2022
Kept thinking how much this reflected Toree's whole "cutesy platformer with dark undercurrents that are kind of just there without any elaboration" and only found out after beating it that it's the same dev lol oops!
Feels like it compromises the pretty empty worlds with a moveset that makes it really easy to quickly get around, reaching the tops of places and scoping out everything below is satisfying and all the levels are small enough that it's easy to map them out in your head.
It's half an hour of very nice feeling easygoing platformer collecting which seems to be the dev's entire moniker, hard to knock that especially with how quickly they seem to get made.
Feels like it compromises the pretty empty worlds with a moveset that makes it really easy to quickly get around, reaching the tops of places and scoping out everything below is satisfying and all the levels are small enough that it's easy to map them out in your head.
It's half an hour of very nice feeling easygoing platformer collecting which seems to be the dev's entire moniker, hard to knock that especially with how quickly they seem to get made.
2023
I'll get around to beating Hi-Fi Rush eventually but for now this is pretty indisputably GOTY 2023. The blueprint for "shorter games with worse graphics" turns out to just be use whatever assets you can find if you can't afford to make them yourself and have that color the tone of the game.
2017
Wrote about this one here; https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/chiegaming/675035381964685312?source=share
2018
Wrote about this one here; https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/chiegaming/675211712305233921?source=share
2018
Wrote about this one here; https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/chiegaming/676036383331237888?source=share
TBD
Wrote about the demo for this here; https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/chiegaming/676403474105319424?source=share
2022
Wrote about this one here; https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/chiegaming/677583486461296640?source=share
2006
Finding out what they'd been doing to this game for the past couple years has been like seeing a friend from middle school again and quickly realizing their life kinda fell apart
"Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk" was a game I stumbled upon back in December '20, I forget if it was through Steam's discover queue or whatever but it looked like my kind of thing and it turned out to be that and a good deal more.
It gave me vivid flashbacks of when I was made to go grocery shopping for milk when I was like 6-7, just forced out there on my own with a bill of what would be roughly 10 USD. I was still too shy and nervous to know how most of the outside world worked so I just ran out in a panic when the clerk tried giving me my change back.
I live about as north as you can get on the earth's hemisphere and I'm pretty sure it was winter so it was pitch dark despite it being like 4-5 PM, I was raised on land where complete darkness is a constant for half of the year, it fucks with your head.
It's odd too because it sounds like the kind of thing that would scare a kid but I was just used to it at this point, most of my memories back then took place at night, the sun might as well have not existed in my mind.
Apparently it only took me 15 mins but it stuck with me hard, it felt like a conversation with someone that sincerely understood and it just kept mentally replaying and I was just so grateful to have had it.
Nowadays I feel kind of ambivalent towards how open to be with being into niche indie psychological horror(?) about mental illness, particularly considering how closely it is to the whole "lain/asukapilled" NEET idealization shit but it is still an incredibly important part of why I go through any of this stuff to begin with. It's hard to not be drawn to it when you feel like you get it and the struggle of being a person that has to exist and take space and resources. I also loved how it uses its blood red and violet palette along with pixelated imagery of places that feel like they might exist (cuz I mean, they kinda do).
So naturally I was really eager to see what a follow-up would be like, I figured it'd be bigger in a very straight-forward Sequel sort of way and it kind of is but it's still really damn good. The plot of the first game gets animated as an opening to this one (which looks really good btw, seriously good direction) and it jumps about an hour from where it left off.
There's a noticeable uptick in graphical fidelity but the color palette is still minimized, this time to slightly more vibrant reds and shades of black due to the change in location and the way the protag navigates it through mental memory alone.
It becomes a bit more of a traditional VN than the last game given the portraits and facial animations but it works, it gives a lot more emphasis on the actual back-and-forth going on. I'll probably write more about it proper and I really didn't mean for this to turn into more about the last game than the one I'm actually going through but I guess it helps I'm using this more as a freeform writing thing than giving myself the burden of writing complete essays.
If you haven't played through Milk Inside, I'd say check it out, Milk Outside is a continuation in the most bluntly direct ways possible but if either of them look cool to you, you aren't losing much time or money with the first one. Not sure what else I can say, shit's just cool.
It gave me vivid flashbacks of when I was made to go grocery shopping for milk when I was like 6-7, just forced out there on my own with a bill of what would be roughly 10 USD. I was still too shy and nervous to know how most of the outside world worked so I just ran out in a panic when the clerk tried giving me my change back.
I live about as north as you can get on the earth's hemisphere and I'm pretty sure it was winter so it was pitch dark despite it being like 4-5 PM, I was raised on land where complete darkness is a constant for half of the year, it fucks with your head.
It's odd too because it sounds like the kind of thing that would scare a kid but I was just used to it at this point, most of my memories back then took place at night, the sun might as well have not existed in my mind.
Apparently it only took me 15 mins but it stuck with me hard, it felt like a conversation with someone that sincerely understood and it just kept mentally replaying and I was just so grateful to have had it.
Nowadays I feel kind of ambivalent towards how open to be with being into niche indie psychological horror(?) about mental illness, particularly considering how closely it is to the whole "lain/asukapilled" NEET idealization shit but it is still an incredibly important part of why I go through any of this stuff to begin with. It's hard to not be drawn to it when you feel like you get it and the struggle of being a person that has to exist and take space and resources. I also loved how it uses its blood red and violet palette along with pixelated imagery of places that feel like they might exist (cuz I mean, they kinda do).
So naturally I was really eager to see what a follow-up would be like, I figured it'd be bigger in a very straight-forward Sequel sort of way and it kind of is but it's still really damn good. The plot of the first game gets animated as an opening to this one (which looks really good btw, seriously good direction) and it jumps about an hour from where it left off.
There's a noticeable uptick in graphical fidelity but the color palette is still minimized, this time to slightly more vibrant reds and shades of black due to the change in location and the way the protag navigates it through mental memory alone.
It becomes a bit more of a traditional VN than the last game given the portraits and facial animations but it works, it gives a lot more emphasis on the actual back-and-forth going on. I'll probably write more about it proper and I really didn't mean for this to turn into more about the last game than the one I'm actually going through but I guess it helps I'm using this more as a freeform writing thing than giving myself the burden of writing complete essays.
If you haven't played through Milk Inside, I'd say check it out, Milk Outside is a continuation in the most bluntly direct ways possible but if either of them look cool to you, you aren't losing much time or money with the first one. Not sure what else I can say, shit's just cool.
2013
I got this one alongside THOTH which grabbed my attention enough to get to this one asap. Am in absolute love with how relentlessly dedicated Carlsen Games is to putting pure game design before anything else, both of these games are so compact and fine-tuned that you tend to forget just how weird the game mechanics actually are.
This one's a super simple platformer, move left/right and jump and that's it, baby! The stages themselves are where things get interesting, all of them have their own set mechanics that switch around and do stuff along with the timing of the BGM.
You'll have to consider puzzles mostly in when to do what, everything basically loops around again after 1-2 bars but what's important is figuring out where in the bars you need to move/jump.
There's also a 'boss' at the end of every stage that works more as a minigame that uses a different control scheme, they're alright, the first one is kinda like a rhythm version of Buster Bros. which is cool.
I'm really excited to see what else these guys will do because this is still very much my kinda thing, cool looking shapes is eternal, babey
This one's a super simple platformer, move left/right and jump and that's it, baby! The stages themselves are where things get interesting, all of them have their own set mechanics that switch around and do stuff along with the timing of the BGM.
You'll have to consider puzzles mostly in when to do what, everything basically loops around again after 1-2 bars but what's important is figuring out where in the bars you need to move/jump.
There's also a 'boss' at the end of every stage that works more as a minigame that uses a different control scheme, they're alright, the first one is kinda like a rhythm version of Buster Bros. which is cool.
I'm really excited to see what else these guys will do because this is still very much my kinda thing, cool looking shapes is eternal, babey
2021
I wound up getting this one at the winter sale's last couple hours on the look-out for more shmups/bullet-hells to try out cuz I've been getting really into those. The screenshots were utterly incomprehensible and it only made sense to me once I checked the trailers but I was already on board given how utterly confused I was beforehand, it's very rare for me to not know the gist of a game based off of screenshots.
The description cites Super Hexagon and Touhou as inspirations and I think calling this a combination of those is probably the closest approximation you could make to any other game, besides that, this is completely its own beast.
You move automatically on a circle in the middle of the screen, all you can do is click a button to switch from clockwise to counter-clockwise and vice versa, p much exactly like Super Hexagon but without being able to stop your motion.
Projectiles come in from all over outside the circle and depending on the type, it will either disappear once it reaches the middle or phase through it.
There's also enemies which is where your attack comes in, you slash at whatever is close to you every time you turn and automatically shoot at whatever is closest by. You can also adjust the aim by holding the button which slows down your movement, it's undoubtedly a lot to get a total grip on and it's great when it actually works out.
Despite having stages that are divided into three Spiral chunks, the whole game is contextualized as a series of puzzles that need to be solved one at a time.
You get a checkpoint for each one you clear (the goal condition is either to just last long enough or drain the HP of whatever boss is looming over the level) and can immediately start over when you die, it's a really neat system and it shows how much work is actually put into making shmup level design work and look so visually dazzling at the same time.
The music's very Touhou, all super symphonic melodies accompanied by some guitars and piano, it rules.
It also lifts from Filipino mythology as well as some Greek mythos which is really neat, I'll have to look into some of the bosses later and see what their deal is cuz they got really cool designs.
It's still in early access and I haven't beaten it yet but there's a decent chunk of stuff already here, the campaign seems like it's about 5-8 hours long but there's a ton of difficulties to unlock which I might check out afterwards.
Regardless there's obviously a ton of passion being put into this and you can feel it, it's absolutely exhilarating. Reminds me a lot of the kind of passion I feel from Silver Dollar's games where they just put out what is at its core a fairly simple game that is ridiculously hard to master and just cram it with stuff, I love it and I really hope to find more devs with this kind of vibe.
The description cites Super Hexagon and Touhou as inspirations and I think calling this a combination of those is probably the closest approximation you could make to any other game, besides that, this is completely its own beast.
You move automatically on a circle in the middle of the screen, all you can do is click a button to switch from clockwise to counter-clockwise and vice versa, p much exactly like Super Hexagon but without being able to stop your motion.
Projectiles come in from all over outside the circle and depending on the type, it will either disappear once it reaches the middle or phase through it.
There's also enemies which is where your attack comes in, you slash at whatever is close to you every time you turn and automatically shoot at whatever is closest by. You can also adjust the aim by holding the button which slows down your movement, it's undoubtedly a lot to get a total grip on and it's great when it actually works out.
Despite having stages that are divided into three Spiral chunks, the whole game is contextualized as a series of puzzles that need to be solved one at a time.
You get a checkpoint for each one you clear (the goal condition is either to just last long enough or drain the HP of whatever boss is looming over the level) and can immediately start over when you die, it's a really neat system and it shows how much work is actually put into making shmup level design work and look so visually dazzling at the same time.
The music's very Touhou, all super symphonic melodies accompanied by some guitars and piano, it rules.
It also lifts from Filipino mythology as well as some Greek mythos which is really neat, I'll have to look into some of the bosses later and see what their deal is cuz they got really cool designs.
It's still in early access and I haven't beaten it yet but there's a decent chunk of stuff already here, the campaign seems like it's about 5-8 hours long but there's a ton of difficulties to unlock which I might check out afterwards.
Regardless there's obviously a ton of passion being put into this and you can feel it, it's absolutely exhilarating. Reminds me a lot of the kind of passion I feel from Silver Dollar's games where they just put out what is at its core a fairly simple game that is ridiculously hard to master and just cram it with stuff, I love it and I really hope to find more devs with this kind of vibe.
2021
Basically an endless runner with a story mode, almost definitely one of the best I've played from a purely gameplay perspective.
The story's just really wacky cute nonsense with anime girls, it's fun, even if some of dialogue is a bit awkwardly written.
It makes up for that by just being really charming in a sort of scene pixel-art weeb kind of way, reminds me a lot of VA-11 Hall-A in that respect. I wanna say it's just "pixel art anime" but I feel like it's a bit more specific than that, it's a pretty distinct vibe.
The first couple stages are pretty easy but it really crams up the difficulty by the latter half, to give you an idea, only 18% of players have actually beaten it. It seriously demands some pitch-perfect play at times which may be because every level is technically randomly generated and the goal is more to just last the time it gives.
Art's cute, the music's dope as hell and it just plays really well for what it is, good stuff.
The story's just really wacky cute nonsense with anime girls, it's fun, even if some of dialogue is a bit awkwardly written.
It makes up for that by just being really charming in a sort of scene pixel-art weeb kind of way, reminds me a lot of VA-11 Hall-A in that respect. I wanna say it's just "pixel art anime" but I feel like it's a bit more specific than that, it's a pretty distinct vibe.
The first couple stages are pretty easy but it really crams up the difficulty by the latter half, to give you an idea, only 18% of players have actually beaten it. It seriously demands some pitch-perfect play at times which may be because every level is technically randomly generated and the goal is more to just last the time it gives.
Art's cute, the music's dope as hell and it just plays really well for what it is, good stuff.
2022
It's tough to even know where to start but I guess I'll give a quick clinical summary.
You work as the live editor of a TV news station, most of the game happens through 4 cameras you have to micromanage alongside a variety of other tools and mechanics that you'll use to keep the show going as smoothly as possible.
The station has standards on what to censor and what to promote, but they're not the ones in control of what gets shown, you'll have to come to your own conclusions on what is right to show the public.
The premise is going to sound incredibly boring to some on paper and if you aren't into the political drama, you aren't entirely out of luck, the game on its own is also just, genuinely really funny.
I'd compare it to Tim & Eric or most other live-action Adult Swim stuff except with, I don't wanna say "actual restraint" but it's got a unique pace in coherence with the game's design, all of it's done in 4 separate takes and the only "cuts" are between commercial breaks, I couldn't help but be astounded over how much planning and communication had to be done to get everything right over every session.
I'll have to check the documentary they made alongside the game to get a proper idea which I'll undoubtedly do soon but in my head, all the potential work is a complete headache to even imagine.
I don't think it can be underestimated to say how much of a behemoth this game is, by the way.
At a staggering 50 gigs and 43 hours of footage, it's got the world record for the most FMV in any game ever. Divide that by 4 and you'll get an average playthrough of the campaign, I'm not entirely sure how they calculated the length since there's definitely more than that but whatever, point is it's as long as you can get for an FMV game right now and that is seriously something given how outright experimental the whole game feels, it's got an almost theater kid feel despite being done very professionally all things considered. Maybe it's cuz of the musical stuff, idk.
It's so detached from any kind of gaming niche I'm aware of aside from the revitalization of FMV games that's been kinda on and off for the past decade (Roundabout and Her Story seem really good but I've heard a lot of mixed things about Late Shift) that it's hard to make any comparisons that'd feel right, but that really speaks to its uniqueness more than anything.
I've heard comparisons to Papers Please from a gameplay standpoint and I can get behind that, though managing your home life is relegated more to visual novel decisions. (which on their own get colored by your performance in the main game)
You won't have to choose between paying for electricity or food for your family but you will get asked if paying for immediate small pleasures or distractions instead of a safely budgeted vacation next year is worth it.
They're story-driven, as opposed to Papers' clinical and mathematical money management.
Anyway, if any of this sounds interesting in the slightest, I implore you to check it out. I really don't know if there will ever be a game like this made again but if it does, I'd play it in a heartbeat.
The team's obviously been passionate as hell about this game throughout its entire development and it shows, the dynamic they got here is way too good for them to not do another project together.
Whatever happens, I'm seriously grateful they stuck with this until the very end because this is a genuine achievement of a game.
You work as the live editor of a TV news station, most of the game happens through 4 cameras you have to micromanage alongside a variety of other tools and mechanics that you'll use to keep the show going as smoothly as possible.
The station has standards on what to censor and what to promote, but they're not the ones in control of what gets shown, you'll have to come to your own conclusions on what is right to show the public.
The premise is going to sound incredibly boring to some on paper and if you aren't into the political drama, you aren't entirely out of luck, the game on its own is also just, genuinely really funny.
I'd compare it to Tim & Eric or most other live-action Adult Swim stuff except with, I don't wanna say "actual restraint" but it's got a unique pace in coherence with the game's design, all of it's done in 4 separate takes and the only "cuts" are between commercial breaks, I couldn't help but be astounded over how much planning and communication had to be done to get everything right over every session.
I'll have to check the documentary they made alongside the game to get a proper idea which I'll undoubtedly do soon but in my head, all the potential work is a complete headache to even imagine.
I don't think it can be underestimated to say how much of a behemoth this game is, by the way.
At a staggering 50 gigs and 43 hours of footage, it's got the world record for the most FMV in any game ever. Divide that by 4 and you'll get an average playthrough of the campaign, I'm not entirely sure how they calculated the length since there's definitely more than that but whatever, point is it's as long as you can get for an FMV game right now and that is seriously something given how outright experimental the whole game feels, it's got an almost theater kid feel despite being done very professionally all things considered. Maybe it's cuz of the musical stuff, idk.
It's so detached from any kind of gaming niche I'm aware of aside from the revitalization of FMV games that's been kinda on and off for the past decade (Roundabout and Her Story seem really good but I've heard a lot of mixed things about Late Shift) that it's hard to make any comparisons that'd feel right, but that really speaks to its uniqueness more than anything.
I've heard comparisons to Papers Please from a gameplay standpoint and I can get behind that, though managing your home life is relegated more to visual novel decisions. (which on their own get colored by your performance in the main game)
You won't have to choose between paying for electricity or food for your family but you will get asked if paying for immediate small pleasures or distractions instead of a safely budgeted vacation next year is worth it.
They're story-driven, as opposed to Papers' clinical and mathematical money management.
Anyway, if any of this sounds interesting in the slightest, I implore you to check it out. I really don't know if there will ever be a game like this made again but if it does, I'd play it in a heartbeat.
The team's obviously been passionate as hell about this game throughout its entire development and it shows, the dynamic they got here is way too good for them to not do another project together.
Whatever happens, I'm seriously grateful they stuck with this until the very end because this is a genuine achievement of a game.