SuperBiasedGary
7 reviews liked by SuperBiasedGary
A mess of a trilogy closer, downgraded on every front from its progenitors, unable to meet its high ambitions. It's not without merit, but it's extremely hit or miss. Its approach to chronologically ambiguous storytelling is maybe its only unmarred highlight. Its character beats, puzzles, and twists (of which there are many) peak at "not as well done in the previous two games" and bottom out unfathomably low.
Its attempt to tell a much more harrowing tale than the previous two games is seriously undercut by its mawkish writing, awkward character animations, and stiff voice acting (which reeks of poor direction, not a slight on the VA's talent). Because of these, it often ends up as a farce - comic when it grasps for tragedy, and something to laugh at when it asks the player to laugh with it.
I held hope that Zero Time Dilemma would reward enduring until the end. I wanted to know how ZTD would try to justify the time spent playing it. Unfortunately, that desire was left unfulfilled. No puzzle left a deep, lasting sense of satisfaction. No character development or plot arc gave any kind of meaningful insight. No twist or mystery electrified my mind racing with excitement or fascination. All that it left was a beleaguered shrug of exhaustion: "Well, I guess that happened."
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
Its attempt to tell a much more harrowing tale than the previous two games is seriously undercut by its mawkish writing, awkward character animations, and stiff voice acting (which reeks of poor direction, not a slight on the VA's talent). Because of these, it often ends up as a farce - comic when it grasps for tragedy, and something to laugh at when it asks the player to laugh with it.
I held hope that Zero Time Dilemma would reward enduring until the end. I wanted to know how ZTD would try to justify the time spent playing it. Unfortunately, that desire was left unfulfilled. No puzzle left a deep, lasting sense of satisfaction. No character development or plot arc gave any kind of meaningful insight. No twist or mystery electrified my mind racing with excitement or fascination. All that it left was a beleaguered shrug of exhaustion: "Well, I guess that happened."
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
Narcissu
2005
i agree with the writer that it's a failure in terms of it's goals, but it's interesting in spite of that. the limited use of images, the lack of sprites, the limited voice acting, and spareness of writing are trying for something they can't quite reach, the ability to push the work of the story onto the imagination of the reader. there is too much given to truly make the reader do the amount of work the author wanted them to, so it ends up in a weird place where i'm interested in the experiment, and i like the ways it bucks traditional vn presentation even as i think it fails at it's goals.
good story, but nothing special. the way it handles terminal illness is interesting? i like that it makes setsummi's dispair about her future is rooted in the ways her future is taken away from her by her friends, family, and the hospital, not just a lack of hope as she watches death approach.
good story, but nothing special. the way it handles terminal illness is interesting? i like that it makes setsummi's dispair about her future is rooted in the ways her future is taken away from her by her friends, family, and the hospital, not just a lack of hope as she watches death approach.
Holy Ghost Story
2022
This review contains spoilers
In the closing moments of 2022, a ping on discord alerts me that the game I spent most of my Christmas break from work finishing up has been added to IGDB, just in time for me to mark it as my GOTY for 2022. It is of course, not actually that, but something about the misplaced arrogance of doing that, ironically or otherwise, really tickles me. I giggle about it to myself for the rest of a party in a far nicer house than I have scarcely been in for my entire life that puts me on edge about it the entire time I am there.
But, of course, in order to mark it as GOTY, I have to mark it as played. And the easiest way to do that is to give it a star rating, which, of course, was 5 stars, on the urging of a voice in my head telling me that if I'm not going to give the game 5 stars, who will?
In a turn that feels immensely humbling, others have in fact rate it 5 stars. Which I am grateful and mortified about, but also thankful because it lifts from me the burden of having to mark this as 5 stars.
I don't know if other people feel the same about this, but I find it extremely difficult to look at something I've made holistically. I was there for every step of the sausage being made, after all, so maybe it's just natural that I all I see are a thousand tiny pieces, a jigsaw that has no clear overall shape. What this means is that when I look at Holy Ghost Story, I can see lines, scenes, moments and beats, but the whole picture is unclear to me. I think it's a real weakness of my writing, getting lost in the weeds and losing sight of the larger whole. Which is probably why this is twice as long as I planned it to be and has some scenes that an editor probably would have cut, but which I retained because I liked the way the light caught them, irrespective of their place in the wider thing.
Unlike some of the other entries in this mini genre, which comprises some of my favorite pieces on this site, I don't know if I have anything enormously interesting or cool to say about holy ghost story. As something that was originally planned to be a short and sweet project I could cobble together for Halloween, it ending up two months late and maybe twice as long as I intended does feel like something of a failure. Truthfully, I don't know how I feel about this and it's likely that I won't for a while, and if my track record with this sort of thing is any indication I'll probably come down pretty hard against it.
But right now, all I have are the pieces, and I can still pick them up and turn them over in my hands. I know I like reading about game development and the way these things come into life, so in lieu of any actual insightful thoughts or analyses, here are just some little tidbits from the time I spent making this game.
(spoilers, obvs)
- The whole thing was inspired by a riff I had with two of my friends about ghosts whose Unfinished Businesses were incredibly mundane. The ideas I had ballooned out during a visit to the Tate Modern the next day, and then contracted in again while I tried to siphon out the actual core of the story.
- The original title, inspired by one of the pieces in the Tate I saw, was "...almost religious awe..." but ultimately I could not resist the gag of evoking The Holy Ghost. Sorry, big man.
- I wanted to avoid any explicit queer/trans themes for this. A lot of my creative and critical work exists in this space, and I kind of wanted to avoid it for this. Not because I have anything against such works - far from it - but just because I wanted to go out of my comfort zone a little, into the moderately different comfort zone that is Catholic Guilt.
- Embarrassingly, the logo/cover art was partially inspired by the HD Remaster OPs for Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, specifically the bits naming the various Gundams. I'm so sorry.
- This was originally going to be made in Visual Novel Maker, something which appealed to me because of my past work in RPGMaker. However, while RPGMaker as a toolset has it's ups and downs, I think VNM is something of a disaster, with an incredibly clunky interface that is catastrophically less intuitive than the python-based Ren'Py, which is where this ended up.
- Following on from above, the entire script was written in a word document before Ren'Py was opened even once. I future, I think I will play around much more with visuals and music as I am writing rather than writing everything and then making visuals and sounds around that, but I do think inputting the final script manually was good, because it allowed me to do some final last-minute editing and drafting that ended up with some of my favorite lines.
- Originally, the POV character, or "genius", was a much more passive person, who spoke in the present tense, and had almost no internal monologue or interiority. However, through successive drafts, more of a character started to creep in as I started to move the didactic qualities of the script into Genius as a character. I have mixed feelings about how Siobhan is presented but I do feel good about where Genius ended up, this kind of unpleasant, unempathetic, well-meaning but patronizing figure. Despite them being almost completely absent in the original outline, I think the story ended up being as much about them as it did about Siobhan, which I do like, even if it did take perhaps too many drafts to reach that point.
- Accordingly, the scene with Genius by themselves was a late addition that didn't get as much redrafting as the rest of it. I think it's better with than without, but I also side-eye it even more than I do the rest of it.
- My actual favorite thing in the game is Siobhan's name turning pink during the "flashback".
- Do you know how difficult it is to find public domain visual novel schoolgirl sprites that aren't very horny? Let me tell you: pretty fucking difficult!!
- ? speaking in a more formal tone was something inspired by Squigglydot's Post-Disclosure Devil's Night, and it's use of purple prose, to suggest my interpretation that ? was in some way separate from Genius without saying it outright.
- Let me tell you - it has been pretty nerve-wracking working on this while an emerging trend of people in my activity feed crept up of taking random itch.io games, writing a scathing dunk of them, and then others who, clearly, would not have liked said game, downloading and playing it anyway to get their own hilarious dunk in. Which is not to say that I don't think there aren't going to be people who find this to be nails on a chalkboard and will write a funny dunk review of this, but I do think the one thing that would make me regret having made this would be if it became something people crowded around to get the boot in.
- Kevin MacLeod is such a real one dude
- If I had to sum up the lessons I learned from this project, I would say that researching and testing out software with miniscule practice runs is essential even for a "small" project you undertake to "learn the basics" of software, and also that I think I need to divorce myself entirely from the prospect of "true" "solo" development. Anxiety prevented me from reaching out to talented artists and musicians I know about commissioning stuff that would have helped give the game an actual visual identity to call it's own, and I don't want that to happen next time. When I write that Siobhan scowled and yelled, I wish I could have properly conveyed how I wanted that to look.
I hope this has been interesting at all! My nerves and anxiousness around this title have yet to dissipate, so I likely won't be reading anything about it for at least a few days, but knowing that people took the time to check this out means more than I can say, both for the people who enjoyed it and the people it didn't. I'm really looking forward to reading people's thoughts once I feel able to do so without my nerves exploding at first brush.
Hopefully I'll see you again sometime in 2023, hopefully with a less played-out theme!
But, of course, in order to mark it as GOTY, I have to mark it as played. And the easiest way to do that is to give it a star rating, which, of course, was 5 stars, on the urging of a voice in my head telling me that if I'm not going to give the game 5 stars, who will?
In a turn that feels immensely humbling, others have in fact rate it 5 stars. Which I am grateful and mortified about, but also thankful because it lifts from me the burden of having to mark this as 5 stars.
I don't know if other people feel the same about this, but I find it extremely difficult to look at something I've made holistically. I was there for every step of the sausage being made, after all, so maybe it's just natural that I all I see are a thousand tiny pieces, a jigsaw that has no clear overall shape. What this means is that when I look at Holy Ghost Story, I can see lines, scenes, moments and beats, but the whole picture is unclear to me. I think it's a real weakness of my writing, getting lost in the weeds and losing sight of the larger whole. Which is probably why this is twice as long as I planned it to be and has some scenes that an editor probably would have cut, but which I retained because I liked the way the light caught them, irrespective of their place in the wider thing.
Unlike some of the other entries in this mini genre, which comprises some of my favorite pieces on this site, I don't know if I have anything enormously interesting or cool to say about holy ghost story. As something that was originally planned to be a short and sweet project I could cobble together for Halloween, it ending up two months late and maybe twice as long as I intended does feel like something of a failure. Truthfully, I don't know how I feel about this and it's likely that I won't for a while, and if my track record with this sort of thing is any indication I'll probably come down pretty hard against it.
But right now, all I have are the pieces, and I can still pick them up and turn them over in my hands. I know I like reading about game development and the way these things come into life, so in lieu of any actual insightful thoughts or analyses, here are just some little tidbits from the time I spent making this game.
(spoilers, obvs)
- The whole thing was inspired by a riff I had with two of my friends about ghosts whose Unfinished Businesses were incredibly mundane. The ideas I had ballooned out during a visit to the Tate Modern the next day, and then contracted in again while I tried to siphon out the actual core of the story.
- The original title, inspired by one of the pieces in the Tate I saw, was "...almost religious awe..." but ultimately I could not resist the gag of evoking The Holy Ghost. Sorry, big man.
- I wanted to avoid any explicit queer/trans themes for this. A lot of my creative and critical work exists in this space, and I kind of wanted to avoid it for this. Not because I have anything against such works - far from it - but just because I wanted to go out of my comfort zone a little, into the moderately different comfort zone that is Catholic Guilt.
- Embarrassingly, the logo/cover art was partially inspired by the HD Remaster OPs for Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, specifically the bits naming the various Gundams. I'm so sorry.
- This was originally going to be made in Visual Novel Maker, something which appealed to me because of my past work in RPGMaker. However, while RPGMaker as a toolset has it's ups and downs, I think VNM is something of a disaster, with an incredibly clunky interface that is catastrophically less intuitive than the python-based Ren'Py, which is where this ended up.
- Following on from above, the entire script was written in a word document before Ren'Py was opened even once. I future, I think I will play around much more with visuals and music as I am writing rather than writing everything and then making visuals and sounds around that, but I do think inputting the final script manually was good, because it allowed me to do some final last-minute editing and drafting that ended up with some of my favorite lines.
- Originally, the POV character, or "genius", was a much more passive person, who spoke in the present tense, and had almost no internal monologue or interiority. However, through successive drafts, more of a character started to creep in as I started to move the didactic qualities of the script into Genius as a character. I have mixed feelings about how Siobhan is presented but I do feel good about where Genius ended up, this kind of unpleasant, unempathetic, well-meaning but patronizing figure. Despite them being almost completely absent in the original outline, I think the story ended up being as much about them as it did about Siobhan, which I do like, even if it did take perhaps too many drafts to reach that point.
- Accordingly, the scene with Genius by themselves was a late addition that didn't get as much redrafting as the rest of it. I think it's better with than without, but I also side-eye it even more than I do the rest of it.
- My actual favorite thing in the game is Siobhan's name turning pink during the "flashback".
- Do you know how difficult it is to find public domain visual novel schoolgirl sprites that aren't very horny? Let me tell you: pretty fucking difficult!!
- ? speaking in a more formal tone was something inspired by Squigglydot's Post-Disclosure Devil's Night, and it's use of purple prose, to suggest my interpretation that ? was in some way separate from Genius without saying it outright.
- Let me tell you - it has been pretty nerve-wracking working on this while an emerging trend of people in my activity feed crept up of taking random itch.io games, writing a scathing dunk of them, and then others who, clearly, would not have liked said game, downloading and playing it anyway to get their own hilarious dunk in. Which is not to say that I don't think there aren't going to be people who find this to be nails on a chalkboard and will write a funny dunk review of this, but I do think the one thing that would make me regret having made this would be if it became something people crowded around to get the boot in.
- Kevin MacLeod is such a real one dude
- If I had to sum up the lessons I learned from this project, I would say that researching and testing out software with miniscule practice runs is essential even for a "small" project you undertake to "learn the basics" of software, and also that I think I need to divorce myself entirely from the prospect of "true" "solo" development. Anxiety prevented me from reaching out to talented artists and musicians I know about commissioning stuff that would have helped give the game an actual visual identity to call it's own, and I don't want that to happen next time. When I write that Siobhan scowled and yelled, I wish I could have properly conveyed how I wanted that to look.
I hope this has been interesting at all! My nerves and anxiousness around this title have yet to dissipate, so I likely won't be reading anything about it for at least a few days, but knowing that people took the time to check this out means more than I can say, both for the people who enjoyed it and the people it didn't. I'm really looking forward to reading people's thoughts once I feel able to do so without my nerves exploding at first brush.
Hopefully I'll see you again sometime in 2023, hopefully with a less played-out theme!
some delightfully goopy visuals and sets aside, i am honestly stunned by how completely this failed to work for me. i am by no means one of the resi 6 faithful but i found myself constantly wishing i was playing that while trudging my way through this turgid exercise in insecurity. this to me far more aptly demonstrates the air of extreme desperation many people accused resi 6 of, a supremely unconfident attempt to play catchup to an entire history of the horror zeitgeist. texas chainsaw massacre, evil dead, the shining, the ring, blair witch, the hills have eyes, escape rooms, even america's most haunted and ghostwatch...it's all been thrown in and blended together until all that remains is a tasteless textureless black sludge.
the found footage angle is one i found particularly shockingly poor, as someone who counts the blair witch project a personal favorite, and who jumped back into resi 7 because of letshugbro's reflections on this point. aside from the reality show pastiche at the start (easily the highlight of the game for me) there is absolutely zero consideration at any point given to the camera or it's presence or physicality: we simply plainly see through the eyes of the character with a generic vhs filter put over it. it's brazenly pillaging the most basic imagery signifiers of this form possible without a single iota of consideration for the intent or form, purely cynical exploitation in the meanest sense of the word, a reference to it's influences as shallow as a MCU quip.
this is the entire game, a rickety haunted house built on the thinnest veneer imaginable, where every element is never deeper than the skin. the stiff and robotic movements of the bakers, with their glitchy animations, clinically transactional relationship with the player, and scripted sequences based almost entirely on simply waiting around running in circles for the switch to flip in their head that makes them do something that lets you progress, annihilates any sense of organic living atmosphere the game strains to affect, revealing these walking pathfinding algorithms for what they really are. the overtures towards being a return to classic resident evil is similarly merely an illusion that falls apart under moderately close inspection: the inventory management and shared stash is here but the considered map and encounter design that necessitates careful planning and macro-tension across the experience is wholly absent, a build of resources towards a payoff that never arrives, a series of engagements against a single enemy type that never meaningfully intimidates or frightens. a fractured facsimile of classic resident evil is here, but none of the effects it produced is, and what remains is a tedious series of empty frictionless jogs between item transactions to unlock the next area of this vacuous escape room.
if all this wasn't enough, biohazard might honestly be in contention for the narrative low point of the series as i have experienced it. at least resident evil 5 has wesker. the game sure mentions the word "family" a lot but anything it might have to say about that is rendered so completely incoherent by this dangerous combination of shockingly underwritten narrative and tedious "the writer has just had a bad breakup" misogynistic energy that it can scarcely be believed. i was wondering whether or not this was a 1-star or 2-star affair but learning that not being unflinchingly loyal to your cartoonishly evil wife (whose evil is basically never so much as remarked upon by a game that instead chooses to heap infinite mean-spirited scorn upon a child turned by her and her compatriots into a bioweapon) gives you an unexpected Wrong Ending an hour after you make that one choice is what made me decide on the score i did. i am by no means going to defend the travails of prior entries like resident evil 5, but at least that game has been deservedly dragged through the mud for it's perspective. the fact that, five years on, the nightmarishly terrible gender politics of this title have gone almost completely unremarked upon speaks volumes to the degree to which mainstream critics in this medium are completely willing to turn the blinkers on for anything that affects even the thinnest veneer of Western Prestige.
like i say, the word of the day is desperate. frantically pillaging from every horror movie it can find without any care for intent or meaning or context, desperately floundering for relevancy in a world that rejected the apex of what it was pushing towards post resi 4. and yet, ironically, despite my total failure to invest in it, resident evil 7 can only be called a success in terms of reinvigorating the series and giving it a new direction: theme park horror, a series of shallow pastiches, a linear sequence of homage, that has laid the groundwork for the tremendous critical and financial success of resident evil village. and for those who are loving this direction i say, go with god, but there is no way in hell i am getting on board a rollercoaster with foundations as completely rotten as this.
the found footage angle is one i found particularly shockingly poor, as someone who counts the blair witch project a personal favorite, and who jumped back into resi 7 because of letshugbro's reflections on this point. aside from the reality show pastiche at the start (easily the highlight of the game for me) there is absolutely zero consideration at any point given to the camera or it's presence or physicality: we simply plainly see through the eyes of the character with a generic vhs filter put over it. it's brazenly pillaging the most basic imagery signifiers of this form possible without a single iota of consideration for the intent or form, purely cynical exploitation in the meanest sense of the word, a reference to it's influences as shallow as a MCU quip.
this is the entire game, a rickety haunted house built on the thinnest veneer imaginable, where every element is never deeper than the skin. the stiff and robotic movements of the bakers, with their glitchy animations, clinically transactional relationship with the player, and scripted sequences based almost entirely on simply waiting around running in circles for the switch to flip in their head that makes them do something that lets you progress, annihilates any sense of organic living atmosphere the game strains to affect, revealing these walking pathfinding algorithms for what they really are. the overtures towards being a return to classic resident evil is similarly merely an illusion that falls apart under moderately close inspection: the inventory management and shared stash is here but the considered map and encounter design that necessitates careful planning and macro-tension across the experience is wholly absent, a build of resources towards a payoff that never arrives, a series of engagements against a single enemy type that never meaningfully intimidates or frightens. a fractured facsimile of classic resident evil is here, but none of the effects it produced is, and what remains is a tedious series of empty frictionless jogs between item transactions to unlock the next area of this vacuous escape room.
if all this wasn't enough, biohazard might honestly be in contention for the narrative low point of the series as i have experienced it. at least resident evil 5 has wesker. the game sure mentions the word "family" a lot but anything it might have to say about that is rendered so completely incoherent by this dangerous combination of shockingly underwritten narrative and tedious "the writer has just had a bad breakup" misogynistic energy that it can scarcely be believed. i was wondering whether or not this was a 1-star or 2-star affair but learning that not being unflinchingly loyal to your cartoonishly evil wife (whose evil is basically never so much as remarked upon by a game that instead chooses to heap infinite mean-spirited scorn upon a child turned by her and her compatriots into a bioweapon) gives you an unexpected Wrong Ending an hour after you make that one choice is what made me decide on the score i did. i am by no means going to defend the travails of prior entries like resident evil 5, but at least that game has been deservedly dragged through the mud for it's perspective. the fact that, five years on, the nightmarishly terrible gender politics of this title have gone almost completely unremarked upon speaks volumes to the degree to which mainstream critics in this medium are completely willing to turn the blinkers on for anything that affects even the thinnest veneer of Western Prestige.
like i say, the word of the day is desperate. frantically pillaging from every horror movie it can find without any care for intent or meaning or context, desperately floundering for relevancy in a world that rejected the apex of what it was pushing towards post resi 4. and yet, ironically, despite my total failure to invest in it, resident evil 7 can only be called a success in terms of reinvigorating the series and giving it a new direction: theme park horror, a series of shallow pastiches, a linear sequence of homage, that has laid the groundwork for the tremendous critical and financial success of resident evil village. and for those who are loving this direction i say, go with god, but there is no way in hell i am getting on board a rollercoaster with foundations as completely rotten as this.
an entrancing moonlight dance between post-modern naturalism and mushy sentimental romanticism, this is unexpectedly great! for a free-to-play game with very modestly priced DLC that more than doubles the game's length, the depth and quality of writing and interaction here is seriously impressive; on multiple occasions i was genuinely struck by the little things the game picked up on and developed in interesting ways for both the player character and cove. when a character in step 3 commented on how i normally behaved one way but shifted that behavior in certain contexts, or how i would have the pc express outward disinterest in formal engagements but would have them throw themselves into them when they were presented, i was surprised and suddenly introspective in a way that felt extremely complicatedly real in a way i've scarcely seen from a game like this.
it's also a bit more thorny and dramatic than initial impressions might seem: while the game maintains a positive tone (in particular the adults around you are always supportive of whatever developing gender or sexual identity your character might have in a way that is nice but also feels like the part of the game most in tune with the wholesomecore aesthetic it sometimes toys with) and it's never going to spring something truly shocking or upsetting on this pleasant boat ride, you can choose to steer various scenes into rougher waters, if you so desire. some of my favorite scenes were a result of me choosing to do this, playing into the image i had built up of the player character being insecure and socially awkward in often kind of mean and selfish ways.
it's for this willingness to get real and dive into the friction it's scenarios present that the childhood segment ended up as the highlight: overall Our Life is a game about maturity and how people change, and starting off with a bunch of kids who are in turns deeply immature in very real ways and honestly bratty unpleasant is maybe the most unique and singularly well-realized part of the game. the rest of it is good too, with the teenager segment sagging a little bit maybe compared to the others, but for reasons i've talked about elsewhere I think it's the best part of the game and is instrumental to what makes it work. later scenes and conversations only work as well as they do because of the important groundwork laid down earlier, building to quiet, naturalistic crescendos of personal reflection and emotional development. the developing physical intimacy between the player character and cove on the romance route is something i found particularly powerful, as it's one of the few areas where the game puts it's foot down and had my character be realistically too emotionally immature to really get it, and when the two do eventually find a place that works for them, it really got me! our life understands i think that total comfort is ultimately suffocating: to truly appreciate how warm it is under the covers, you have to spend time away from them.
it's not going to be for everyone: i find myself wishing it asserted itself to the player a little more than it did: being able to manually customize cove's personality and appearance somewhat between steps feels like a step too far in player agency, and i'm glad that you can just choose to ignore that because it doesn't feel like the right way to engage with the game. in general, the game isn't particularly interested in challenging the player, which is fine, but it does mean that i can see it totally washing over some.
for me though, it was a surprising delight. there's a sequel in the works that seems to be aiming for less of a specifically romantic frame with more than one central character of interaction, and that has me seriously excited. cove is a really well-rounded character but i was surprisingly enamored by the entire cast, and a game that felt more able to explore that wider cast might have landed even better. very excited to see what comes next from this team!
it's also a bit more thorny and dramatic than initial impressions might seem: while the game maintains a positive tone (in particular the adults around you are always supportive of whatever developing gender or sexual identity your character might have in a way that is nice but also feels like the part of the game most in tune with the wholesomecore aesthetic it sometimes toys with) and it's never going to spring something truly shocking or upsetting on this pleasant boat ride, you can choose to steer various scenes into rougher waters, if you so desire. some of my favorite scenes were a result of me choosing to do this, playing into the image i had built up of the player character being insecure and socially awkward in often kind of mean and selfish ways.
it's for this willingness to get real and dive into the friction it's scenarios present that the childhood segment ended up as the highlight: overall Our Life is a game about maturity and how people change, and starting off with a bunch of kids who are in turns deeply immature in very real ways and honestly bratty unpleasant is maybe the most unique and singularly well-realized part of the game. the rest of it is good too, with the teenager segment sagging a little bit maybe compared to the others, but for reasons i've talked about elsewhere I think it's the best part of the game and is instrumental to what makes it work. later scenes and conversations only work as well as they do because of the important groundwork laid down earlier, building to quiet, naturalistic crescendos of personal reflection and emotional development. the developing physical intimacy between the player character and cove on the romance route is something i found particularly powerful, as it's one of the few areas where the game puts it's foot down and had my character be realistically too emotionally immature to really get it, and when the two do eventually find a place that works for them, it really got me! our life understands i think that total comfort is ultimately suffocating: to truly appreciate how warm it is under the covers, you have to spend time away from them.
it's not going to be for everyone: i find myself wishing it asserted itself to the player a little more than it did: being able to manually customize cove's personality and appearance somewhat between steps feels like a step too far in player agency, and i'm glad that you can just choose to ignore that because it doesn't feel like the right way to engage with the game. in general, the game isn't particularly interested in challenging the player, which is fine, but it does mean that i can see it totally washing over some.
for me though, it was a surprising delight. there's a sequel in the works that seems to be aiming for less of a specifically romantic frame with more than one central character of interaction, and that has me seriously excited. cove is a really well-rounded character but i was surprisingly enamored by the entire cast, and a game that felt more able to explore that wider cast might have landed even better. very excited to see what comes next from this team!
This review contains spoilers
cw: allusions to suicide, self-harm, and bodily harm. discussions of mental health and social phobia included.
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All around my house, there is a garden made of glass. It looks so beautiful outside my window. During the day, the light from the sun shining down on it refracts through the trees made of twisting and flowers made of tiny perfect shards, a dazzling kalidescope of colours dancing through the garden. And at night, the light from the stars shines down on each one of the mirrorleaves that make up the bushes and trees, each one twinkling and dazzling with the light of an entire sea of stars.
I want nothing more to get closer, to see the forest with my own eyes, feel it with my own hands, hear it with my own ears. But every time I get close, every time i try to venture outside and into the world beyond my window, it hurts. I try to walk through it, as carefully as I can, but thorns that others can see but I can't cut into me. I shatter fragile flowers into a thousand tiny jagged shards with a single clumsy footstep. And sometimes I catch my face in reflections in the glass, reflecting a twisted, malformed image of the self that exists in the mind's eye, all the imperfections and flaws cutting all the deeper for their concreteness. Each time I try to walk through the garden, each time I try to exist in that space, in that moment, I shatter beautiful things around me at every turn, without intending, without meaning, and hurt myself in turn.
And so, I flinch. I retreat. I walk away, back behind closed doors. Where I can't break anything else. Where I can't hurt anymore.
And I stay there.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've always been fascinated by the relationship visual novels have with space and time. Almost all of the ones I've played - from serious personal reflective pieces to light-hearted romances - contain within them multiple parallel worlds, different realities of the same story spiraling off in their own directions. Romance stories that contain within them a dozen universes where the main character dates each member of the cast, stories with countless detours and Bad Ends on the way to a True Conclusion...it's not unheard of in literature, but it's ubiquity within the VN space is striking. Even Umineko, the most notable VN I have played (some of) that does not have branching routes or choices, plays extensively in a field of alternate possibilities and routes in a way that assumes familiarity with forms and rhythms that simply isn't given outside the Visual Novel. Even setting aside my lingering university Grant Morrison Phase giving me Multiverse Brain Worms that only the media environment of 2022 could entirely rid me of, there's something entrancing about a work that contains multitudes of itself within it, rivers that break off and flow in altogether separate directions from a source they all draw from, answering the same questions in different ways.
And yet, even in games like Zero Time Dilemma that are absolutely lascivious in their interest in parallel worlds, rarely has this aspect of a visual novel truly affected me. The ways in which the different branches and routes do, certainly, but the act of choosing itself rarely strikes me in such a way. It's connective tissue, not a beating heart in and of itself.
This cannot be said for one night, hot springs, a game I played last year, and have attempted to write about multiple times, only to fail each and every time. A game where the use of these choices, the use of these other realities, and other possibilities, existing side-by-side, affected me more than I could have ever imagined.
Mechanically, one night is simple. You simply read the story of Haru, a trans woman, and her friends visiting the hot springs for a birthday party, dealing with the frictions and relationships that Haru confronts along the way. Through that story, you make little decisions that branch the narrative in different ways. Some choices will simply move the narrative along in a different direction, while other choices will make you lose one of three hearts on the top of your screen, and if you lose all three, you get a "bad" ending. Classic visual novel stuff. But how one night presents these choices, how it presents the consequences of getting a game over, and how I responded to both...it was...
it was more than i could take.
i thought i knew. i thought i knew what i was getting into. i had played another of npckc's games, tomato clinic, before this one, and it was mostly just, well, cute. that's not to say there was nothing there, it felt very true to the awkward role of educator average queer people are often forced to play for well-meaning but uninformed cishet people, but overwhelmingly what it did was make me smile and not much else. and y'know i was expecting the same thing here. i was expecting to smile, to have a nice time on my lunch break.
that didn't happen.
what happened instead was that this game hit me with incalculable force, all the stronger for how completely unexpected it was, it's deliberately small presentation cutting deep into in ways that left me genuinely shaken and deep in thought about who i am and why i act the way that i do.
that's a hyperbolic statement. and i expect, for many people, it won't ring true. but it did for me. and articulating why requires articulating...myself, somewhat.
full disclosure, i first played this about a year ago. and i've tried to write this review multiple times before. but I just found no way of doing so without talking explicitly about why it made me feel the ways that it did, what about it that caused it to hit so hard. excessive auto-biography is a bad habit i fell into far often when i was writing more regularly on letterboxd and i have tried to avoid that here, to not treat a work's relation to me as the beginning and end of its critique. i am simply not a very interesting person, and saying "i personally related to this work" for a piece of criticism doesn't make for compelling writing by default. i don't think i've always succeeded, but it is something i have tried to aspire beyond on backloggd. i just found that impossible for one night hot springs. and i still do. and yet, i still want to talk about this game, what i think it does and has to say, and if i have to talk about myself to do so, then that is what will have to happen.
so, apologies. this is One of Those.
i am a non-binary trans person. i am also autistic, described to me then as "asperger's syndrome", and was diagnosed at a young age because I was a particularly...noticeable case of it. in addition, i was also diagnosed at a relatively young age with social anxiety disorder, then described to me as "social phobia". autism manifests in myriad different ways for myriad different people, and what is true for one person will not ring true for others. one autistic person i knew in university was one of the most socially capable people i have ever known, effortlessly charming and quick-witted in a way i am not or never have been. i struggle immensely with tone, expressions, and conversational flow, of knowing when to say the right thing, or how to say it. i speak without full confidence that my meaning will be expressed, only having hope that it will land how i intend to, without hurting anyone around me, and if i do, i hope only that i can recognise it and make amends for it immediately. whether this creates or simply feeds into my social anxiety disorder i can't say for certain, but the way others will speak in ways in ways i don't entirely understand i will respond in ways that i less comprehend and more simply Hope are the way one is Supposed To Respond certainly does not help the fact that i approach most conversations with almost everyone in the world with a certain degree of nervousness, if not outright fear, whether it's hoping to make a good impression on someone new, or hoping i don't accidentally hurt the feelings of someone i care about, there's always a reason to feel nervous about the very simple act of interacting with another human being in the world. being non-binary doesn't help much either, as in the majority of situations that take place in areas where i am not able to make my pronouns clear up front, misgendering and misrecognition isn't so much a possibility as it is a certainty.
if you've interacted with me personally at all you almost certainly think of me as oblivious or distant, speaking clumsily, awkwardly, stand-offishly, or any combination of these or any other, for which I apologize, because even reaching this level of capability requires a level of effort on my behalf that often leaves me completely exhausted from even basic interactions. none of this means i don't enjoy being with others, for me, no interaction is natural or free-flowing, it's a panicked and practiced effort to keep my head above water with immense effort.
so, often? i will flinch. i will shudder. i will apologize - for any unintended slight, for my existence as a whole. out of fear, out of resignation, out of the crawling voice in the back of my skull that tells me that no one - no one - wants to be around me, ever - i will find ways to extricate myself or excuse myself from situations, sometimes from all things altogether. faced with friction, it is easier to simply relent, to stand aside, rather than to speak up, because my voice is coarse and harsh and i cannot stand the noise it makes as it crawls out of my throat.
time and time again, i have taken the path of least resistance, so, when i played one night hot springs...i did the same. when haru suffered the routine emotionless deadnaming that is the common result of interactions in the world, i instinctively picked the options that made her flinch, shudder, to take the path of least resistance, to allow herself to be walked over rather than assert herself. as i do each time i play through a vn like this for the first time, i picked the options that struck as natural, and each and every time, it led me down paths that ranged from self-humiliating to outwardly self-destructive, to erode away at Haru's confidence because i had none, until eventually she can't take any more, and retreats into herself mid-party, until she vanishes, leaving the concern of her friends in her wake.
this is my world. this is the world i have made for myself. this closed-off, tiny thing, where i slam shut every door i have to knock on out of fear of what i might find on the other side. playing this game forced me to confront things about myself that part of me might have thought were natural, or even noble, boldly self-sacrificing myself, excusing myself from the company of others for their own good. but really, it was just cowardice, in the face of a world that is difficult, that is challenging, that hurts and where, yes, you can cause hurt in turn. but there's nothing noble about hiding yourself away in a dark corner of a distant room, afraid to even speak. one night, hot springs, despite it's incredibly warm, soft visuals and gentle music, is absolutely uncompromising in what it revealed about the way i so often choose to live my life.
it's a depiction made all the more heartbreaking by the results of resisting my natural instincts, peering into the alternate worlds in this story, and seeing for myself the words i have left unsaid, the friends left unmade, the closed-off hearts that could have been opened, but remained sealed out of fear. there are some really warm, beautifully written scenes in one night, hot springs, and it's only by seeing every path, by walking down every door, by availing yourself of the power visual novels grant you to see every possibility in this single night at the hot springs in a way you never could in real life, can you see the full shape of these people and the feelings they have for one another. something is always left unsaid, unheard.
each time i leave my house, each time i meet with friends, each time i poke my head around to my roommates, each time i log on to this website or any other, i am haru, and her choices become my choices. to risk walking barefoot through a garden of glass for what i know to lie on the other side, or to remain behind it, and make of it an insurmountable wall that grows smaller and smaller as my world contracts more and more into that darkened corner in my room. but there is a wider world out there, full of people i want to see, full of potential great memories and warm moments. not every night at the hot springs will be good. there will always be opportunities i cannot take, things left unsaid, and things left unheard. but if i flinch and retreat every time i face difficulties, every time it seems like this might be a bad night at the hot springs, then i'll never have a good one. i'll never have that night where i make a new friend, reconnect with an old one, or tell someone how i really feel about them.
the cringey, melodramatic thing i wrote at the top of this review? that's the best picture i can paint about what it feels like to live behind my eyes, of trying as best as i can to communicate fully and completely with the people i love because i want to be with them and enjoy their company more than anything else in the world, but knowing that it will always be difficult, knowing that it requires constant, agonising effort. it's not the same as feeling that, every day. i do not think writing, or video games, are true empathy machines, despite assertions to the contrary rising in both gaming journalism and academic spaces in the past couple years. i don't think video games can make you feel what it is like to be trans, or autistic, or socially anxious. neither this review, nor one night, hot springs will make you feel like what it feels like to be me.
but do they have to? i don't think they do. i think all they have to do, in the sounds they make chiming with another, in how they look matching an image etched into your heart, in the words they speak, and how they feel to play, to produce some kind of image that resonates, some kind of emotion that resounds...to reach someone, anyone, and maybe even be reached in turn.
and it isn't easy. believe me, i know.
but when it works? when you reach out a metaphorical hand, and meet another? it is so, so worth it in the end.
there is no reason to believe npckc will ever read this. but, i'll knock on that door anyway, speak up anyway, just in case my words reach theirs.
Thank you for your game!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All around my house, there is a garden made of glass. It looks so beautiful outside my window. During the day, the light from the sun shining down on it refracts through the trees made of twisting and flowers made of tiny perfect shards, a dazzling kalidescope of colours dancing through the garden. And at night, the light from the stars shines down on each one of the mirrorleaves that make up the bushes and trees, each one twinkling and dazzling with the light of an entire sea of stars.
I want nothing more to get closer, to see the forest with my own eyes, feel it with my own hands, hear it with my own ears. But every time I get close, every time i try to venture outside and into the world beyond my window, it hurts. I try to walk through it, as carefully as I can, but thorns that others can see but I can't cut into me. I shatter fragile flowers into a thousand tiny jagged shards with a single clumsy footstep. And sometimes I catch my face in reflections in the glass, reflecting a twisted, malformed image of the self that exists in the mind's eye, all the imperfections and flaws cutting all the deeper for their concreteness. Each time I try to walk through the garden, each time I try to exist in that space, in that moment, I shatter beautiful things around me at every turn, without intending, without meaning, and hurt myself in turn.
And so, I flinch. I retreat. I walk away, back behind closed doors. Where I can't break anything else. Where I can't hurt anymore.
And I stay there.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've always been fascinated by the relationship visual novels have with space and time. Almost all of the ones I've played - from serious personal reflective pieces to light-hearted romances - contain within them multiple parallel worlds, different realities of the same story spiraling off in their own directions. Romance stories that contain within them a dozen universes where the main character dates each member of the cast, stories with countless detours and Bad Ends on the way to a True Conclusion...it's not unheard of in literature, but it's ubiquity within the VN space is striking. Even Umineko, the most notable VN I have played (some of) that does not have branching routes or choices, plays extensively in a field of alternate possibilities and routes in a way that assumes familiarity with forms and rhythms that simply isn't given outside the Visual Novel. Even setting aside my lingering university Grant Morrison Phase giving me Multiverse Brain Worms that only the media environment of 2022 could entirely rid me of, there's something entrancing about a work that contains multitudes of itself within it, rivers that break off and flow in altogether separate directions from a source they all draw from, answering the same questions in different ways.
And yet, even in games like Zero Time Dilemma that are absolutely lascivious in their interest in parallel worlds, rarely has this aspect of a visual novel truly affected me. The ways in which the different branches and routes do, certainly, but the act of choosing itself rarely strikes me in such a way. It's connective tissue, not a beating heart in and of itself.
This cannot be said for one night, hot springs, a game I played last year, and have attempted to write about multiple times, only to fail each and every time. A game where the use of these choices, the use of these other realities, and other possibilities, existing side-by-side, affected me more than I could have ever imagined.
Mechanically, one night is simple. You simply read the story of Haru, a trans woman, and her friends visiting the hot springs for a birthday party, dealing with the frictions and relationships that Haru confronts along the way. Through that story, you make little decisions that branch the narrative in different ways. Some choices will simply move the narrative along in a different direction, while other choices will make you lose one of three hearts on the top of your screen, and if you lose all three, you get a "bad" ending. Classic visual novel stuff. But how one night presents these choices, how it presents the consequences of getting a game over, and how I responded to both...it was...
it was more than i could take.
i thought i knew. i thought i knew what i was getting into. i had played another of npckc's games, tomato clinic, before this one, and it was mostly just, well, cute. that's not to say there was nothing there, it felt very true to the awkward role of educator average queer people are often forced to play for well-meaning but uninformed cishet people, but overwhelmingly what it did was make me smile and not much else. and y'know i was expecting the same thing here. i was expecting to smile, to have a nice time on my lunch break.
that didn't happen.
what happened instead was that this game hit me with incalculable force, all the stronger for how completely unexpected it was, it's deliberately small presentation cutting deep into in ways that left me genuinely shaken and deep in thought about who i am and why i act the way that i do.
that's a hyperbolic statement. and i expect, for many people, it won't ring true. but it did for me. and articulating why requires articulating...myself, somewhat.
full disclosure, i first played this about a year ago. and i've tried to write this review multiple times before. but I just found no way of doing so without talking explicitly about why it made me feel the ways that it did, what about it that caused it to hit so hard. excessive auto-biography is a bad habit i fell into far often when i was writing more regularly on letterboxd and i have tried to avoid that here, to not treat a work's relation to me as the beginning and end of its critique. i am simply not a very interesting person, and saying "i personally related to this work" for a piece of criticism doesn't make for compelling writing by default. i don't think i've always succeeded, but it is something i have tried to aspire beyond on backloggd. i just found that impossible for one night hot springs. and i still do. and yet, i still want to talk about this game, what i think it does and has to say, and if i have to talk about myself to do so, then that is what will have to happen.
so, apologies. this is One of Those.
i am a non-binary trans person. i am also autistic, described to me then as "asperger's syndrome", and was diagnosed at a young age because I was a particularly...noticeable case of it. in addition, i was also diagnosed at a relatively young age with social anxiety disorder, then described to me as "social phobia". autism manifests in myriad different ways for myriad different people, and what is true for one person will not ring true for others. one autistic person i knew in university was one of the most socially capable people i have ever known, effortlessly charming and quick-witted in a way i am not or never have been. i struggle immensely with tone, expressions, and conversational flow, of knowing when to say the right thing, or how to say it. i speak without full confidence that my meaning will be expressed, only having hope that it will land how i intend to, without hurting anyone around me, and if i do, i hope only that i can recognise it and make amends for it immediately. whether this creates or simply feeds into my social anxiety disorder i can't say for certain, but the way others will speak in ways in ways i don't entirely understand i will respond in ways that i less comprehend and more simply Hope are the way one is Supposed To Respond certainly does not help the fact that i approach most conversations with almost everyone in the world with a certain degree of nervousness, if not outright fear, whether it's hoping to make a good impression on someone new, or hoping i don't accidentally hurt the feelings of someone i care about, there's always a reason to feel nervous about the very simple act of interacting with another human being in the world. being non-binary doesn't help much either, as in the majority of situations that take place in areas where i am not able to make my pronouns clear up front, misgendering and misrecognition isn't so much a possibility as it is a certainty.
if you've interacted with me personally at all you almost certainly think of me as oblivious or distant, speaking clumsily, awkwardly, stand-offishly, or any combination of these or any other, for which I apologize, because even reaching this level of capability requires a level of effort on my behalf that often leaves me completely exhausted from even basic interactions. none of this means i don't enjoy being with others, for me, no interaction is natural or free-flowing, it's a panicked and practiced effort to keep my head above water with immense effort.
so, often? i will flinch. i will shudder. i will apologize - for any unintended slight, for my existence as a whole. out of fear, out of resignation, out of the crawling voice in the back of my skull that tells me that no one - no one - wants to be around me, ever - i will find ways to extricate myself or excuse myself from situations, sometimes from all things altogether. faced with friction, it is easier to simply relent, to stand aside, rather than to speak up, because my voice is coarse and harsh and i cannot stand the noise it makes as it crawls out of my throat.
time and time again, i have taken the path of least resistance, so, when i played one night hot springs...i did the same. when haru suffered the routine emotionless deadnaming that is the common result of interactions in the world, i instinctively picked the options that made her flinch, shudder, to take the path of least resistance, to allow herself to be walked over rather than assert herself. as i do each time i play through a vn like this for the first time, i picked the options that struck as natural, and each and every time, it led me down paths that ranged from self-humiliating to outwardly self-destructive, to erode away at Haru's confidence because i had none, until eventually she can't take any more, and retreats into herself mid-party, until she vanishes, leaving the concern of her friends in her wake.
this is my world. this is the world i have made for myself. this closed-off, tiny thing, where i slam shut every door i have to knock on out of fear of what i might find on the other side. playing this game forced me to confront things about myself that part of me might have thought were natural, or even noble, boldly self-sacrificing myself, excusing myself from the company of others for their own good. but really, it was just cowardice, in the face of a world that is difficult, that is challenging, that hurts and where, yes, you can cause hurt in turn. but there's nothing noble about hiding yourself away in a dark corner of a distant room, afraid to even speak. one night, hot springs, despite it's incredibly warm, soft visuals and gentle music, is absolutely uncompromising in what it revealed about the way i so often choose to live my life.
it's a depiction made all the more heartbreaking by the results of resisting my natural instincts, peering into the alternate worlds in this story, and seeing for myself the words i have left unsaid, the friends left unmade, the closed-off hearts that could have been opened, but remained sealed out of fear. there are some really warm, beautifully written scenes in one night, hot springs, and it's only by seeing every path, by walking down every door, by availing yourself of the power visual novels grant you to see every possibility in this single night at the hot springs in a way you never could in real life, can you see the full shape of these people and the feelings they have for one another. something is always left unsaid, unheard.
each time i leave my house, each time i meet with friends, each time i poke my head around to my roommates, each time i log on to this website or any other, i am haru, and her choices become my choices. to risk walking barefoot through a garden of glass for what i know to lie on the other side, or to remain behind it, and make of it an insurmountable wall that grows smaller and smaller as my world contracts more and more into that darkened corner in my room. but there is a wider world out there, full of people i want to see, full of potential great memories and warm moments. not every night at the hot springs will be good. there will always be opportunities i cannot take, things left unsaid, and things left unheard. but if i flinch and retreat every time i face difficulties, every time it seems like this might be a bad night at the hot springs, then i'll never have a good one. i'll never have that night where i make a new friend, reconnect with an old one, or tell someone how i really feel about them.
the cringey, melodramatic thing i wrote at the top of this review? that's the best picture i can paint about what it feels like to live behind my eyes, of trying as best as i can to communicate fully and completely with the people i love because i want to be with them and enjoy their company more than anything else in the world, but knowing that it will always be difficult, knowing that it requires constant, agonising effort. it's not the same as feeling that, every day. i do not think writing, or video games, are true empathy machines, despite assertions to the contrary rising in both gaming journalism and academic spaces in the past couple years. i don't think video games can make you feel what it is like to be trans, or autistic, or socially anxious. neither this review, nor one night, hot springs will make you feel like what it feels like to be me.
but do they have to? i don't think they do. i think all they have to do, in the sounds they make chiming with another, in how they look matching an image etched into your heart, in the words they speak, and how they feel to play, to produce some kind of image that resonates, some kind of emotion that resounds...to reach someone, anyone, and maybe even be reached in turn.
and it isn't easy. believe me, i know.
but when it works? when you reach out a metaphorical hand, and meet another? it is so, so worth it in the end.
there is no reason to believe npckc will ever read this. but, i'll knock on that door anyway, speak up anyway, just in case my words reach theirs.
Thank you for your game!
queen ashelia b'nargin dalmasca
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