread-and-butter of the game is severing, and when the game attempts to introduce additional factors it's hit or miss. take for example enemies that split open into reams of parasitic spawn upon death, specifically when the arms have not been severed. the little tykes are finicky to dispatch with anything other than the flamethrower, and when not getting picked off one by one they have a bad tendency to leap upon you and force you to perform a mashing QTE to remove them, something the game leans on a bit too heavily even with regular enemies. anything with projectiles is also sketchy, as isaac struggles to maneuver around them thanks to the camera angle; the damage is less the issue compared to the obnoxious hitstun. even then, much of the annoyance is combat stems from ignoring the severing gimmick, and I more or less understand the designer's intent in slapping the player's wrist for attempt to play guns ablaze, but no one is a perfect aim (esp on ps3 at ~20 fps). I could do without lethargic segments of carefully sniping single-tendril projectile minions strewn across the ground when I could be thrown into the actual fear inherent in the quickly-moving enemies of regular combat. plenty of the necromorph variants don't have the issues regardless and enrich the design no matter the apperance whether it's the occasional invincible stalker miniboss or the shuddering valor crewmembers that move at lightning speeds.

which is to say, the game is frequently great and occasionally fantastic whether wading through a sea of aliens or being a handyman around the decks of the ishimura. for perspective, I believe this game took me around nine hours, and at the same time by re4 rules it bats a lower average in terms of overall scenario/encounter creativity, regardless of the praise above. the bar is high! I'm putting it in this context because the other, possibly more intended context of tense space thriller is less appealing to me. bioshock-esque audio logs, frequent yammering from people never properly introduced, an extremely on-the-nose analogue to scientology, pointless intrigue that never affects your actual tasks around the station... how many times must I watch an NPC soliloquize from behind plexiglass before executing something supposedly shocking before I get the point. it was de rigeur to do shit like this tho in the 360 era, and the absence of traditional cutscenes makes it easier to swallow for sure. it's just odd none of the staff ever realized how goofy it is for isaac to be running around digging through receptacles for spare items while someone is solemnly shooting a random crew member. in 2022 you're not here for the story though, you're here because you want an early HD third-person shooter that doesn't lean on a cover system as a crutch. in that respect dead space is a lot more clever than it originally lets on.

I gave the sewer section a bit of a hard time in my re2make review, but in comparison now I feel like I may have gone a little overboard. the sewers here are so much worse. drab coloring, utterly pointless spiders, and that obnoxious steel bridge you need to repeatedly reorient all combine to make this section such a slog. on my claire A playthrough I got to the corpse with the eagle medal without any room in my inventory, and thus had to loop through the entire main section of the sewers a second time purely to grab the medal and leave the area. that includes turning the large fan off, running through its vent, dropping off items at the item box, running all the way back around through the spiders again, bringing the bridge back down to the first level, running over the bridge and moving it back up to the top level, then running through the whole crocodile tunnel and then up the garbage chute ladder just to grab one item, all because they didn't put an item box next to typewriter at the end of the bridge. a pure time-waster all around, with nary an interesting setpiece in the whole place other than that crocodile. to be clear: it is totally sweet to blow up that air canister in its mouth and sever the top half of its maw cleanly off. still though... not worth the rest of the hassle.

that's blowing things out of proportion a little bit given that the other sections generally fare better, but compare the sewers to a comparable area from the original resident evil: the guardhouse. this area is equally brief but features a slew of little brainteasers and unique rooms to keep your interest, such as the billiards/keypad puzzle, mixing V-JOLT, various block-moving puzzles, and fighting plant 42. there are multiple rooms out of the gate to explore, which lends a proper sense of discovery to the exploration you perform. the sewer has a miniature sherry/ada segment consisting of a single box puzzle similar to the basement one from the guardhouse (here you arrange three boxes as a bridge and then raise the water level, whereas in the prior game you simply push the three crates into pre-raised water for a bridge) and the crocodile boss, but otherwise it's bare. the only real detour you can take is collecting a bit of ammo from the storage room where sherry had previously been, with everything else being exactly on the main path. it's certainly the low point of this game as a whole.

the police station is the obvious analogue here to the mansion from the original. I've struggled a bit to characterize its puzzle design relative to the mansion... my gut instinct is that re2's structure is more linear than re1's, but expressing evidence of this is difficult. each area is built around collecting a set of keys to access an exit: the natural element stones to exit through the storage shed of the mansion, and the animal stones to exit through irons' office in claire A / the chess keys to exit through the sewage maintenance area in leon B. in both cases the individual keys are locked behind puzzles strewn through various rooms that are otherwise auxillary to progressing the plot, encouraging the player to thoroughly explore the environment. progression is blocked off by another set of related keys that open up chunks of the area, represented by medieval armaments in re1 and card suits in re2. the structure of re2 in this first section feels so closely wed to the original's to make any sort of delineation a struggle.

however, I think I've come to two conclusions regarding this that I feel are plausible. the first is that re2 is better than re1 at using aspects of the environment to imply routing. a subtle example of this is the east hallway on the 2F where a helicopter has impacted the building and exploded. when walking into this corridor for the first time, a zombie is placed in foreground to the player's left with a door in the background to the player's right; the average player will run to the door and thus avoid going into the dead-end with the helicopter. this door leads to the roof area with the stairs to the shed, where you find not only the bowgun but a valve that can be used to extinguish the helicopter's flames. other examples of this design practice exist as well, such as the massive swam of zombies outside the 1F east main office implying you should take the other route which leads to the grenade launcher. the second conclusion is that re2 is worse than re1 at providing optional areas and puzzles in its main hub. because there are not different endings, the game lacks built-in incentives to take one's time and thoroughly explore individual rooms compared to more-hidden items like the mansion MO disks or the magnum in re1. this suits the game to some extent because each room here tends to have only a single objective, but at the same time it ruins the interconnected feel of the station. puzzles in general tend to be simple lock-and-key affairs more often than re1, which more often tested the player's ability to make logicial deductions about the behavior of the environment in puzzles such as the gas room or opening the waterfall. re2 does have a couple instances of optional content, specifically the shared weapons locker that requires both a key card and power to open, but I feel like this design pattern isn't as pervasive as it is in the first game. much more running from keyhole to keyhole in general without much need to take stock of your surroundings and determine what to do with the items you have.

that shared weapons locker is one of the primary components of the zapping system, which links one playthrough with each character together via viewing the same series of events through the eyes of both. in most cases this amounts to either simply witnessing events you performed with one character indirectly with the other, but in other cases the player must weigh decisions based on evaluating short-term/long-term benefit. examples of this include deciding which group of window shutters to close with the loose wires, which will cause one hallway to get swarmed with the zombies part of the way through the A campaign (these will be present from the get-go on B) and the other to remain sealed until part of the way through the B campaign. I enjoyed this one and felt vindicated by my choice (sealing the east hall), but other choices felt less substantial, like choosing which character gets to enjoy the effects of the anti-BOW gas that seems to do very little (I did this during leon B). the most disappointing of these to me was the culture experiment room, which requires both characters to individually descend to the deepest part of the lab past an inexplicable moth miniboss to register their fingerprint on the lab's security system, followed by ascending back to the floor above to use said fingerprint on the culture experiment room lock. after doing this with your B character, you get to enter into a swarm of buffed-up lickers, for which your reward is the SMG... maybe I would've felt less disappointed by this if I didn't have leon as my B, who already had the C. Magnum and felt unstoppable, but at the same time I don't know what I expected otherwise. I was hoping for something like a rocket launcher given the amount of effort required, but I got one during the final mr. x fight anyway so whatever.

as for the novelty of actually playing the game twice back to back, I again feel mixed. the B campaign enters the station via the shed to the side and witnesses the helicopter crashing, a neat touch. past this the station is basically executed the same as during the A campaign with the order slightly changed at the beginning to require getting a key card from the east main office to unlock the west side. unfortunately the changes in key locations leads to some routing awkwardness: for example, I did the entire west side of the building in one clean sweep and thus felt cramped in the east side for most of the rest of my station playtime. the unicorn medal/spade key also feel utterly useless during this section given that the only door it opens is for the filing cabinet room where all that remains is a first aid spray and an ink ribbon... the crank was here in the A campaign which justified the excursion. leon at least has an expanded basement with the prison to explore and part of the sewage disposal where he exits the building, but all the puzzles are the same regardless and his sewer/lab sections are pretty much identical as well outside the addition of the power room floor for the latter. what he does have is Mr. X, who is suitably menacing even with his appearances being scripted. in theory I prefer the AI stalker of the remake, but considering that I rarely was hindered by him during my playthrough of that game, I think this deterministic approach works just as well. he's not really truly scary given that he's effectively a free ammo dump every hour or so, but a couple of his appearances actually made my heart skip a beat, specifically bursting through the wall of the room with the cog in it. I had that exact same interaction in the remake and it got me there too (I assume it's semi-scripted there as well given that it opens up a new route).

what I will give to re2 across the board are its improvements to combat. tilting the protagonist's head towards enemies makes fighting off-screen or obscured enemies less taxing, and the ability to shove a zombie off of yourself in order to knock down a whole set is incredibly useful in group scenarios. the lickers perfectly replace the muppet-ass hunters from the prior game, with a disgusting exposed brain, some unsettling breathing, and a particular sensitivity to noise making them much more interesting to maneuver around and away from. the plant monsters are relatively goofy in comparison, but show up infrequently (not remotely as fear-inducing as the chimeras though). bosses still pretty much consist of shooting off rounds until they get too close and then running five feet away, but I didn't expect more or less given how simple combat is regardless. while I'm describing positives for this game, I also have to praise how much more proficient the modeling of the background environments is here. compared to the garish reds of re1's mansion, this game presents a bevy of places that feel properly lived-in with an ambiance to match. significant increase in graphical fidelity for the character models as well, though I can't really say I like the CGI FMVs more than the live-action ones.

I gotta stress that I did enjoy playing this, just that I had a lot of reservations while doing so. I'm not sure playing both scenarios pretty close to each other particularly helped either. other than usual gripes I list throughout here that I could probably apply to other psx-era survival horror titles, I legitimately feel like re2 is a step-down in stage/scenario design from its predecessor, by inches perhaps but still in a noticable way. re1 tied all of its areas together in a way that made them feel like all part of a whole, where exploration in one part would yield results in another. re2 instead frontloads many of its best moments in the mansion and then features two cloistered areas afterward that feel overly self-contained, along with the factory section (super undercooked compared to the catacombs from re1). I guess part of this is brought on by higher expectations given its legacy, but I also just expected a full-on improvement in every way from the first, and re2 doesn't quite stick the landing in that regard. I could also see how someone takes the negatives from my review and sees them as standout aspects of the game - i.e. someone who prefers their survival horror less rooted in point-and-click and faster paced overall. totally valid.

went into this expecting an onimusha to resident evil 4. it makes sense, right? let a less prestigious capcom team give their own spin on a tried-and-true gameplay style like onimusha had done for the original resident evil trilogy. this could have potentially been a winning proposition for the company: imagine a slower, more methodical killing simulator on a frigid planet hostile to mankind... aliens bursting from crevices in the walls swarming in on you to explode with a blast of the shotgun. sneaking into a underground military base to seize a mech and mow down legions of of opposing soldiers in an unadulterated bloodbath. carefully hiding in the tundra rationing your healing items, checking ammo, and seizing what little resources you can find within the flurries. the possibilities are really endless to simply reconfigure what previously worked for the company.

instead we got lost planet. from the moment you first drop into the snowbanks of EDN III, you'll find that the protagonist "wayne" aims in an odd fashion where the small movements of the right stick will solely move the reticle, with only larger movements causing the camera to follow. this hinders the player's ability to circle-strafe reliably, and without any other movement techniques and a horrifically slow walk-speed simply traversing becomes an utter chore. the designers rectified this by just making most enemies stand stock-still 80% of the time, which is about as interesting as it sounds. the enemies that don't, such as certain aliens (known as "akrid") who are able to roll within armor plating and can only be damaged by attacking their tail weak spots, become massive chores that are barely worth pursuing.

perhaps part of the rationale behind the poor on-foot movement was to highlight the armored vehicle sections that make active appearances in most levels. unfortunately, these mecha are equally as cumbersome to maneuver in. no matter what vehicle you land in, each movement has excessive start-up lag, especially when it comes to jumping, which often is the only evasive ability available. occasionally a given suit model will have a dodge, but these come with their own sluggish startups and endlags, and telling which mechas actually have them at a glance is difficult. not only is the visual differentiation between models indistinct, but their movesets lack parity in most cases for some odd reason. not all mechas can hover, or jump extra high, or drift or dash or what have you, and what buttons these abilities are assigned to are overly tailored to the individual vehicle to such an extent that pressing your auxillary buttons is an essential part of vehicle initialization just to get a clue on what your toolkit contains. even when you reach the final mission and gain access to a suit with some real flourish and supposed finesse in the air, it's still utterly bungled. copying the zone of the enders control scheme doesn't work with the jerky ascend/descend buttons that must be clicked once to begin moving vertically and once again to halt. it doesn't even have true lock-on! not to get ahead of myself but yes, somehow the climatic aerial mecha dogfight is one of the worst parts of the game.

when it comes to the level design the resident evil 4 comparisons start feeling even more distant. environmental variation is adequate here - as much as it can be for a game in this setting - but the scenario design around these areas feels nonexistent. each room functionally just opens up a differently-shaped arena for bog-standard combat encounters without ceasing. it's all get-from-A-to-B objectives in what tend to be large, empty rooms outside of enemies and weapon drops. even with the game's "signature" grapple mechanic, vertical traversal seems quaint at best, though it may be that this is partially due to the grapple also possessing interminable startup and fiddly aiming - not really a shocker considering how shoddy the rest of the handling implementation is. given its contraints and poor reach, most accessible grapple points that aren't for rudimentary platforming sections consist of simple catwalks to grab weapons from or areas you could otherwise reach on foot via ramps. with few novel ways to traverse each area and no fresh objectives to pursue, each level bleeds into each other in one long endless journey to amble towards the next cutscene.

another lesson lost from resident evil 4: making every bullet matter lends significant weight to each firearm. lost planet ignores this in favor of centering the machine gun, a spray-and-pray implement so common in the seventh console generation. cannon fodder soldiers will easily withstand a full clip before bloodlessly falling down, and many of the more powerful enemies are even worse. sure, more powerful weapons do exist, such as the rocket launcher or the rifle, but the former only serves any purpose when fighting on foot against mechas (and still will take several hits to neutralize), and the latter reaches the point of requiring two headshots in the late game to kill infantry. most of the actual firepower comes from the mechas and their artillery-level weaponry, and in many cases the best answer are dual-wielding gatling guns in a braindead high DPS onslaught. this will shred the fiery weak point of any akrid assailant and even deal with opposing mechs (especially if you throw in a shotgun), and while not particularly enthralling it at least yields some sense of actual destruction to the affair. these strategies work against most bosses as well when there aren't opportunities to simply hammer the glowing weak points with launchable grenades or more rockets... there's very little to say about the boss designs in general for this reason.

then again, perhaps a better point of comparison is gunvalkyrie, sega's xbox-exclusive alien extermination title. much of their DNA is mutual: both games emphasize fighting for survival in both organic and synthetic alien environments, both feature a traversal quirk, both are unorthodox third-person shooters, etc.. in this light lost planet seems a little more forgivable, if only just by being safer. gunvalkyrie offers an unparalleled sense of speed, but lost planet's environments are better-tuned for the traversal characteristics of their protagonist. what lost planet lacks in unique mission objectives it makes up for in consistency and lack of standout frustrating sections over its runtime. lost planet also properly integrates its story throughout the game.... actually considering the low quality of the narrative and its awkward relation to many of the missions in the first half of the game maybe it's not actually better in that regard. if anything it certainly feels like slightly more than a tech demo; obviously much of the game is built around demonstrating effects like natural snowfall and billowing smoke from missile strikes, but there is at least a game that attempts to build upon itself through its missions in comparison to gunvalkyrie's disjointed manner.

I could delve further into individual issues the game has (thermal energy is a standout ??? mechanic), but I think it's clear from the issues I've brought up to this point that the disease at the heart of this game is the utterly lethargic character design, from the individual animation timings all the way down to the damage values and ammo count for each gun. wayne's state transitions are completely rotten and the whole rest of the game's structure exists to attempt to patch over the fact that he lacks any energy or snappy response to any input from the player. from that perspective, it honestly makes me hate the rest of the game somewhat less; for what it does it at least accomodates the inscribed playstyle and doesn't attempt to circumvent it. however, just having that dismal core design became more and more apparent the longer I spent within this mess.

I've been ruminating on a previous review for this game. the miasma around it contains a lot of current ambient thought patterns of the affectionately-named "nintendrone" crowd, specifically around topics that have arose in the Switch Era. I think for many of us zoomers in the age range for backloggd (and the broader sphere of gaming culture online in general), the beginning of the switch's life cycle was a special moment. for me personally, the switch released a week before my 18th birthday, and after eventaully snagging one during its inital availability drought, it was my first real console that I owned. not just a shoddily-maintained handheld or a hand-me-down sixth/seventh gen console for me to fiddle around with, but something with brand-new games releasing for it that I could hook up to a TV! the bounty was particularly rich that year too; botw day 1, rereleases of several standout wii u titles, a brand-new collectathon mario game, a long-awaited "true" sequel to xenoblade, and splatoon 2, a multiplayer shooter tuned specifically for the zoomer crowd. the original splatoon presaged our modern neon-color, trend-focused, "what's cool with the kids?" mass-culture shooter wave that awoke from the decline of the tacticool brown-and-grey military shooters of the late 00s and early 10s. it's only natural that nintendo would ride the wave onto their big launch for the switch, and at just the right time as well, lest we forget that fortnite released in early access within the same month that splatoon 2 hit shelves.

five years later, it's inarguable that our perceptions would have shifted. the pangburn who had not started college yet grinding out turf wars on the couch is now halfway through grad school. I've now seen the many ups and downs of the switch as nintendo has consistently reprised their role as the clueless corporate granddaddy of gaming, prone to making jarring business and PR decisions more often than they can spit out decent games. I've witnessed the internet at the same time fall out of the honeymoon period many of us had with nintendo during 2017. putting so many great titles in the launch window left 2018 particularly dry other than the excellent smash ultimate late in the year, and when the release train revved up again in 2019 the quality was much more uneven. wrapped up in 2017 specifically was a revitalization of japanese gaming that brought attention back to the kind of games I'm primarily interested in -- the aforementioned nintendo titles, yakuza 0, nier automata, persona 5, resident evil 7 -- but those good times weren't going to last, right?

hence my interest in the aforementioned review. its main thrust is that nintendo is leveraging FOMO in order to sell everyone on a new copy of splatoon; which is true in the sense that this is how every new game is sold at retail price. it's also an accusation that nintendo has been rightfully accused of exploiting for their limited-time mario 3DAS and shadow dragon rereleases, or their underproduced amiibo lines and retro plug-and-play consoles. there's also a significant portion of this review extolling nintendo's countercultural original splatoon aesthetic that has been dampened in subsequent releases. personally I don't find any of these games particularly against the grain unless we're discussing it through the lens of the prior onslaught of modern warfare-era titles, which is a shaky ground to stand on considering in that case splatoon set the new standard and now suffers the proliferation of its copycats. punk? maybe pop punk... lord knows I had a steady diet of blink 182, alkaline trio, jeff rosenstock, pup, and screeching weasel back when I was playing splatoon 2 regularly. and isn't it more punk to deface clean hotels and malls in the name of artistic anarchy?

meeting those points at face-value means I'm getting lost in the smokescreen though, I need to dig deeper. because there are multiple valid mentions of this new entry lacking innovation, but they're nonsubstantial and swallowed by the rest of the remarks. this is understandable: it's hard to elaborate on features that don't exist. these are buoyed with remembrances of the earlier titles and how fresh they felt at release, contrasted with the stale aura of this new title. there's a general sense that something is wrong with this new game, right? it must be something new... but there's so little here that's actually new that it's hard to pinpoint. could it be the locker cosmetics and their associated "catalog" score, which scans as a battlepass in a post-fortnite world, or the new gachapon machine set up in the lobby? the former is entirely passive and totally free, so its only sin is just being cribbed from contemporaries, and the similar daily gacha is just an extension of that pernicious old ability chunk grind. what could possibly be that missing piece, that absent little bit of soul that the game lost between splatoon 2 and 3?

to me that answer is nothing. I think that line of inquiry is a dead end. my actual opinion? splatoon 3 feel bleh because splatoon 2 (and probably by extension splatoon 1) felt bleh. they're the same game!! I have returned to the well of squid kid bliss and instead am left wondering how eight years into this franchise I am still left without a way to alter my loadout, or play on more than two maps in a given mode at a time, or properly choose which ranked mode I want to play without having to wait for the choices to rotate every two hours! there are reasons these restrictions were originally set up, such as a limited initial set of stages for splatoon 1 or the need to make sure that ranked has a short matchmaking time, but there are other avenues to pursuing these aims that don't come at the expense of player choice and freedom of expression. I just want to use aerospray without getting trapped with these goddamn fizzy bombs, these fucking things that not only need to be cooked to make any impact but even then stil pale in comparison to virtually every other subweapon. could I please get a special that isn't reefslider as well? could I perhaps at least get to avoid playing on a stage that doesn't have walls that make reefslider glitch out near them? or at least could I not have to play on mahi mahi resort like five times in a row?

which is not to say there aren't minor QoL additions that perhaps alone make splatoon 3 marginally more playable than splatoon 2. the addition of a physical lobby where you can practice between rounds feels more engaging than the menus of the prior games, and thank god that I can finally make a room for my friends rather than messing with the awkward drop-in system. at the same time however, nintendo seems to be floundering a bit in terms of actually making substantial improvements to the game. in their stead, many changes have been made that seem to exist purely to justify the sequel status. sheldon, for instance, takes tickets now for weapons instead of money, which more closely ties his selection to your level progression I suppose? at the same time you still cannot truly skip his obnoxious spiel every time you set foot in his shop, so it might as well not have not been a change at all. the way that ranks for ranked mode are maintained now consist of a universal rank instead of individual ranks for each mode with the tradeoff of individual losses counting much less. perhaps there was a calculated reason for this change, but it ultimately makes me favor avoiding ranked modes which I'm particularly bad at such as tower control due to retaining my overall rank from my preferred modes such as splat zones. these are all side-steps to existing mechanics without being solutions to issues, and they hurt my impression of the game.

I must stress that I do like the overall design of splatoon, regardless of the nitpicks above. the way that refilling ink encourages traversal and the way that turf war flips typical PvP interactions on their head (running is often a viable option!) makes the flow of each match visceral as you continually move from area to area in a mad dash for territory. this is why I sunk so many hours into splatoon 2 back when this concept was still so novel for me. however, this style of play also creates very momentum-heavy matches where the outcome of a match can feel certain only halfway through. walking through endless puddles of your opponents' ink, especially the closer it is to your home base, makes me feel dejected even if I manage to get a kill I'm happy with or make a substantial endgame push towards the opponents' lines. this is amplified by the meager rewards from a match loss; seeing those progression bars get a few sparing drops towards a new level after trying your hardest in a match makes me feel like I almost wasted my time playing. when not playing competitively and thrown in with random team members into a game that seems to tacitly encourage communication, I feel pushed away from participating for more than a few matches at a time, just like I did towards the end of splatoon 2's life.

this is something that really felt noticable for me after I recently tried out modern warfare 2's online beta on the advice of a friend. having not played CoD since middle school, I was shocked at how different the atmosphere was. unlike splatoon, modern CoD is enraptured by the current trends in shooters with its season-based structure and mountains of progression bars, but at the other end of it there's something still very personal and intimately fun waiting in store. getting a double or triple kill at all could keep me going through multiple fruitless deaths afterwards just from the giddiness of succeeding in a split-second interaction. overall team scores just didn't matter, as my personal performance and growth felt rewarded by the systems of the game. who has time to worry about teammate behavior when you're succeeding on your own terms? splatoon 3 makes efforts to rectify this issue with its per-match rewards to each player highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, but these seem to confer little outside of maybe influencing the rewards in an anarchy series. perhaps nintendo is trying to highlight competition and community, but in a game where you have absolutely no way to engage with your teammates before and after matches, the effort seems wasted. splatoon could potentially learn some tricks towards crafting a more efficient timewaster from its contemporaries instead of half-heartedly incorporating their progression systems.

this bears mentioning though: just how much of my enjoyment with CoD came with not engaging with the game for over a decade? has my critical perception been inadvertedly weighted towards the novelty of it in a way that I've lost with splatoon? and again, how much of my degredation of splatoon 3 comes from releasing after a shoddy couple of years for nintendo's public-facing wing? splatoon 3 sits in the middle of a pretty good lineup of switch titles, but in the time since the original hype has died down it's much easier to feel and hear the nervous whispers of those wondering what the hell is going on with tears of the kingdom's rollout rather than the basking in the glory of breath of the wild still fresh in everyone's minds. of course, even breath of the wild cribbed much from its open-world contemporaries, and even though I loved it at the time I can see the criticisms from those who weren't too dazzled to see through the brand recognition on top of it. so perhaps then, splatoon has just been another multiplayer shooter all along, and the light is just harsh enough now for us to call it what it is.

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there is something behind that $60 price tag, and it's.... tableturf battle. this might have been the case if nintendo had bothered rolling out online multiplayer for it, but leave it to them to surprise in the oddest of ways. instead we get a brand new single-player mode that seems to derive more from octo expansion (note: I have not played it) than its direct predecessors for better or for worse. I played about sixty total levels including the three mid-game bosses but not including the crater or rocket levels.

splatoon 3 opts for more focused, puzzle-like level design over its predecessors, which were built around every potential loadout being used in every level. this entry opts for bespoke loadouts for each stage to maximize the amount of encounters it can build around those particular weapons. in a few cases this results in some really clever stage design (I'm thinking of the curling bomb stage towards the end of the game that focuses on tightly-aimed ricochets) but in most cases falls surprisingly flat. much of this is due to carrying over many enemies from the prior games with few updates. these octopi foes generally have extremely poor mobility options compared to the protagonist and generally wield highly-telegraphed projectiles that can be easily evaded, and this game in particular really struggles to emphasize its intended stage routes with how useless most of these enemies are. this is particularly noticable with how many basic cover configurations you'll fight enemies from that seem almost copy-pasted throughout the game. splatoon 2 has its own foibles (overly long, unfocused level design) but generally designed more interesting arenas with better escalation of conflict than 3 does. splatoon 3 has a tendency to lock down level progression into very pre-defined, "solvable" encounters that do not surprise the player when completed "correctly" and feel broken when subverted by obvious means. this could still be elevated if that escalation of conflict was engaging, but splatoon 3 tends to favor overloading each level with rote expressions of the player's toolkit before hinting at more thoughtful level designing past the final checkpoint. the curling bomb stage perfectly showcases what could have been the case for these levels, where initial simple ricochets build up into longer areas with movable walls, platformers, and adversarial inkers to navigate and plan around; it helps that for this level the solution space is purposefully wide and more daring solutions yield rewards.

the more explicit puzzle stages have a couple bangers as well (the pac-man level is particularly cool), but too many fall into common level design traps like long obstacle cycles to listlessly wait through or boring auto-scroller sections. I could understand trying to make these easily solvable to make sure everyone has access to the final areas, but in this mode virtually every level is optional, and I would've enjoyed seeing some more out-of-the-box puzzle ideas beyond just shooting targets with a particular weapon on an ink rail or simple rube goldberg contraptions. some of these are particularly frustrating; the one I have to highlight is the tennis level, where the angle of the player's camera behind the "net" sort of kills my depth perception in the void beyond where the targets are shot from, and the level ends with a block that taps the net and never makes it into your play area as some sort of sophomoric joke to force you to replay another minute of scripted tennis target shots. bleh. just less than what I would expect from nintendo in terms of design finesse.

bosses are fine, but the standout is definitely the area six one. probably the most explicit reference we've seen yet to another game that dealt with cleaning up someone else's ink...

I hate swirling around so many negative thoughts in my head regarding this game because the intentions are utterly pure. it is abstract, buoyant, and dedicated to showcasing an alien natural world that few other games can compare to. its graphics have a cheeky lo-fi bent to them, relying heavily on undulating curvature and bold primary colors. the songs its blob-like creatures constantly sing along touch upon many genres and play with language in fascinating ways. and yet, despite all of this, as an creative work locoroco reminds me most of the kind of project that would reduce your art school friend to tears after getting eviscerated in crit for being particularly lazy. the definition of a C- game, if you will. something entirely resting on its quirky graphical presentation with a game sort of tacked on underneath.

over an astounding 40(!?) levels you will help the titular locoroco roll across the landscape by tilting the world around them via the bumpers, and somehow doing little else in the process. locoroco is sprightly and highly maneuverable when tiny, but in their aggregated form they expand in size when eating red berries strewn across each level, and as their size expands their responsiveness takes a dive. that undulating property I mentioned prior isn't merely a neat graphical trick; it feeds into an exaggerated physics system that showcases the weighty locoroco sinking into the ground at various spots as if a water balloon were to traverse across molten rubber. in the process, locoroco frequently will get trapped even on sloped surfaces or will meander despite the world being at full tilt in a given direction. to compensate, obstacles tend to be more suggestions of adversity than true challenges, and I want to stress this is not a "the game isn't hard enough!" complaint. most levels will literally consist only of rolling in a given direction while occasionally jumping or using one of a rotating selection of simple interactables (spring, sticky ceiling, vaccuum monster that shoots you in a given direction). even with one of the few members of the moja troop on-screen to halt your progress, your solution to actually dealing with them will generally consist of rolling right past them. for what should be the core features of the game here, it's a bit shocking how undercooked it all is.

with such a simple mechanical realm to work in, locoroco may have succeeded as something without a discernable genre, or perhaps a puzzle game with a couple additions to the interactable set. unfortunately, the game opts to pursue a classico platforming structure instead. this is perhaps the great incongruity of the game: what could have been aesthetically novel or even boundary-pushing settles into the plodding rhythms of so many games that have come before. much of the incentive structure of the game is built around endless collectables such as the aforementioned berries, mui mui aliens, and locoroco house parts to decorate within the main menu. there are rare moments these are actually hidden behind challenges that escalate whatever the loose mechanical through-line of a given level is, but in the vast majority of cases exploring for these consists of merely finding a spot where the wall is intangible and moving into a secret area to collect your prize. there's absolutely no heft to this design whatsoever beyond giving these purely linear levels little stubs as branch-off points for observant players to be rewarded for finding - or in practicality, anyone who misses a jump and ends up falling through some indentation in a wall into a glob of items.

I actually thought there were six worlds (and thus, 48 levels) and felt a little shocked that right as the game was beginning to consider adding some basic platforming trials to the experience within the final few levels, it just ended. a few hours of watching my locoroco burst into bits and tumble down winding tunnels pachinko-style over and over again just to sit and watch the game attempt a half-hearted boss battle. feeling like I had missed something, I took a look at the minigames where I found only one unlocked... a crane game. tried it twice and then my friends came back with takeout, so I turned this shit off and we watched fulcrum/damianluck925 instead.

first thing you'll notice is that the reticle moves much quicker than the player left to right as you aim from the foreground into the background, making repositioning yourself a bit of a fine art. shooting will lock your character in place which keeps reaiming a cinch, but when you're actively needing to evade attacks you have to make a lot of tradeoffs between having enemies lined up in your sights and being able to avoid their fire. in the vast majority of cases the obvious choice is to spray bullets and make quick adjustments with the helpful roll/dodge. however, as the game progresses, the coarse distance that this roll takes you will inevitably place you into other fire, bringing this original tradeoff back to the forefront. do you intentionally place your cursor far away from your opponent with the intent of dodging their fire and in the process lining them up for a quick kill? do you just avoid shooting at all and run down the clock? can you grab a powerup to slide out of the situation or take advantage of the copious i-frames on the jump or the melee attack? feeling around this flowchart is initially unintuitive, but with practice it becomes thrilling to push your toolkit to its limits.

across six stages (it seems the original set comprises the easy difficulty while normal and hard swap in one new level apiece) you'll more than get acquainted with the limited controls enough to take on the challenges that face you. originally I had tried to slot in "vast exploration of scenarios" (or something to that effect) in the prior sentence, but the game doesn't deserve quite that much credit. regular enemy design is phenomenal across the board, with an excellent range of bullet patterns, strategies to kill, movement/behavior, and combinations of encounters. a great example of this is the elevator ride in the underground which combines giant worms with a specific noggin weak point which can control at least half of your movable area at a time while metal casters lob molten steel to form temporary traps and trios of bothersome gnats take potshots at you. other than a few clunkers (the dull bank vault in the final stage, the inoffensive first area in the underground), there's total gold in scenario design to be found here.

where the game began to lose my interest is mainly in-between these with an abundance of repeated miniboss fights. the worst of these is a snappily-dressed duelist who scrambles on the floor after being shot only to stand back up and quickly snipe you if you aren't looking; once you become confident in his inability to fire back when you have him locked in a bullet stream, the only danger becomes losing your focus as you wait for him to stand up for the umpteenth time. other minibosses range from shockingly tricky (the mariachi skeleton who served as a huge brick wall for me within the first few minutes of the game) to unquestionable pushovers (the lumbering robots in the first part of the underground stage who rarely fight back and will quickly tumble with the slightest resistance). the main bosses themselves tend to fare a little better, but many of them lack substantial auxillary attack patterns that don't derive from simply sending out regular mooks to add a few extra bullets to deal with. without more substantial threats not simply stemming from whatever the primary attack is, a few repetitions on any boss will have you easily knowing the exact counter for each wind-up indicating an upcoming attack. on replays this becomes less than ideal, especially when considering the mostly-fixed enemy spawns and the timer that controls when one can move to the next phase. this latter aspect can be hastened by killing enemies to preemptively shave seconds off the clock, but combined with the aforementioned issues, I found myself zoning out more than once on replays.

most of this analysis stems from my runthrough on easy with clint mind you. I got utterly wiped on normal for my first several attempts and deigned to reduce the difficulty after having noticed others talk about that these settings seemed a little overtuned compared to the original. after my easy playthrough I decided to switch to one of the new characters, bullet the dog, for a playthrough on normal and instantly understood why they had elected to alter the game balance. no comment on doris as I didn't try her, but this mutt effectively renders the entire first paragraph of my review irrelevant. bullet not only can run around freely while shooting but also fires said shots from a drone that has noticable auto-aim. it becomes a totally different game when you can absent-mindedly strafe back and forth while barely attempting to focus your fire, and the supposed difficulty spike on normal becomes a total non-issue.

unfortunately I still had to replay the game (the first half anyway) multiple times with bullet due to my ps4 acting suspect over the last couple days and shutting down a couple of times while I had suspended the campaign to work/get food/etc., forcing me to start at the beginning more times than I would've liked to. for a game with an arcade-style structure this is somewhat damning; if I feel bored replaying a game that explictly is meant to be replayed many times, I can only give it so many props. still, just thinking about some of those specific levels gets me a bit giddy. I almost wish there was a level select cheat so I could skip that opening volley and jump to some of the best parts the game has to offer. eventually I'll come back and try the other characters if I can convince someone to try the multiplayer with me without scaring them off with the rigid handling.

got sucked into the wiki for this game and started having a little too much fun reading it... it claims kid chameleon is "the iliad" of the 16-bit era. I guess it would make sense that there were some players at the time enamored with its sense of scope, enough to look past the absolutely wretched level design. even with 103 levels and a variety of alternate routes through the game, each bite-sized challenge tastes far too sour to enjoy the variety. level design is often immature and confusing, with dead ends, blind jumps, hidden spikes, and invisible blocks scattered no matter where in the game you are. this is compounded by handling inspired by sonic's momentum without the carefully tuned parameters behind it; our protagonist casey awkwardly quickly accelerates and is slow to deccelerate as if the ground lacks friction, and his ability to move in the air is incredibly touchy for a game replete with single-tile platforms to land on. it's hard to forgive a platformer that's this utterly shitty and never seems to end.

where the game does succeed is with its power-up system, more or less. to curb the aforementioned difficulty each mask/costume for our protagonist to wear can be esaily found strewn through each level, and each one gives a full reheal as well. between them all there's no real standout either: each one has some major positives, even if they're not immediately apparent. enemies generally will die from a bonk on the head but also can be easily dispatched with the samurai's katana or Jason Voorhees's throwable axes, and other masks like the knight or the hoverboard offer enhanced mobility options. all of this feels clunky (especially when it comes to the samurai's ducktales-esque downward stab or the extra-wide skeleton tank), but it at least makes wallowing through each level less of a chore. this is especially the case when the devs offer an actual bespoke challenge suited towards one of the masks rather than simply plopping interactables into the world.

the game is somewhat ugly for a '92 genesis title, particularly when the backdrop is a cave or something similarly dull. minor parallax effects when bodies of water are present in the background somewhat rectify this. the level themes themselves are also noticably drab, and you'll rarely remember that you're actually a radical kid running through a holographic world outside of the neat level transitions at the end of each level. the branching pathways and multitude of areas would have benefitted well from a world map, or absolutely anything beyond the silent splash screens introducing each locale. music is surprisingly good given that it's a GEMS title, as beside for a couple grating clown synths it's overall got a nice groove to it and doesn't attempt any out-of-place rock stylings. otherwise there's just little to differentiate it from other mid-tier genesis title of its era.

played around 25 levels I think? maybe a little less or a little more, I don't know exactly what route I took. I quit at madmaze mountain for those curious, near the halfway point of the game.

this short project exhibits interactive vignettes containing original music composed by creator wondermagenta/ziad.

the beginning track, stargazing, begins with an airy synth line and punchy drums soundtracking a night skateboard sesh. cruising on asphalt, the camera generally fixates on the ground, locating this intro firmly planted on the earth. this is followed by rocket man, which lets the player control a blast-off into the statosphere. the ability to turn on the rocket's boosters to add percussive elements to the backing track loosely connects to mizuguchi's technique of letting the player collaborate with the composer to influence the rhythm and dynamics of the soundtrack. the brief third track features another plaintive synth lead accompanied by buzzing square-wave bass and some light guitar licks in an environment that lets you fly around in a small starfield pursuing a particularly large celestial body. the tone shifts dramatically in the following section, where in an arrangement reminiscent of space invaders you can bat small moons towards a shifting matrix of aliens to score points. all of this is obscured by a soft vhs/crt filter along with a muffled flip of jpegmafia's baby I'm bleeding featuring ziad rapping. we then get a bit of backstory regarding the previous events, telling the tale of a dog stranded in deep space finding some strained comfort in collecting different stars in an endless cycle. perhaps this reflects the creator's state of mind if we draw a connection between the collection of stars to ease the pain of being released into space with, say, the consumption of media in order to blunt the impact of adulthood in an unforgiving society and economic structure. some of this is reflected in the final song, which draws from kanye's auto-tune era over a ballad of midi instruments, intoning on the pain of living while continuing to push through and live powerfully to one's final breath. the credits follow, with the nice little touch of having their own mini-physics system that allows each word to bounce before you click it and it gives a satisfying pop.

how much you dig this will depend on your appreciation of the music, considering that the level of interaction is rather low. at its best, the soundtrack evokes a loping, trance-like indietronica feel a la to rococo rot. however, the overall palette falls back on simple synths with a little delay repeating somewhat tame riffs without a lot of variation in texture between the tracks. the creator also shrouds himself somewhat shyly in instances that blunt the emotional impact. the unaltered peggy sample in gigaslammer 9000 dx is iconic enough that it overtakes the individual creativity of the scene, especially since ziad reuses the same flow from the track and makes the lyrics illegible. the final track, major tom, unobscures the lyrics, but leans on kanye's style of emotive autotune for its delivery. while kanye's most expressive uses of the technique on both 808s and yeezus harness the plugin to heighten the range in ways that kanye couldn't necessary achieve on his own, this track's rendition of it uses homage to such an extent that the context overwhelms the inherent sonic qualities of the track. however, I did want to point out that the bassline on this latter track was particularly virtuosic and lent the track some serious groove.

definitely impressive in its scope, particularly the vast use of mixed media and multiple perspectives/interaction modes between each track.

I think it's generally easy for cis people to write off stories that center around dysphoria due to a surface-level "I won't be able to relate to it" mentality. I am saying this as a generalization, but I'm really projecting my own trepidation regarding trying this particular game stemming from lingering transmisogyny on my part. which is to say that even though I consciously accept and support trans people in my words and deeds, I still was quick to other the transness within the game and write this off after first hearing about it as "this sounds interesting, but it probably won't really hit for me." this is of course blatantly untrue: no one will ever know features a rich level of detail for a game of its scope with surprisingly engaging exploration mechanics. I have to thank my current fascination with survival horror for pushing me to plunge into this one and take a detour from my usual gaming habits, as generally I have ignored smaller, more confessional games like these on some arbitrary "quality" metric. it feels easy sometimes to avoid games with subject matter I irrationally don't think I know how to engage with. I dunno, I've been revising this paragraph over and over again trying to make it less ugly, but I guess I also feel like the context is important for my interpretation of the game.

because really a lot of my experiences do rhyme with the protagonist. I went to a small high school in the south with a generally friendly student body, all the way down to jamming with my friends in the recording studio and frequently skipping class (I once got caught by a teacher having left in the middle of The Manchurian Candidate to play through a very decent chunk of SotN in our student commons). on a smaller scale I understand the general alienation demonstrated through flavor text as the player observes the idle behavior of other students in the building. through that I began a long web of synthesizing goufygoggs's experiences to my own, and especially to those of the people around me that I observed through all my years of high school and most of my undergrad before the pandemic hit.

goufygoggs's self-depiction reminds me a lot of people I knew in engineering school specifically; technically capable and driven by passion but ultimately overwhelmed by an consistent inability to perform and intense self-loathing. everyone has a certain ambient level of anger and hate and depression that they deal with, and dysphoria drenches this resting kindling like kerosene, able to potentially spark an intense fire at any moment. in-game intrusive dysphoric thoughts are represented as unavoidable encounters that the players must engage with a resident evil-style dichotomy of options: waste precious resources mowing the monster down or run along and take the hit. in theory we optimize towards the former, but in reality we end up reluctantly accepting the damage as we play, and the game runs with this concept to demonstrate the inability to mitigate each and every dysphoric thought one experiences throughout the day. in particular one person comes to mind that I connected to these musings: a rather talented trans girl I was acquaintances with thanks to our shared interest in 6502 assembly and TIS-100. I recalled two specific instances that tied well to this game:

1) she and I were in a digital logic class together, and she completely missed our second midterm for reasons that I do not know and never asked her about. shortly after, we had a final project where we had to build a working stopwatch from scratch on an FPGA board. I remember after nearly a month of being absent she showed up with easily the most impressive stopwatch of all of us; full hour:minute:second display, the ability to save times, et cetera. as a last desperate attempt to score much needed extra credit, she far exceeded the requirements and produced something truly excellent. she did not pass the class.

2) after returning from summer vacation, I went to a meeting for a club that she had a leading role in. in the intervening time since I had last seen her it was clear she was beginning her transition, as she had visibly grown breasts and had begun wearing makeup. despite this, the team captain took the opportunity to deadname another member of the team who happened to be this girl's best friend. she protested and the captain awkwardly mumbled an apology followed by "I don't really know a lot about that stuff." when the meeting was over I went ahead and asked her what her pronouns were; she responded that no one had asked her in our department before and she didn't really know what to say, though she eventually settled on she/her "for now." I remembered this moment specifically after the in-game line about resigning one's self to using he/him around the school.

in that sense my initial excuse of "this doesn't relate to me" is wrong. many moments in this game led me to flesh out my mental depiction of people that I hadn't seen in years and had always wondered about if I had maybe gotten to know them better, or what their mental state might have been. in essence, a story this raw and unyielding about the trans experience really did reframe the way I thought about prior experiences and gave me a better theory of mind. I think this phenomenon really only could have come out of this style of game given just how it truly bares the creator's soul in a way that a fully fictional story could not approach. much like how watching documentaries in my adulthood led me to recontextualize current events I had witnessed in my past, no one will ever know reorganized my mind palace in a way. there are a lot of memories there that are too painful to bring up, ones that remind me of how much pain I dealt to people in the past. I was that friend the protagonist mentions in passing who knew people were out but didn't know how to bring it up or talk about it. in some cases, I selfishly let the flames of their dysphoria rise even higher with my actions without proper apology or consideration for what I had done. much of this is tied in with goufygoggs's owns admission of physical harm to loved ones, a stark confession of wrongdoing that fuels her self-hate in a way I can understand. that's a good deal of what I relate to here.

this is before even getting into her poignant character study of her father, in many ways the reflection of the protagonist. caught up in his own cycle of self-loathing, he has an equally dysfunctional upbringing as his daughter did, and though never spoken to, demonstrates the end result of years of refusing to properly cope with both his trauma and his failings. his infidelity mirrors the protagonist's own physical outbursts as expressions of unmitigated psychic damage, all covered by socially-acceptable addictions: the father's prescription drugs and the daughter's video game obsession. yet through this shines a muddled but unconditional love between the two, not always visibly shown but conveyed with pitiful tenderness. it's heartbreaking but absolutely a necessary component to understanding the protagonist's pain and inner turmoil from the moment she wakes up in his apartment.

as mentioned prior, the game itself draws heavily from classic survival horror. it plays with the same basic resource management scheme while imploring the player to explore every room in a claustrophobic and purposefully opaque map. each class takes place at a specific time of day, for which the player must find a certain number of time-wasting activities strewn throughout the halls of the school while also contending with the aforementioned dysphoric thoughts and the dwindling phone battery (your ammo against said thoughts) that comes with it. once time has been spent and the correct start time for class has come, the player must navigate to said classroom (which hopefully they have already found) for another chapter of the story above. outlets are selectively placed in each wing of the school for the player to recharge their phone at a single time, forcing classic routing techniques in order to wasting too many resources running from place to place. the "puzzle" here becomes more clear as the game progresses, as the player must also keep track of when certain rooms open up later in the day for the player to waste more time in. these are unavoidable as there is strictly just enough activities to take part in between each chapter (especially as the game continues) and thus not a single one can be missed without being too early for the upcoming class. outside of the story I found this action well-paced and fascinating enough with the fantastic amount of character and stinging humor goufygoggs's brings to the writing here.

one final thing to mention before I go ahead and post this so I can go to bed: the ending is absolutely hideous and made my heart twists in knots. I'm not sure if it depicts a true event (another connection, this happened to my roommate and his girlfriend just nine months ago to my shock) but it preys upon all of my worst medical fears. this is all accentuated by some truly inspired soundtrack selection, perfectly timed to increase the looming dread and eventual shock the player experiences. true survival horror.

wanted to dive into the classic REs because I wanted to play nemesis and code veronica down the line (and maybe zero) so I figured I might as well start from the beginning. this is the ultimate director's cut hack which restores the original uncut and colorized FMVs along with the soundtrack from the first two editions, so no ghostwritten MIDI squelches for me. it seems like a weird combination of elements of both the original and director's cut: original american difficulty (in terms of enemy/player HP and resource drops) with auto-aim restored and enemy layouts from director's cut. the translation even seems to interleave the old and the new at separate points... the infant-to-elder puzzle has the awkward original hints while the pool password puzzle has the revised, more legible hints. I had a fascinating time watching some videos and reading up on all the differences and finding where this hack (and the dualshock version) manages to fuse them together.

even though the presentation is purely vintage, the core design shines through. as this was a chris playthrough, I felt more pressed than my remake playthrough with jill to plan item usage carefully and optimize my routes. chris lacks access to jill's lockpick and two of her inventory slots, giving him heavy constraints over how much he can carry at once. a single firearm, an ammo supply (which thankfully never stretched into two slots during my playtime), and a full heal eats up half the space straight away, leaving just enough room to bring whatever your next key item is to its corresponding puzzle along with room to pick up whatever you find along the way. with these restrictions careful item box placement becomes essential to keeping backtracking from becoming too strenuous.

resident evil achieves this simply by how contained its world is: the core realm of the first two thirds of the game can be ran across front to back (west side of mansion to the back of the guardhouse) within a couple of minutes. plenty of analysis already mentions how the protracted door transitions heighten the apprehension of exploring a new area, but they also manage to make each area feel just a hair more immense. cutting from the top of the elevator to the bottom without watching that slowly-lowering rust-covered platform would make it more than clear just how small the environment actually is, for better or worse. on a first appearance the depths of the mansion and its surrounding areas seem endless, but once the majority of the threat has been cleared out and you're left to simply clean up items it sort of ceases to become enjoyable. in effect the fear is gone since you know that no more zombies walk the halls and you're left to run through endless garishly well-lit rooms.

if anything the real fear comes from the encounters, specifically in the latter half of the game. once you know the head-splattering shotgun trick regular zombies and their naked variants towards the end of the game feel effortless to dispose of, but hunters and chimeras are a much more dicey proposition. hunters specifically have copious i-frames on their jump and can easily decapitate you without much warning, and walking into an area to discover they've suddenly infested it becomes an ever-present fear in the second mansion visit and the catacombs. however, the director's cut bumps up the hunter count in these areas and it's pretty clear from watching videos of the original release that I might have preferred having fewer in the game... they're the most annoying enemy to fight by far (chimeras are also bad but magnum ammo is not in short supply by the time you reach the labs). missing a shotgun round because they immediately jumped upon standing up is frustrating to say the least, and the auto-aim doesn't fare well with their ability to juke the player. this all adds up to finding the right balance to properly scare the player however: weaken the enemy too much or make them too easy to dodge and they won't be able to take the threat seriously, while make the enemy too annoying to deal with and the actual combat mechanics overwhelm the player's suspension of disbelief. in my case I had gotten tired of them by the time I reached the catacombs (which feels oddly unfinished as a whole) while my roommate was sitting in rapt fear watching me get utterly shredded in these sections, a reaction I didn't even see from her when she watched me play silent hill. not bad for these muppet-ass looking monsters from '96!

anything else I can delve into regarding the mechanics undergirding this game I probably already covered in my review of the remake from last year, specifically the "dungeon crawler" reconnaissance/optimization cycles moving through each of the areas. it all exists here, and while the puzzles and overall structure may not be as robust, virtually everything that game does simply builds on top of this. the ingredients are all here after all. it's important to note as well that this game in particular feels more comfortable letting puzzles lead to nowhere or letting the player remain confused on totally optional content that may or may not actually help them in the wrong one. so many important items found entirely out of the proximity of where they're actually used, and random items that have bespoke interactions with no seeming purpose (what was that crack at the bottom of the wall in the labs even for?). more experimental without as many expectations and restrictions as the later titles in the series would need to contend with. also

I've always had an issue with dropping games after getting stuck -- even if very briefly -- only to struggle to want to pick them up again after spending time away from the game. uncharted is a special case here, with me getting stuck on a puzzle around the final third of the game when I was a spry 12 years old. a couple months ago my gf asked me to pull this one out, and I ended up exhuming this decade-old save... slotting back in was almost too easy. when your whole game is the most by-the-numbers cover shooter it's hard to forget how to play it, and the rest of the components barely qualify as notable gameplay additions.

this an early cover shooter too, and it is relatively rough even compared to its forebears. snapping to cover is not a natural system and rather seems sloppily mapped per-object, meaning that many deaths will occur from drake refusing to crouch behind whatever wall or railing he's near. guns are piddly and lack weight, weapon variety is ho-hum, and enemy AI rarely pushes or does anything beyond leaning out of cover. it's effectively a series of light-gun corridors strung together by ico-ripoff platformer sections. they're not bad, and at its best it's a competent third-person shooter -- at the very least the pistol hits pretty hard! during this clean-up I didn't play any of the vehicle sections but given my sparse memories I'll assume they were nothing special, if at least not particularly frustrating. the only real other twist the game takes is a detour into some like horror elements with the introduction of zombie-monster-cursed-people things. perhaps playing a lot of RE has rotted my brain recently, but the ugly mo-cap animations these creatures perform after taking full shotgun rounds to the face really feels unsatisfying. no gibs? no more than a couple little spurts of blood? the added sixaxis-powered motion QTEs when they jump on you have really aged poorly as well, though I suppose I can forgive it considering it came out in only '07.

also it's old hat to say it on here by this point, but good god is nathan drake just completely devoid of character. naughty dog has never been good at making anything that wasn't just completely creatively bankrupt, and absolutely nothing in this game has a shred of originality. nathan does nothing and has no character beyond endlessly quipping, which I suppose may be lightly innovative for this time period. years before the overall cultural shift towards non-stop defusing of tension and suppposedly self-aware whedon-ass dialogue this game was already utterly mired in it.

for my playthrough of silent hill in the last couple weeks, I was comfortable on the couch in my living room, surrounded by earnest support and goofy comments from friends. I played silent hill 3 in the opposite setting, trapped in my room alone, unable to see virtually anyone thanks to a positive covid test. wood-panel floors, nauseating warm light bleeding through closed blinds, and the industrial cacophony of silent hill 3 on the tv in front of me. dunno if this made the experience any more or less authentic, or helped me channel my ennui into a suitably hateful object. didn't really make me much less miserable regardless.

silent hill was a redemption, silent hill 2 was a masterpiece, and then team silent split into two teams, prodded on konami to strike while the iron was hot. while the silent hill 4 team tore up the prior canvas and created a new concept wholesale, silent hill 3 meandered in circles until finally being patched together and sent out the door. it is, without a doubt, the gimped entry. slightly shorter than silent hill 2, the game reuses the hospital locale from that game nearly wholesale along with the slice of silent hill around it, which happens to be only time heather actually gets to wander the streets of the titular town at all. it lacks the side quests of the original and the player psychoanalysis of the sequel, concluding with only a single ending on a first playthrough and slightly different one if you prioritize combat on a subsequent run. on structure alone it feels unfortunately slight.

a purely structural view of a silent hill game diminishes the importance of its indelible imagery, and silent hill 3 comes out guns blazing in this regard. this is a vengeful silent hill, dripping with bile and blood and pulsing with constant stark red. heather, mother of God, intensifies the usual otherworld into something even more hellish. the usual flayed-flesh walls and rusty grating give way to squishy fatty surroundings that completely choke out light and close in around heather, sapping her health. crucified corpses found in the cages of prior games now brazenly hold their dead offspring, barely beyond that of a fetus. behind cracks in the walls and gaps in the floors heather is constantly stalked by loyal servant valtiel, who will drag her corpse away if she is to die. however, when she finds him curled within a wooden womb in woman's locker room of the hospital, she can't help but feel pity at his childlike mannerisms. the game heavily ruminates on these ideas of maternalism and the body being violated, making true on the potential wrought from silent hill 1's story.

which I must say, silent hill 3 returning to the occult origins of the series allows the developers to reinterpret and heavily expand upon the first game's concepts. while that game only plays with the implications of its plot, silent hill 3 centers the experience around the tortured soul at the heart of silent hill 1: alessa. her consciousness within heather allows her trauma to bubble to the surface as the game continues, reliving and recontextualizing moments from the first game that were only glimpses past the blank eyes of harry mason. heather's sense of unreality within the fog and other worlds are not simply expressions of fear but furthermore her grasping with the hidden memories she must let percolate from within her. she is not who she thinks she is, and her struggle with silent hill is not simply one of unleashing smothered guilt but rather letting the memories of alessa relive within her without overtaking her. the endgame reflects this heavily, as the bowels of the order's church turn into a garden of memories from the original game remade for heather to navigate and relive her past life. loose connections in the first game are made concrete here, immortalizing alessa not just as an off-screen torture victim and a vanishing spirit but a real girl, one who tried to reconcile both an earnest belief in god with the fury and broken psyche of her abusive mother. indeed, the game analyzes the cult itself heavily in these closing chapters, focusing on religious doubt and the interplay of accepting a community versus actually adhering strictly to said religion's practices. vincent and claudia's relationship is at the center of all of this, with vincent wishing for restoration as he succumbs to pleasures of the flesh, all the while naively hoping to restore the status quo of the cult he helps run.

the absence of this lens within analyses like that of super eyepatch wolf reveal an inability to dissect this game outside of the lens of silent hill 2's individual psychological breakdown. clinging onto poorly sourced interviews has allowed such a belief to exist, when really it seems more clear that silent hill 3 simply had a troubled development (starting off as a... rail shooter?) and shuffled into its current state with a small team and truncated budget. the story threads from sh1 may have been used partially to help buoy the creatively adrift project, but they certainly are integrated with a thoughtfulness that does not seem solely some executive-level demand to "franchise-ify" the series. the narrative this game presents features a psychologically-damaged protagonist that heavily distances itself from simply repeating james sunderland's story; heather struggles to maintain her emotions and frequently lashes out in comparison to james' near-suicidal indifference to the events around him. she learns to accept and show love to her alessa side, giving her the strength to press on and challenge her role as vessel for god. she's expressive even in her flavor text and perfectly shifts moods on a dime in her cutscenes; I would dare say she's the best of the original three protagonists. to lament that she needed an identical arc of suppressed guilt to james sunderland trivializes the many undercurrents this game implants within its understanding of the events of the original game.

so why did I like it less than the first two? the rail shooter origins for this game may shine through more than expected given that the game overall has a somewhat heavier focus on action. for the first half of the game this is not much of an issue -- you can play the game running past each monster with little problem, just like in the prior entries. a few new systems are added to supposedly spice things up such as a clumsy block and beef jerky for distracting the dogs, but actually putting these into practice feels difficult. investigating doors also now takes place in real time, meaning that the usual gameplay loop of clicking through dozens of doors with jammed locks now feels genuinely dangerous. solid change, and one that I think benefits the series more than anything. it's into the second half of the game with much more involved boss fights and strong enemies that completely block off certain hallways where the gameplay begins to fall apart. healing items are actually somewhat scarce, and I managed to finish the game with absolutely nothing left. having to navigate these awkward shooting sections with combat that has changed little from the first entry just feels like a waste of time, and frankly reduces the horror aspect for it for me. the enemies may feel less powerless than in prior entries, but their presence becomes more of an annoyance when you stumble into rooms with several identical ones all swarming on you or when they begin to use firearms against you.

but this is the second half of the game, right? what about the first half? possibly the real extenuating factor that really lost my interest was the subway/sewer/construction site/office building section. in what makes up easily over a quarter of the game, heather runs through endless concrete halls and through the same copy-paste building format over and over again. endless reception desks and subway signs and sewer hallways just... don't scare me. you get a little otherworld taste at the end of that office building section that saves the experience a little bit, but after so long of just wandering about with little threat from the enemies around you, it feels almost too brief. the second half has the excellent amusement park locale which is just absolutely sickening to look at and to hear, but it's sandwiched between the hospital reused from sh2 and the church by which point the combat focus becomes more annoying. this whole second half is littered with virtually every great setpiece in the game (shame on me for somehow walking past the infamous mirror room, the womb otherworld is really hard to see in), but there's just so many more nitpicks here than I had with the prior two games.

the process of writing this honestly makes me think that I particularly enjoy thinking about this entry much more than I do playing it. a lot of the best reviews on this site come from this game as well imo. it's a shame then that this particular game goes a little overboard in making each of its areas truly dangerous. when I laughed at silent hill it was a way of hiding my true fear; when I get annoyed at silent hill 3 it simply dilutes that real fear and renders it secondary. and wow did that final boss have a fuckton of HP.

"harry mason introduced the everyman to survival horror" "as an ordinary man harry mason can't take many hits and struggles with firearms" my man is standing here nailing headshots with hunting rifles like it's nothing. he's getting pounced on by flesh gorillas, mauled, and then crawling out like he just took a scratch. he's surviving electrocution and then nailing noscopes like it's easy. and there's no question he's been doing his cardio as well, sprinting across an entire town while barely breaking a sweat. barely loses his composure until a lady literally turns into a blood demon in front of him. even then he takes a second to sit with it and then starts running around literal bizarro world again as if nothing happened. what does chris redfield have that harry doesn't?

when I played silent hill 2 I managed to self-impose the dread and anxiety required to fully immerse myself in the dilapidated corridors and alleys of the titular town. not so much this time. my friends/roommates were really into watching this one so I rarely played this one alone in the dark like I did its sequel, and I played the game accordingly. lots of riffing and plenty of laughs at the stilted dialogue, creepy setpieces, and oddball puzzles. when I got to the lighthouse I was really having to strain my tank controls prowess to run up the spiral staircase, and as a bit I made a couple other people try it to prove I wasn't crazy; I'll always remember that shit.

but I can't deny that when I played this alone for a bit in the otherworld version of the school, even as I worried that I couldn't remember how to envelope myself in that fear, I could feel those telltale signs occurring. the tightening of the chest, and that prickle in the throat letting me know that the imagery of strung-up bodies and rusty grating were starting to make me anxious. even with few prior antecedents that managed to capture this disgust and visceral psychological torment within the digital world they managed to perfectly envision it on such limited hardware. scenes like the rows of windmills placed in the middle of nowhere after the caterpillar fight or something as simple as covered corpses on beds in the hospital convey sickness and decay without hesitation. the lighting as well, from the muggy daytime streets to the narrow beam of the flashlight control the player's gaze so perfectly, unsettling them as they dare to peek into a corner or open yet another door.

what perhaps surprised me the most was the game's structure. from back to front the game isn't particularly long, and unlike its sequel the actual dungeon sections are much less heavily emphasized. these locations in silent hill 2 contain heavy story significance and a much stronger sense of relevance to james' history and mental state in comparison to the school and the hospital, which serve more functional purposes to harry than thematic ones. the rooms as well feel much more cookie-cutter by comparison, with fewer key areas of interest and more vessels to contain keys of various shapes. where this game succeeds in disorienting the player most is in the ever-shifting locality of the places you visit. building floors that disappear, bathrooms that exit on different floors than you entered on, and entire city streets melting away before your very eyes; all of this culminates in the nowhere, where previous areas are stitched together into a dizzying maze detached from any semblance of reality.

silent hill also has significantly better puzzle design than its follow-up thanks to the lack of any sort of item combination feature. keys are keys, no need to weld multiple random items together to get to the next area. instead the progression feels much more directly drawn from resident evil, with a mixture of fun little brainteasers and lock-and-key matching. surprisingly these appear very little in the second half of the game, assuming that you totally skip the kaufmann side quest as I did (thought I looked around a good deal and yet totally missed the bar, and as soon as you walk down the street on the boardwalk you're completely locked out of this whole section unfortunately). past the hospital there's quite a while of just running past hordes of enemies completely incapable of keeping up with you: in the town center, the sewers, the dock on the way to the lighthouse, and then the sewers again. not really an issue considering you still get to take in the sights regardless, but I would've preferred a little more "dungeon-crawling" so to speak.

when I first tried this game years ago the clunky combat and controls threw me off, and if you feel like you're in this boat take some time to get used to it and explore. items are ridiculously common and taking damage usually yields little risk provided you keep tabs on your health. although I didn't use the strafe at all and barely touched the backjump, overall these are some super tight controls. would not blame anyone for trying the second game first and then coming back to this one like I did.