Propping up video game reviews and out-of-context clips as if they hold incriminating value against a product or group of people is a cancer on this medium. It has done more work to de-legitimize games as a form of art than almost anything else. Honestly, you would laugh if somebody reviewed an album they had not listened to and simply said "it sound no good". me too lol.

You can dress up review as a flowery philosophical inquiry, a comedic retelling or most pretentiously a definitive answer to the question of "how good is it". I don't appreciate any of these and I don't think what I'm about to say is reductive, these are pretty much just time wasters that bring less to the table than the thing they're riffing on. I know this man, I absolutely love wasting time. It's not a bad thing that they exist, but let's stop pretending they're anything more. I believe reviews at their most valuable are either a showcase for the opinion of a reviewer with an understood character, or an assessment of what kind of person might appreciate the product.

I was convinced I hated this and that it was a piece of shit. I actually properly played it only after catching wind of a plot interpretation I was not aware of. When I had first tried to play it years ago, I was so blinded by indifference and the expectation that it was trash, I had missed the unbelievably blatant symbolism that unlocks almost all of the narrative's depth. I'm not saying it's without faults as any game might have, and it's no doubt a niche rpg, I just want you to know that a huge number of people discuss or comment on this game as if granted divine knowledge of it's quality from a higher authority, while in reality they don't even know what's happening in it. At the very least, this game forced me to re-examine my views of the online reaction culture that I already loathed, as I'd fallen victim to it. That's a bigger personal impact on me than most games.

It's funny what website I'm writing this on.
A game about a guy who treats both his life and his relationship with media as a grand and noble ordeal, while he also misunderstands them and treats them like disposable trash. And so, the response to YIIK somehow manages to be one of the most strange and fascinating things about it. I don't like the combat in this game very much btw, I like just about everything else in it quite a bit.