Alan Wake is all about stories and creativity, but it struggles with language. Both games center around reality-warping meta-narratives which shed light on the author’s disorganized psyche, but an abstract conflict like this is difficult to portray either visually or interactively. The visual motif it uses to do so is probably the most simplistic and traditional one of all: darkness and light. Light of goodness, shadow of despair, it’s been in use for literally thousands of years, and for a nontraditional story like this, it at least works as a familiar foundation to ground understanding. The interactive language meanwhile is equally simple, but in a way that feels less purposeful.

A game about creativity, self-doubt, and the nature of reality is, for some reason, presented by way of a third-person shooter, with a dynamic difficulty system generous enough to preclude any sense of survival horror. These shooter mechanics exist mostly as a way to create a sense of pushback, rather than actually representing the conflict that drives the narrative. However, I do have to give it some credit, as it actually does come close to doing so with the design of its enemies. Most of them are faceless shades, which stand around in the midst of other identical, but harmless, shadowy figures. At the start of the game, you’ll find yourself waving your flashlight from spot to spot, hoping to find foes amongst the fakers, but that’s as far as the mechanics ever push you. If you use a healing item, you can be certain that within two item boxes, you’ll find a replacement, and if you used all your ammo, you’ll instantly find more. The interactive language it’s using is, again, incredibly simple, just meant to slow you down, not to have much actual relevance to the story.

But of course, that’s the reason why we’re here in the first place; it’s hard to portray a struggle against the self in a way that can be experienced from without. It’s what brings us back to the darkness-and-light motif, an idea general enough for an audience to reflexively understand, but this generality creates a feeling of hollowness in its message. With this theme being the core of its visual and narrative identity, the only language it had to convey the fulfillment of a character arc was in the shedding or embracing of inner darkness, which flattens the nuance of a mature plot into a finale that feels like a kid’s cartoon, telling you to just believe in yourself.

That’s what I mean when I say the game struggles with its language; its genuinely interesting plot and narrative themes are let down by the methods chosen to communicate them. This is the same way I felt while playing Alan Wake 1 and Control as well, like Remedy’s boundary-breaking impulses are forcibly being restrained by the need to speak in marketable terms. That’s, ironically, why I’ll just keep buying these games. I want them to know that they’ve proven themselves, that they’ve reached their audience. I’m here, I’m listening. I want them to confidently say what they have in mind, to finally speak without reservation.

I want to be clear that I’ve already lied to you by the time you’ve read this, because this game isn’t worthy of four stars. However, it is one of the most interesting and unusual games I’ve played in a long time, so I wanted to get the word out. If janky, mediocre PS1 games which fly off the rails are your thing, then go play it. Otherwise, I’ll just talk about its weirdness, spoiling things as I go.

So, the plot starts off in a Ghost-in-the-Shell cyber future, with your three protagonists entering the stage via the obligatory cyber helicopter. The first one you control is Hana, a slick super-spy who fits the mold of her time, essentially being Lara Croft by way of Motoko Kusanagi. Then, you have Glas, whose five o’ clock shadow and bright blue hoodie signify that he’s a hard-boiled detective undercover as a fifth grader. Finally, you have Deke, a potentially fake Australian who says “bloody” and “sheila” while wearing an unflattering turtleneck. The mission of this little mercenary band is to sneak into a yakuza hideout, and get information from their inside-man about the leader’s missing daughter. Sneak in, get the info, go out and find the girl, turn her in for a massive reward, easy. But of course, the job goes bad, the informant dies, the boss discovers what the mercs are up to, and they’re on the run. Now they have to get the girl as a bargaining chip for their own lives, and the race is on.

Please change the disc.

This game’s backgrounds are all pre-rendered videos, and it’s extremely central to this game’s identity. I may complain about how you have to juggle four discs to play a five hour game and laugh at the low resolution, but I can’t help but love how this game looks. I mean, it looks rough, but it’s the sheer commitment I respect. They didn’t want a rectangle with a circle on top as their helicopter; they created a fully-detailed model to be used in a pre-rendered video alongside other real-time effects. They wanted vents fogging up a rooftop with steam, not flat concrete walls. MGS-style head wiggling for talking wasn't good enough, they wanted animated faces with expressions and mouth flaps. They wanted an interactive animated feature within the limitations of the PlayStation, and that ambition really impresses me. I’ve played a ton of games which call back to this era, but they never replicate that ambitious attitude. They never capture the feeling of pushing the system to its breaking point, or of solving technical challenges with creativity. I mean, analog flaws are cool and all, but it feels like throwback games often miss the point by celebrating limitations for their own sake rather than for the creativity they engendered.

Please close the lid. Loading.

The second mission has you catching up to the missing girl, who’s in a town overrun by what seem to be zombies. She’s a little vague on the details, but she tells you that she “didn’t know that blood was the catalyst”. It’s a bit of a jump from the straight cyberpunk we started with, but sci-fi mixes with any genre pretty well, so it’s all good. She agrees to return to her father, as long as she gets to see a woman known as Madame Chen first, since she can explain things. But of course, Chen’s working with the yakuza, and the girl’s captured as soon as Glas brings her in the door. This third mission has you switching between characters in Madame Chen’s restaurant-slash-brothel: escaping capture as Glas, sneaking in as Hana, and kicking in the door as Deke.

This is an abrupt stop, but I’m about to drop a significant spoiler for the exact moment that shit flies off the rails. If this has piqued your interest at all, stop at the end of this sentence and go play it. This is the big reveal.

Ok, now change the disc again.

Glas and Deke are ambushed. They die, and their souls go to hell. The madame turns out to be a demon queen, and Hana kills her. Her blood melts a hole into the underworld. Hana descends the melted blood hell pit to go kill Satan.

That’s not an exaggeration. Not a joke. That’s what happens. You've spent the majority of the game as these two characters, and now they're bloody scraps. As hard of a tonal pivot as it is though, this is the exact moment where I totally fell in love with this clunky old game. With such an unsafe move, it achieved something that Resident Evil was never able to: the establishment of vulnerability when players are at their strongest. It’s a Predator-esque pivot where a lone action hero has to come to the realization they’re actually in a horror movie. You used to worry about normal soldiers shooting at you, and suddenly you’re facing demons with scythe hands. Maybe the zombies in the second chapter should have struck me more than they did, but I was expecting them to be explained away. I thought it would be revealed that the yakuza girl was genetically engineered to work with next-generation nanomachines or something, and that the nanobots in her blood were lethal to anyone else. I mean, the zombies in the games which inspired Fear Effect were the result of an engineered virus, and I don’t expect Jill Valentine to go kick Satan’s ass until RE10 at the earliest.

One last disc change.

That’s as far as I’ll spoil the plot, since I think it’s enough to convey why I have four-star love for this mediocre game. It’s just so wholeheartedly bold. Even to this day we get lazy rearrangements of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but Fear Effect showed how to use the format while fearlessly establishing its own identity way back in 2000. It fought every technical limitation, ignored standard practices, and did its own thing. Being just as good as the other games out there wasn’t the goal at all, it had to blow people away. It probably shocked you at least once just in this summary, and I didn’t even include some of the cooler things it does towards the very end. So, I’m fine with it having a shit inventory system. I’m fine with a broken lock-on. I’m fine with all the flaws, because, as cheesy as it is to say, this game was never trying to be good, it was trying to be awesome.

I’m going to spoil an early-game puzzle here, without giving you the solution. It’s a little paradox I want to present because it truly embodies La Mulana.

Strength lies at the foot of Futo.

This hint is in an early-game area themed around the history of a family of giants, with their statues dominating each screen you walk through. There are a series of tablets describing their defining characteristics, so you have to find all that information, write it down, and use it to determine who is represented with each carving. Then, there are a few hidden ways to interact with some of them, letting you discern a few which seem identical. If you’re meticulous in your note-taking and experimentation, you can determine the exact statue that represents Futo, walk right up to it, stand at its foot in search of strength, and find…

Nothing. You whip it, use every item you have, poke at everything on the screen… nothing happens. You actually need an item from much later in the game to follow up on this hint, despite your best efforts.

Except, that’s not true. You need to activate a mechanism in the prior area first, then the chest will appear, so if you’ve skipped it, you’ll need to go back.

Wait, that’s not it. It’s that you need to enter that screen from above through a false wall, then whip a normal-looking block at the top to break it, causing a chest to fall at Futo’s feet, which you can then open for your reward.

Actually, that’s wrong. You need to use a weight to activate an invisible mechanism at its feet. Turns out, every giant statue had one of those little invisible mechanisms, so instead of compiling notes and doing research, you could have just lucked out and hit the down button at some point while you were walking around like I did. So, I just went down the line placing a couple weights and got my reward. Zero thought required.

That experience is what it’s like to play La Mulana. You buy the game after hearing how much cleverness is required, how you have to take pages of notes, and how it’s obscure and gratifying. You start your little document, dutifully adding screenshots where necessary, and then find it mostly useless. It occasionally helps, but La Mulana is not a game about testing your intellect or ability to correlate information from different sources. It’s about running into every wall and being sure to whip it a couple times. It’s about killing every enemy on each screen at least once, just in case. It’s about pressing the down button on top of, and to the side of, any suspicious objects. The puzzles and tips are actually, for the most part, straightforward and direct. You can usually read a hint tablet, make a guess at the solution, and be right the first time. However, what you can’t guess is how to even interact with that solution, because it's lovingly crafted to be arbitrary.

That’s why I listed out all those false ideas. I bet if it’s been a long time since someone played La Mulana, they may have gone “ah, of course” at first, because each of those solutions are recurring tropes which apply to the majority of the puzzles across the game. It’s why, after dipping my toe in with a 20-hour guideless hintless expedition, I’m going to shelve it. For all the hype surrounding the confounding puzzles, it requires a shockingly low amount of logical problem solving. Instead, it requires perseverance, and I don’t find that to be a particularly engaging concept on its own. Video games are so comfortable to play that all it takes to persevere is deciding you want to, which means a design like this is forced to do whatever it can to disinterest the player in some capacity. It has to frustrate you, because if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a game here at all: the central conflict of the player against self wouldn’t exist. La Mulana isn’t bad because of it; it has to be this way.

So, I’m just gonna stop here. I might have continued if the game made me feel smart or skillful, but I don’t want to annoy myself for its own sake, which is what it would boil down to. That core of the experience is probably why my little group has made a ritual of coaxing people (like myself) into streaming it. You don’t get friends to stream normal puzzle games, and you don’t get them to stream simple platformers, but you get them to stream La Mulana. It’s funny to watch people get annoyed, and it gives cathartic schadenfreude to see them fall into traps the same way you did. That leaves your choices for enjoyment being completion of the entire game, laughing at someone, or just saying "fuggit" and doing something else, and personally, I think my chances of success are best with the last option.

I recently received a very kind comment, where someone said that they enjoyed my reviews in spite of the fact that I give all their favorite games two stars. That’s just an unfortunate side-effect of beating hundreds of games; the potential for a novel experience shrinks while the bar for excellence goes up. Also, I only write a review when I feel strongly about a game, which means it’s either something I love (rare for the aforementioned reasons) or something I’m particularly dissatisfied by. So, I hope no one takes it personally when I say that this game is slop.

I’m fine with remakes. In fact, I endlessly talk about how REmake might be my favorite game, and I even enjoyed the remake of 3, the one people don’t like. It has plenty of flaws, but at least I know why it exists. I can feel its thesis: it wanted to take a game designed to evoke Terminator, and cut down on all the parts which didn’t fit the explosive pacing. So, out goes the clock tower, in comes the rail gun. With this game though, I feel absolutely no thesis, since it doesn’t commit to either a new direction or general refinement. The main problem I had with the original was its pacing, with hours in the middle where there’s hardly any mechanical escalation. In the remake, this issue isn’t corrected, but doubled. Now you have asinine sidequests ranging from rat-stabbing to item fetching, randomly grinding the game to a screeching halt. The difficulty adjustment system from the original would elegantly tune supply levels for each area, and the new system tries to do it in the same way, but players can now craft ammo of any type at any time, trivializing challenges on demand. Knifing an enemy on the ground was perfectly simple, now it’s cluttered with contextual prompts. Even simply dodging an attack is cluttered, with a few scarce attacks requiring contextual dodges, which didn’t feel great in the original even when it was kept outside of core combat. People were ok with knife durability in RE2, so let’s just throw that in while we're at it, despite how the flow of combat was originally designed around its constant use. People didn’t like Ashley in the original, so let’s give her infinite health, making it beneficial when she gets hurt intercepting attacks. Let’s expand the treasure-combination system to the point where players have to futz with crafting every time they visit a merchant, because it’s a safe change we can sell as a new feature. The list goes on with complaints like how most encounters begin with enemies teleporting behind you, a hit-or-miss new script, and so on, but the point is that none of these changes are even in service of a greater goal. The core experience isn’t revolutionized even a tenth as much as the other modern remakes, it isn’t scarier or more action-packed, the mechanics are less elegant, and the problems were, at best, left untouched.

That’s why this game is just slop to me. It's a disinterested ladling of content onto the beige plastic lunchtray that is my psyche. It wasn’t created through passion, but to fulfill an obligation. Resident Evil remakes are safe investments, so Capcom felt obligated to rearrange a near-perfect formula, even without a creative vision for it. All it was intended to be is “more”, a version of Resident Evil 4 they could port to the next few generations of consoles for $70 instead of $20. Well, they certainly achieved THAT goal, but if their idea was truly to recreate the magic of Resident Evil 4, they didn’t even come close.

Whenever I write, I nurse self-hatred for my lack of emotional wonder. I just can’t get tied up in fiction anymore, which often makes my perspective on narrative entirely worthless. I’ll start on something new, and abruptly quit when I grimly realize that I haven’t empathized enough to make the critique worth reading. However, I can sometimes disguise my numbness by asserting that a story didn’t do enough to make me care, a statement which sounds wonderfully cogent while actually being entirely empty. It doesn’t really answer the question of why something may or may not be worth experiencing, it’s just a circumstantial punt, it’s the argumental equivalent of cutting the Gordian Knot. If Alexander wanted to be the ruler of all Asia, he had to find a way to untie it, but he simply cut it apart and said it was the same thing. A convenient trick to be sure, but destroying a question isn’t the same as answering it.

Despite having some flagrantly terrible views, DMX also had one quote which I spend a lot of time thinking about. "Sometimes people want to feel worse, they don't always want to feel better. However the fuck you want to feel, there should be a song that helps you feel that way… who the fuck wants to be happy all the time?". The popularity of difficult games, horror games, or even sad story-driven games proves the point to some degree, but each of those genres are associated with niche appeal. Maybe it speaks to the idea that people’s lives generally skew towards negative emotions, so mainstream media leans towards positivity in response. However, emotions don’t always fit nicely onto a negative-positive line, and the most profound moments in life almost never do. So, if your doctor recommended that you experience something existentially confusing for a well-rounded emotional diet, would you act on that?

Every night, I do a routine, in a neat loop around my house. I check my bathroom sink for drips, I check all the electronics in my office are off, I check my garage door is closed, I check the front door is locked, I check the stove is off, I check the dog’s fed, and I check the back door is locked. I choose to do all of that so I can sleep without worrying. However, I’ll do it twice, and that’s not something I would say I choose to do, necessarily. It’s a compulsion, something I’m emotionally pushed to do despite the fact that there’s no reason for it. I’m someone who’s proud to be logical, but I end every day with what’s essentially a ritual to ward off evil. My brain has a recurring argument against itself and loses.

What stood out to me about Marathon was that it wasn’t fun. Specifically, in how that un-fun quality felt intentional, as you fight through cramped, winding corridors with a tight ammo supply provided by a mad AI who deems you hardly worthy of the effort. Again, it feels like Marathon was reevaluating the rules of its genre before they had been firmly established in the first place, as if it was satirizing an event which had yet to happen. You don’t get thrilling arenas where you get to go nuts, you don't get a BFG, and you don’t get any boss fights. You certainly don’t get a story even as minimalistically gratifying as killing every demon on Mars. The question you have to grapple with as a player is how much that’s worth experientially, when you know the design intent of its unorthodoxy was only to set it apart from its contemporaries, and is only incidentally set apart from later games. I think that’s why the series exudes a certain mystery though, it feels equidistant from the past and future no matter when that happens to be.

There’s a celebrated episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation which really bothers me. It’s titled “Tapestry”, with Picard living the alternate life he would have led, had he been a more risk-averse person. He comes to rage against the path-not-taken and how his alternate self never lived up to his potential. I always thought that was an extremely unfair assessment though, since prime-Picard completely inhabited the shoes of alt-Picard, rather than viewing his life and perspective in totality. Maybe alt-Picard’s lifestyle was truly more fulfilling, with a career he genuinely enjoyed as a balanced part of his life, rather than being submerged in the all-consuming responsibility of captaining a starship. Maybe he would rage just as much against the prime timeline’s lifestyle, of commanding people to their deaths and perpetuating astro-political conflict. I think the message of the show should have been twofold, in that it’s easy to feel like the grass is greener on the other side, but when it isn’t, you should try to be holistically understanding of your alternate selves.

This review contains a minor spoiler for Marathon, specifically of a plot detail mentioned in an optional terminal near the start of the game, and heavily implied throughout the rest of it. That spoiler is how the main character is a battleroid, a cyborg created by enhancing a dead body. So, even in the earliest days of shooters, we had a perfect hero to satirize the genre: a corpse electronically commanded to propagate. If that’s the hero of this world, maybe it should have been left to rot the same way. For games this bleak, you’ll often hear “the best narrative choice is to not play the game”, but that’s a smug punt of the issue if you ask me. It’s sorta like saying that you should destroy the universe when you get hungry. Something’s gotta die for your biology to keep functioning, or you have to just accept your own death, but the ideal solution isn’t to erase the concept of life altogether.

Puzzle games are designed around balancing signal and noise, nudging players towards correct solutions while also obscuring them enough to provide satisfaction. That’s the reason why Portal increases the amount of white portal-able surfaces over time, it creates difficulty by flooding areas with possibilities while removing distinctiveness from areas relevant to a solution. The same concept applies to mysteries in general: butlers have killed enough nobles to where the choice of murderer goes without saying, but that’s also why they’re chosen as red herrings to obscure the truth. However, in either case, the difference between signal and noise is only revealed once a solution has been found, and in the case of a surreal mystery, there may not be an unambiguous solution at all. You reach a point where logic fails and you’re forced to arrive at a conclusion based on a feeling. That’s what's unique about the surreal, though. It gives you the intellectual freedom to find signal through noise, but only if you’re capable of doing the same on an emotional level.

Expressiveness is the quality that defines roleplaying games: they’re judged by how freely players can assert themselves in a reactive space. Players want to convey their personality and make choices, but while these are the obvious core concepts of the genre, Baldur’s Gate 3 has proven to me that they’re not what makes an RPG great. Having the capacity to make decisions is certainly a necessity, but decisions only matter when players care about the outcomes. Choices surround us in every moment of our lives, but most vanish from our minds within seconds for that very reason; they’re so emotionally inconsequential as to be hardly worthy of notice. So, more fundamental than allowing for choice is providing a real adventure in which to make those choices, and defining a journey which has players encountering challenges, learning, changing, and overcoming. This is the critical component which Baldur’s Gate fails to establish, most glaringly from its narrative structure.

(Minor spoilers through act 2)
In the opening cutscene, your character has a mindflayer tadpole inserted into their head, so your call to adventure is getting it out. This is fine in itself, but the game is quick to tell you that there’s no urgency to this task, relieving you of the burden of care. Every quest you receive to accomplish this goal, across the first ~22 hours of gameplay, results in failure where your party just sorta gives up. It takes another ten hours before the main villains are established, a stale group of evil zealots of evil gods who just love being evil, pursuing an agenda which players can't feel meaningfully aligned against. The simplicity of the central narrative gives the impression it’s just supposed to be a foundation for a character-driven story, but the interpersonal aspect is similarly lacking. In what feels like a symptom of the game's long stay in early-access, your companions put their love and trust in you in act 1, before anyone’s had the chance to organically develop relationships or encounter life-changing struggles. Characters don’t have the time and space to have an arc, and you don’t get the chance to express yourself alongside them, you simply skip to the end for an immediate and vacuous payoff. There’s no journey here, you’re simply being presented with scenes from an adventure without actually going on one.

The same can be said for the mechanics, even when they’re lifted from the tabletop game, thanks to a design philosophy where every playstyle is thoroughly accommodated. This seems like a good strategy in a genre where players want to assert themselves, but the refusal to challenge players leaves unique approaches feeling irrelevant. Even with a party led by a Githyanki barbarian, with very little in the way of charisma, intelligence, or skill, there was never a time I couldn’t overcome a situation in an optimal way. I could pick whatever locks I wanted, disarm whatever traps I wanted, circumvent any barrier I wanted; the game never asked me to think ahead or prepare. I didn’t have to be ready with certain spells or proficiencies, it never demanded more than following a clear path. Even if it did, the cheap respecs mean that you’re a maximum of 400 gold away from having a team perfectly suited to the task at hand, and even if you don’t end up using that option, knowing that your choices are so impermanent is a detriment to any feeling of growth.

That’s the key here: growth. My characters leveled up, but I don't feel like they grew. I traveled, but I don’t feel like I went on a journey. I made choices, but I don’t feel like I went in new directions. After a fifty-hour playthrough, all I remember was that I chilled out, ran around some nice maps, and managed my inventory. I spent all that time relaxing well enough, but I didn’t overcome challenge, feel much, or learn anything. All I could confidently state that the game did for me is live up to its basic selling point, of being an adventure I could take at home, a journey where I go nowhere.

Since this is a private blog only my closest friends can access, you already know of my grudge with Platinum games. Their mechanics are always good, but they also reliably have enough annoyances to outweigh the positives. For Bayonetta, the slow ranking screens, failure to even mention its coolest mechanics (more players have beaten the game than used dodge offset 20 times, according to Steam), and terrible story left me cold. Wonderful 101 has a lot of charm, but a ranked combat system relying on gestures which fail 5% of the time left me 100% annoyed, and so on. However, since Platinum was pretty much the only company working in the genre, I was told that the problem was with me. That this is just what action games are, and if I’m not the kind of person to decide on multiple playthroughs before I’ve finished my first, this genre isn’t a fit for me.

I really appreciate this game providing backup for Devil May Cry in showing how all those things I’ve heard for years were completely untrue. It’s totally possible to enjoy an action game on your first playthrough. It’s totally possible for an action game with a lot of options to explain them without feeling like a tutorial fest. Action games can have really enjoyable stories that enhance the experience, even if they “don’t matter”. They can appeal to casuals and S-rank chasers; this game just reinforces how the genre doesn’t need to be as niche as people think. The combat can be enjoyed even if you’re just light attacking and dodging, but you also have a lot of tools to dig into. The main campaign is organized to have a fairly standard pace with action mixed with platforming and downtime, but after you beat the game, you’re given multiple new game modes where you get straight to the action, and then ALSO a bunch of campaign challenges in case you want to test yourself that way instead. It just… does it right. Almost all the things that annoy me have been polished away.

Of course, I realize I’m yelling at a strawman here, but you have to realize that I’ve gazed too deeply into the bad-take abyss for the last 14 years since Bayonetta came out. The amount of comments I’ve received telling me that I was filtered by a game I already beat on the highest difficulty made me lose my good sense and write a terrible review where all I did was complain to no one with overly long sentences. And also, to be at least a little fair, this game does have flaws. I think the amount of platforming and searching is a bit excessive, especially near the middle of the game. For a game based around its music, most of its soundtrack is actually pretty forgettable, and the low budget is certainly felt with Devil May Cry 5’s OST blowing it out of the water. The lack of a 1-on-1 duel to a waltz beat is an insane missed opportunity that I have to assume they left for the sequel. It also shares one of my least favorite things from Platinum titles, where extremely key skills aren’t given by default, and left at the bottom of the shop menu. Why the directional parry is separate functionality from the normal parry is simply beyond me. There’s certainly room for improvement here, but I just can’t find the same energy to complain about them when everything else is so charming. It got me excited for the genre again. Honestly, that’s all I needed to say.

If you’ve followed the Amnesia series, a title like “The Bunker” probably inspired a lot of confidence. It’s simple. It calls back to the elegance of The Dark Descent, it’s not a tie into some ham-fisted game-spanning metaphor. Sure enough, this plays more like Descent than Pigs or Rebirth, centering on the horror natural to total darkness rather than being artificially constructed by a narrative. The pace is hands-off, with the single objective of escaping the titular bunker being given at the start, and the rest is up to you. Discover how to escape, come up with solutions, avoid the monster. This loose format is meant to tie into the game’s selling point of allowing for open-ended approaches. The Dark Descent had you solving puzzles to unlock new areas, but in The Bunker you might find a door and decide to smash it, blast it, or unlock it. Some options may attract the monster, but hey, you gotta escape somehow.

…and that “how” is by smashing, blasting, or unlocking. I know I already said that, but as much as The Bunker wants to create an air of immersive choice, your options boil down to these three things for every door in the game. There are literally no puzzles at all, only doors. Each area has its own twists on how it limits those three options, but this isn’t Prey where you have about eighteen choices for every obstacle; you’re using bricks, grenades, or keys. The interaction with the monster is similarly shallow, working identically to any other basic stealth-game enemy since time began: you can put down distraction items or throw something to make a noise. It results in the monster having no unique personality or identity, and it doesn’t foster the type of creativity the game begs for with its loading screens, which tell players that any solution they can imagine will probably work. With that being insisted upon multiple times every session, I really tried to do unique things, like set up time-delayed distractions in different areas or use physics objects to circumvent obstacles, but you just can’t do that. It’s too simple. That’s not always a bad thing for a horror game, but if immersive interaction was what we were supposed to get in exchange for a tightly designed atmosphere and an interesting narrative, then all we’ve done is go backwards.

I usually wait a few days before reviewing a game to let it settle in my mind and reach a more objective emotional distance, but this game has gotten me heated enough to where I had to capture it on paper. Specifically, it’s because this might be one of the worst designed games I’ve ever played.

Gnosia is a hybrid between a visual novel and a social deduction game, where you’re on a spaceship with 14 other people who may be sneaky aliens who want to kill everyone. A discussion happens each day, the humans decide who to put into cold sleep, the aliens decide who they want to kill, and the humans win when all the aliens are sleeping, or the aliens win when they’re at least 50% of the crew. It’s a well-tested design for a party game, but remember, this is a single-player experience. You’re playing against AI whose emotions you can’t read, and whose personalities only come out through a very small selection of dialog lines for each situation. Instead, the socializing that forms the core of the design is simulated by random skill checks: each AI character has a set of stats that are rolled whenever they tell lies, which are then rolled against perception stats. At the end of each round, you get XP to level up your own stats, and the game begins again. And again. And again. And again and again and again. To finish the game, it took me one-hundred and sixty-three rounds of playing the same game over… and over… and over again. The reason why is because you can only truly complete the game if you’ve seen all the character events, which randomly happen between nights depending on unspoken criteria like who’s alive, who has which roles, who trusts who, which events have happened previously, and so on. They’re usually just very short dialogues that give you new personal trivia, and don’t build into characterization you can use in the daily discussions.

So, let me recap the design of this game for you:
You’re playing an inherently social game against emotionless robots.
Your ability to deduce who’s lying is up to random chance.
Other characters believing you is random chance.
Being selected for cold sleep or elimination is random chance, which can prevent you from finishing events.
Events are based on criteria you’re never told of, and appear by random chance. Luckily, they’re only rarely affected by winning or losing, so your gameplay performance is of no consequence.
If you engage with the game by piping up and influencing discussion, you may be told your excessive talking is suspicious, and sent into cold sleep despite being correct. This is due to random chance.
If you stay quiet to avoid the aforementioned suspicion, it may be seen as, in itself, suspicious. This can happen by random chance.

It’s utterly baffling. This game should have choices and deduction, but every mechanic is oriented in a way that takes agency away from the player. You can’t participate in discussions until you’ve grinded stats, and even then, it's up to chance. You can’t choose a character who you want to learn about. You can’t decide how the story goes. It’s all random. The game just happens in front of you as you sit there powerlessly. I re-bound my controller to mash the A button so I could blast through the entirely irrelevant gameplay, which made me finish it 5 hours faster than the average completion time. That may seem like a weird thing to bring up for a visual novel, but again, there’s no story progression or development in the discussions which take up 95% of your time. If you put all the story moments together, they would probably be less than an hour in total, for a game which takes at least twelve hours to beat. If I had to give one begrudging compliment, it’s that some characters can be likable in their events, but when in the next iteration they may hate you because of random chance, I just can’t feel a kinship or build a relationship with them. It’s all so pointless. Even in a game as bad as Heavy Rain, I could at least tell what the point was, why someone would play it and what they were supposed to get out of it. Not with this one. I don’t even know how to conclude this review. The game has no thesis and no point and neither do I. I just hate it.

Action games generally operate on the concept of player empowerment, granting the tools to overcome any challenge without a scratch, as long as players have the skill to realize that potential. Meanwhile, horror games operate on the concept of player disempowerment, giving the bare minimum in order to foster a tense atmosphere, so balancing the priorities of each genre seems like mixing oil and water. Resident Evil games are famous for trying to do so, but they usually break into a horror-centric first half and an action-centric back half, without a true blending of the concepts. The Evil Within meanwhile actually managed it, but had to alienate players in some key ways in order to do so. Firstly, the logic behind the story is nearly impossible to follow at first, leaving players unable to find their footing, confused at why the progression is so jumpy and unfocused. Then, the mechanical restrictions feel like they’re equally arbitrary: Sebastian can only initially carry about twelve bullets, and not even a full healthbar’s worth of recovery. He can barely run at all, and in order to alleviate any of this, you may have to bank up green gel over the course of multiple chapters. It can seem like the game is simply trying to make action feel scary by stressing out players with cheap deaths, but once you commit to learning the game, a brilliant method behind the madness reveals itself. While the story is mostly nonsense, the abstract nature of it allows for level design suited to a wide variety of challenges. With new mechanics being introduced at a steady pace, players are constantly kept on the backfoot, and thus disempowered, even as their growing mechanical knowledge empowers them. The shallow capacity for supplies is an obvious form of disempowerment which prompts players to spend resources cleverly, but their abundance between each fight empowers players to use their entire toolkit freely. The upgrade system empowers; the below-par baselines make unupgraded stats more of a problem in the face of scaling challenge. For every give, there’s a take, and thus, a harmony between action and horror is reached. As stated before though, the “take” for that brilliance is a frontloaded sense of disempowerment, with players having to get through most of the game before they’ve experienced enough character growth and skill development to redress the balance. So, I really can’t blame anyone for bouncing off of this game, but I also truly believe that as of today (less than a week away from RE4 remake), it’s the best merging of action and horror in gaming. Resident Evil 4 is pure satisfying action, Dead Space commits to bloody horror, but The Evil Within is purely… both.

It was two hours into this game when I fired my first bullet, directed at the first boss. Considering how most horror leans towards loud action instead of quiet dread, I was initially impressed, but it slowly dawned on me how terrible the implications truly were. The gameplay of survival horror is about managing resources: you weigh the convenience of a neutralized threat against the danger of an empty magazine, and consider alternatives like taking damage to run past, or circumnavigating the threat in other ways. In my entire playthrough, I only killed a single common enemy, as it blocked a narrow hallway with no alternative routes. So, that avenue of decision making, and thusly, gameplay, didn’t exist for me. I could walk into any room, and if enemies were laid out in a troublesome way, I could walk out and back in until they loaded into spots which presented no challenge. It seems like a cheesy strategy, but the game provided a survival-horror framework which is meant to focus on intelligent usage of resources. So, bypassing every room without challenge isn’t a decision that I made to go against the design, it’s the opposite: it’s the default optimal choice within the framework. With no pressure to make new decisions, there was no engagement. Verbalizing that perspective helped explain my boredom with Signalis’ gameplay, but it also explained my complete lack of interest in the presentation. Did they make save points throw up a screaming red screen because it was atmospheric, or because it’s what Silent Hill did? Did they make the soundtrack a cacophonous industrial grind because it fit the setting, or because it’s what Akira Yamaoka did? Was the idea to make bold new decisions, or go with the framework? Genre-defining fundamentals like fixed camera angles are one thing, but title-defining personality is another, and much of what’s meant to make this game unique is taken from genre templates. To be fair, it does have some original ideas and nuances to its presentation, but if the way you find that uniqueness is by locating keys to open doors to find boxes which contain keys to open doors with boxes with keys, it just isn’t worth it. You’re mindlessly stepping through the patterns of a game which defined too much of its personality by following patterns.

A while back, I was invited to visit some friends near our old college. While the chat was nice, I had mostly been looking forward to walking around campus again, seeing what had changed and sort of... exorcising the spirit of it from myself. Those were the worst four years of my life, and I was hoping that by revisiting it after years of cooling off, I could make up with that little chapter in history. Problem was, when I got there, it was just grass and buildings. I didn't get to comfort my younger self as I stressed out, I just saw the Computer Science building. I saw a lawn. It was surreal to watch students walk by as their life-chapter unfolded in a way I was failing to do for myself. I didn't realize I was falling into the same trap here. It originally took me about seven tries to beat this game because I was so scared, and now I feel nothing. I'm the same, but different. The place is the same, but different. I couldn't tell you if it's better or worse, it's just the same. But not the same you might wish it was.

For someone who loves their Castlevania and Resident Evil, I’m weirdly skeptical of franchises. I’m attracted to games which have a unique flair or an idea that hasn’t been explored elsewhere, so when I see people asking for a third or fourth iteration on something, my reflex is to roll my eyes a bit. The first thought that pops into my head is how they should be hoping for the sort of originality that got them excited in the first place, but that really is an unfair perspective for a variety of reasons. While I can praise Resident Evil’s boldness in reinventing itself, my favorite entry is a remake, and the best classic-vania is the eighth one. Castlevania is a particularly good counterpoint to my insufferable attitude, since I perfectly enjoy the first game and would hardly change anything about it, but it was the years of iteration on the series that made Rondo of Blood such an artistic triumph. It proves that something that’s good could always be refined a little more, and refinement is a quality that’s impossible to fake. A similar, unfakeable quality that you get with a franchise is that of history, which is harder to describe, but it’s one that Yakuza fans deeply understand. The first time you play Yakuza, you run around Kamurocho without thinking too much about it, but a few games later it’s hard to turn down an alleyway and not remember a pivotal moment that happened nearby. A developer can throw a novel’s worth of backstory at you, but personal attachment won’t exist without actual time and investment. It’s both of these qualities that I think make Mega Man Zero 3 such a unique experience, being the result of refinement across roughly twenty games. The platforming and combat are as good as a platformer could ever have, and I can’t even think of any critiques. Analytically, I find the mechanics to be a perfectly smooth wall, so rock solid that I have nothing to grip on and have hardly anything to say. The history aspect has been more on my mind, with its bleakness contrasting so much from where the story began. Mega Man was a series about an innocent robot boy fighting a cartoon Albert Einstein, and by Zero 3, you have a devastated planet, torn apart by global warfare and factions desperately trying to survive with limited resources. Doctor Light used to seem like jolly old Saint Nick, but by the time of this game, you could make an argument that going back in time and killing him before he could make any robots would be the best conclusion to the franchise. If the Zero series had been its own original thing, I don’t think my imagination would have been sparked in the same way, if at all. Without the slow development across the main games and the X series, it would probably feel like a fairly standard post-apocalyptic sci-fi experience, but by being a natural growth of almost 20 years of development, it held weight with me in a way most other games don’t. So, a game like Zero 3 simply couldn’t exist without a Zero 2, a Zero 1, an X5, an X4, an X3, and so on. Through repetition, something totally unique emerged, the same way it did for Resident Evil 4 or Symphony of the Night. While I wouldn’t say Zero 3 quite lives up to those monumental games… it actually comes pretty close.

DeAndre Cortez Way’s 2009 critique of Braid is well known for how it pioneered games analysis on Youtube, but it’s even more famous for its assertion that the game lacked central purpose. While entertainment is generally associated with some degree of pointlessness, there’s also expected to be some degree of enrichment, whether that be through the merit of competition, mastering challenge, or constructive escapism. If the audience is left without a lasting impression, the experience may as well have never happened, so it’s important for games to construct purposefulness, regardless of how artificial it is.

I started reevaluating this concept when Roll called me up as I exited a dungeon, mentioning that I must be getting hungry, and that I could have a slice of the apricot pie she baked as soon as I got back to the ship. The line is completely pointless. The subject never comes up again, it doesn’t build into any new characterization, and the game would be functionally identical without it, but even so, they went to the trouble of writing and recording a voice line for it. Similarly, while Roll is established as your mechanic, she’s not the person who saves your game and heals you, it’s a small robotic monkey that constantly does The Monkey like Johnny Bravo, and I can’t fathom why. That is to say, I can’t fathom why it’s constantly dancing and I also can’t fathom why it was included in the game at all, but there it is. The more I looked for it, the more I noticed how Legends is completely saturated with pointlessness, including its plot. The stakes are incredibly low, you’re simply trying to find a treasure before the Bonne Family Pirates do, but they’re such a loving family of good-natured criminals that you wouldn’t mind them winning. In multiple cutscenes, MegaMan seems like he wants to communicate to the Bonnes that there’s no real reason to fight, but they keep doing it because they love it. Details like these give the game a totally unique atmosphere of joyous pointlessness, like the developers themselves were building the game in ways that made them laugh, regardless of how much sense their design actually made. The game feels like a celebration of doing things entirely for their own sake, and not getting too caught up in finding a grand purpose. I wouldn’t exactly call it The Myth of Sisyphus for kids or anything, but at the very least it’s a perfect example of how pleasant it can be that there ain’t no point to the game.

I’m only on Backloggd occasionally, so I’m uncertain if the mood has shifted away from calm personal essays that don’t focus too much on the game, but heads up, that’s what this one is. You can relax that tension you’re holding in your shoulders.

I’m between jobs right now, in a manner of speaking. My last day of the job I’ve had for the last six years is this Friday, and my next one starts Tuesday. After a few months of interviewing, I thought this would be a triumphant moment, but honestly, I don’t know what to feel. The people here took a chance on a green-as-grass college grad like me and taught me everything I know, so it doesn’t feel great to leave them behind. On the other hand, I feel like I don’t have a choice, with how the market demands you keep up with skills, and how this office’s days seem somewhat numbered. The new role seems nice and all, but there are some pretty loud whispers that things might get hard for everyone soon, and if that happens, being the newest hire isn’t an enviable position. So, I’m in a weird overlap where I have a firm direction, but I don’t know where I’m actually going, or what any of this is leading to.

That’s something that the protagonist of Titan Chaser and I have in common, I think. You might guess that a game about a freshly-hired colossus wrangler would center on action, but instead, the main focus is on their similarly uncertain internal monologue. They wonder about what’s happening back in the city, what their parents are up to, whether this job should be pursued as a career, all the mundane anxieties one would expect to have in real life, just juxtaposed against the backdrop of safely guiding a giant wyvern down the road with an old car. There’s an obvious absurdity to it, like, how could they be thinking about their apartment arrangement when a dragon is just ten meters overhead? Instead, our protagonist simply gets the job done, while learning (and loving) the car’s functional quirks and musing about the future. It makes them come off as a bit distant at first, but it’s a perspective that has a subtle beauty to it. The car is a little wonky, but that can be appreciated, it’s simply a feature of its nature. The dragon doesn’t need to be worried about if the right process is followed, nature will simply run its course. So, the unusual calmness doesn’t signify detachment, but rather, a presence of understanding. After all, there’s no sense in breathlessly trying to get out of a car all in one motion, you turn off the engine, engage the brake, open the door, get out, and close it. You can’t lead a wyvern home by standing miles away and screaming, you gently guide it point by point. The final step that the protagonist and I need to accept is how you can’t take on the burdens of a lifetime all in one day. You may feel like there’s a dragon overhead, but really… that's ok!

Also, this game was recommended by the lovely Lily, who I hope y'all are already following by this point. Thanks for another good tip!