extremely surreal to see that a prevalent consensus on this is that it's an OBVIOUS uberbleak nihilist exercise in cynical ultraviolence when I feel like it's Very Clearly shooting for (but emphatically not always flawlessly succeeding at) humanist themes exploring mercy, kinship, and absolution: The last spoken line/thesis of the game is literally "I don't know if I can ever forgive you, but I'd like to try" which basically mirrors the bubbly final sentiment in Steven Universe of all things... like come on people the game clearly has a lot of faith in human compassion and optimism that we can be (and are) better than our worst impulses. We can (and should!) totally debate the efficacy of the way the game communicates these ideas. I think there are plenty of areas to criticize or outright condemn in terms of execution; the pieces written about the games fraught zionist inspirations and the discomfiting misogynoir on display in regards to a specific moment are especially vital reads--but framing this story's outlook as intentionally nihilist, player-blaming pain porn about the inescapable cycle of violence is just.. totally disingenuous to what it's clearly trying to do, imo. A story about empathy without a soft and tender pastel veneer does not render it ineffective or worthless. I would probably argue that the game's refusal to over-sentimentalize the repugnance of its deuteragonists' actions (or make their realities easily accessible/justifiable) lends more integrity to the challenge of conveying the inherent worth and potential for change within them... I feel like the game makes it extra clear that Abby and Ellie are not universalizing prescriptive ciphers for the human condition / our inescapable URGE 4 VENGEANCE and are instead very specific / detailed character studies of damaged people whose emotional processing is expressed through borderline surrealist New French Extremity interactive dream logic in a world that also presents a variety of individuals with approaches and outlooks that are direct foils to these self-destructive coping strategies!!!

lots and lots of thoughts about this game, might revisit and explore further at some point

(also feel the need to say that Naughty Dog's crunch culture is a blight on the industry and this game could have been just as affecting as a more contained and less needlessly sprawling experience)

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!

Headbone connected to the headphones
Headphones connected to the iPhone
iPhone connected to the internet
Connected to the Google
Connected to the government

mascotizing, de-eroticized, de-humanizing wooby doo-doo that started out as a low key homophobic ~sooo randim~ joke about how funny gay cultural nomenclature is to its straight creators but then got agonizingly retconned into game grumps' (ugh) flailing attempt at a self-serious inclusivity project. Too ignorant and afraid of offending anyone to portray anything resembling adult human intimacy or eroticism, and reeks with the no homo!!!! creator's fears of depicting anything messy, hot, or specific about icky degenerate gay sexuality. Never overtly cruel and clearly interested in playacting safeness and inclusivity, but the placid smoothness of everything feels like its own form of erasure--and it's a smug, self congratulatory one. This is clearly not really trying to provide anything meaningful or substantive for gay audiences: it's for obnoxious straight "allies" to play and have fuzzy wuzzies about how great they are for wubbing the cutesy wootsie daddy poos--they're smol pastel beans just like us!!! Heinous. I dont want to yuck anyones yum too hard or whatever but if you're a queer adult and love this game I kind of think you're a fucking idiot

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!!!

Look, as much as I treasure this game I completely understand the (usually clear-headed and astute) swathe of middling reappraisals that I've noticed recently. I think the uniformly positive SHOCK 2 THE INDUSTRY reception this had, along with its legendary/unassailable art game™ status, are somewhat responsible for a glut of lazy contrarian game design theorizing--and the now VERY tired trend of copycat "nonviolent guideposted explorathons" that reek of a certain elitist hostility toward any games that dont fall into this hyper-accessible, beauty obsessed, pseudomeditative format. I'm sick of this very narrow concept of what constitutes an artistic or thoughtful game too!

However, I can't blame Journey for the cultural response that engulfed it, especially because I truly believe that Chen and Santiago operated from an honest and inquisitive place of creation while chasing the ideas that most captivated them--not out of some pompous guiding impulse to shake up the system or merely prove that games could be "more". Watching interviews with Chen where he barely holds back a giant beaming smile while discussing his inspiration for Journey--the sense of disempowerment, awe, and unity felt by those who had seen the Earth from space--showcase an entirely uncynical fascination for an implicitly compelling subject to explore through gameplay. Journey feels incredibly bright eyed and open: its taut aesthetic beauty, welcoming accessibility, ambiguous spirituality, and intimate nonverbal social system don't come across as demands or provocations to me, but as the shared passions of a group of artists culminating into this radiant, excited thing. A lot of the game actually feels metaphorical of the game-creation process for this small studio of friends experimenting together: the stone-carved glyphs and histories of bombastic past creators are present and noted, of course, but they're merely abstract window dressing in the much more personal collaborative journey being discovered.

I do think ThatGameCompany's prominent reputation HAS affected their process, and no longer feel the same spark in their work. I don't know if I believe in the whole "art has a singular soul" concept or even invest too seriously one way or the other in auteur theory in general, but I do know that for me, Journey emits a purity of spirit that makes me feel an intense affinity with those who created it--one that isn't matched by later games with very similar structural trappings. Maybe it's not possible to feel that anymore if you're coming to it with the foreknowledge of the game's reputation and legacy, or if you've already had this sort of experience with one of its many stylistic second cousins. I'm not sure.

sorry 4 the beyond tired analogy but this game is like a frail and defiant flower blooming uniquely through the rubble of its own technical limitations. It's simultaneously a nearly forgotten relic and an undeniable genesis point / clear creative influence for countless other game achievements for both the fractured Team Andromeda artists themselves and other inspired gamedevs (Rez, the team ICO oeuvre, thatgamecompany, from software, etc). An eerie and sensitive story with so much more brevity and respect for player time than typical JRPGS (probably both by intent and as a technical necessity) but also an unparalleled amount of spaciousness and quiet power. The still unimitated positional combat system is a complete revelation and so so beautiful in its graphic framing and expressivity. The closest thing I can think of is the (also spellbinding) Evrae battle from FFX, but magnified tenfold and constantly eclipsing the presumed limits of its prior majesty over the course of an entire game. The dynamism and propulsive grace within the compositions of each battle tableau grant an ATB-based jrpg the sensoral exhilaration of an Ace Combat game. The fact that the balancing is a bit too easy hardly matters when PDS remains such a bold declaration and unmatched proof of concept for an entire school of systemic evolutions it was denied the chance to ever iterate upon. These battles set my imagination on fire!!!

The game is tragically inaccessible and unretrievable (the source code is completely lost and the effort/interest level required to reverse engineer a faithful re-release seems unlikely), but it also feels fitting for something with such a lamentful cadence to end up as a lingering piece of gaming hauntology. if fucking bluepoint or whoever decide to remake this absolutely peerless achievement in HD i will officially detonate the vest.

Emulate on Yabause/Yaba Sanshiro, SSF, or Satourne, the full game runs extremely well now! if you are having issues 4 real find me on social and message me and i will walk your ass through the whole process because truly everyone interested in games should play this game

for some reason this is probably the only time a piece of media has ever made me feel "triggered" to the point of trembling white hot panic and rage and I'm very lucky to be able to say that because it was a fucking horrible experience and I hated it a lot!!! As someone who watches a lot of "transgressive" or politically indefensible genre media and has a complicated fragmentary interest in it I'm no stranger to sadist exploitation and the justification of horrific, perverse acts committed against women as a callous means to reinforce a fictional world's steely hopelessness but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. The way this game doles out such repugnant torments to its one female character, a child (who was previously presented as a duplicitous saucy nubile cartoon temptress in a way that felt indefensibly racist and pedophilic), granting her zero dignity or humanity and utilizing her sexualized abuse as some cheap suggestion of a new "darkly-real, Kiefer Sutherland's war on terror" stylistic direction for this series.. is just... fucking grotesque and too ghoulish for me to even process. Kojima's misogyny was always something I had to internally justify or excuse up until this point--undeniably objectifying and ignorant but mostly absurd in a schlocky horny genre way I was personally able to overlook--and i think part of what I found so fraught about GZ was how intensely it laid bare how adjacent to abject misanthropy and callous hatred his views on female characters always were. I mean there are hints of this in MGS4 as well with the BnB's--the body oil moaning nymphoid war crime victim sequences that immediately transition into narrated monologues (not from them of course) about how these women had dealt with like the most lurid and sensationally violent trauma possible and you freed them via murder actually bc that was your job and right 2 do! That was disgusting to me at the time as well, but something about the treatment of Paz: an unrelenting violation of a character as a means of stylistic/thematic transition and an intended vehicle to generate hype (Metal Gear pulls no punches now this aint your momma's genre game we put Liveleak ISIS torture in it!) just utterly revolts me and makes me feel queasy 2 my core. The insult to injury was seeing this games attempt at some hateful cruel stylistic baptism for the series and then having Quiet's design revealed... Ground Zeroes isnt even an honest statement of intent for the series; Kojima isnt heralding in a new misanthropic world of mutilated dignity and constant desecration... he's simply incorporating that into his world where women are also sexy cartoon sidekicks with coo coo pulpy character designs... I think part of what upset me so much about this is envisioning the mental landscape of someone who is able to justify a narrative universe in which both of these ideas can non-schizophrenically coexist, let alone communicate anything valuable about geopolitics or war crimes. Utterly vile / fuck this piece of shit 4eva and tbh while I found so much of death stranding to be arresting and sprawling and deeply felt I also am unable to remove the stain of this fucking filthy worthless game from any of his other works! u marred your library forever u fucker I hate you!!!!!