Shymain
2006
By far my favorite of the Ranger series, and in contention for my favorite spinoff. The dungeons are great, I love how difficult the one-line captures can be, sniffing out every little nook and cranny in the world to complete the Dex in post-game is a legitimate joy, and I have basically nothing bad to say about this game despite playing it perhaps a dozen times in my life. I wish that some of the nice improvements from Almia had made it in (a larger world, more bosses, more companions), but overall this game is just consistently really good in a way that other entries in the series fail to be. Also, the soundtrack fucks.
2022
In the post-Disco Elysium world, every goddamn socialist game dev wants to be the one to make the next Disco-type game. None of them have been successful -- and I'm not sure it's a particularly worthy endeavor -- but even when they fail to reach the heights of Disco Elysium, they can end up being quite good on their own terms.
Citizen Sleeper is a game that made me emotional several times while playing it. That is less a credit to its generally subpar and terminally online writing than it is to the fact that the narratives that this game taps into are deeply powerful and emotionally resonant stories about belonging, connection, and finding your place in a world that is entirely hostile to you. When the game dips into ideology, it is often far too explicit and on the nose, and it lacks the ambition required to justify that lack of subtlety. As such, the game is at its best when it leans into its world, which is crafted in such a way that the political themes that are so often shoddily handled directly are instead personally felt and understood through the hostility of the world.
Because of this, it is a massive flaw that the systems which, towards the beginning of the game, are expertly crafted in such a way to keep you constantly on the edge of disaster ultimately end up crumbling. All sense of tension is lost, you acquire absurd amounts of currency with ease, and due to the game enabling you to do everything you want to do, the game systems become a superfluous time waster between underbaked bursts of dialogue and countless time-locked events. You are left with a game that ends up drifting away into nothingness until you choose to ultimately shut off the game and be done.
In fairness, perhaps some of this is variable based on how you choose to end your game. I strongly believed that the choice which made most sense for my Sleeper was to remain on The Eye, and I also believe this was the choice that the game was thematically trying to lead the player towards. Maybe other endings were a satisfying cap to the game, but between the lack of an actual end point and new quests being added in DLC, it feels as if the game was never quite finished.
Perhaps the most egregious fault of this game, though, is that not a single fucking person proofread the script. Countless obvious errors litter it. Any game which attempts to largely position itself as a great game due to its writing should hold itself to a far higher standard of quality than this.
Despite all these critiques, this game was largely quite enjoyable. I played it in a single session and apart from a little tedium towards the end, I think my time was well spent with this game. Certainly far better spent than with the other major attempt at replicating Disco Elysium's writing this year.
Citizen Sleeper is a game that made me emotional several times while playing it. That is less a credit to its generally subpar and terminally online writing than it is to the fact that the narratives that this game taps into are deeply powerful and emotionally resonant stories about belonging, connection, and finding your place in a world that is entirely hostile to you. When the game dips into ideology, it is often far too explicit and on the nose, and it lacks the ambition required to justify that lack of subtlety. As such, the game is at its best when it leans into its world, which is crafted in such a way that the political themes that are so often shoddily handled directly are instead personally felt and understood through the hostility of the world.
Because of this, it is a massive flaw that the systems which, towards the beginning of the game, are expertly crafted in such a way to keep you constantly on the edge of disaster ultimately end up crumbling. All sense of tension is lost, you acquire absurd amounts of currency with ease, and due to the game enabling you to do everything you want to do, the game systems become a superfluous time waster between underbaked bursts of dialogue and countless time-locked events. You are left with a game that ends up drifting away into nothingness until you choose to ultimately shut off the game and be done.
In fairness, perhaps some of this is variable based on how you choose to end your game. I strongly believed that the choice which made most sense for my Sleeper was to remain on The Eye, and I also believe this was the choice that the game was thematically trying to lead the player towards. Maybe other endings were a satisfying cap to the game, but between the lack of an actual end point and new quests being added in DLC, it feels as if the game was never quite finished.
Perhaps the most egregious fault of this game, though, is that not a single fucking person proofread the script. Countless obvious errors litter it. Any game which attempts to largely position itself as a great game due to its writing should hold itself to a far higher standard of quality than this.
Despite all these critiques, this game was largely quite enjoyable. I played it in a single session and apart from a little tedium towards the end, I think my time was well spent with this game. Certainly far better spent than with the other major attempt at replicating Disco Elysium's writing this year.
2022
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 very aesthetic indie game with a great concept which unfortunately falls prey to the trap of being severely underbaked. somewhere between the text messages and talking to the old lady i took a guess at what the plot of the game would be, and i was exactly correct beat for beat, twist and all.
i can imagine a world in which this game was a really compelling, well-written mystery in which we do tons of detective work and chase down dead ends due to our own desperate hubris and eventually reach the fateful ending of this game, and that hypothetical version of the game would be a masterpiece. as it stands, it's just a short point-and-click with a lot of heart and not a lot of substance. i look forward to what comes next from this team.
i can imagine a world in which this game was a really compelling, well-written mystery in which we do tons of detective work and chase down dead ends due to our own desperate hubris and eventually reach the fateful ending of this game, and that hypothetical version of the game would be a masterpiece. as it stands, it's just a short point-and-click with a lot of heart and not a lot of substance. i look forward to what comes next from this team.
2020
if this is resident evil 3 but bad, then i need to play the original ASAP because this game went hard as fuck. i was compelled enough to platinum the game within 24 hours of starting it -- i did not ever want to put it down until there was nothing left to do. i can't say the same about re2make, but this game made me redownload that one and maybe this time around i'll fall in love with it like i did re3make.
2022
This review contains spoilers
it was very brave to have the final boss be the most clunky bullet hell of all time. glad i beat it on attempt one because i would not have had the patience for a runback. otherwise it was a banger game. frustrating in all the right ways for a survival horror
The base game is my favorite piece of gaming media of all time. This expansion is mid enough that I couldn't be assed to finish it, and I honestly think its inclusion in the game makes it moderately worse (and potentially MUCH worse if you are a first time player who somehow stumbles upon the DLC before beating the game). It's baffling that this came from the same people that made the base game. Cool lore expansion, though.
2014
i think the fact that twice now i've been unable to make myself play even to the halfway point in this game because i nearly pissed myself is the highest endorsement i can give a horror game. excellent atmosphere, nothing else does it like alien isolation. i hope to return and beat this one day.
This review contains spoilers
Since every chapter is on this site individually, I may as well review them one by one as I play them. I'll start by noting that I am, in fact, playing these in Japanese, and frankly I'm pretty shit at Japanese. I can make it through Ace Attorney games without much issue and with a very high degree of comprehension, but that's because a) I've played them in the past and b) they're much simpler on the writing side, specialized legal jargon aside. (Seriously, from this episode alone I've mined like 500 vocab words, and I'm sure I could have mined another 200 or so that I chose not to mine.) So take this with a massive grain of salt.
That being said, if I were reading this in English, I probably wouldn't have made it through the first 30 minutes. That's not because of the pace -- this game is slow as anything I've ever played, which I'll return to later -- but because of the writing style. I clicked over to the English translation every once in a while to make sure that I wasn't egregiously off-track with my understanding of what was going on (I wasn't, thank god) and every single time I did, the god-awful stylization made me want to tear my eyes out. I'm sure some people find it charming, but it was truly painful.
I can't say much about the quality of prose in a language I'm still very much learning, but I can definitely speak to the plot, pace, and characters. The plot of this game is good as fuck, once it starts to be real. There is a ton of time in the early game where almost nothing happens apart from children doing children things and living a normal life. I think the game justifies this very well with the moments of meaning slowly sprinkled in throughout the first several chapters, and each of the tiny little plot teases was very impactful for it. That being said, I feel like the time could have been used better -- the characters are pretty one-note, and after an interaction or two you know everything there is to know about them. I think the game is really aware of this, too, as after a few chapters it starts omitting a lot of the everyday stuff to just hit you with the key points.
Once the game gets going? Incredible for a few chapters. The festival had some of the best atmosphere in any VN I've read, and the next couple chapters were very tense and had me on the edge of my seat. Unfortunately, the encounters end up being very same-y, repetitive, and frankly stretched my belief further than I'm willing to extend it (as far as the behavior of non-possessed humans goes, specifically) and so the game really loses its spark towards the end. By the final chapter I was really wishing I could read as fast as I can in English so I could just be done with the episode already.
I want to say that the mystery was good in this episode, and maybe later on I will find out that it is. But for now, I feel like I have no fucking clue what's going on apart from some vague thing about the village being cursed (I did actually pick up that the possessed Mion and Rena specifically knew when people left or entered the village, which I was proud about when that was mentioned later on) and, er, everyone dying? Okay, in fairness, that's an exaggeration. I get the whole "there are three possible theories" thing that the game was going for with possession vs conspiracy vs delusion, and I'm almost certain that the game telling us those are the three options means it will be something completely different revealed later on. Of the three, I'd certainly lean towards the former with a bias to the "well-technically-it's-not-possession-it's-weird-medical-technology-or-something-that-lets-us-brainwash-people" school of Professor Layton-style bullshit. Which I hope I'm wrong about, because Professor Layton is campy enough to get away with it excellently, and this game decidedly is not.
I guess now's a good time to say that I'm going in, like, 98% blind on this -- I have a number of friends who are really big fans of this game series, so over the course of years of discussions that I didn't pay attention to, I know that somehow there's something like a time loop involved, and I was really expecting that to be set up towards the end of this episode. As it stands, it wasn't -- instead, everyone fucking dies, the end. Which is honestly cool as hell, but I don't get what is left to read? Like, there's the obvious cliffhanger with Ooishi presumably having the vial and doing an investigation on his own, but somehow I doubt that's what happens next just based on the fact that all the chapters in my steam library have pictures of the main five kids as their cover art. What the fuck is up with that?
This all sounds like I'm being critical, I'm sure, but I'm not. I'm very confused and tentatively very excited about what is to come, and I hope it lives up to the high expectations that this chapter has set. It's clear there's some sort of superstructure to the way this series is going to work, I just have no clue what it is. As such, that makes it really hard to give this game a fair and proper rating, so I fully reserve the right to come back and completely change it later based on whether I think it does its job in the overall scheme of the game well.
Actually, you know what, I lied earlier when saying that I can't evaluate the prose quality. I definitely can on one specific point: repetition. Holy fuck. I do not need to read Keiichi saying the same line four times in different ways and then thirty seconds later doing it again and then next chapter thinking back to the same line four times in different ways and then summarizing the same line four times in different ways by saying it in four more different ways and JESUS CHRIST unless this game gives me a very, very good justification for why it's doing this, I am just going to assume it's poorly written low-quality filler. Great for language learning, though.
Anyways, all said and done, this game feels like it has left me with a ton of questions, and I have a feeling they aren't going to be answered any time soon. It has an excellent tense atmosphere for half the game, it rewards you for making it through for a handful of chapters, and then becomes a slog. It stands to be seen whether future episodes can justify some of the contrivances in this episode well enough to make it really good, but even as a standalone work, I'm fairly happy with this. Would tentatively recommend.
That being said, if I were reading this in English, I probably wouldn't have made it through the first 30 minutes. That's not because of the pace -- this game is slow as anything I've ever played, which I'll return to later -- but because of the writing style. I clicked over to the English translation every once in a while to make sure that I wasn't egregiously off-track with my understanding of what was going on (I wasn't, thank god) and every single time I did, the god-awful stylization made me want to tear my eyes out. I'm sure some people find it charming, but it was truly painful.
I can't say much about the quality of prose in a language I'm still very much learning, but I can definitely speak to the plot, pace, and characters. The plot of this game is good as fuck, once it starts to be real. There is a ton of time in the early game where almost nothing happens apart from children doing children things and living a normal life. I think the game justifies this very well with the moments of meaning slowly sprinkled in throughout the first several chapters, and each of the tiny little plot teases was very impactful for it. That being said, I feel like the time could have been used better -- the characters are pretty one-note, and after an interaction or two you know everything there is to know about them. I think the game is really aware of this, too, as after a few chapters it starts omitting a lot of the everyday stuff to just hit you with the key points.
Once the game gets going? Incredible for a few chapters. The festival had some of the best atmosphere in any VN I've read, and the next couple chapters were very tense and had me on the edge of my seat. Unfortunately, the encounters end up being very same-y, repetitive, and frankly stretched my belief further than I'm willing to extend it (as far as the behavior of non-possessed humans goes, specifically) and so the game really loses its spark towards the end. By the final chapter I was really wishing I could read as fast as I can in English so I could just be done with the episode already.
I want to say that the mystery was good in this episode, and maybe later on I will find out that it is. But for now, I feel like I have no fucking clue what's going on apart from some vague thing about the village being cursed (I did actually pick up that the possessed Mion and Rena specifically knew when people left or entered the village, which I was proud about when that was mentioned later on) and, er, everyone dying? Okay, in fairness, that's an exaggeration. I get the whole "there are three possible theories" thing that the game was going for with possession vs conspiracy vs delusion, and I'm almost certain that the game telling us those are the three options means it will be something completely different revealed later on. Of the three, I'd certainly lean towards the former with a bias to the "well-technically-it's-not-possession-it's-weird-medical-technology-or-something-that-lets-us-brainwash-people" school of Professor Layton-style bullshit. Which I hope I'm wrong about, because Professor Layton is campy enough to get away with it excellently, and this game decidedly is not.
I guess now's a good time to say that I'm going in, like, 98% blind on this -- I have a number of friends who are really big fans of this game series, so over the course of years of discussions that I didn't pay attention to, I know that somehow there's something like a time loop involved, and I was really expecting that to be set up towards the end of this episode. As it stands, it wasn't -- instead, everyone fucking dies, the end. Which is honestly cool as hell, but I don't get what is left to read? Like, there's the obvious cliffhanger with Ooishi presumably having the vial and doing an investigation on his own, but somehow I doubt that's what happens next just based on the fact that all the chapters in my steam library have pictures of the main five kids as their cover art. What the fuck is up with that?
This all sounds like I'm being critical, I'm sure, but I'm not. I'm very confused and tentatively very excited about what is to come, and I hope it lives up to the high expectations that this chapter has set. It's clear there's some sort of superstructure to the way this series is going to work, I just have no clue what it is. As such, that makes it really hard to give this game a fair and proper rating, so I fully reserve the right to come back and completely change it later based on whether I think it does its job in the overall scheme of the game well.
Actually, you know what, I lied earlier when saying that I can't evaluate the prose quality. I definitely can on one specific point: repetition. Holy fuck. I do not need to read Keiichi saying the same line four times in different ways and then thirty seconds later doing it again and then next chapter thinking back to the same line four times in different ways and then summarizing the same line four times in different ways by saying it in four more different ways and JESUS CHRIST unless this game gives me a very, very good justification for why it's doing this, I am just going to assume it's poorly written low-quality filler. Great for language learning, though.
Anyways, all said and done, this game feels like it has left me with a ton of questions, and I have a feeling they aren't going to be answered any time soon. It has an excellent tense atmosphere for half the game, it rewards you for making it through for a handful of chapters, and then becomes a slog. It stands to be seen whether future episodes can justify some of the contrivances in this episode well enough to make it really good, but even as a standalone work, I'm fairly happy with this. Would tentatively recommend.
games really WERE better when i was a child
I FUCKING LOVE MILES EDGEWORTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm so pissed that this game spent so much time building up the cool-ass meta 4th wall breaking shit only to be so anti-climactic and lame. They clearly wanted to do something ridiculous with this game and were too fucking cowardly to go all in, so we got this half-assed attempt that just results in the actual game being mid in addition to the metanarrative being incredibly shallow. Team Zero Escape has continually fumbled every game since ZTD.
2019
What a weird-ass game this one is. I highly recommend it just for how unique and imaginative (a legitimately rare trait when it comes to games!) it is, despite it also being slow and clunky and often a time-waster. You get to decipher a conlang which is cool as shit despite it being a fairly shallow one, but I assume that was required to make this work as a full game. This game is very organic and your playthrough will not be the same as mine, or anyone else's, from what I've seen.
2020
This game makes me cum. God fucking damn is it sexy.
2018
There's so much that could be said about the thematic depth of this game, of the pure emotional core that Dontnod captures perfectly yet again despite their writing always just being a little bit off, of the brilliantly real characters that light up this fictional world... but I'm lazy, so for now I'll just say: I want to live in chapter 3 of this game. Best LiS moment of all time.