Reeeeally? Was "War is... Le bad!!!" really passed off as riveting political commentary back in 2012? Did FPS Dudebro gamers really need "Here comes the airplane!" levels of spoonfeeding through the most mid, scripted, generic ass gray military cover shooter on this side of Gears of War with execution animations that feel right out of a rekt thread to even consider pondering the fact that just maybe the U.S military does plenty of fucked up shit to soldiers and civillians alike to the point of creating their own enemies?

Don't answer that actually, of course they do. Maybe the United Emirates had a point for banning this game over there, cause frankly they ain't missing out on much. Hard to criticise power fantasies when you're being one through and through.

"I wonder whether knowing the truth would have helped me overcome the grief or not. Maybe if I'd known, I wouldn't be forced to live the life I do now."

Beautiful. Amazing. So glad I managed to finish this before closing out the year, the Kyle Hyde duology is a must play during December. Didn't manage to play a chapter a day to go with the chronological events but it's still a dazzling atmosphere nontheless.

There's always a melancholy associated with the end of the year for some. You think about what you've done all year round and what you failed to do, you try to put a smile to your friends and family at get togethers while hoping the future won't weigh you down as much as your past has, and that's pretty much the main theme which both of Kyle's games work with.

Aside from the great quality of life additions (I love how this game has a novelized version of itself to read along with the backlog in case you're a dumbass like me and forget what you're supposed to do every 10 seconds), you can really tell that this is an expanded version of Hotel Dusk. This time being a lot more personal given it's about Kyle's father and him trying to have closure with the ghosts of his pasts that have been literally living under his roof.

While some might feel it's contrived that for the second time in his life, every single character in this game is directly tied with each other's past to help Kyle out in the mystery, there's a sence of mundanity to it all that makes you realize that truth is stranger than fiction. We're all sulking about the past in one way or another, having a larger, unsolved problem in our lives that we tend to put on the backburner indefinitely because we need to function in our day to day, distracting ourselves with either work, our social life or even with lesser problems, there are things we can't process and make peace with because all in all, we're just trying to get through the day.

While the anticlimax in Hotel Dusk works because you can't expect all the character's life problems be solved in just a single meeting, there is a feeling that everyone can and hopes to move on from what happened which feels even more powerful here given what we know about Kyle, while being bitter in his own way, he still unconsciously finds himself helping tenants he barely exchanged a word with off of sheer circumstance, but also because he knows no one else will do it.

R.I.P Cing. You went out too early but you shone with the brightest of supernovas. Hopefully the Another Code duology sells well enough for us to see a remake for these games too. Happy New Year, folks.

"There are so many people around the world forced to keep burdens on their own. And one thing's for sure: I'm one of them."

A lot weaker than I remember it being when I played it in my teenage years. I feel like the game's themes and atmosphere are pretty counter intuitive to the minigames Mr Smiley gives you. I should feel isolated, dreading the sound of the clock ticking, anxiously waiting for the next letter to deliver me more bad news. Instead I'm like "Shit, the snake hit the wall again. One more try and I'll read the letters."

In a way the pandemic years and the author's suicide might have made the game a lot more heavy and true to life than it planned to be on release, I'll leave that up to you if that makes the game age better or worse.
Also the cell door looks like amogus.

I'm sorry, am I meant to be angry? Am I supposed to be mad that this game sucks ass? It is genuinely hilarious how bad every aspect of this game is. I can't help but laugh anytime I imagine someone who unironically thought Zero Time Dilemma was the best visual novel ever made back in 2012, waiting day after day that the sequel to your favorite series (which might I add only continued due to fan support) strikes lightning in a bottle twice, and when it finally does, you get this shit. How can I be mad? This is hilarious!

Zero Time Dilemma is the Shenmue 3 of Visual Novels, the Hunt Down The Freeman of mystery stories, and the fact that this was well recieved upon release only fuels my conviction that Uchikoshi is a hack with Naoki Urasawa Syndrome and can only write the same mystery story every time no matter how many stories he makes. The schadenfreude I get from shit talking this game is unparalleled, there's really no point in trying to make a coherent train of thought for ZTD but since it's so bad it warps itself into being funny, I think there are a few noteworthy thinks that make it an enjoyable experience compared to Virtue's Last Reward for me despite my score.

- The model quality is a surprising step up from VLR but jesus the animations on these are hilariously awful, Eric is always laughing no matter the occasion, the lip flaps aren't even close to matching on either language and everyone moves like puppets on a string, it makes Sonic Adventure 2's cutscenes look professional.
- What I tend to like the most about visual novels is how you can read the story at your own pace, be it a speedreader or an overanalyser, everyone can process the story at different intervals that make them comfortable with the experience. Throwing that out the window is a daringly bold move if you don't consider that they were trying to rip off telltale games's approach to gameplay with cutscene work that only rivals Yandere Simulator
- The escape rooms are pretty much the only thing that is consistent with the rest of the series to compensate for the neutered returning characters, but the flowchart is probably the worst one of out all, not only is it needlessly long, but the disordered nature of it's structure means you'll be clicking aimlessly through out of order events which feel like extremely inconsequential stepping stones until you reach that wet fart of an ending.
- It is clear that Uchikoshi wrote himself into a corner since VTL, and though I can feel pity on him, Zero escape is nowhere near the top 5 most convoluted and complex video game narratives, let alone for visual novels, so he only has himself to blame for making this jenga tower of a plot structure and failing to stick the landing.
- Multiverse theory is a load of horseshit and did irreperable damage to science fiction.

Suda Is so crazzzzzy! Love him!!!

I don't know, I got up to Digital Man before throwing in the towel on this one. I usually make a habit of not reviewing games I abandon but I feel like I have to make sense on what I played somewhere because it wasn't exactly a short amount of time.

The only aspects 25th ward has over the silver case would be the visuals and the music, but aesthetics and vibes alone can't really carry what essentially feels like a retread of the first one without really adding a new spin to it.

While I'm glad the gameplay was toned down because it was easily the most mind numblingly dreadful aspect of TSC, 25th Ward would benefit significantly from being a phone game where it not for having even more obnoxious puzzles than Flower Sun and Rain. At least in FSR you could tell the game was taking the piss on itself so checking manuals and doing basic math didn't feel too tedious thanks to the writing, but I would be damned if I wouldn't prefer a fade to black over doing that w.c keyhole puzzle shit twice or any walking section of this game for that matter. The nail has been hammered in the prequels and any more strikes feel like you're just trying to crack the wall.

This is something I could stomach if the dialogue, characters or lore were remotely engaging, but whe word salad and innocuous interactions of the cast feel like a chore to read due to being a tiresome recreation of what was already on TSC, and without the big threat of Kamui on the horizon which neatly connected all the chapters like we had on Transmitter and Placebo, everything feels so distant from each other that even when returning faces show up, the stilted dialogue that should explain the titular 25th ward reads like a shallow "The autoritharian government is bad and killing is human nature!" to which again, been there, done that.

I'm glad that it exists and it's not lost media for flip phones. If anything it shows the potential in mobile storytelling while we are getting shit like honkai star rail and FGO clones thriving on the market but I can't exactly say this is approachable even as someone who enjoyed the first Silver Case, so the effort of making a physical copy and a collector's edition makes me wonder if it will suffer the same fate eventually.

I don't doubt it gets better eventually later on but knowing about the whole 100 endings thing and how it pokes fun at shallow, inconsequential choices in Visual Novels, making a "Is this what you wanted?" message at the end of your remake feels incredibly tone deaf because as I stated earlier: No. I really don't care about this game's choices given how most of the times they feel like padding, so it being a kinetic novel with no choices would have done wonders for you, Suda."