wanderer above the sea of fog above the 45th boss arena above the medieval fort archipelago adjacent to the nodal sprinkling of challenge tower/upgrade caves in conversation with the impenetrable questline diaspora above the ancient pagan city above the ancienter pagan plague swamp above ash lake above the fromsoftware slurpee dispenser of mass effect 3 endings

Frightfully fun, often peerlessly gorgeous devourer of my finite life! Truly engrossing and addictive for its often well masked vacuity and kind of horrifying that this and FFXIV will likely end up being the longest single campaigns of any story I've ever experienced. I like it I love it I want some more or it and dear god I hate myself

the opening montage of Up really destroyed a whole generation's concept of effective nonverbal storytelling by making them think a parade of prefab domestic clichés embellished with flavorless Milestone clipart set to overbearing music is in any way sophisticated or interesting huh

this girl is a tasteless unfuckable dweeb and i wish her all the worst. the way she's simultaneously a self-insert wish fulfillment character AND the most hapless and bland cozycore dork imaginable is really dark tbh. inexcusable taste in stuffed animals! stop decorating with your diploma already you absolute MONSTER!!! When a sappy celeste-adjacent chiptune ballad plays as it's revealed via context clues that she came into her own after a trip to Japan (and returned w/ a bevvy of basic tourist kiosk tchotchkes) and now feels confident enough to explore rockabilly-lite fashion...hell. It's all so flavorless and antiseptic--she is 30 where the hell is her hitachi wand and why CANT i stuff her horrid garb into the closet in the ideal organizational format--the pile? the subject here is so unpalatable that i honestly would have preferred they scrap the whole progressing narrative concept entirely (esp. when its used in such an unambitious way that communicates very little beyond trite sentimentality; life has its ups and downs, #gratitude, don't make time for haters who dull your shine, the more things change the more they stay the same, when god throws out a mug he buys you a wacom tablet) and instead present a medley of varying rooms/spaces occupying a plethora of subjects, aesthetics, and experiences, but also idt the same devs who chose this protag have anywhere near the worldliness or savvy to attempt something like that. impressive amount of unique isometric assets and cool implementation of foley though!

maaaan i really wanted to get into this but its mostly another nah from me. Little Hope still on top, I'm afraid, and its not a high peak! i feel like a lot of people are going to prefer this to the prior episodes bc it doesnt klutzily trauma metaphorize/bad tripify most of its horror away, but it kinda replaces that genre-disinterested sloppiness with several sins i might find even less tolerable. REALLY hated the sanctimonious and frankly gross both sidesy iraq war enemy of my enemy shit starring a truly heinous and visually indistinct cast that's not even fun to root against. sadly the legitimately fun stunt-casting of Ashley Tisdale is mostly wasted, as her role feels pretty joyless and minor and whatever happened with her wonky bobblehead character model animation is deeply rude to her tbh!! still some camp value to be derived from her wannabe The Descent cosplay bits but eh). The creature design is a huge step down from Little Hope in terms of conceptual inventiveness and setpiece choreo imo, and all the relationship/personality stat mechanics are back to feeling mostly pointless and unintegrated into anything structurally valuable. The pacing might also be the worst in the series... after a splattery and fun enough second act closer, the game totally flatlines during its pre-finale with some awful and overlong attempts at relationship building/EXPLORATION OF "THEMES", and the plodding infodumpery is just a mess. Pretty sure the overall playtime is comparable to the rest of the series at around 4-5 hrs, but the group i was playing with all got so fatigued at this point that any atmosphere completely deflated and things really began to feel bloated and tiresome. The whole escape/epilogue is an enormous whatever.

Idk, at this point it feels fair to say that doing a one year production cycle for these wildly ambitious, modular, and asset intensive games is unrealistic and borderline harmful to the team--I am rooting for this corny lil studio and think theres a lot of talent here but its clear they're not being given the time to script, sequence, and execute any of these potentially fun ideas with the care they deserve. Cant imagine the stress Covid placed on top of this already untenable work pipeline! Its just awful to think about and I feel bad even critizing something that so clearly suffers from being a product of directorial ignorance and project management bordering on abuse. I still value this series as enjoyable enough little spectator-friendly B games to get drunk and play through with friends--its still a rather untapped niche and this team does have an undeniable signature I find charming despite it all--and I might be being especially hard on this one bc the character i played literally did almost nothing aside from that snoozeville "breathe slowly and dont get detected" button press minigame for the entire story! Still leagues better than man of medan even so. I really recommend that anyone with brain worms like me who still inexplicably wants to endure each installment of this series check out Supermassive's way less visible murder mystery side game Hidden Agenda because, while still a mess in many ways, its absolutely superior to any of these!

This was way more compelling when I was playing it on my japanese phone vpn prior to the English release, understanding maybe 40% of the (dreary and predictable, it turns out) fable anthology storytelling, trying to fill in the blanks with my own sense of mystique and ambiguity, and enjoying the zoned out uninvolved music visualizer combat with the relief of not being able to monetarily invest in the gacha elements at all. Well now I played it w the full glory of intelligible language context and yeah it's kind of an insult on all accounts!!

love the idea of the jrpg goth western visual touches this occasionally hints at tho, and some of the character art and music still soothes me despite not surprising. Bummer those are wrapped in a predatory piece of shit mostly just spinning its own wheels

not a poorly crafted experience in any sense and i'm sure theres a lot here i lacked the generosity to find but i felt like i could completely visualize the creators' concept and reference stack with such exact clarity that it became distracting:

femininely morose akihiko yoshida and ayami kojima art/
lilting twinklechoral keichi okabe-wave ost/
vanillaware storybook Spine animations/
folklore character collection combat/
soulstroidvania wielding its genre structure of labyrinthine sparseness to spin a ludically obvious yarn about seeking ~ absolution amidst decay ~

-- and I had to uninstall because the returns are so diminished for me at this point and it was genuinely making me sad that such a clear and passionate labor of love could feel so utterly taxonomizable and consumed by its own clockably interrelated references

at this point idk its just kind of upsetting to play something with such a rigorous and dogmatic commitment to its reference material that doesnt seem to extend very far beyond the world of games themselves, even if said games are all things i find personally beautiful and worth emulating. felt like a very workmanlike and glossy medley of touchstones from works that clearly moved the creators--but executed in a sort of surface way that belies their inability to cogently, personally express how said works resonated beyond mere facsimile. no judgies girl i relate and its why i havent reliably maintained any true semblance of a dedicated art practice for years!!!

tldr; i saw myself in this and i didnt like it

the ritual universality of the (un)flattering dick pic... inspired concept full of so much latent meaning !!! played a few years ago at Bit Bash convention in a cordoned off little adults only gaming zone which felt like the perfect public/private lurid liminal space to experience something this crass and intimate in. The...kind of stark and blunt (but open, nonjudgemental) intersectionality of the character body/genital selection and compositional choices feel way more liberatory and human than 99% of tryhard oversentimentalized statement pieces that dont know how to shut the fuck up and grant audiences some ambiguity and respect!!! Robert Yang predicted subverted and surpassed the largely dull incoming wave of wholesome indie identity art photography games before the first warning sirens were even audible to most... forever legend

like part 1 proper, this dlc was joyous and silly and beautiful and expansive and reverent and operatic and imaginative and completely dumb in all the best of ways!!!! i love what they've done with yuffie here, how meaningfully they've expanded the wutai/shinra conflict and her role within it, love that we get to see a whole new mini scenario with Scarlet vamping around and being a camp cartoon villain, and i love the whole remake project in genny!!! sorry 2 be a simp gleefully nursing at the squenix teat unable to focus on people's many thoughtful criticisms about legacy/faithfulness/fundamental change in game aura/sometimes frustrating pantomime of naughty dog or marvel style mechanisms of story divulsion/obnoxious prolonged episodic price-gougey release strategy etc but this shit simply rules and is pure undiluted joy 2 me and i cant help but want to tell the haterz to go break their teeth on a da chao bean!!! get in the car ladies we're getting blasted at the happy turtle 2night!!!!

shocked by how into this I am despite it overtly representing like 800 simultaneous trending references and roguelikes not being a thing I typically enjoy at all! The scott/villeneuve style trappings are obvious but they're cleverly wielded to convey a story through refreshingly non-cinematic means, and so much of the housemarque soul is still present here. The playfeel is stellar--the dualsense and sound integration especially--and the grueling pointillist combat is reactive and wondrous in a resogun meets nier meets furi kinda way. The punitive precision and masochistic self-empowerment systems (parasites, malignancies) feel so synchronous with the game's themes about delusions of potentiality and the horror of being trapped within a losing conversation with yourself. The whole "the location is its own character" thing is so pat and tritely overused as an assessment at this point but uh... it kind of is tho and i really like it!!! I haven't finished yet and honestly don't think you're even intended to in order for the experience to meaningfully land; the whole notion of "seeing it all" as a means of understanding game messaging is so parochial and rooted in other mediums and their histories, and an especially odd cudgel to use against Returnal when frustration, obfuscation, and defeat are all integral ideas being directly explored in it!!! I will be genuinely kind of disappointed if the ending brings any semblance of traditional closure. Selene is a wonderful and subtly articulated character and the experience feels much more like a portrait rather than a journey. More cagey, damaged middle aged ladies in games plz, i love a smooth altruistic jrpg teen but it is really nice to get to excavate a thorny character who already comes with so much baggage and life experience!!!!!!!

repression is the most grueling form of labor / regret murders our potential selves

i am vast; i contain malignancies!!!!!!

5 stars for the spiritual kinship with (and really novel, well-individuated rearticulation of) Coraline/Street of Crocodiles/Svankmajer's Alice, 2 stars for the beyond tired slenderman stuff and cyclical conclusion. I think the boarding school/hospital zones are the conceptual high point; things got a bit too maudlin and "ending explainedy" for me after that--it felt like watching Tideland clumsily transitioning into a Nightwish music video by the finale

so many moment to moment vignettes in this are extremely evocative, textured with grief and intimate violence in gasp-worthy ways, but I didnt feel much incentive to linger on the work as a whole after finishing, and the noticeable attempts at franchise weaving/lorebuilding seem like an active detriment rather than a strength. Really preferred the game when it was wafting between poisoned dollhouse perversions of nurturing/socializing spaces rather than the slight interpersonal character work, and imo literalizing the TV teleporters origins/function robbed them of a lot of their traumatic power. Still a very melancholic and lovely little game. It's much more confident and symbolically contained than most of its peers, even with its missteps

This isn’t even remotely as morbid a failure as it’s being made out to be (imo this is far from being the worst platformer of the year, let alone of all time), and they clearly responded to what criticism about the demo they could in the small window of time they had, but this is still a very disappointing release from someone of Yuji Naka’s pedigree. There are some real easily corrected choices here that totally perplex me: why do you need a key to unlock the costume pickups when these keys are, without fail, placed directly next to the box pickups and mindlessly accessible? Why are Balan’s Bouts dreary, maliciously unforgiving QTE sequences instead of cute little rhythm games that would enhance the game’s theatrical motifs? Why do you have to “stock” costumes instead of just being able to swap to them once encountered? Like almost everybody, I have LOTS of problems with the game, but it feels a little cruel and incurious to see people hammer so hard on BW for not being this conventionally engaging mechanically tight platformer (none of Yuji Naka’s games really are lol) when to me it seems like Balan’s priorities… clearly aren’t to be that? I agree that the game fails on its potential in a myriad of frustrating ways, but I’d much rather discuss those briefly glimmering unique elements that could have been pushed further rather than rail on it for feeling “dated” while simultaneously condemning it for not being kinesthetically identical to a legacy platformer series that’s pushing 40.

I think, ideally, the game’s one-button input philosophy and limited level design are intended to create a hyper-accessible fanciful spree of cutesy quick changing aesthetics and encouragement--a sugary character randomizer musically shifting between different flavors of low-stakes whimsy--and thats a vibe outline I can definitely see merit in. Sometimes this almost kind of works: a lot of the costumes are goofy and adorable! It’s genuinely kind of fun to get a new suit and wonder what it can do! There are a few rare moments where the level design and powers are in great harmony and the whacko dancing npcs appear and seem to be cheering just 4 u--u go girl!!! Unfortunately, the levels and costumes rarely feel as exuberant and symbiotic as they should to make something like this work, and the game REALLY underestimated just how meaningful any ability that overwrites your jump function needs to be in order to not feel completely disempowering. It can feel patronizing and dull, but it’s absolutely not some utter atrocity of design; The game is internally consistent and it functions coherently within its own parameters, despite them being pretty mystifying and insipid at times--it’s not some Sonic 06 level technical failure in any regard. I was let down by the mechanics, sure, but my real problem is that the game is rarely as bold and engaging an aesthetic experience as something like Nights or Chu Chu Rocket. However, there are still some bits of genuinely quirky individuality I really enjoyed.

The musical theater aesthetic is a totally bonkers camp delight. Some of the scenarios leading to these redemptive dance numbers are hysterical and charming (I particularly love “girl and her dolphin friend had a falling out (???) and need to reconcile”) Seeing the motion-captured choreo kind of poorly translated onto all these wonky deviantart original character costumes has a synthetic but silly sort of jankiness that fully circled back into an earnest and endearing place for me. The cutscenes are genuinely lovely, and the craftworld sort of cgi stuff they do is great. I kind of love the enigmatic stupidity of the Tower O’ Tims and its ever-expanding marshmallow peep Rube Goldberg device that appears to do nothing but exist for its own sake--I couldnt help but laugh when I spent 10 minutes watching the dumb little critters revolve around in their weird merry go round in order to unlock a third “tim trampoline” i literally never saw any of them use. The soundtrack is unequivocally pretty excellent, although it definitely feels a bit slight on tracks.

I have to wonder what a kid playing this would feel like, someone with a looser outlook about what the genre should do, someone with a less claustrophobic understanding of competence/quality than me--someone who can play games and not even compartmentalize them into genre expectations at all! I’m not even sure those kids exist or would care about this game, but the kind of frustrating letdown experience of Balan was still memorable to me despite itself, and playing it had me thinking about my own processing and approaches to design when playing games. And hey, my partner and I have been swinging our little terrier around and belting the game’s wannabe Idina Menzel gibberish anthems to her for the past week so that’s gotta be worth something right!!!