One time 3 years ago my brother-in-law asked me what my favorite Fallout game was and I said "New Vegas" and he said "ah, I can't play something that old" and now once a week I spend like 5 minutes imagining a version of that day where I ruin my dad's birthday dinner by giving a detailed explanation of why that betrays a deep lack of appreciation for games as a medium. Anyways I feel pretty confident saying that New Vegas is the only consistently fantastic and interesting Bethesda-published RPG that came out after 2003 or maybe ever

Three extremely cool characters and 10,000 geckos. Genuinely do not know how to feel about this one- almost every "tribal" character is flat and feels vaguely not okay, and the world can feel a lot more barren and dull than a lot of New Vegas's normal locales; the story it tells is definitely compelling, but, to me, feels less personal and affecting than Dead Money. In a lot of ways this holds the appeal of FO3 or Skyrim, where it's a largely empty open world that's also very pretty to gallivant through and is filled with things to shoot/experience points to rack up. Outside of its scenery and the writing of a few characters it's not very memorable but it's clean honest fun!

Maybe one of the most interesting game expansions I can think of off the top of my head? It makes sense a lot of people hated this when it came out- it's designed to be punishing and friction-filled in a way the base game just isn't. I adore New Vegas for what it is as this shockingly reactive open world, but even with hardcore mode and mods like JSawyer Ultimate and Famine (both included in the lovely Viva New Vegas project), the Mojave wasteland is still shy of being harsh enough to stop the game from eventually becoming much less threatening. Your character by the end of a play-through of New Vegas's base game is a one-man army, who likely also has two companions at all times keeping them safe. And this is fine! The core narrative of New Vegas kind of needs you to be feeling powerful and hyper-competent by the end in order to work; you don't end your game with the protagonist single-handedly deciding the fate of an entire region if you don't want them to feel like they've earned that by being the most epicest cowboy in the wastes. It's great working your way up to being a genuine legend, and it works for the kind of story New Vegas is trying to tell. Still, I love the desperation of games that make the player feel like every moment is a struggle for survival.

Dead Money delivers on that in spades- every skill and attribute on the player's character sheet has a place in helping your courier survive a complete nightmare scenario, from relying on medicine and survival to keep oneself alive, using intelligence, science and perception to understand a mute companion (which allows her to convey information that genuinely makes the game easier!), explosives to disarm traps, lockpicking to steal vital supplies... and yet, New Vegas's relatively more restrictive approach to doling out perks and skills means that being a jack of all trades isn't as viable as it is in other Bethesda-type RPGs. How a player who's built their character around guns, survival and repair will survive the Madre in an entirely different way than a character with a high lockpick, sneak or science. The scarcity of resources here and the constant drain on the player's health means that this one night spent pulling off the world's most fucked up heist (ended my playthrough crippled, irradiated and addicted to like 3 drugs lol) is the most harrowing obstacle you've faced yet. All the weapons suck ass compared to most of what you can get in the wasteland; the police pistol is maybe the only one that felt good to use in my character's hands, but ammo can be an absolute headache to find and you'll often have to pinch your bullets to survive. You come to rely on your companions and your character's own abilities in order to survive and make sure everyone comes out alive. This extra emphasis placed on desperation and scarcity always makes my time in Dead Money seem even more engaging than the base game. A more attentive and careful approach is required to make it through- there is no Julie Farkas here to flush your radiation, cure your addictions and heal your crippled limbs. The only other people you have to rely on are all self-interested and obsessed with a single goal, a goal you might want nothing to do with.

The quality and tightness of Dead Money's writing really reinforces that sense of being alienated by everything you meet in the Sierra Madre while also making you give a shit about the other players in this prisoner's dilemma, I think. Games will get lavished with praise and used as examples when they connect their gameplay to their narratives (Bioshock's big mind control twist linking to the player's lack of agency is talked about a lot), and Dead Money's ending where you realize you can't possibly escape with the treasure you came here for due to your character's carrying limit is often cited by people who love New Vegas as an example of mechanical storytelling. It deserves it, yeah, but I think that it also kinda overshadows a lot of the other cool stuff Dead Money does mechanically to support its narrative. Dead Money's writing is as far from subtle as one can get ("let go/letting go" is beaten through the player's skull with a hammer) but still has a lot more to say than I think most game stories do. Each character is trapped and cut off from others because of their obsessions, obsessions that are literally killing them, and the only way to survive yourself is to keep them alive by showing them that they don't need to keep dooming themselves to try and get back what they lost. Each character's motivations feel so real and make sense for the people they've become- even Dean Domino, most disgusting man on Earth, feels like he's been given an inner world. "I have a massive ego and am miserable and seeing this guy who's gone through more pain than me still find happiness makes me furious- I cannot die until I fuck his wife and fuck his Casino". Like "know the combination, and the Sierra Madre opens her legs" is such a sleazy line but feels like it gives a glimpse into how this guy thinks. In his mind, he NEEDS to cuck a guy who has been dead for 200 years by penetrating a building or else this guy will continue to be more of a man than him. The one character who you can't convince to move on from what happened to them in the past ends the game either dead or forever locked in the heart of the vault that he thought would get him back what he lost.

This is something I think is genuinely way too rare in video games from this time period with this kind of budget- a story that seems like it was written by people whose work is just as informed by their own understanding of themselves and other people as it is by tropes and simple drama. Loss and obsession being the central theme here is also cutely reinforced by the entire mission being a sunk cost- you will likely leave the Sierra Madre with nothing but what you learned from how it hurt you (represented by XP!). Literally all you can do now is leave this nightmare behind and seek your fortunes elsewhere. The Sierra Madre is dead, and it doesn't hold anything for anyone who isn't interested in staying there forever. I'm not saying Dead Money is like, peak fiction, but to me it's interesting fiction, which is an unprecedented thing to be able to say about a DLC for a 7th gen game.

Imagining this being played by its target audience, but, more specifically, a version of myself who is young enough to be the target audience. I download it at the age of 8 and barely survive the first 19 minutes because of the terrifying Viva Pinata bird. Minute 20 hits and I come face-to-face with Jumbo Josh; his goofy fucking face comes out of the darkness and I start absolutely screaming. I am not okay. My mom bursts into the room and asks what's wrong and then gets really annoyed when I tell her it's because Garten of Banban scared me and we get in an argument over how she knew she couldn't trust me not to play something inappropriate and I get sent to my room. Later on that night I hear my mom say "this is why the computer isn't good for him!" and my dad starts arguing back about how I'm a growing boy. They're screaming now at each other and usually that would already be upsetting but it's even worse because all the while I'm fucking terrified that Jumbo Josh is going to burst into the living room and kill them both. I go to school the next day and all the kids have just watched the Markiplier playthrough of Garten of Banban 2 and they ask me what I thought of it and I sheepishly say I'm not allowed to play Garten of Banban and one of them calls me a pussy and gets sent to the principle's office for it and the whole class hates me. I didn't even rat him out someone was just around to hear him say it but they all still blame me. On the way out to the busses at the end of the day I walk by a kid wearing the $59.99 "Banban's Party" backpack you can buy from a link on the game's main menu and I see Jumbo Josh and start freaking out again. Was going to rate this one star but I'm mad now because this could have happened to me so now it's getting half a star.

(This was originally written as a Steam review because I want more people to play this- edited it just a teensy bit for Backloggd. Still, on Steam most people are looking at a review for the purpose of making a purchasing decision, and this game has been largely thrashed in Steam reviews for being pretty expensive for a game with this many glitches- that's why there's a whole paragraph on its pricing and value.)

I'm not going to pretend that this game isn't held together by dreams and prayers; it will almost certainly crash on you multiple times throughout each playthrough. The experience of playing Wrought Flesh resembles the experience of someone with lethally high blood pressure that has just downed a few 5 hour energy; a feeling that at any moment you'll feel reality stutter, before everything suddenly ceases to be.

That said, I think there's an insane amount of imagination and fresh ideas here, and I think Wrought Flesh executes them very, very well. It makes me sad that this game has had a kind of lukewarm reception; if it weren't for the innumerable bugs or the fact that most gamers cannot resist comparing any weird indie game made after 2021 to Cruelty Squad (which the game absolutely takes inspiration from, in the same way a ton of survival horror games made in the early 00's took inspiration from Resident Evil and Silent Hill) I think this would have been received way, way better.

Gunplay is simplistic but I do think that the mobility options that you're given and the pretty good enemy variety (especially in the second area) keep combat engaging and intense. KillFuck, a drug that allows you to slow down time, is a surprisingly useful resource, especially if you need to focus on taking down a single enemy or dashing in to grab a body for healing while under gunfire. There's not a ton of build variety that I observed during my first playthrough, but I also largely ignored the elemental damage that can be modified into your secondary weapon; I could easily see myself getting a kick out of seeing how far I could take that on a repeat playthrough.

The environment and worldbuilding feels like it's drawing from a lot of inspirations to make something unique and interesting, and I think the low-poly visuals contribute to the grotesque, alien flavor of the setting. If you're a fan of the kind of bizarre terrain and "feel" of games like Morrowind, but are looking for something way more grotesque, this might really click for you. There are even a few locales that are quite pretty and feel cozy! Towns generally offer a break from the intense hostility that you'll be facing from the rest of the environment. I think it would have been pretty easy for the dev to make the game the constantly offputting, but the little areas where it feels like you can breathe easier are a really nice change of pace.

Pretty much all the Steam reviews for this game mention price and seem pretty hung up on it. I am absolutely of the philosophy that price shouldn't come into play in an analysis of a game, but this is also clearly a huge sticking point for people, especially since games are ultimately still commodities and- In This Economy?! Given how many people cite this as the primary reason for not recommending the game, I think it's at least worth mentioning here. I can understand why someone might find the price a bit steep, especially given the insane number of bugs and glitches, but I do think there's enough game here due to a plethora of side quests. Most of them are fetch quests, but ones that I think are still worth completing. They often take you off the beaten path or require you pay more attention to the world around you, and give you more opportunities to enjoy the combat and find some fun, novel upgrades. Still, if you enjoy indie games and don't mind the frustrations that are going to come with a game made with a shoestring budget, I think this is more worth the pretty small amount of time it takes to complete than a lot of longer, higher production value games I've played recently.

Part of the reason I'm writing this review, even though I know it's probably not going to have this kind of impact, is because I want more people to give games like Wrought Flesh a chance, and I really want to see what the dev makes next. Games like this are often a big risk for one or a few people to make, and I think passion projects like this can be really exciting. I do wish some of the game was more polished, and I do wish that some of these bugs got squashed, but I'd also love to see the developer of Wrought Flesh make more games. Whether that be an expansion for this, or something completely new, there's clearly a vision and a lot of good design sensibilities here.

Replaying for the first time in 7ish years and I think I enjoyed it much, much more upon a revisit. I think there's something about the patience and creative puzzle-solving this game's stealth requires just was not clicking with 15 year old me who came into it really wanting Dishonored or Human Revolution; an assassination sim with slow movement and an emphasis on trickery rather than Doing a Non-Lethal Silent Takedown was not something I really understood.
Additionally, not only did I want it to be fast-paced, I wanted it to be a power fantasy about knocking guys out and only taking lives when it was necessary for progression. Those previously mentioned games- Human Revolution and Dishonored- make playing the dashing rouge pretty simple. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but in both those games playing nonviolently is really more of an aesthetic and narrative choice. Adopting a no-kill rule can require some extra caution, but it's very doable.
In contrast, I would spend upwards of 3 hours in a single Blood Money mission as a teenager trying to be the kindest version of Agent 47 I could possibly be, reloading saves constantly and actively refusing to kill my targets in any ways that didn't get reported in the mission stats screen as "accidents". If the line cook I was knocking out and stuffing naked into a dumpster saw my face and counted as a witness, I would immediately reload so I could knock him out properly. Notoriety as a mechanic might as well have not existed to me- I refused to complete a mission unless I completed it ethically and perfectly.
I have found, upon revisiting Blood Money, that I was absolutely torturing myself by doing this. You should be avoiding combat to the best of your ability, but the game uses its (pretty ingenious) limited saving specifically to force you to adapt and come up with inventive solutions to unexpected problems. Furthermore, the solutions kind of have to be violent due to the game's witness system- Agent 47 is not a dashing rogue, at least not here. Instead, he's a cold-blooded killer whose animations are so methodical and technique-driven as to feel almost alien. There's no chance at redeeming him through the player's actions, and to me this feels like an open invitation to, at least on your first time through a mission, slit a few throats if you need to. After all, you don't avoid notoriety by never making a mistake; you do it by leaving no witnesses.
When you start playing more dynamically like this and let yourself be Evil, I think the game opens up a lot more. The tools you're given are simple, but many are multi-purposed- explosives are tutorialized as being a good way to cause a lot of the game's "accident" deaths, but there are other missions where you can sneak a bomb in a target's briefcase and activate it when they carry it into the same room as another target. A silenced Silverballer round is often the simplest, easiest way to carry out a hit, but metal detectors and blood splatter ensure that there are more complex elements to consider even when taking the simplest approach. Every Blood Money mission is an (often shockingly detailed and well-conveyed) puzzle box that begs the player to express themselves through patient cunning and improvisation, and I think that understanding this has made me appreciate the game much, much more.

I think I can understand why someone would point to this as an example of style over substance- if you have a rudimentary understanding of how markets work a few hours playing SWOTS will make it simple enough to speed through without much challenge save for the odd hyper-specific client demand. That said, this really doesn't bother me or change what I DO like about SWOTS, which is that I think it generally has a lovely aesthetic which it uses smartly.

Trading organs on the stock market is like the most in-your-face device for getting an anti-capitalist message across, but I think what makes SWOTS succeed so much at its concept is how well it puts the player in the seat of a "market speculator". The second you've pressed the button to start the trading day you're accosted by just enough beeps and dings and bright colors to keep you perpetually stimulated without leaving you confused, and the fact that the gameplay is dead simple (you'll spend most of your time buying cheap, shitty organs to flip to clients for a profit) means that every 2-and-a-half minute trading day is a frenzy of trying to meet 6 or 7 client demands in as little time as possible, all while the incredibly catchy soundtrack shifts with the menus to keep the aesthetic from being too monotone. Lights flash, organs pulsate rhythmically, a number representing your worth keeps dipping and going up- it's a very, very pretty slot machine. It succeeds wonderfully at putting you in the mindset of the kind of ridiculous, greed-driven, morally bankrupt gambling that governs an insane amount of global finance. It'll occasionally try to make you think a little about what you're doing- maybe a client's request is clearly written in desperation and you know you'll be screwing them over by selling them something shoddy- but with the exception of the shocking, out-of-nowhere endings there's always a number going up and a dozen fun noises and pictures pulling your attention back away from how fucked up this all is. It's simple, but really effective at making you empathize with the kind of disgusting dopamine junkie that will happily scam someone out of their life for profit. It's a very effective device. You can know almost nothing about markets outside of having watched that Dan Olson crypto video or playing Cruelty Squad and you'll get what it's trying to say

I don't think SWOTS is a game that anyone's going to stick with for too long- its multiple endings weren't that tantalizing to me after a couple playthroughs- and so the lack of difficulty or depth isn't really something that bothers me. It's a thrilling, simple little stocks game that has really fantastic audiovisual design that feels considered. In that regard, it pulls off what it's going for very well.

So for this one I most just have a bunch of disjointed observations at the moment
-Absolutely gorgeous to look. The color palette used here is delicious
-It's mechanically dense but in a way that feels really intuitive- the surface you're walking on affecting volume is a really neat touch
-For some reason I don't think it gripped me as well as I would have expected; I think what bogged it down most for me was some of the mid-game stuff where it feels like the game forgets its own strengths.
-That's not to say I don't love Revolver Ocelot's Torture Chamber. I adore Revolver Ocelot's Torture Chamber.
-I'm sure 1,000,000 people have pointed this out but Gray Fox and Snake absolutely have some fascinating shit going on. Guy who revels in pain and screams HURT ME MORE!!! as he gets shot and who will not be satisfied until he has one glorious final battle with his old pupil. It feels immature to be like "ha gaaaaaay" but I will at least say that it's very WarriorMale
-Otacon is delightful :)
-Liquid Snake's whole deal is fantastic. I love his weird stupid sibling rivalry shit. So salty that he got "all the recessive genes" which he and seemingly the script interpret as meaning he got the less-good ones. And he turns out to be wrong! The most dramatic human being on Earth who pulled off this insane plot because he's dumb as fuck. Love him
-Naomi'e deal is compelling in a lot of ways; aside from that the female characters are written in a way that's pretty lame. Snake and Meryl have very little chemistry. Meryl's whole deal that she became a soldier because of daddy issues and that she's upset because war isn't as glamorous and simple as she expected has some pretty sexist overtones yeah but on top of that it's also just dull and kinda sucks.
-The way certain information is conveyed with the HUD rocks; the Stinger missile's first-person aiming and the way the lock-in is represented is just insanely cool stylistically and would be way less interesting or compelling if done in a game with an otherwise hyperreal style today
-I liked it a lot overall! Good game.

I mean it with complete sincerity that Kenshi's gameplay loop is great because it is built upon one of mankind's greatest hidden truths: that it's actually fun as hell to play with dolls. Kenshi doesn't have any clear objectives and pretty much every system is designed around creating emergent stories as you puppeteer a legion of little action figures, dress them up, and have them fight battles and eventually build their own GI Joe Command Center. This probably sounds mean but don't get me wrong: Kenshi absolutely rules, and that is because in addition to being extremely imaginative, the other kid you're playing Action Men with is an absolute bastard who will stop at nothing to mercilessly kill or mutilate your favorite guys. He's crafted an intricate and beautiful fantasy world filled with a billion things that want to pull your characters apart. And it's that danger and struggle that sucks you in- you root for your characters, you feel a genuine sense of tension when they're bleeding out and you're unsure if you'll be able to rescue them in time. You want them to succeed so desperately, and it makes it extremely rewarding when they do.

Everyone was unconscious and my lead scientist, Bombingham, was dying. Beep, the iron-willed childlike Hive drone, who Bombingham had always looked after and made repairs to the robotic limbs of, had been crippled, but by the skin of his teeth he managed to crawl through a sea of corpses to patch him up before collapsing himself. It genuinely made me feel something. That's the appeal of Kenshi- the most harrowing playset money can buy.

After replaying Morrowind in full for the first time since I was like 12, I think a couple things have been reaffirmed to me- things I had forgotten in the last decade since I actually played through it from start to "finish". I'm planning on going back to tidy up loose ends and play the expansions once I've gotten through another game or two, but even though I don't know if I'm ever gonna write a complete and comprehensive "review" of Morrowind, I wanna write down the stuff that came to mind while I was playing it:

So firstly, I think I sort of forgot how profoundly this game influenced my taste and defined what I like in video games. There's something about Morrowind's approach to crafting a rich, unfamiliar world and making the player slowly piece together its mysteries that stuck with me, and even now I feel that in some of the games that I've come to love in the past few years- Pathologic, Caves of Qud, Oleander Garden's Hexcraft games (please play Harlequin Fair), and even Kenshi (which I'm playing now specifically because I'd heard it took heavy inspiration from Morrowind and I wanted to see how it felt diving straight into after finishing this) all hit this note for me, and I think that it's this part of Morrowind that sticks out to people most. Its world is imaginative and alienating, extremely detailed and storied, and you're arriving to it as an outsider. Everything is overwhelming when you first step in, and there are mysteries to be solved both in terms of the history of this world and the mechanics that will help you survive it. When people talk about Morrowind, this is what they remember- that sense of scope that actually drives the player to read the in-game literature and mess around with its mechanics until they feel at home in its swamps and deserts of ash.

That said: oh my God does the ever-present combat make exploring that beautiful and alien world a chore, and in a world that's as genuinely vast as this anything that's going to deter you from exploring it feels like a huge flaw. For a game that's remembered for and finds its identity- at least retroactively in 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓒𝓸𝓵𝓵𝓮𝓬𝓽𝓲𝓿𝓮 𝓘𝓶𝓪𝓰𝓲𝓷𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓸𝓯 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓖𝓪𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓗𝓸𝓫𝓫𝔂- in its harsh and unforgiving world and the joys of conquering it, it's kind of sad how much of the game is turned into a trivial but time-consuming annoyance once you realize that the primary obstacle to overcome is its combat. It's absolutely everywhere- the game is silly with things to stab, and doing so becomes as dull as unflavored oatmeal once you have a large enough health pool and offensive skills to basically steamroll everything in your path. And yet, it still takes just enough time and effort to kill things that it doesn't stop being a thing you have to account for while adventuring. I've heard a lot of people talk about how rewarding it is to get strong enough and understand its systems enough to solve the puzzle of how to get infinite stamina, craft artifacts and spells that let you run with infinite speed across its terrain and fly over mountains, and become permanently invisible to enemies while still retaining the ability to chop them to death as they repeatedly scream their race's possible surrender barks. And that's true! All of that is rewarding, but it's mostly for the reason that it lets you bypass the parts of the game where you have to kill your 8 hundredth cliff racer or Dremora Lord or smuggler who begins a fight by screaming "It's about time... I HAVE SOME FUN!" before dying in two hits. Morrowind's terrain and world is lush with ancient ruins and mysterious caves, and your reward for delving into them is the most boring swordplay in the world. Fighting a woman whose body is made of gold in an ancient place of forbidden worship somehow manages to become rote and routine. Vvardenfell stops feeling threatening. If I'm placed in an unfamiliar situation I can be confident that I have something in my spell list or some weapon in my inventory that can totally nullify whatever's waiting for me.

And I think the most tragic part of this is that the combat kinda needs to be there- not even just from a gameplay perspective, but from a thematic one. The world of Morrowind is a violent and hostile and alien place, one where the wildlife really will rip you apart, one where there are incredibly powerful Slavery Wizards who have dedicated their lives to insane quests for power- one where a volcano at the very center of the world spews a disease that twists people's flesh and drives them to murder. The game has humor and triumph and comfortable, cozy locales outside the wilderness, but even then it's hard to shake the darker, more threatening elements of Vvardenfell. The world of Morrowind needs to be filled with danger to feel real, and it's a shame to me that the danger present in it becomes nullified way too early and way too easily, especially if you already have a knowledge of the game's systems. That, to me, is its biggest shortcoming.

And yet, in spite of that, I really, really cannot bring myself to not love Morrowind. For all my problems with it, there's so much passion here, so much effort to make a world that's not just expansive and has a complex history, but that's genuinely beautiful to behold. I sometimes wondered why this game always looks so much less appealing to me with community-made patches that add more realistic textures, with mods that dramatically change the lighting or saturate the colors to make the game more "vibrant", and like, after my most recent playthrough I think I put my finger on it. Morrowind's world is designed to feel ancient and alien, and its color palette reflects that- the title screen is clearly trying to evoke an ancient, weathered parchment; the skill icons look like eons-old folk art, simple and abstract. Most of the brightest colors are reserved for UI elements that need to stand out like the Health, Magicka and Stamina bars, while the actual world tends to use more muted colors. The simplicity of the textures, the murkiness of a lot of the game's visuals- I genuinely feel like these things slap so fucking hard. I'm definitely far from the first person to notice this, too. If you're looking for a genuinely excellent visual mod, I need to recommend Morrowind Watercolored v2. The mod is excellent and has a complete understanding of the appeal of Morrowind's visuals- all the textures are based off the originals and none of them try to add extra detail; instead, it makes some subtle changes to make the game's textures appear even more like a moving painting in a way that you really won't even notice unless you're looking for it. Morrowind is not meant to be a place you could potentially inhabit. You are stepping into a dark fantasy world that's long been lost.

There's also a very real sense that this game was made by humans in a way I don't get out of Oblivion or Skyrim. The fingerprints of Morrowind's developers and designers are left all over the world- in the imaginative writing and lore, in the fact that some of the most powerful enchanted items in the game were made to commemorate forum users who died during the development of the game whose ashes you can find, and even in the extremely self-indulgent multi-part quest where you can enter a loving and passionate friends with benefits arrangement with a Khajiit thief. Morrowind is an extremely flawed game that also is absolutely teeming with soul- it feels like the sort of game that would be way, way rarer in the AAA space today. In Morrowind every Easter Egg is a reference to some forum poster or in-joke or an environmental designer's favorite Monty Python sketch; in Skyrim you climb to the top of the world to find a tribute to Notch Minecraft, serving as a subtle assurance that, even if Bethesda's legal department had a problem with him, Skyrim's developers certainly don't :) It's hard to put into words, but I get the impression Morrowind was made by individuals who cared and had ideas in a way a game like it simply wouldn't today.

Final note: the main quest's approach to prophecy and myth and how it's used to shape the narratives and attitudes of entire cultures is really cool. Surprisingly clever and more well thought-through than I noticed as a tot.