I took a week after 100%ing the game to think about it, and in retrospect, I'm more disappointed with it than I was at first.

There's a very unfortunate tendency in game writing that seems to pop up when a game wants to be "about" some Big Idea. Almost every time that Big Idea is some variation of existentialism, "we make our own meaning," so on and so forth. This tendency is to start reading Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles at you, couched in very poorly written original prose. There are, I think, a few obvious problems with this.

First and foremost is that a well-written game very rarely has to tell you what it is About. This is one of the reasons I actually think I enjoyed the demo a lot more -- the general idea that our actions literally changed who the princess was and how we perceived her and that reality was a mutually created spiral was already obvious without a single word being written about it. Unfortunately, it seems like the creators didn't really trust that audiences would Get It, and thus they leaned much deeper into the explicit conceptual stuff in the full game. The full game is so bloated with the internal cosmology that it seems to have no room to actually substantially explore anything.

Secondly: Listen, no disrespect, but laymen (I am one of these!) trying to explain philosophy at you pretty much always goes poorly. To communicate your Big Idea well, you need to be internally precise and clear about what your Big Idea is, and know how to put that precision and clarity into words. If all you can really accomplish is a string of mixed metaphors that vaguely hand-wave towards an idea, it does make me question if you even knew exactly what you wanted to say. I don't think this game really did -- some sort of mashup between "you make your own meaning" and "change is inevitable" and "you experience the world and yourself through other people," all of which are generally very broad and potent ideas that have been explored a ton through various works, and none of which this game really seemed to explore beyond a surface level of just Informing You Of The Idea. It's a very Nier: Automata approach to Big Ideas.

Finally, maybe a bit of a personal gripe, but I don't even think that the "reading an SEP article at the player" approach is necessarily bad. I'm open to the idea, but if you're gonna do it, I'd at least like the article you read at me to be a little more novel? Hit me with some weird-ass niche stuff that I'd struggle to read and make it more interesting! Be a weird little guy that explores weird little ideas and pelt me with that shit! I love learning about new stuff. I think it's inherently interesting. But dear god I cannot stand having games just tell me "hey! listen! did you know... we make our own meaning?" on repeat. I got it! I understand!

All that said: I don't think Slay the Princess is bad. I liked the voice acting a lot, the art was neat, the writing was (at first) a less insufferable and more clever version of the Stanley Parable kind of writing, and generally I'm always excited for new things from this dev team. Scarlet Hollow is one of my favorite VNs, it's just excellent on all fronts and I always highly recommend it! It's just too bad that this game got deeply caught up in a poorly crafted conceptual structure rather than leaning into the strengths of this dev team (very good character writing and slow burn spooky vibes).

It could have been a lot worse. They could have named a giant robot Nietzsche. Thank god there aren't any games that do that.

there's a point halfway through where you realize a lot of what you assumed was just humor because of the satirical tone of the writing was just the game saying what it meant. like, okay, let's examine the white supremacy shit: there is no route where the text is "hell yeah we love white supremacy it rocks!" and the joke is that this is a stupid text. the text itself is instead very explicit about how this is an abhorrent and violent ideology which even treating with apathy is wrong. the joke is, holy shit isn't it fucked up that we're just kinda describing the real world at you? people believe this and act like this?

so then there is no reason to believe that the rest of what this game is saying on the surface level is any less sincere and straightforward. and man it has some powerful shit to say at times, i'll be honest. some parts toward the end of my playthrough had a fairly strong emotional impact. feminist kino.

Pentiment reminds us that reading is an act of necromancy.

THE LETTERS MOVE! Even as you read the text in this game, it shifts and rearranges itself underneath your eyes. It is text as a living, breathing entity, and I am positively shocked in retrospect that no other game has done anything like this. Great innovations, I think, rearrange the world around them. They seem like the obvious solution in retrospect because they are so overwhelmingly right that it seems a travesty for any other solution to be used in their place.

Pentiment loves writing. It loves text, it adores the written word, and it is obsessed with the act of reading and being read. It makes every single other text-heavy game look worse by merely existing with such passion for this medium. How am I supposed to read a VN, play a CRPG, wander a walking sim, when the entire time I am now acutely aware of just how dead those texts are? They are cold and unfeeling, just a tool used to get across words to the player, and nothing more.

The text in this game has mechanical depth! I don't just mean the writing, which is a strong contender for the best prose in the entire medium, but the text itself -- the ink bleeds to life in front of you, filling in the outlines of the words as they appear. Several handcrafted typefaces populate the dialogue of this game, each of them accompanied by the scratching of a pen on paper or the satisfying clunk of a printing press, like the voice beeps of a visual novel on steroids -- it turns the act of reading into an awareness of the act of writing, intimately coupling the consumption of the text with the creation of the text in a way that somehow makes the characters in this game feel even more real and human than if they were fully voiced.

Each typeface refuses to just have one variant of each letter, but instead several varying versions of letters are used depending on where they are contextually located, causing the text to bleed and run into itself in a satisfying and natural way. The letters change as you read, but not in a lazy and random way, instead carefully handcrafted for effect. The speed of the changes is just so that, for those within an average range of reading speed, you won't so much notice the exact changes of the letters as they happen, but instead you will always be right on the tail of the rearranged characters, noting their presence in the corner of your eye and by the stains left beneath the newly written text. This is, of course, the titular effect, and it says everything about the historical and cultural themes explored in this game -- but that is for another review to discuss. For our part, we are here solely for the text!

In far more obvious ways, the way that characters write their dialogue reflects who we understand them to be, whether it's in the choice of typeface, the frequency of spelling mistakes, or the ways in which alternate colors of text are used. Some characters wield red text as if we are reading a Red Letter Bible, and other characters hold completely different things to be significant and holy, and thus represent that with red text instead. When characters are impassioned, or tired, or terrified, their text is filled with errors and rapidly changing letters. We get a sense of who they are without even reading the words that they have to say!

Pentiment is all about uncovering the vibrant life in that which we view as dead, permanently separated from us, and hidden by layers of dirt and centuries of distance. It argues that even the very words in which history resides are alive -- and if the text is alive, how can its contents not be? In a world of digital text and mass alienation, is all too easy to conceptualize of a relationship between us, the author, and the text that looks something like author --> text --> reader. The author creates a text, its own standalone object, and we consume it. Pentiment rejects this entirely, and reminds us that the relationship has always been that of a conversation! The act of reading cannot be separated from the act of writing. When we engage with a text, we are fundamentally engaging with its author as well, and by doing so reaching across continents, across millennia, connecting two living persons even if it means that we are resurrecting the dead to do so!

I did not think text could be something that I would find this beautiful. This is what the medium of gaming deserves, this is what it's always been capable of, and it is a joy to finally see the medium's potential fulfilled in such a loving and thoughtfully crafted manner.

Play this motherfucking game!

I asked for a whirling, living, breathing machine, and she gave me the hell I most desired.

Economics is kinda bullshit, okay? I’m a communist, plenty of you fuckers are communists, we’re obligated to believe that if nothing else. But wouldn’t it kinda be neat if economics had something to it, if everything was just supply and demand at various levels of scale, if you could feel the veins within the invisible hand of the market and twist them in any way you liked? Fundamentally, this is what Victoria 3 offers the player: You get to build an economy and make it run so goddamn good that you launch your country’s standard of living into the stratosphere.

The process of industrialization is the beating metal heart of this game. It starts, if you are a weak enough power, at the most basic level: You set up logging camps, use the wood you produce to build tools, use those tools in your logging camps to increase productivity, start mining iron with the tools you built, increase the efficiency of tools using that iron, and on and on it goes. It’s all very straightforward in a line by line description, but fails entirely to capture the dynamic energy that sets this apart from other grand strategy games like it. That energy comes from the populations. You’ll hear this come up whenever people discuss Victoria as a series: It’s all about population management. You want to meet their material needs, provide them with jobs, track what classes of society they come from and who you are empowering, so on and so forth. It’s all about the populations.

But there’s almost a sense that management is the wrong word entirely—left alone, your populations manage themselves. They’ll work on subsistence farms and provide their own needs, and everything will stay at a relatively good equilibrium unless a greater power swoops by and annexes your entire country out of the blue. Whoops! There’s a very real pressure to be better, be stronger, be more capable of resisting imperial powers, and this can only be managed with a directed vision. Pure reaction will never be enough. This is why resistance movements and rebellions in the real world do not merely dissolve once they have achieved their immediate goals—dissolution of the state creates a power vacuum that is just asking to be filled. (Vincent Bevins writes about this phenomena at length in relation to modern mass movements in his excellent new book If We Burn, as a side note. Please read it!)

No, management implies that you are creating from the ground up the forces of society. But these forces arise naturally—they are a structure inherent to any group of people interacting at scale, though they may manifest in different modes. Our role is not to create, but to direct as best we can the immense forces that we already possess. This is the feeling you have when your country begins to industrialize and you see the basic production you had at first start to swirl in self-powering feedback loops, profits seemingly arising from nowhere by the sheer nature of the movement of money between industry and consumer and government. There is no better feeling than when you painstakingly direct the production methods of each factory and construction company and mine, one by one transitioning to the new tools you have access to, causing your country’s productive capacity to explode exponentially, only ever growing bigger and bigger. Your standard of living increases, industrialists and the petite bourgeoisie grow more powerful, and demand more and more—

And so you become a monster, lost to pure momentum.

My favorite thing to do in this game is to play as marginalized and minor powers across the world. It’s incredibly satisfying to do that initial work of building something from nothing. With the way that this game encourages you to think about populations at all times, it almost feels tangible how many people you are pulling out of poverty. But with smaller nations, there’s always a ceiling. This takes one of two forms: resource shortages, or population shortages. The first of these is not such a big deal—this is what trade fundamentally solves. Sometimes you have way too much iron and need more oil. The solution presents itself. But population shortages? If you run into these, you’re fucked.

See, this machine of pure human and industrial momentum is always stealing just a little bit from the future. The process of industrialization is a challenge to outrun the consequences which you necessitate by engaging in industrialization. Your profits come from constant expansion and growth. Your citizens are happier when you are doing more, cutting down more trees, mining more iron, squeezing every last drop of steel out of the resources you have. But what if there is no expansion left in the interior? You can’t build any more factories, you don’t have people to work in them! In fact, given how much of your economy depends on the construction sector, you'll even start to implode, unable to sufficiently create demand for all the goods you've been producing, if you're unable to keep building. How can you continue to compete? If you don’t compete with the global market, they will overtake you, grow more powerful, be able to raise a greater army, and then you will be back where you started—just a minor power swept away by the colonizers and conquerers that surround you. What can you do when you don’t have any of your future left to steal from? You steal it from someone else.

This is the enticing trap of colonialism, for once your country tastes the labor, the goods, the blood of one colony, they will never be satisfied. Interest groups are often a mechanic that feels a little half-baked and oversimplified, but on this point they feel fundamentally correct: Basically no group within a colonial power opposes colonization. It’s just objectively profitable for them, when the world is filtered through this lens of economics to such an extent that all is consumed by it. Even when your society has more than anyone else in the world, they still desire to just consume more and more and more. I’d almost say this game is cynical if it wasn’t so fucking on point. When the world is all an abstract map of economic affairs, the desire to paint your color across the world is almost natural. For a moment, I understand how we got to where we are.

But then I zoom in on the world and it comes alive, and I can understand no longer.

- - -

A post-script as thanks for reading:

I find recently that most of my media analysis tends to find itself drawn magnetically to human nature as a concept in one way or another. Sometimes it's an obvious connection, like Killers of the Flower Moon, and sometimes it's a little more obtuse, as with this review. But even here we made the connection at the end: "the desire to paint your color across the world is almost natural." I think this actually comes full circle to the comment I made about economics being bullshit at the beginning of the review, a connection which I'll explore in a moment. I think it's probably a very important idea to focus on because it seems to deeply underpin basically all of how we understand the world, and I think we don't get to the center of that nearly often enough. How can you deconstruct an ideology without understanding its foundations?

There's this pretty fundamental assertion that every regressive, conservative, etc. etc. likes to make in their art, which is that on some level This Is Just How Things Are, which always takes the form of telling us that some particular tendency is just part of human nature. Isn't it just so convenient that those who did horrific evil in order to claw their way to the top of hegemony, and who continue to employ great violence at their behest in order to maintain that power, didn't really do anything bad because if everyone does something how can it really be bad? It's a deeply false but psychologically necessary claim: That the evil I do is not evil, and you would have done it too if you were me.

It's the same reduction that is made to turn humans into economic machines—understanding us simply as a set of material inputs and outputs who consume and produce things. It's a claim that if you had the same material conditions, you would necessarily do the same thing. But this denies the "you" in you, doesn't it? Think about yourself for a moment. Find where "you" are, the consciousness and the observer of the consciousness, whatever that means to you. How is this amorphous primal beast of a thing reducible to deterministic inputs and outputs? Do you really believe that? This is merely an assertion of their axioms of truth onto yours, a refusal to negotiate reality with you but instead an insistence of their own experience, a complete and utter denial of the real of the subjective, of the concept of a You! It is the ultimate solipsism, the greatest sin, the making of man into machine with a computerized brain, the ooze of capital left behind in the creases of everyone's brain from its utter hegemonic power in the ideological realm.

All of which is why I say that economics (or rather, the mainstream capitalist understanding of economics) is bullshit—it is a fundamental reduction of humans to being consumers and producers, and that can never meaningfully capture the picture of any social structure that emerges from how we interact with one another. You've gotta look elsewhere to understand that. It's stuck too deep in the realm of asserting its own axioms, that great circular reasoning, to hold any real truth. It's fundamentally inflexible and immobile in a way that the absolute reality of what we call a political economy can never be reduced to.

Victoria 3 captures all of this incredibly concretely, a little glimpse of the irreducibility behind economy, the first of the shapes in its stages of dialectical development on the way to understanding what that irreducibility even is. It's an astounding achievement, even if it is limited at times by the boundaries of its understanding and imagination.

The experience of playing Suzerain is that of discovering Wikipedia for the first time, in a very literal sense: Within the first minute of gameplay, I clicked on the first bit of blue text that I encountered to discover that behind the text, there was an entire encyclopedia of knowledge to consume. In an approximately hour-long frenzy of jumping from link to link, desperately wishing that I could open browser tabs as if it was really Wikipedia, it became clear that understanding this web of links was somewhat of a logic puzzle in its own right.

In a sense, it was almost like a social studies test for a reality I’d never before encountered. What was this world, and how did the pieces and players fit together on a geopolitical level? Little by little you can piece this together from the more obvious information provided — you can stumble upon Karlos Marcia’s wiki entry fairly quickly, and from there you can figure out who is the USSR allegory, who is the China allegory, and so on and so forth, building in your head the political relationship map upon which this world is constructed — a task that can be monumental at times, given that you are essentially handed 100 years of international history and tasked to figure out how it all fits together — but a task that is deeply rewarding and satisfying. It was all worth it when, upon meeting the character of Bernard Circas, I immediately was able to place him within the context of Sordland as someone who seems to me to be analogous to a Bernie Sanders figure but half a century earlier (okay, at least a little of this is due to his name) and became an insufferable Bernie Bro in this fictional universe. This is not to say that Suzerain relies upon 1:1 real world analogues — usually there are important reshufflings of overlapping interests in a way that gives the geopolitics of this world the feel of a collage, where each nation has been cut up into slivers and pasted back together in a new and interesting, yet all too familiar, arrangement. For any comparison that I make, I’m sure there’s someone willing to contest it on the grounds that I am emphasizing some similarities too much and some differences too little, or vice versa, and I can’t for certain say that they’re wrong. Unless it’s Karlos Marcia. That one’s just straightforwardly obvious.

It is a key accomplishment of this game that somehow, despite the immense breadth of the political directions in which you can go, it never quite feels as if the game is sacrificing anything to make it happen. In a game that is all about politics, the depth of the politics are what counts the most, and I could not be more pleased with this game than I am on that front. Even my beloved Disco Elysium does not feel as if it has as thorough of a grasp on the systems of ideology that interweave with one another on a national and international scale, despite its marked triumphs in being one of the approximately three games out there that have good writing. (At least one of the others is Pentiment, for the record, and I cannot quite decide on the third.)

And yet the combination of depth and breadth do not sacrifice flexibility in any way: It is easy to feel as if the game railroads you when you are on your first attempt at running Sordland. It is shocking, then, to rewind time and discover that the only thing that railroaded you in any direction were the consequences of your previous decisions. If you appeal to nationalists, the left will trust you less. If you undermine business interests, they will plot against you, even if you later choose to ally with them in other ways. The ripples you cause, as a person with immense power in this newly post-fascist country, will shake and consume you if you do not pay close attention to them — and yet, they are fully the fault of you, and no others.

That is not to say that you have sole agency within the scope of the game’s world. Quite the opposite — every single character and source of information must be approached with an awareness that they have their own goals and agendas, and with the knowledge that there is no such thing as an impartial truth in the world of Sordland’s politics: Truth is a powerful thing, and in the game of politics, power is everything. A monopoly on truth is a monopoly on power, and thus each faction seeks to establish such a monopoly through apparatuses of the press, the party, and the people. (Damn, didn’t think I could pull that alliteration off, but I came through somehow!) It is your job to analyze the plurality of truths and data put out by everyone from the media to NATO — sorry, I mean ATO, the very subtle analogue — to your own governmental reports, and determine who can be trusted about what. This is a point which I feel is likely to trip up players of this game, as it is reasonable to assume that the reports you receive from your own government are just a mechanical trapping to communicate to the player the impacts of their decisions, and of course they play this role as well — but even within this mechanical scope, there is room for bias and subjectivity to be introduced, and as such further muddle the waters of your political decisions and their outcomes.

It is reminiscent of Pentiment in a very significant sense here: There is no external arbiter of truth. Where a lesser game would tell you definitively that your policy was good or bad on a range of various metrics, Suzerain does not let you have an easy out on this front. Did you make a mistake, or is that just what the cryptofash of the NFP want you to believe? Are you about to be invaded and do you need to reinforce your armies, or is that the paranoid blustering of a general used to the former fascist leader’s policy of ruling with an iron fist? Are you failing the people on social reform, or is that just the ever-critical eye of the radical, er, Radicals (I refer to the news outlet here) assuming bad faith on the part of your government where it does not exist? All of these answers are sincerely difficult ones to answer at times as no faction is flat and single-dimensional but instead contain a multitude of material interests that intersect and conflict in sometimes truly spectacular fashion.

There is a certain thing that the game does that must be emphasized — it is a vital point that cannot be overlooked that the game, as with the various parties and outlets and people within it, holds its own set of political biases and beliefs. It is deeply easy to forget this given how flexible the game systems are politically and how naturally the systems within this world fit together. It is also, paradoxically, harder to notice this broader scope of bias because of how explicitly the game narratively and mechanically draws your notice to this bias in the more cramped scope of the in-game entities. We know that the biases of "Geopolitico", the neoliberal internationalist pro-capital news outlet, exist — but that news outlet’s text (and set of biases!) comes from a team of writers that are themselves just as subject to bias as any else. At times, I think you can start to feel the impacts of this on what is viewed within the realm of possibility.

However, I mostly emphasize this so as to swing right back around and say that I think the writers do an excellent job of legitimately allowing a plurality of politics to arise naturally as the player engages with the game, in a way that feels as if immense effort went into trying to avoid undue ideological encroachment upon the world of Suzerain. Look, much of what you are tasked with doing is to figure out the goals of each faction and organization within the politics of the game, and evaluate with that knowledge whether you can trust what they have to say on an issue. Apply that same process to the writers of this game, and I think it is clear that this game is a fantastic good-faith effort to faithfully reproduce the infinite complexities of our real life geopolitical situation in a fictionalized frame that gives us the unique opportunity to recontextualize our own politics within a world free of the easy mental shorthands which have been ingrained into our minds. This game makes you grapple with your own politics conceptually and practically, and it seems equally likely that on any front you might come out convinced of your wrongness or convicted of your rightness.

Who knows — perhaps the fascists and/or social conservatives out there that played Suzerain might disagree with me on all that. Regardless, the fact that this game exists in concept, let alone was executed to such near perfection, is an absolute anomaly in the field of media that is gaming. The prose and dialogue are often understated as compared to other text-heavy games, yet feel consistently high-quality in their restraint. It gives me a significant amount of hope for the medium: Between this, Pentiment, and Disco Elysium, it seems more and more that we are getting text-heavy games just on the fringe of the mainstream indie scene that are competently written, with an eye for politics, systems, and narratives alike. If any of these things are interesting to you, it is hard to think that playing Suzerain is something you could possibly regret, even if you do not ultimately love it like I do. For my part, I played this game obsessively, a full 10 hour run in one setting, and at 6:45 am, when I was finally released after 9 years of unjust prison and the author of my biography revealed her name, I could not hold back the tears.

- - -

As an endnote, let me caution you to stay far away from any online forums where people discuss this game. Due to its proximity to games like Europa Universalis etc, the fanbase of this game is largely made up of polcomp types, i.e. reactionaries who mostly understand politics as a choice between equally valid aesthetics, i.e. the most insufferable people on this planet.

Yes, it's weird as fuck that I'm giving an idle game a 5* score, especially one that reads so relatively dry compared to many others in the genre. But this game does something that many other idle/incremental games would never dare to do, and it massively succeeds for it: It strips down the Idle Game to the bare metal formulae and numbers that keep the game machine going, and then allows you to try as hard as you can to exploit those formulae and systems and make your numbers go up as fast as possible.

This is where the "exponential" part of the game comes in. As you break the systems and progress through the layers of game by manipulating the coefficients and exponents and variables themselves, the barriers of entry increase exponentially. You consistently find yourself leaping between orders of magnitude to the point that "orders of magnitude" becomes your base unit of measurement and you instead start making order-of-magnitude level leaps between orders of magnitude, and that cycle continues to repeat in perhaps the most numerically satisfying way possible. This game broke my conception of "big numbers" a million times over, and I fucking loved it.

The best part of this game is that it really understands that the core appeal which it offers is in this progression of scale rather than progression of numbers -- an appeal which is, ultimately, true of the vast majority of the genre, but the games rarely seem to be so explicitly aware of it -- and as such, this appeal is capitalized on to the maximum possible level. Every single time you think you've reached the last level of progression, the last layer of numbers going up, the absolute extent of what the scope of this game could possibly be, you cross the threshold into yet another higher layer and realize that the impossibly massive scope which you just mastered was nothing but the beginning of your journey. This kind of recursive shift fits perfectly with the shape of my brain, so to speak, and as such I cannot help but love how well it is executed. You get to shift from manually making second by second choices about how to maximize formulaic growth to automating the ideal growth to automating the automation of the automation of the automation etc. etc. and the layers just continue piling up but never, ever manage to become too heavy or busy for the game to hold its own.

And even better is that the game does not allow itself to decay into just being the same thing on each layer but with different variables -- the typical experience you would expect from an idle game -- but instead, that itself is the first layer of many. At each turn, the way that you play the game and interact with the formulae and numbers (and at times, actual math!) that controls this game continues to change and morph in ways that keep it interesting at all times.

Exponential Idle is a masterclass in the genre of Idle/Incremental games. For several years, I was obsessed with this genre, played all of the big staple names as well as every single indie title I could find on the internet (I still miss the one that let you write Javascript code to automate systems in the game, perhaps the most ingenious twist I have seen in the genre), and without a doubt, this game tops them all. Since finishing my month-long semi-active playthrough nearly a year ago, I have had exactly no temptation to return to any other game in the genre. They may have pretty graphics, nice lore, good design, but they do not grasp the fundamentals of the genre like this game does. If this game went on forever, I would continue traversing each and every level of exponential power scaling for the rest of my life.

It is a shame that a game like this, which had moments of legitimately good writing and occasional glimpses of interesting ideas, was published in an essentially half-finished state. When the credits roll and you've seen all the answers, you realize that the totality of this game is less than the sum of its parts, and ultimately anything of meaning it tried to say was drowned in self-indulgence. In full seriousness, the game is better if you drop it after Act 2. So do that, and go play one of the many far better games which stylistically influenced this one.

This is a delight to play, and not just in the very horny way that you'd expect with a game like this. Included in the game is a toggle to disable all 18+ content, which I thought was very funny when I first saw it -- but the writing in this VN is just lovely, the characters are cute and charming, and this could easily stand alone without the (really good) explicit content. So much love and care went into making every part of this VN and I sincerely adore it. Margaret is such a relatable character and I want her life so bad. It's the ultimate dream: Become a librarian, get really into tea, gather a cozy circle of close friends, and just settle down for a life of comfort (and lots of reading).

Shoutout to that one meme on twitter that led me to this game and my newfound desire to be an adorable mousegirl :3

I am fortunate enough to possess a [CENSORED TO AVOID NINTENDO HITMEN] and thus I had access to this game a little over a week early. Normally, this is something that will prompt me to dive deep into a game. When Pokemon Legends Arceus (not a good game! yet somehow the best Pokemon game) leaked about a week early, I was absolutely in love and I played about 100 hours of it before it officially released.

As of right now, I have played... maybe 7-10 hours of Tears of the Kingdom. I can already feel the reflexive "you haven't played enough to know if the game is good!!! it gets better!!! delete your review!!" comments coming in. Unfortunately, I'm already confident I've seen all I need to see to know that this game is just unspeakably uncompelling. One or two of the new guys in this game made me go "neat!" and I was impressed upon first seeing The Chasm. But, man, the beginning of this game just utterly fails to pull you in like Breath of the Wild did. It's such a failure that I'm questioning whether BotW was even good in the first place.

Going into this game, I was a massive fan of Breath of the Wild. As someone who has historically been skeptical of both Zelda games and open world games, it managed to thread the needle and be an absolute obsession for the better part of one summer in high school. The way it naturally pulled you in every which direction was so engaging that I could not stop exploring and appreciating the intrinsic joy of finding cool new bits of the world. (I maintain that BotW does this far better than any other open world, sans Genshin Impact, strangely enough. Somehow despite the utterly predatory monetization, shallow writing, and clunky mechanics of Genshin, the world design is absolutely beautiful and entrancing in a way that is hard to compete with.)

But Tears of the Kingdom has none of that. Is it just a DLC? No, not at all -- comments to such regard seem like absurdly hyperbolic contrarianism for the sake of Cool Gamer Cred On Backloggd Dot Com. The world feels completely unfamiliar with how completely it has been redesigned, and at times that is a weakness of the game. If you've ever played a randomizer of, say, Super Metroid, Hollow Knight, or even a Zelda game like Link to the Past, you will be familiar with the feeling of playing a game that distinctly feels like it was not designed to be played in the way you are experiencing it. That feeling of almost disorientation is largely why randomizers are so fun: they extend the lifespan of a game that you love but wouldn't want to play in the exact same way yet again. If only these randomizers could be hand designed by the original developers to allow you to experience the game in its full glory several times over!

In theory, that's something like what the TotK overworld should feel like. Yet the ways in which the world has been shuffled feels, well, random, like a generative AI was fed a list of structures and locations and ideas from BotW and spat them back out in a soulless jumble. It would have almost been better if the world was copy+pasted.

To TotK's credit, this is not true of the newer parts of the game. The Sky Islands and The Chasm are both very distinct from the overworld and feel far better designed, if a bit same-y within their own bounds. In fact, the new things about TotK tend to lean towards the "really good" side -- the handful of new boss enemies I encountered were quite fun to crack (but upon figuring out their tricks, they became trivial), and in particular the cave systems in the overworld do an actually good job of lending new life to a familiar land. My favorite moment out of my playtime so far was being ambushed by a mass of writhing shadow hands in one of these caves, getting up to higher ground, and bombing the shit out of the hands until they died. I jumped down, proud of myself for dealing with them safely, and then a fucking health bar appeared at the top of the screen and Shadow Ganon kicked my ass with his Dark Souls-lite-ass moveset. Fucking incredible moment that came out of nowhere, but I'm legitimately afraid that somewhere in the game there is a guy you are supposed to talk to who will loudly exclaim HEY DID YOU KNOW THIS IS A THING? HERE IS WHERE YOU GO TO FIND HIM AND THIS IS HOW YOU BEAT HIM because that has been my experience with most things in TotK thus far when it comes to natural exploration and the open world.

In a way, it's all too reminiscent of my experience with the similarly middling game Horizon: Forbidden West. That game has a million flaws which I won't go into too much here, but the distinctly best parts were tackling the hardest challenges in the game while incredibly underleveled and undergeared. (Cauldron KAPPA, anyone?) But after doing that, there was really nothing of interest left, and the world itself was just too big and too generic and too arbitrary. That describes my time with TotK to a T.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just missing something. Maybe the game does get better. The first dungeon has given me no hope at all that the game is going to be particularly good when it comes to the scripted content, the side quests are already unappealing and overwhelming, all the points of interest I give a shit about are locked behind invisible walls and story quests with no indication of how to get to that content Now. It feels like the core feedback loop that was so addictive about BotW has been both bloated and constrained to the point that it is lying swollen and dead on the ground, and occasionally when you kick it, it will posthumously cough up a rare nugget of interesting world design.

Or maybe BotW was never good and I just needed to play TotK to realize that. It's absolutely dire that the result of playing the sequel to a game I love is not being disappointed that it doesn't live up to the original, not even blown away with how much better it is than the original, but outright doubting whether the original was good in the first place. Is there any stronger condemnation of a sequel than that?

I'll likely pick the game up again and get further into it out of obligation at some point soon. Maybe I'll eat my words by the time the game is over. Maybe I'll permanently drop it halfway through. Stay tuned to find out!