this game got me like:

FEAR!
FEAR GOD AND BRING GLORY TO HIM,
FOR THE HOUR OF HIS
JUDGEMENT HAS COME TO YOU
NOW!
WHEN THE THOUSAND YEARS HAVE EXPIRED, SATAN WILL BE RELEASED!
JUDGEMENT.
HAS COME.
TO YOU.

One of the most uniquely surreal games I've ever played, Garage feels kind of like a nightmarish cross between Animal Crossing and Eraserhead where instead of colorful, welcoming pastoral towns populated by friendly animal people you get a pre-rendered industrial hellscape of steel, shadows, and commodified and passionless sexuality where everybody looks like robot versions of the Eraserhead baby and the Lady in the Radiator and who are just going through the motions in this dying world. I liken the game to Animal Crossing because fishing is a major component of the game, you need to fish for frogs to accrue money to survive as your fuel bar and your ego bar, your own sense of self, is dwindling away and need to be replenished. Like Animal Crossing after it, you will also become to grow accustomed to Garage’s grotesque community and setting, what initially starts off bewildering and alien eventually becomes almost familiar.

The crux of the game aside from fishing to obtain upgrades for yourself to let you fish more lucrative frogs and expand your lifebars is to find out who you are and uncover the secrets of this strange world. Your movement is mainly limited to tracks around the areas which really adds to the nightmarish industrial atmosphere the game has. It can be kind of disorienting at first making your way around because the tracks be can rather maze-like but you get used to it and one the of QoL additions in the remaster is a map to help you around. Most of the main progression involves exploring, talking to people, and solving puzzles. For the most part this is all surprisingly straightforward for a 90’s PC adventure game as characters will tend to give you hints on where to go and the puzzles aren't moon logicy at all. Unfortunately, the game really starts to drag towards the end though as it becomes actually kind of obtuse and it gets padded out by having to fish for this one frog three times in a row for no reason.

Regardless Garage is an experience that I won’t soon forget and it’s fantastic that such a unique work in the medium is finally available to the rest of the world officially after spending two decades in obscurity even in its own home country of Japan. Definitely check it out if you’re interested.

This is your brain on capitalism.

GARAGE is the kind of experience that'll stick with me forever. An immersive, overwhelming, one-of-a-kind world full of suffering, charm, grit, and love. At its simplest, it's a game about a stranger in a small town full of quirky characters not unlike Twin Peaks, but with your only mission being to escape. The layers which reflect capitalism, industrialization, misogyny, and the body, all come after. It's got a pretty heavy third act with thoughtful and harrowing emotional and psychological threads, all tangled up like pipes and wires - no matter which ending you land on.

I can totally picture myself wanting to recommend this to people, but ultimately I kinda think I can't - just because of how totally obtuse, cryptic, and kind of impossible it is to play without the assistance of the very welcoming discord community.

Great game for me. But I dunno who else it's for.

I cannot forget what I've seen and experience in this game. It's world is a bizarre, genuinely likable yet dim and grotesque one, full of bizarre metaphors for capitalism, sex, and identity.

Everything had me scratching my head, and maybe there is no particular meaning, but there were many philosophical thoughts that this game threw around at me through both words and atmosphere. Despite its overall darkness, the game can be very funny, and very charming.

The sheer uniqueness and timelessness of this game cannot be stressed, and I've truly never experienced anything like it. Now with modern ports and a proper English translation, I urge you to try this game if even slightly interested.

I thought I had my expectations in check but wow this was disappointing, such a downgrade from RE2 on every level. I knew going in that fans of the original disliked a lot of the changes here, and I can confirm that this game doesn’t care much about being faithful to the original. I’m fine with that, but the content that got replaced is so much better than what’s here. There were multiple moments here that were obnoxious bc of what felt like huge design oversights. The game looks and sounds great for sure, but it runs out of steam so fast. It’s even shorter than the original RE3 on a first playthrough which is insane, and there were still parts I wish were cut. Level design is my biggest issue here bc they clearly didn’t know when to calm tf down with enemy placement, it’s impossible to avoid so many of these guys so you end up just shooting everyone you run into and it’s so much less engaging than before. There’s also a few level specific mechanics that just do not feel well thought out at all. Boss fights are a notable sour point here, there aren’t many but they’re just damage sponges and are more irritating than challenging. Nemesis is not threatening whatsoever and his chase scenes are really lame even when compared to the original. This game fails as a follow-up to the RE2 remake and it’s even worse as a remake of the original game.