SlimeLord
Recent Activity
30 mins ago
SlimeLord
reviewed
Who's Lila?
This review contains spoilers
Truly accurate weird guy high school experience. This is what it's like folks
I really enjoyed this! I have some problems with it but I'll get into those in a bit. This is actually my second time posting this- I initially felt a little embarrassed posting this because it's pretty personal wrt how I connected with the game but fuck it. First, I wanna say why I really love Who's Lila, and felt weirdly seen by it. and in that it's just really aesthetically lovely.
There's a Jacob Geller video that some of this will probably sound a bit redundant next to, but I think for me Who's Lila's hit the "fear of losing control" mark a little differently and in a way that felt deeply cathartic. This game pokes at a LOT of my specific fears from growing up with some William-esque social deficits, and I think that's why it struck a chord with me- being misunderstood because of how I might express an emotion in a way that seems odd and of social interaction feeling like a game of delivering an "expected" response is kinda just what it's like when you've got that spectrum swag. Actively having to fight the way my brain wants me to talk and act, being worried that I'd offend someone with a strange noise or mannerism that was misread- these were the things that kept me awake and made life feel impossible when I was a little younger than William. It also can create a real sense of alienation when your school life feels like a social minigame- Will's intentional self-isolation and his need to construct a companion to keep him company feel like familiar concepts to me. I used to project thoughts onto my dog and guinea pig and have back-and-forths with them when I was too exhausted to actually talk to people, at least until I couldn't stop imagining them threatening me and had to stop. Coincidentally, Who's Lila has a scene that reminds me of this to a T when William and Lila are talking about the nature of the mind and she starts intentionally making him freak out.
Guess what I'm saying with all this is that Who's Lila feels like it taps into the fear of having a mind/thoughts that can work in ways you don't want them to very well. The autism/social anxiety parallels are pretty clear, but I also spent a lot of my early teenage years with overwhelming harm OCD- this fear that there was something inside me that would take control of my body and make me do some Martha's Apartment shit to my loved ones or peers. It got to the point where I would deliberately try not to be too physically close to people just so I wouldn't risk suddenly snapping someone's neck as I walked by. Who's Lila plays into that fear of hurting others and of being unable to do anything about it- to suddenly have something akin to Lila enter you, an intrusive thought that actually has power, and that's trying to replace you. I was in Will's position in some ways in High School, and these thoughts and images in my head felt like they were bleeding into me and were going to kill me. It's terrifying, and I think 14 year old me maybe would have benefited from seeing a game that captures that feeling so well, even if it wasn't the creator's intent.
"Yeah I constantly have uncontrollable, extremely distressing thoughts about murdering people in violent, horrific ways and perform rituals that I think are keeping me from acting on them" is not a feeling that's easy to talk to if you've never been told it's just the symptoms of a pretty common mental illness. I don't think Who's Lila is "about" OCD, much less the specific kind I have- but the way it dis-empowers the player and constantly reminds them that we are puppeteering a teenage boy's body and making it do horrible things really resonated with me and made for effective horror. The scenes with The Stranger feel particularly representative of this, especially the one in the Lovers ending. Just played out exactly how my nightmares from around that time of my life did. "You look very cute today. Don't scream." Being taken over by your own thoughts and made to do something horrible, presented nightmarishly. Genuinely gave me chills.
Moving away from why the game hit so hard for me and into some more general stuff; the dithering is both a really clever choice to mask the extremely low-detail models and to lend the game a ton of style- just gives it this hazy, dreamlike feeling that creates a constant alienation and that's backed up by the eerie, spacious soundscapes. The bizarre environments and characters you meet are immediately memorable and striking; shoutout to the Stranger. I love the Stranger. Captures the feeling of the Mystery Man without just ripping off Lost Highway entirely.
I do have some minor grievances with the game's writing- not problems with the themes or plot, but in the way it expresses them. GarageHeathen had, in my opinion, a pretty singular vision here, but I think there's occasionally an unfounded lack of confidence in the extremely effective mechanical and visual storytelling to get those themes across. There's a lot of expository text in Who's Lila, and there were a few times that it felt like characters were re-clarifying things that were hinted at in different endings. I don't think Who's Lila is pretentious or "fake deep", because it does have something to say and I think that thing is interesting- but it sometimes feels like the dialogue is actively trying to prove that to me- that yes, these symbols and concepts mean something! I don't think that's necessary. The storytelling here is strong but part of me wishes the visual/mechanical elements were able to speak for themselves just a tiny bit more. That said, I think Who's Lila is genuinely fascinating. It affected me and I think you should play it if it looks even vaguely interesting to you and you're down for a one-player ARG point'n'click
I really enjoyed this! I have some problems with it but I'll get into those in a bit. This is actually my second time posting this- I initially felt a little embarrassed posting this because it's pretty personal wrt how I connected with the game but fuck it. First, I wanna say why I really love Who's Lila, and felt weirdly seen by it. and in that it's just really aesthetically lovely.
There's a Jacob Geller video that some of this will probably sound a bit redundant next to, but I think for me Who's Lila's hit the "fear of losing control" mark a little differently and in a way that felt deeply cathartic. This game pokes at a LOT of my specific fears from growing up with some William-esque social deficits, and I think that's why it struck a chord with me- being misunderstood because of how I might express an emotion in a way that seems odd and of social interaction feeling like a game of delivering an "expected" response is kinda just what it's like when you've got that spectrum swag. Actively having to fight the way my brain wants me to talk and act, being worried that I'd offend someone with a strange noise or mannerism that was misread- these were the things that kept me awake and made life feel impossible when I was a little younger than William. It also can create a real sense of alienation when your school life feels like a social minigame- Will's intentional self-isolation and his need to construct a companion to keep him company feel like familiar concepts to me. I used to project thoughts onto my dog and guinea pig and have back-and-forths with them when I was too exhausted to actually talk to people, at least until I couldn't stop imagining them threatening me and had to stop. Coincidentally, Who's Lila has a scene that reminds me of this to a T when William and Lila are talking about the nature of the mind and she starts intentionally making him freak out.
Guess what I'm saying with all this is that Who's Lila feels like it taps into the fear of having a mind/thoughts that can work in ways you don't want them to very well. The autism/social anxiety parallels are pretty clear, but I also spent a lot of my early teenage years with overwhelming harm OCD- this fear that there was something inside me that would take control of my body and make me do some Martha's Apartment shit to my loved ones or peers. It got to the point where I would deliberately try not to be too physically close to people just so I wouldn't risk suddenly snapping someone's neck as I walked by. Who's Lila plays into that fear of hurting others and of being unable to do anything about it- to suddenly have something akin to Lila enter you, an intrusive thought that actually has power, and that's trying to replace you. I was in Will's position in some ways in High School, and these thoughts and images in my head felt like they were bleeding into me and were going to kill me. It's terrifying, and I think 14 year old me maybe would have benefited from seeing a game that captures that feeling so well, even if it wasn't the creator's intent.
"Yeah I constantly have uncontrollable, extremely distressing thoughts about murdering people in violent, horrific ways and perform rituals that I think are keeping me from acting on them" is not a feeling that's easy to talk to if you've never been told it's just the symptoms of a pretty common mental illness. I don't think Who's Lila is "about" OCD, much less the specific kind I have- but the way it dis-empowers the player and constantly reminds them that we are puppeteering a teenage boy's body and making it do horrible things really resonated with me and made for effective horror. The scenes with The Stranger feel particularly representative of this, especially the one in the Lovers ending. Just played out exactly how my nightmares from around that time of my life did. "You look very cute today. Don't scream." Being taken over by your own thoughts and made to do something horrible, presented nightmarishly. Genuinely gave me chills.
Moving away from why the game hit so hard for me and into some more general stuff; the dithering is both a really clever choice to mask the extremely low-detail models and to lend the game a ton of style- just gives it this hazy, dreamlike feeling that creates a constant alienation and that's backed up by the eerie, spacious soundscapes. The bizarre environments and characters you meet are immediately memorable and striking; shoutout to the Stranger. I love the Stranger. Captures the feeling of the Mystery Man without just ripping off Lost Highway entirely.
I do have some minor grievances with the game's writing- not problems with the themes or plot, but in the way it expresses them. GarageHeathen had, in my opinion, a pretty singular vision here, but I think there's occasionally an unfounded lack of confidence in the extremely effective mechanical and visual storytelling to get those themes across. There's a lot of expository text in Who's Lila, and there were a few times that it felt like characters were re-clarifying things that were hinted at in different endings. I don't think Who's Lila is pretentious or "fake deep", because it does have something to say and I think that thing is interesting- but it sometimes feels like the dialogue is actively trying to prove that to me- that yes, these symbols and concepts mean something! I don't think that's necessary. The storytelling here is strong but part of me wishes the visual/mechanical elements were able to speak for themselves just a tiny bit more. That said, I think Who's Lila is genuinely fascinating. It affected me and I think you should play it if it looks even vaguely interesting to you and you're down for a one-player ARG point'n'click
41 mins ago
1 hr ago
1 hr ago
4 hrs ago
SlimeLord
completed
Max Payne
First played this 5 years ago and "loved the style :D" but hated moving/shooting/taking painkillers/any other thing you do while actually controlling Max Payne. I'm genuinely kinda embarrassed this was my take because it turns out I was just playing it entirely wrong? There were moments in this newest play-through where I winced a little bit after remembering how I dealt with combat encounters coming back to them. Felt like I was doing parallel play with my 19 year old self and screaming at her for getting frustrated with scenarios I was enjoying. "Yeah no wonder you hated the gunplay you were barely using its central mechanic!! Stop trying to duck behind cover!" "Remember when you forgot you had a sniper rifle for that section in the Aesir building where you're being shot with grenade launchers from unreachable playforms? And you thought it was "broken" because you couldn't clear it easily with a Desert Eagle?" Just a constant parade of "Jesus Christ what were you doing".
Maybe I shouldn't be quite as harsh to 2019 me but I do think this game clicks a lot more once you accept that it's very difficult and requires you to use all the tools at your disposal. Individual rooms are little gunplay puzzles that you need to maybe die to once or twice before using bullet time to clear effectively. Thinking bullet time was "style over substance" or w/e just meant I wasn't really playing Max Payne at all. To be fair I was originally playing this out of obligation a guy who thought I would be hotter if I also liked Remedy games so it's not surprising I just wanted the whole game to be over.
I think I also just wasn't into it enough to appreciate how genuinely fun a lot of the storytelling is- started playing Max Payne 2 at the time of writing this and I like the pacing and cut-scene direction in it even more but here you can see a lot of that same style even as it seems they have to stretch their budget way thinner. The graphic novel sections are wonderful and I love seeing all the photo-sourced panels- you get the impression the devs were having a blast, they're leaning into the camp of it all. Still, other sections manage to be much darker in a way that feels effective. Any section set in Max's house or a nightmare variation of it is genuinely uncomfortable; the bit in the one nightmare section where almost all the walls in the house are replaced with the disgustingly cheerful wallpaper from the baby's room and rock-a-bye baby is echoing through the house got me pretty bad. Like Max's brain is actively taunting him with how disgusting and backwards the irony of finding the murdered corpse of his infant son in this room designed to feel safe and Lovely is. The "Huggies!" poster in the baby's room in particular feels extremely cruel.
Love the goons. Love how the killer suits are revealed through their dialogue to be LARPing idiots who want to live out the same power fantasy the player is. Just having played the opening chapters of 2 last night "My gun's name is Dick Justice" contrasted against the appearance of Dick Justice as a TV show that's very clearly a parody of Max himself in 2 also feels like it's retrospectively calling attention to Max's own state as a roleplaying weirdo, which from what people have told me/what I've played thus far is a thing that gets explored a lot in 2. Feel as if another review on here by Woodaba illustrates this point much better than I could.
Gunplay is obviously very tight and stylish. Chugging painkillers while mid-shoot dive then switching your weapon is tons of fun and can help you choreograph genuinely excellent little shooutouts, and when you get the grenade launcher it becomes indispensable to beat the reaction time of late-game enemies while also ensuring you don't blow yourself up. VATs got absolutely lauded when FO3 came out but I think this game is very impressive for bothering to make sniper shots bullet-cams and slow-motion enemy deaths into a source of flair in the same way that game does but in 2001. Feels as if every weapon is designed around how cool it'll feel to be used in bullet time. I will say, however, that I wish the shotgun felt a bit more viable in the late game without having to use the Jackhammer. I felt like I was still able to use most of my other weapons towards the end aside from the one-handed variants of the Beretta and Ingram, but pulling out the sawed-off or pump-action just felt like an easy way to get killed. Feels like it limited the scope of what an encounter could look like at the end of the game just a tiny bit.
Overall this was a blast. Managed to pull me away from the Hitman: Freelancer Hardcore doom spiral (which I want to write about at some point because it's so fun but also so insane both in how it twists Hitman into a roguelike and the thematic shit weirdness that comes with that) which I can only thank it for because I need a break from beating my head against a wall due to being Bad At Gaming. Love you Maxwell! Just keep being yourself and you can do anything! :)
post-review note: Jesus Christ does Rockstar need to do some serious patching work on this. I know the remake is coming out but c'mon man. Got softlocked in the Vinny chase because white men can't jump unless they're running at or below 60 FPS. Dude just fell into a pit because his movement in that cutscene is framerate dependent and I spent the rest of the mission watching goons react to a guy who wasn't there tell them to whack da crazy bastard. I was able to move cut-scenes for some reason and the section ended when the camera eternally hung on a scene that seemed to have its completion dependent on Vinny reaching a certain place which he couldn't because he was invincible and stuck in a hole somewhere. Needed to download a hex editor at one point, an expanded, open-source version of the NVIDIA control panel, add some framerate limiters on, etc. Pumping the game full of community patches and screaming "WE'RE LOSING HIM!" as something else with my rig causes visual fuckery every other chapter. Glad the game was good enough to make constant troubleshooting worth it.
Maybe I shouldn't be quite as harsh to 2019 me but I do think this game clicks a lot more once you accept that it's very difficult and requires you to use all the tools at your disposal. Individual rooms are little gunplay puzzles that you need to maybe die to once or twice before using bullet time to clear effectively. Thinking bullet time was "style over substance" or w/e just meant I wasn't really playing Max Payne at all. To be fair I was originally playing this out of obligation a guy who thought I would be hotter if I also liked Remedy games so it's not surprising I just wanted the whole game to be over.
I think I also just wasn't into it enough to appreciate how genuinely fun a lot of the storytelling is- started playing Max Payne 2 at the time of writing this and I like the pacing and cut-scene direction in it even more but here you can see a lot of that same style even as it seems they have to stretch their budget way thinner. The graphic novel sections are wonderful and I love seeing all the photo-sourced panels- you get the impression the devs were having a blast, they're leaning into the camp of it all. Still, other sections manage to be much darker in a way that feels effective. Any section set in Max's house or a nightmare variation of it is genuinely uncomfortable; the bit in the one nightmare section where almost all the walls in the house are replaced with the disgustingly cheerful wallpaper from the baby's room and rock-a-bye baby is echoing through the house got me pretty bad. Like Max's brain is actively taunting him with how disgusting and backwards the irony of finding the murdered corpse of his infant son in this room designed to feel safe and Lovely is. The "Huggies!" poster in the baby's room in particular feels extremely cruel.
Love the goons. Love how the killer suits are revealed through their dialogue to be LARPing idiots who want to live out the same power fantasy the player is. Just having played the opening chapters of 2 last night "My gun's name is Dick Justice" contrasted against the appearance of Dick Justice as a TV show that's very clearly a parody of Max himself in 2 also feels like it's retrospectively calling attention to Max's own state as a roleplaying weirdo, which from what people have told me/what I've played thus far is a thing that gets explored a lot in 2. Feel as if another review on here by Woodaba illustrates this point much better than I could.
Gunplay is obviously very tight and stylish. Chugging painkillers while mid-shoot dive then switching your weapon is tons of fun and can help you choreograph genuinely excellent little shooutouts, and when you get the grenade launcher it becomes indispensable to beat the reaction time of late-game enemies while also ensuring you don't blow yourself up. VATs got absolutely lauded when FO3 came out but I think this game is very impressive for bothering to make sniper shots bullet-cams and slow-motion enemy deaths into a source of flair in the same way that game does but in 2001. Feels as if every weapon is designed around how cool it'll feel to be used in bullet time. I will say, however, that I wish the shotgun felt a bit more viable in the late game without having to use the Jackhammer. I felt like I was still able to use most of my other weapons towards the end aside from the one-handed variants of the Beretta and Ingram, but pulling out the sawed-off or pump-action just felt like an easy way to get killed. Feels like it limited the scope of what an encounter could look like at the end of the game just a tiny bit.
Overall this was a blast. Managed to pull me away from the Hitman: Freelancer Hardcore doom spiral (which I want to write about at some point because it's so fun but also so insane both in how it twists Hitman into a roguelike and the thematic shit weirdness that comes with that) which I can only thank it for because I need a break from beating my head against a wall due to being Bad At Gaming. Love you Maxwell! Just keep being yourself and you can do anything! :)
post-review note: Jesus Christ does Rockstar need to do some serious patching work on this. I know the remake is coming out but c'mon man. Got softlocked in the Vinny chase because white men can't jump unless they're running at or below 60 FPS. Dude just fell into a pit because his movement in that cutscene is framerate dependent and I spent the rest of the mission watching goons react to a guy who wasn't there tell them to whack da crazy bastard. I was able to move cut-scenes for some reason and the section ended when the camera eternally hung on a scene that seemed to have its completion dependent on Vinny reaching a certain place which he couldn't because he was invincible and stuck in a hole somewhere. Needed to download a hex editor at one point, an expanded, open-source version of the NVIDIA control panel, add some framerate limiters on, etc. Pumping the game full of community patches and screaming "WE'RE LOSING HIM!" as something else with my rig causes visual fuckery every other chapter. Glad the game was good enough to make constant troubleshooting worth it.
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