The surface charm of Bayonetta, a hypersexualized spectacle, belies a sadistic seduction, the pinnacle of character action gameplay gate-kept by the genre's tradition of ball-busting difficulty. Taking after it's spindly namesake, the game by nature is a sort of dominatrix, stomping you down into the dirt and cracking the whip at your attempts to fight back. It's brutal, frustrating, agonizing to watch as your nerves fray and senses dull, with each encounter providing a fresh boot to the teeth. Broken, battered and bruised, you look for solace, only to be greeted with a stone-cold consolation prize for your struggles. Against the crushing odds, each step becomes heavier, each mistimed strike putting you at the whims of Heaven and Hell alike. Hours pass, anger boils over, resentment turns to fascination… and the highlight of any character action game, the most brilliant of afterglows, shines clearly – the flow state: the melding of mind and body, attuned to the same frequency for a singular purpose. Free from your submission to unceasing cruelty, you take the reigns as a domineering hellion, a unholy agent of divine retribution against the legions of Heaven's army.

Unshackled from preconceived notions, Bayonetta's essence breaths uninterrupted. PlatinumGames's masterwork is informed by the inescapable interplay of sex and violence; the first glance at Bayonetta herself can tell you that. But despite the game's seemingly adolescent pandering, there burns a heart of rebellion within the work, a feminist bend buried under the suffocating weight of the social gaming sphere circa 2009. The duality of Bayonetta, as sex-positive icon of empowerment versus gross exploitation of sexuality, is ingrained into every aspect of her.

This is to say that, despite the obvious trashiness inherent to the game, the blatant fanservice and standard anime bullshit lacing the game, it's hard not to see a extreme version of myself I'd want to see: a hyper-femme confidence elemental, a perfect beauty that defines human limitation, a plain-and-simple unstoppable bad-ass. Dare I say, with every tasteless shot and embarrassing line in consideration, that Bayonetta is, in fact, transition goals?

In a way, Bayonetta represents an "ideal", a splinter of me shattered and scattered across a million separate works. But with this knowledge in mind, it's difficult not to feel slightly conflicted: after all, the character exists as an amalgamation of Hideki Kamiya's fetishes and fantasies, a woman that literally lives to please a man. For all my desires to view her as some new-age feminist idol, she is a personification of the objectification of women in gaming. I suppose it's only fair to invision her divorced from her initial context, a messy reimagining to fit her into an even messier personal image. Consider it me embracing another odd inspiration into an increasingly messy queer narrative.

The scandalous spirit of Bayonetta is, at the same time, its most beautiful and most reprehensible quality. Without it, it would stand as a husk, mechanically interesting, but without a soul to prop it up. In equal senses, it's the exact reason I recommend and shy away from suggesting the game; it represents a part of me, while also being an element I'm somewhat ashamed to admit to. Needless to say… this game feels essential. Whether it clicks with you on an individual level or not, you owe it to yourself to try it.



This review contains spoilers

Without putting too much weight behind it, The Darkness II’s narrative hinges on unrelenting slaughter, insatiable animus driven by a thirst for blood and a taste for flesh, where nameless mafiosos beg for sympathy in the face of humanity’s deepest fear personified. Following our protagonist, a husk holding back a being of unimaginable cruelty, we are sat front-and-center to a carnival of carnage, an audience-participation showcase of gunshot wounds and lacerations, disembowelment and bisections, an infinite abyss of bodies broken in horrific and macabre ways, a slaughterhouse founded on the non-descript goal of revenge. Jackie Estacado, the human vessel of The Darkness, carves through the underbelly of New York City on a vicious killing spree, but his butchery is, in the end, pointless; with nothing to lose and nothing to truly live for, he blindly massacres untold masses, a futile death wish with no end in sight.

Reading the obvious text of the game, the story is about Jackie’s struggle to control the eponymous Darkness, which proves inescapable and indomitable. With the Darkness holding the cards, the ethereal force drags its host onward with the promise of a final meeting with Jenny, Jackie’s fiancée, buried deep in the recesses of Hell following her murder in the previous game. But as much as The Darkness is a tale of love overcoming things beyond comprehension, of doing anything for the one you love, I can’t pretend that’s what I take away from the story. For all its bloodshed, its unbridled chaos, the Darkness itself isn’t the embodiment of humanity’s fears, nor is it an indestructible force of nature. The Darkness is grief; It’s the bitter dread of regret, the biting agony behind every mistake you made, and it’s the lashing out that follows bottling up everything inside for far too long.

Jackie, fully consumed by his own darkness, is numb to the pain he causes, to the misery around him. With the light of his life snuffed out before him, his agony, his loneliness and fear, bottle up, a powder keg waiting for a spark to set it off . The catharsis of letting the Darkness loose serves no purpose, however; despite his rage, uncapped and free flowing, Jackie finds himself alone in a Hell of his own making, his purpose for living concluding that he, as he stands, isn’t something that can safely exist in a reasonable world. Jackie isn’t to blame for the loss of Jenny, but his utter refusal to consider the possibility that her death wasn’t directly his fault leads to yet more regret, more anger, more bitterness at a world he wants no part in. The Darkness isn’t power, it isn’t the ability to tear down everything in your way, and it isn’t something to envy: It’s a slow suicide.

The Darkness II lives and breathes extremity, the sort of gorehound appeal that ran uninhibited through its comic book predecessor, but despite its grotesque grandeur, built on intense gunfights and the thrill of the kill, the extravagance of the Darkness’s malice is skin-deep; digging deeper, the nightmare isn’t the abomination you pretend to control, it’s the knowledge that you can’t fix the mistakes you’ve made, and you can’t escape the person you’ve become.

What makes a person who they are is an endless ocean of choices, decisions, and mistakes. It’s nearly impossible to sum up the human experience succinctly, no matter how you go about it, but the past always returns as a unifying factor. Going through life, with every fleeting moment influencing, or influenced by, an infinite amount of moments, what gives someone that unique spark among the almost eight-billion could be condensed to the minutiae of human life, the trials and tribulations of living on Earth. Each trauma, each miracle, every fear and passion, coalescing into an approximation of humanity, the individual soul.

Blue Reflection: Second Light initially seems wrapped up in this hypothesis, with memories and recollections of the past at the forefront of determining who we are. Waltzing across each character’s reified backstory, a physical representation of themselves, the keypoint in coming to terms with oneself is found in accepting what came before. Throughout the story, however, there’s this constant rhetorical question being asked, an implication that shines doubt what you are approaching as a goal. As you weave between the collective backgrounds of the game’s cast, the detours through the various Heartscapes becomes secondary until… something happens. Somewhere between spending precious hours beside these characters and learning their experiences one by one, Blue Reflection… opens up. The narrative isn’t about "the before", the uncountable and infinite universe of outcomes that fused into what becomes an individual. The "past" isn’t “you”, so much as it’s context for “you”. What makes someone who they are after that, in the moment, is just as much the bonds they share, the loves that flourish, the passions ignited and fears embraced, as it is an arbitrary “past”.

…It’s sort of inescapable that this game is focused on the meaning of “moving on”. The summer vacation framing, the constant allusion to people not wanting things to end, the oppressing fear of what comes next and the change it brings… The future as we know it is beyond the horizon, endlessly far off but within reach, all the same. What happens to the friendships we made, the stories we’ve told and moments we’ve shared, five years from now? Ten? Fifty? Facing the crossroads at the end of an era, what will you take away, and what will you leave behind? Even looking at Backloggd itself, it eventually vanishing is a sure-fire possibility. Not now, maybe not in the near future, but… what do you do with that? For most, this site, the one-liner reviews, the heartfelt tangents, the caustic arguments, will all vanish without a trace, while others will hold the memories earned here close, all gained by sharing a passion with, to be blunt, total strangers.

Inevitably, this will end, and we’ll all move to new corners, a sort of “moving on” itself. But is that necessarily a bad thing? If the site died tomorrow and the community surrounding it shriveled up, would that change the love and hate that went into the words etched into it? Just as the past gave context to who we are now, does this community become another page of backstory, a background to appreciate as we move onto the next thing?

…These are some thoroughly navel-gazey thoughts brought out by what could be surmised as a “cute-girls-doing-cute-things” game, and I won’t pretend I haven’t gone off on similar tangents for an endless slew of slice-of-life anime. But over the entirety of Second Light, with every new character thrown into the party, I saw a familiar face, a person I recognized personally. Chalk it up to great writing, or chalk it up to me seeing what I want to see. I’ve seen these stories, not in a “trite anime trope” way, but in a “I know someone like this” sense, and even on a niche video game logging site I’ve seen the people who are deftly portrayed in Blue Reflection. I won’t go as far as to say this is an essential introspective reflection on community or something pompous like that. I’d imagine for most crowds, this will come off as a very well done character-focused slow burn, and that itself is by no-means a negative reading. But I suppose I can only say this, the story, what it meant in the grand scheme of things, hit me at the right time.

Bongo may be a "scrunky" and a "scrimblo", but do you know who the first scrunky was? Jesus Christ

The curtain falls on the Edo period, signaling the dying gasps of the samurai. Capping off two centuries of nationally recognized peace, the dawn of the Meiji Restoration saw the formal shuttering of the Tokugawa Shogunate and, in practice, the extinguishing of the samurai as a social class. As the country's foreign policies shifted, and an influx of Western ideas flowed into the formerly isolationist nation, the historical warrior of Japan’s past became a relic, both of the Warring States period and of the daimyo structure of feudal Japan. Finally without real meaning, the samurai of old were cast aside, left only as a remnant of the nation’s past, relegated to history books and academic study.

The fictionalized samurai, seen in SNK’s Samurai Shodown, is immeasurably brave, impossibly strong, a personified force of nature fit to confront demons and gods alike. This dramatization, of the samurai as more than a sword for hire to a high-paying daimyo, solidified their place in fiction, continuing the legacy of the bushi class through the modern day. But when we remove the pomp and circumstance, excise the bombast of gods, devils and demons, what remains? With no one to lead them, and stability leading to stagnation, where does that leave the wandering ronin at the end of an era?

Last Blade 2 is a double-sided blade, both a celebration and vigil to the samurai, showcasing the elegance and grace found in the tension of combat while reflecting on the mundane lethality of swordplay. As swords clash, the conflict is not scored by epic orchestras, but by the howls of wind, the crackle of a roaring fire, the voiceless bustle of a trodden dirt road. Each battle, a constant push towards retaining the way of the warrior against the sands of time, is foregone; if the fight itself doesn’t kill the combatants, time is sharpening the knife angled at their way of life. With the end of days in mind, they fight simply to prove it meant something. Without leaders, without a kingdom to defend or a war to die in, the samurai lives and dies through their sword. A final farewell to a remnant of history, Last Blade 2 tells apocryphal tales of beauty and bloodshed, a bittersweet finale to a bygone age.

By the middle of the 2000s, the zombie genre had turned a page. With George A. Romero’s take on the zombie, primarily as a symbol of consumerist culture in Dawn of the Dead, slowly falling into the past, the modern zombie was viewed as little more than a violent marauder, a faceless mass dedicated to the sole purpose of visceral carnage, both as an actor of said carnage, or as an excusable victim. Within the context of zombie media, the death of a living being is the peak of misery, the failure of a group or society to protect its own, symbolic of the loss of innocence, while the true death of the undead is typically reserved for scenes of wanton brutality, either as an action set-piece, or to display the morbid mundanity of life in the apocalypse. Seeming valueless, the pop-culture zombie no longer stood in as a representative of any perceived plight, anxiety, or worry, instead becoming an unavoidable, vacant threat, something to expound the tension of the group, as opposed to being the source of tension in and of itself.

This change in style in the undead landscape paved the way for zombie works in general to experiment in presentation, taking the iconography of Romero’s of the Dead franchise and putting new spins on it, framing the end of the world in different lenses. In a way, 2006’s Dead Rising purely represents this experimentation, becoming a beacon of the era’s sensibilities, not only in technical and mechanical value, but as a symbol of where the horror genre was. Dead Rising, the splatstick masterpiece, found its place as the forerunner in gaming’s view of the undead, as an innumerable wave of ghoulish targets for what could fairly be called bullying, tied together with a feel that leaned serious in presentation, but often showed its hand at the surreal nonsense surrounding every second of gameplay. The tone defined the game, and in the same way that tone defined the growing landscape of zombie media.

So, as hype for a sequel swept through the scene, and as Dead Rising 2 entered development, it made sense that it would attempt to follow the vibe set by its progenitor while also tracing the energy of the new decade of horror. Released at the dawn of the 2010s, this sequel aimed to go bigger, bolder, and dumber than its already ludicrous prequel, but along the way, something… changed. What once was a splatterhouse comedy now felt mean-spirited, cruel in a way that felt absent from its predecessor. Somewhere along the way, through the change in developer from Capcom Production Studio 1 to Blue Castle Games (later known as Capcom Vancouver), the magic of what made Dead Rising feel unique was lost, replacing it with a colder, rougher, harder-edged soul.

Feeding off the harsher aesthetic of late 2000s horror, with the advent of the torture porn subgenre and the exploitation revival in full swing, Dead Rising 2 sees a world that lacks the spirit of the original, all in the hopes of endless escalation. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment you can tell things are going to be for the worse… perhaps it starts with seeing how the game has moved to hardcore male gaze pandering with every single woman in sight. Perhaps it's the fact that you can’t go fifteen steps without a Playboy cover filling the screen. Maybe it’s noticing how you’re expected to have moved on from the ubiquitous mini-chainsaws and conventional firearms of Dead Rising to Firework Launchers, M60-toting plushies, Serv-bot brain blenders, and Knuckles-approved Knife Gloves as your bread-and-butter zombie dispatchers. It’s not as if the series was known for an sort of basis in reality, as anything other than an excuse to throw you into a messy sandbox bound to an anxiety-inducing timer, but seeing such a sharp lean into try-hard jokes makes the humor of the original shine ever so clearer.

Dead Rising 2 is… disappointing. In an attempt to solidify the foundation built by Dead Rising, the sequel works only to sully the perfection that came before it, over-polishing a knowingly messy work and filing off any sense of personality in the process. It’s still a mechanically and technically impressive work, and its attempts to build on Dead Rising’s formula are admirable, but they all serve to push the series in a direction that feels completely at odds with the prequel.

It's all fun and games until you realize Garlicoin is a real cryptocurrency that the game features, for some reason.

For want of not completely exposing my messy mental health escapades on a public review site / sort-of game blogging microcosm, I'll leave my review at me feeling some personal attachment to the story of this game. I suppose playing out the toxic and positive aspects of the inner voice, the proverbial "voice in your head", does something to personify the inherent discomfort and fear of having some indistinct audience to your life.

Of course, I'm not that player, and as much as I want to embrace the story the game wants to tell, there's really no... reason, to treat the protagonist with anything other than care. Maybe that's part of the message: Of the intrinsic disorder of negative thoughts , the uncontrollable nature of intrusive thoughts. Wish it was done through deeper prose, relying less on trite scares ingrained into the visual novel landscape.

I relate, but it doesn't really... say anything, that isn't already deeply well known to those who suffer from mental issues, or the wider landscape of "people with a normal amount of empathy". Wish there was more to it!

The essence of bullet hell is embodied by the flow state, the merging of action and reaction into a cohesive whole. Unburdened by self-consciousness and doubt, the player becomes one with the work, a metatextual intertwining between the self-insert protagonist and the player themselves. Weaving effortlessly between spirals of malignant neon, one brushes against certain death versus overwhelming odds, limited not only by the mechanical functions of the game, but by the stress inherent to seeing a wave of fluorescent fire flung in your direction. Success is found not in fighting the game’s systems, but instead in embracing the chaos and cacophony of bullet hell: Seeing bullets rain down on your self-insert of choice, and cutting a path through the onslaught, with obscene firepower, unbroken grace, or by sheer determination.

Hypothetically, the experience of a shoot 'em up is antithetical to a metroidvania; One encourages complete adherence to the rules, the other constantly pushes you to go beyond the expectations of the game, the former rewards finding surefire paths to a concrete goal, the latter is defined by meandering detours in the service of securing a step forward on a path. It’s a dichotomy that builds an uneven foundation. When paired together, both sides struggle to become the defining “face” of the work, as the focus inevitably wavers between the explorative core of a metroidvania, and the breakneck action of an STG.

It’s a nightmarish endeavor to create something that scratches the itch of two divergent genres, and when I initially started Rabi-Ribi, that ingrained conflict was immediately apparent. For the first handful of hours, my experience was relegated to enjoying a perfectly fine, if mortifyingly shameless, exploration game. Hardline three out of five… you know the type. But after crashing against the initial wave of bosses, delving into the ways of Big Combo, and making a difficult decision to drop the difficulty to normal… Something clicked. It wasn’t until around Aruraune’s boss fight, half way through the game, that Rabi-Ribi's elegance in design finally revealed itself.

The hyperfocus… The loss of anxiety… The full acceptance of the game’s mechanics… At the halfway point, Rabi-Ribi re-attunes itself, subtly shifting from a smart metroidvania to an ingenious STG. As if fully accepting this genre shift, the final fights of the game embrace the concept of flow state, celebrating it as the final, ultimate end-goal of the genre, beyond victory, beyond aesthetic value, beyond even being “good” at the game. Your reward isn’t a high-score, breathtaking GCs, or even further mastery of the game, as much as those are all parts to find joy in. Your reward is the sense of perfect alignment with the game: Of full focus, complete immersion, and functioning at your peak doing something you love, regardless of winning or losing. It’s the soul of bullet hell condensed to a beautiful ending fight.

Rabi-Ribi is a game I struggle to recommend with a straight face: the main character might as well be the protagonist of the Daicon IV Opening Animation, But With A GunFairy; that, and the very-subtle-and-not-at-all-on-the-nose Nekopara allusions, do wonders in souring public perception toward the game. It's deeply, deeply upsetting that the most beloved representative of two of my favorite genres is going to be a game I’ll be mocked to the ends of the Earth for loving… But I adore this game. It’s flawed, for sure, and your tolerance for Anime™ has to be decently high to not be rightfully filtered for the abundance of otaku-bait character designs, but looking past that, on a pure mechanical level, Rabi-Ribi represents what I love in two genres that exist at odds with each other.

The immense mindgames behind crouching low punch neutral... The oppressive rushdown inherent to the cr.lp->cr.lp->cr.lp->cr.lp combo... The abject lack of overheads... The Real Warriors Kusoge

Lost in the nebulous space between the soulless flair of the modern military shooter and the heartfelt kitsch of the retro “classic” shooter, the shooters of the late 2000s and early 2010s were inspired in equal measures by the all-encompassing pop-fervor of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the deteriorated foundation build by the likes of Doom and Quake. Spurred by the overwhelming presence of Infinity Ward’s absurdly influential franchise, alongside a legion of like-minded contemporaries, Activision sought out a greedy double-dip. As one of their franchises altered the landscape of first-person shooters, the company dug into the established market with a new project cobbled together with the essence of their largest releases, a faceless, amorphous summer blockbuster with the capitalistic purpose of scoring big returns on a low investment. With emotion and heart out the door, and with eye’s on the dollar, Activision tasked Raven Software, longtime icons of the first-person shooter genre, with concocting this husk of a game. Unfortunately for Activision, their wishes for a quick-and-easy turnaround crashed headlong into the creative might of an exemplar of the industry. Budgets ebbed and flowed, deadlines came and went, and the tumultuous project underwent a lengthy stay in development hell.

The shambling corpse, a patchwork of Bioshock, Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R., and everyone’s favorite yearly jingoist genocide simulator, languished in limbo for years under the overbearing boot of Activision until the dawn of the 2010s. Finally free from the eternal prison of middle-management and executive meddling, Singularity sprung forth, bearing the influence of its progenitors on it’s sleeve. Alas, as the game rose to life, so too did it sign a death sentence for Raven Software, now a prisoner to the Call of Duty mines. With its wretched history behind it, and a decade after the fact, how does it hold up under scrutiny?

It’s uh… It’s mid. Maybe it’s the whole “copy the middle points of a hundred other games” thing, maybe it’s the complete lack of personality present, or perhaps it’s the feel of a weary dev team trying their hardest to make anything out of the nothing they’ve been handed. It’s a multi-million dollar project informed not by its own original ideas, but by the constant struggle to do anything original with the ideas it was made to encompass. Fuse that obvious discontent with a development cycle that could charitably be called trouble, and it’s no wonder the game came out in such a half-baked, malformed state. It should say something that the high point of the game was a Russian scientist claiming the way to prevent this broken timeline was very LowTierGod-ian, a succinct “you should kill yourself…now!”. As the game lays broken and rightfully forgotten to the sands of time, I’m drawn not to the game itself, but what it represents. To put it clearly, Singularity is the embodiment of the soullessness, the abject emptiness inherent to triple-A game development.

While not itself guilty of the crimes it represents, the game is a sacrifice to the altar of auteur theory, prestige media, and big-screen hollowness. It’s a game defined not by what it does, but what it’s corporate malefactors did to it in the name of creating a product for the mass market. Singularity breaths deep the fumes of Hollywood action cinema, and hacks out a dull, lifeless imitation. Resting inside the game there’s the shell of something wonderful, a grindhouse alternative history shooting gallery, and during succinct moments that beauty shines through, particularly in some of the truly inspired tools granted to the player to expense with wave-after-wave of Russian soldiers and mutated radiological monstrosities, but surrounding every second of that perfection is a curtain sewn with the express point of snuffing out whatever original light shines from within. Short and simple, it’s a game that, with more time, more care, more love, could have been something special: not influential or astounding, but more than the mediocre slog it devolved into.

when the seven boys are clever

The creative experience is knowing, at any time, you have the potential to put a YIIK into the world. Harrowing.