Mutazione is a game about family. Perhaps not by blood, but with love, any community can be a family and any family can feel like home. The inhabitants of the town have gone through a lot, are still going through a lot, and so are you. But as an outsider, you have to really break down these walls.
Mutazione is described as a soap opera and I can see why, but to me its almost as much that as a meditative experience? Apart from the literal imagery in the game, coming into somewhere new as an outsider, with no judgement unto you, and being able to just help, unbiasedly help all inhabitants deeply and spiritually is lovely. Planting plants and singing to them helps beautify the area and gives you materials to help more. Just helping an entire town, alongside your playable character grow and change and move on from pain and seeing the physical space grow with you is awesome.
The soundtrack is absolutely paramount in this experience and coupled with the art creates the most calming, surreal experience. I love this game.

"i don like this :(" - what my friend wanted me to make my review

Sorry, Goose, but I actually have a lot more to say about this. After giving up on this and beating MOTHER 3 and 1, I decided it was only fair to come back and finish it. I came in with a fresh mind, and was really hoping I would like it as much as everyone else does, but sadly, that just isn't the case.

I'll start with the positives: it's very charming! The reputation it's built up for being very quirky and funny is definitely deserved, there were double-digits times I found myself laughing at a gag or throwaway line, and I think more jokes landed than flopped, which is impressive considering just how many there are. The art style is very striking and creative, it makes the little details like the towns' buildings more memorable and the party members' designs simply iconic, though the peak is the final boss without a doubt. While I personally don't like the SNES soundfont, I do like a majority of the songs from the MOTHER 1 soundtrack that were touched up (e.g. the shop theme) and the two final boss themes are just fantastic, the last being one of my favorite songs in video games. However, that's about all I can say for positives, although the charm is definitely a major part of the game.

The biggest negative I have is the gameplay. Underneath its silly, surreal syrup of style, the RPG that lies at the core is pretty weak. The rolling numbers are a nice addition, but I find that a majority of the time they roll too quickly to the point of being useless, with party members already dead before the healing text box popped up. Too many fights are just A-button mashing with next to zero actual strategizing, ESPECIALLY once Jeff gets his late game bottle rocket collection. Even when you can't bash an enemy to death, I found that Paula and Poo's (and, when necessary, Ness's) PSI attacks rendered most foes dead within the first round, and even if it went on longer, it felt like more of a nuisance than a real fight. Not only the gameplay, but I find that the characters and world are much less interesting than either of its two sibling games, and even on its own, it lacks in that department. What is Paula's character outside of "she's nice to Ness and has psychic powers"? I know it's a lot to ask a SNES-era game to have incredibly compelling characters, but when a major ending plot point is reliant on the fact that you care about them, it feels cheap to ask that when you haven't given me enough to care about. As for the world itself, I just don't find it particularly interesting. It's neat to look at it now, nearly 30 years later, and see just how much of it is a time capsule of an exact era in American culture, but that's about all I feel, the world feels much more disjointed and segmented than I'd want it to.

Rating this game is admittedly very difficult for me, because I don't feel like a 5/10 is correct, but I don't know what to rate it. I think, for what it's worth, it's aged decently. Sure, the menuing is painfully clunky and the console lag can be insufferable at times, but it's not terrible and still very much playable, though I think the amount of slow-scrolling text boxes during battle can certainly start to wear one's patience thin. The gameplay is not great, but the style and vibe of the game definitely wins me over and is what kept me playing until the end, even if the ending was more of a let down for me than anything. I feel near equal parts positive and negative things about this game, and it evens out to a resounding shrug of an experience. I'm glad I played it, and I think its influence on the world of gaming has been more of a good thing than a bad thing, but it's not one I can see myself coming back to, nor is it one I can even see myself recommending.

Hollow Knight is an excellent budget title that could serve as the framework for a truly special game. The scale of its world and its contents is simply astonishing, and the universe it all takes place in is certainly a fascinating one. Hallownest feels like the remnants of a once-thriving, underground kingdom. No matter where you go, you catch glimpses of its former glory buried beneath the scars of tragedies and conflicts that have long since passed. You walk through the fractured remnants of a society slowly being reclaimed by its broken ecosystem. The atmosphere is perpetually tinged with a nigh-palpable moroseness, but it's not so overwhelming that it blends all the different areas together.

Every biome is visually distinct from each other, and they all tell self-contained stories about the different corners and communities of Hallownest. It is no secret that Hollow Knight's greatest aspect is its world design. Even a contrarian dickass like myself cannot deny that the world design is anything short of fantastic, and I think that it's worthy of all the praise it has received. It's hard to make a game's world feel truly sprawling-- even big budget titles struggle with that-- but Hollow Knight's map feels like it goes on forever in every direction. It's not just that the map's filled with wide, empty levels with nothing to do, there's a lot to do just about everywhere. Every biome is packed with things to discover, and even if you miss some of those things, just seeing how the different levels and biomes connect together is certainly one the biggest motivators for playing the game. There's always something else to do, there's always something you haven't seen yet. A lot of love went into both building this game’s world, and making it interesting to explore.

The most impressive thing to me, though, is not its world, but rather the amount of art that’s in it. The game was made by a core team of 3 people (4 if you count the composer/sound designer), but only one person made the entirety of the art and animations. For context, there are over 150 enemies and bosses in the game, many of which have multiple unique states and poses, and one guy designed and animated all of them on top of drawing all the characters, art assets, environmental assets, visual effects, UI assets, and more. I don’t usually like giving all the credit to one person in a team, but Ari Gibson is an absolute fucking beast of an artist, and I strongly believe that his work is a key factor of why Hollow Knight captured the hearts of many. In fact, his art is what initially made Hollow Knight interesting to me. Every part of the game is filled with beautiful, screenshot-worthy material, and every screenshot shows off an enthralling universe just begging to be explored. It’s a game that obviously wants to be played; a notion that’s echoed by its incredibly low price of entry.

I’d heard nothing but praise for the game since the day of its release. I’d seen dozens of people fall in love with it. In fact, I sat next to someone who played it every day during class on her macbook. Even without the sound, I could see she was enthralled by it. At the very least, it seemed like something I'd enjoy, too. So years later, when it finally came time for me to play Hollow Knight, I wanted to give the game the best chance I possibly could to shine. I approached the game with a completely open mind and made it my mission to focus on how playing it made me feel.

However, the more I played the game, the more my priorities shifted. No longer was I “giving the game a chance,” I made it my mission to see everything it had to offer. I was determined to do the ultimate playthrough of Hollow Knight, in which I would refuse to get an ending until I memorised the entirety of Hallownest, completed everything in the game, mastered the mechanics, and accomplished absurd personal challenges.

For 9 months, I basically played nothing except for Hollow Knight. I amassed 165 hours of playtime and saw nearly everything in the game. But here's the catch– to this day, I have only done a single playthrough and have not gotten a single ending. I haven’t finished the game, and I do not ever plan to.

Before I continue, I want to explain why my playtime is so absurd. Hollow Knight is definitely a big, nonlinear game, but when you’re as immensely stubborn as I am, it becomes even longer than it was intended to be. Backtracking is a significant part of progressing through it, but the most interesting parts of the game for me were the moments I was meant to turn away from.

For example, I spent a long-ass time beating the Colosseum while vastly underlevelled. I’d say I spent nearly ⅓ of my playtime doing so because it pushed me to master the mechanics and required my undivided effort to beat the challenges. Yes, it was a serious time sink that was easily avoidable, and sure, I may have had to motivate myself to play it at times, but even though I wasn’t exploring Hallownest, I was learning how to use my arsenal to its full ability. The different layouts and enemy encounters in the Colosseum were not just interesting to discover as I progressed, they were intriguing to engage with and discover how to most effectively beat. So even though it took me a long time to beat, I didn’t regret a single second I spent there and never once lost my patience.

It’s places like the Colosseum that demonstrate the best of what Hollow Knight has to offer, gameplay-wise. When the player is pushed to improve their skill by pushing back against the friction of the world, it legitimises their actions in the world. Those moments of triumph made me feel like I was progressing just as much, if not more than when I was simply exploring the map.

There’s proper brilliance embedded throughout Hollow Knight, but its limitations hold it back from being something I’d consider to be a truly great game. It’s obviously impressive that Team Cherry was able to create something so massive out of a very simple framework, but by aiming to make the largest map possible with incredibly simple core mechanics, those peaks in gameplay are divided by increasingly large valleys of mediocre filler.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the world design is lacking or anything like that, obviously the levels are fantastically arranged. However the excellent world design is brought down by the parabolic gameplay pacing and lacklustre level design.

When I say that the level design is lacklustre, I do NOT mean the levels are poorly constructed. There isn’t a level I can think of off the top of my head with poor construction or readability (actually I technically thought of one of the levels with Loodles in them, but that’s not really worth mentioning, I say as I make mention of it). Most of them are adequately put together and relatively enjoyable to beat the first time you see them. The issue, however, is that, as I stated earlier, Hollow Knight is heavily based around backtracking, which means you will venture through most of these levels many different times. One of the most difficult aspects of designing a game like this is making levels that are interesting or enjoyable to play through multiple times, and Hollow Knight does not have many levels that are like that.

The vast majority of them are made up of the same floating platforms, spike pits, walkways, and enemy placements in slightly different arrangements. There is generally only one way to venture through them without much in the way of variation, save for the occasional shortcut or biome-specific obstacle. Although the traversal options change with the acquisition of new movement abilities, the levels themselves stay largely the same as the first time they’re discovered. The player is tested on exactly the same things regardless of how skilled or experienced they are with the mechanics. While there are some changes and rewards for backtracking through the map, they are generally incidental in nature and do little to breathe new life into the levels. For lack of better phrasing, there comes a point where Hallownest stops feeling like a world, and the moment that happens, Hollow Knight becomes a large grocery list.

See, at first it takes a while for the game to open up and become interesting from a gameplay perspective. But once it does, you really embrace that feeling of discovery, of seeing new things within this ever expanding world. Unfortunately, once you reach the endgame, that sense of discovery begins to fall off. The destinations stop being worth the journeys you have to take because you have already encountered the exact same obstacles on your previous journeys. Once you become familiar with Hallownest, you inevitably lose the feeling of excitement in its mysteries. The pursuits become mindless. You end up having to trek through the same simple levels, just to see what else is there, even if the things aren’t worth seeing. There is always something else to do, there is always something you haven’t seen, but the distance to the reward becomes further as the reward itself becomes ever smaller.

Once you’ve seen most of what Hollow Knight has to offer, it is no longer intriguing to traverse its world. You begin just chasing places for the mere sake of chasing places, and you inevitably run out of steam and motivation with that pursuit. That was the trap I fell into. At a certain point, I was just playing the game just so I could say I had completed everything, and not because I was getting anything out of it. The thrill of adventure and discovery had long since turned into a slog since the contents of the game itself was ultimately stretched way too thin.

I want to love Hollow Knight, I really do. I put so much time into it and tried as hard as I could to do so. Some would even say I tried too hard. There is a lot to love about the game and I applaud Team Cherry for what they managed to achieve with it. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in their shoes right now, given both the immense amount of hype people have for Silksong and the fact that they have to make a follow up to a game like Hollow Knight. I, myself, am looking forward to seeing how they evolve with the release of their next game. But as for Hollow Knight itself, I’m glad that I played it, but I certainly don’t have any desire to revisit it.


But nah, in conclusion, bad game by lazy dev. By the way, why do people like the OST so much, it’s really not that special smh.

dmc4 is undercooked as hell but i still love it as much as the other entries. like, yeah,
-the campaign folds back on itself about halfway through
- story is underwhelming and lacks the same focus seen in DMC3
- superfluous stuff like the dice game
- the savior boss
-the god damn style ruining chimera seeds, who thought this shit was a good idea
-(more of a personal gripe) not being able to equip/unequip Dante's devil arms.

despite it all, the combat does a lot of heavy lifting and was arguably the most intrinsically enjoyable it ever had been in the series before 5 came out. Dante is absolutely insane, in and outside of gameplay, and Nero, while not as deep, is still an absolute treat once you're used to him. his exceed system is just too good. and I love most of the bosses in this game.

it's hard to ignore what dmc4 could have been, but what's there is still a blast.

I just finished the normal ending of hollow knight with 88% completion marked. I have some boss rush content and a few small sidequests to finish up but otherwise I think I'm perfectly comfortable with where I'm at with the game.

This game is amazing honestly! I don't play a lot of metriodvanias so coming back to this was refreshing. But you're mileage on this one may vary, so let's dig into why that may be the case.

Firstly, I say coming back, because at one point a couple years ago I put a solid 20 hours into this game and hated it, but I've almost certainly warmed up to it because in a sense I think my priorities and sense of appreciation for ambient story telling has changed.

I'll return to the ambient exellence in a moment, allow a short tangent on my past perceptions. You see, back then I think I was annoyed, in part because I found the game far too simple and easy, none of the music or art stuck out, and I think I quickly had picked up on the lack of diagonal platforms or general lack of collision platform complexity.

It's also a very slow experience. When you start playing, there's no functional way to put it, the game is boring you can only jump, you walk absurdly slow, and your not bound to pick up a dash for around the first couple hours or so. When you start, you're coming out of a cave, reading some esoteric plaques about the Pale King, etc. And every area to the west of the starting place is fairly unexceptional until you get to the Lost City (which is absolutely breathtaking).

So what kept me hooked this time? Certainly it wasnt my attention span, if anything its gotten worse. The main thing, aside from some company to keep me comfortable during downtime, is actually something that would be a bit invisible to a lot of people. For one, opening up the map and finding secret areas is extremely satisfying in itself. Almost every room has a cove that connects and a lot of the time that sense of exploration actually gives you something better than just the material benefit of saving the Grubs or a Pendant, but instead shortcuts back through and around areas your in. Connecting the map is an incredible gameplay loop, because they seemed to have gone out of their way to make the game as compact and interconnected as possible for this type of game. By comparison a lot of other Metriodvanias, like say axiom verge try to tire you by giving you a giant planetary world, Hollow Knight feels appropriately scaled down, the tram stations, stag stations, and elevators eventually make you realize getting to almost anywhere on the map takes about at most 2 minutes, which is not something you can say about most of these games.

The other reason is far more invisible. The developers were incredibly mindful about the rumble effects in this game. I play a lot of my games on an xbox controller because the rumble effects can be tactile and satisfying, and would usually rather exchange it over better aim or higher button variety in most games, especially since I play a lot of my games lazy from my bed. In this case, whenever you dash a faint small rumble is emitted. Whenever you get hit a very large rumble input is let out, and whenever you are attacking an object a slightly medium sized rumble is released on impact. What this means is, combined with a soothing orchestral ambience, with notably no percussive or juttering beats in the tracks, a lot of being outside combat is not necessarily to avoid dying, since it's fairly easy to get your currency back but instead keeping the percussion as quiet as the music and tone of the game, whenever you get hit its loud and disruptive. In the meantime the very small non attention seeking rumble set off by a dash is so incredibly enjoyable you could simply dash around for hours exploring and have that carry the quiet moments on its own. You're playing as a small bug, so of course your job should be to keep a low profile and not cause too much disruption all at once and your own presence would be bold but quiet. Meanwhile, when you get hit back to back it feels like a small earthquake is happening. In this way the core mechanics of the game build in with the environment and character you are actually playing.

Now I could sit here and gush about how amazing all of the areas of the game are, but this wouldn't provide much utility as a review or memoir of the experience to my later self, not only because it would be far harder to actually read back and reminisce on, but also because I could simply look up a video or open the game in 3 minutes and simply see this to be the case, so instead I'll bring attention to one of my favourite encounters in the game. Underneath the City of Tears, the main City region of the game, is the sewers area referred to as the 'Royal Waterways'. The area is shrouded in darkness and dew, most of the time you hear creatures far before you come into contact with them, and a lot of stuff is toppled over, with your bench in the area being tilted sideways. It's supposed to be messy. Ominous, and foreboding. This all comes to a head when you meet the little bugger asshole called in game a 'Flugenon', a small worm that lets out this nasty frenzied gutteral sound like nothing else in the game, and on sight with you chases right after you as a turret. Once you realize what is happening of course you smack it down, only to then moments later have 2 smaller pieces chase after you, one in the sky and the other on ground. Both making smaller and slightly distinct sounds from the larger version. These zombie worms cover a lot of the darker regions of the sewers, they impress me both because of their enemy movement and attack pattern design feeling so disorienting in how smooth it is, but it also filled me with dread, despite the fact I didn't die to them even once! It just added so much to my experience that these little guys were there.

The reason I thought to highlight these incredibly small pleasantries is that I quite honestly think it's this, and not how difficult or complex a game is, that matters to me more these days. If I were to assess this game on its difficulty I would of course feel disappointed, as even though I did die a lot, I only felt 'challenged' by the Prince Zote level 4+ fight, and some of the Dreamer fights. This is absolutely because the Souls series has warped my perception of how long I should be spending on a boss. I'm generally of the impression if I didn't spend over 20 minutes on a boss, it wasn't a very good boss, this is definitely a sentiment I'd do best to get away from, as by that metric almost all games are going to disappoint. But I hope you can understand its a sentiment that was not consciously cultivated by any means. I should note however this was quite the game to do it, as I felt my encounter with none of the bosses this time around were wasted, I particularly want to give notice to the Lost Kin and Prince Zote fights. Along with a wonderful final boss. These fights were absolutely brilliant with the zoning and focus it requires to take on Prince Zote, and the story that goes along with him, making him likely one of my favorite boss encounters in a videogame in recent memory.

Zote's story and his 62 precepts alone were worth the experience, but a lot of the small cast in this game are great in terms of offering both functional and storytelling purpose. I love the fact that when you hit up many of them with the mind reading device, you find out most of their thoughts are actually as equally mundane as what they express aloud a lot of the time. It's a nice touch, because you could have easily made for example the map makers wife Iselda have a mind completely panicing about her surroundings, but I think it makes a lot more sense that shes actually still just brooding about her husband and giving a small insight into her past life through that, rather than something contradictory. It's very easy to write a lot of thinking dialogue as contradictory or histrionic, and occasionally that is the case, but in reality I think a lot of peoples thoughts tend to reflect their outward presence. There's a charming realism about it. Plus its not exactly like there would be much point to putting on social masks for most of these characters at this point anyway. And the relationship between Bretta and Zote, the 2 most primary in their attention seeking behaviours reflect how futile doing so actually is.

Unfortunately, what stops the game from really being stellar, is when the small pleasantries clash with equally small frustrations. To its effect there's not as many, but they still stick out in a way that takes from the experience rather than adding to it.

For one, the economy of the game is understandably stagnant, so after you get to around the distant village or so, you'll stop having money to actively spend on. Perhaps earlier or later, depending on how mercurial you are, but I cant really see people getting more than halfway through the game without having most of the charms and upgrades bought out or at least the money to do so when they get around to it. This on its own is completely fine, you dont want to ramp the difficulty of the game too hard on grinding and, pairing that in with an economic depression from there being no population and therefore almost no shops left is great storytelling. But there is one exception: Divine. Divine takes your strongest charms (basically the build modifiers) and asks for huge sums of money to make them unbreakable. The issue is she asks for 10,000+ Geo per charm, and you cant get the breakable version back once you gave it to her. But, there's functionally no place to get that much geo that doesnt require large amounts of grinding. I understand shes a greedy prying mantis insect, but it would take me probably about an hour and a half of straight grinding one area to do this effectively, and farming has a lot of narrative issues because I start to treat the game as a calculator rather than as an experience, I know this enemy spawns here therefore I can farm it.

On top of this, the only real purpose of doing this is to exchange one tedium for another, since the character who can repair them is just in a slightly annoying spot on the map you have to go back to every time you die. It doesn't help that the charms in question also are just objectively better than most of the other charms in the game making it no question that unless you're not in the mood you make the run back anyway. I personally almost think this breakable charm mechanic would have been better off not being in the game despite its obvious narrative flourishes around it. Not to mention it makes choosing which charms to equip rather juvenile, you always equip Fragile Strength because it makes you do 50% more damage, making the possibility and build choice space that much smaller ultimately.

Following this, theres also the fact that one of the main powerups you get allow you to go through black laser doors but never mention this to you. It mentions you can shadow dash, but not through the door. I spent quite a few hours not doing much of anything because I assumed I had to do something else first. It seems primarily like a playtesting oversight; they didn't mention this in the blurb on pickup. After recognizing this I played the rest of it with a walkthrough armed. There are also giant coin pouches you have to hit over and over again for Geo, and seperate from the other considerations on geo drops, you usually only get about 30 Geo from each, as an external reward, the benefits of this are so incredibly low its almost not worth doing, I think for some of the later sections of the game they could have increased the coin drop rate from this to about 300, but they remain this same drop rate throughout the whole game.

One last complaint I have is that while the game is great in terms of boss designs, only knowing to top off moves at around 5 or 6 and knowing when to challenge the player with appropriate gap closers on most fights, the game really falls short in terms of its platforming. There's one section of the game in particular that attempts to test your platforming skills called the White Palace. Here, the game tests you by offering several difficult to navigate platforming sections, but the issue is that your vertical fall is not quite floaty or precise enough to support this. I think that your character accelerates vertical speed in the air, which is fine, but it also hits maximum velocity incredibly quickly. This maximum speed is frankly far to difficult to comfortable control. On top of this, most of the platforming involves buzzsaws. My girlfriend joked this was the 'super meat boy section' just because of how many buzzsaws there are. It makes sense in meat boy, a game hostile and arcadelike enough to get away with moving buzzsaws, but it doesnt make sense in a giant palace, even if it is a dream! I think they just ran out of ideas for what an appropriate obstacle to overcome would be.

And to be frank this is an issue I have with metriodvanias in general, but especially this one with the way the art direction is in particular: there is absolutely no way I'm going to passively explore the world for more secrets. The secrets are often hidden behind invisible walls in this game, making the assumed function of doing a full clear for the grubs or random missed goodies and charms, absurd. They make it slightly easier with the limited markers, which I admit are also quite fun to use to chart the map and note difficult/interesting areas to return to. However when it comes to finding grubs and charms, you would be doing quite a bit more wall hugging than you would probably like. I cant imagine pushing up to 97% and then trying to till the whole world for the last 2 relics or Grubs or whatever. They easily could have added a post game charm that makes the process of a clean sweep easier, as it is, this game could never convince me to 100% it, especially not without a guide. Now to be fair, a guide and simply not choosing to elect myself into stupid platforming sections in a game that doesnt support it that well solves both these problems. I also personally don't need the best charms anyway by the end of the game, and they are 'unbreakable' in the dream sections by default anyway, so the lack of external rewards make the difference for divine is not a big deal, but I cant really see myself doing a replay of the game anytime soon.

One last thing before I let you go, there's a justifiable amount of comparisons to be made between the story thematics and general gameplay of this game in relationship to Dark Souls. I don't want to overstate it, but the base ending of Hollow Knight read quite literally as a 'linking of the fire' rehash of Dark Souls. The story being esoteric and told mostly through descriptions and random hidden notes. The general gothic quality and themes of infection and decay. The futility of resurrecting kingdoms, etc. Also, the fact that it uses a checkpoint mechanic similar to the Souls series.

Personally, I think the only part where it drops the ball a bit is on the main ending Hollow Knight fight, I'm not really sure the game gives a proper send off of him as an antagonist despite it being the name of the game, a couple characters in town timid about the guy might have helped, since a lot of the commentary was about the Pale King! It just left me scratching my head. On every other front, I think it's okay to ape the influences of Dark Souls. It shouldn't really disrupt your experience all that much, and personally I just think calling antagonists and areas things like 'Lost Kin' or 'Royal Waterways' just has a certain gothic allure to it you don't see elsewhere. I wish well to more games taking advantage of what Dark Souls brought forward, especially on the point of environmental storytelling, which is monumentally well done in this case as well.
High props to the devs for also making all the DLC free as well! I'm comfortable considering all this DLC content along in my perception of the main game. Despite the game not being mechanically or emotionally challenging, this experience will stick with me for a long time and it ticks off a lot of the boxes for what I tend to be drawn to in terms of game design and atmosphere building in games as an artistic medium. Thumbs up all around!

"Destroy the darkness of delusion with the brightness of wisdom. The world is truly dangerous and unstable, without any durability. My present attainment of Nirvana is like being rid of a malignant sickness. The body is a false name, drowning in the great ocean of birth, sickness, old age and death. How can one who is wise not be happy when he gets rid of it?" - Gautama Buddha

Rain World is not a game about living. It's not a game about dying. It's about samsara.

Why do so many yearn for annihilation, for silence? Why are we caught between quiet and din? What are we tied to? How do we remember the past? How permanent is history? What is it made out of? Is it in objects? Is it in something spiritual? Is it in technology? What are the driving forces of technology? Can technology be spiritual? Why do we make machines? Why do we make them look like us? Why do we make them look so different from us? What do they do when we are gone? How different is technology and nature? What is nature in the first place? Is nature cruel? Is nature kind? What does it mean to be cruel, to be kind? Is there such a thing as morality in an ecosystem? What is nature made out of? What is an animal? What is the life of an animal? What is the life of two animals? What is the life of a thousand animals? What is life at all? What does it mean, really, to be living? Why is it so painful? Why do we go on? What do we need? What do we want?

"Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett

I am not, nor have I ever been, a spiritual person. I don't think I ever will be. But Rain World helps me understand why people become Buddhists. This game was a spiritual experience for me. I mean that. I hate it, I love it, I am endlessly fascinated by it. It is an utterly singular game. I don't think there has ever been or ever will be another game quite like Rain World.

One of the best games ever made. Beautiful, fascinating, haunting, terrifying. But it's hard to recommend. It's one of the hardest and most grueling games I've ever played. It's profoundly frustrating. But it's a masterpiece. Even without my unique connection to it, it is full of incredible ideas, beautiful art, and shocking design. It's a vast ecosystem full of wonder and terror. It's stunningly beautiful on almost every level. I feel it on a visceral level. It's constantly on my mind. I cannot escape it; it's inside me. It's one of the best games ever made.