Well I've been a fisherman all my life, I love fish, that's why I like to hook'em.

Imagine yourself at your local fishing spot outside Castlevania in your tricked out motorboat that is painted your favorite color with perhaps flame decals attached, you're minding your own business drinking your green tea, then suddenly it happens. Your rod jerks forward, and Terry Bogard leaps from the water and into your boat yelling "BITE"! Then together you both scream "FISH" as you furiously begin reeling in as the big one fidgets your line left right and all about. With great anger and vigor you try to keep a hold of your rod while maintaining your composure to reel in at the correct time, and Terry begins backseat fishing as he casually informs you to "turn the rod right" and "lower the rod". You continue your fight, the microseconds feel like seconds, the seconds feel like minutes, and as the line approaches your boat....

"TIME'S UP"

Terry gets out his megaphone and bellows into your ear "C'MON C'MON TRY IT AGAIN!!!" as you smack that start button and await for reality to resume your battle with the big one, the line makes it's way to you. The frame rate even can't contain itself from all of the excitement, and out leaps straight into your hand....

The smallest bass you ever did see.

"Nooooo! Smawl one..."

Disappointed, you put the bass back in the water as Terry pouts about all the wasted energy and time. The hell you doin' in my boat Terry?! Get outta here!

Sega's ability to inject an unhealthy dose of fun into any game they touch will never be matched. The undisputed masters of bringing overwhelming positive energy to unsuspecting gamers everywhere. I want this kind of fun present in all of my sports and random assortment of tabletop games. BIRDIE! HOME RUN! CHECKMATE! TOUCHDOWN! YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP! Hell yeah, we playin' a sports game and you're gonna have fun goddammit!

I have this propensity to never play games a second time, even the ones I love. It serves me well more often than not, because I greatly value backlog exploration and sheer variety over mechanical or scholarly mastery of any specific title. Where it bites me in the wahooey, however, is in largely skill-oriented titles like character action games, ones that demand keen attentiveness and willingness to retain and juggle knowledge of systems macro and micro. For as much as I love these games for their absolutely unbridled pomp and the hot-blooded verve that courses thru em - I know I’m not going to get the most out of them, I just don’t have that kind of attention. Bayonetta 1 is astoundingly good, but it’s a game I essentially Bronze Trophied my way through, and only watched .webms of people going sicko online for. I only knew what dodge offset WAS when I hit the last level, when it was too late for me 😔.
Bayorigins: Wily Beast and Weakest Creature is just a nice little scrimblo that forces a more steady pace with its longer runtime and focus on action adventure & metroidvania-lite elements. There is a more sensical focus on the storytelling here than in the mainline entries, exemplified through its presentation style of a children’s picturebook narrated by a granny. It’s all just nice, the visual direction is utterly astounding, and is the most blown away I’ve been by sheer artistry in a videogame in a very long time, the shader programmers were spinning in their chairs like the tasmanian devil on this one. With the combat being a touch more of a tertiary focus on the title than the rest, it allows itself time to slowly blossom through the course of the runtime with a steadily increasing amount of abilities, roadblocks and enemy gimmicks - and while there are no post-battle ranking screens to have Stone trophies nip at my heels, it felt immensely satisfying to sense myself mastering it under a more forgiving piecemeal delivery. It’s actually a little impressive how intuitive this control scheme becomes after an awkward starting period; forcing the player to control two separate characters by splitting the controller inputs down the middle. With its smart application within certain story beats, I became more than sold on the way this plays, kinda love it. For all these reasons, it's my favourite Bayonetta game. This is the warmest I’ve felt for a Platinum title since Wonderful 101, and while it doesn’t reach the same heights, it’s a miraculously good little spinoff to patch over my confidence in the studio that Bayo3 had dented.

Subway Surfing in the City of Glass.

The OG Mirror’s Edge is a bit of a darling to me - this laser-focused parkour action thrilla that limits it’s scope to densely choreographed sequences through rich, hyper-real urb environments. There’s a weightines to Faith’s movement, allowing the player to feel a sense of inertia to the stunts you string together, putting stones in your gut whenever your unbroken momentum ends in freefall. It’s so lean it’s so Mean.

Ultimately I put off playing Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst for yearz because I knew what they did to it. I knew it was an open world game, a sprawling map peppered with waypoints and collectables and challenges and skill trees and XP and shit. This Human Revolutionification of a game I originally adored because it sidestepped that stuff. With a few concessions (I skipped every cutscene and ignored everything that wasn’t a story mission), I was finally able to get over myself and just give the game a shot, and I’m happy 2 share that I think ME:C is Alright!!! It’s OK!

The shift in focus is almost immediately striking as the art direction of Catalyst shifts from heavily stylised minimal realism, to this catastrophic directionless mush of overexposed modernism. It's like every expensive yacht in the world crashed into one another to form a continent. It’s kind of pretty but it really doesn’t inspire awe in me in the same way as the OG… A lens flare fried calamity of white pointy buildings with an accent colour thrown in for good measure. Whenever I replay Mirror’s Edge, I gawk at the level of attention poured into the texture, staging and lighting work - and I just couldn’t find anything to care about here.

The reason for this visual mulch is, of course, gameplay clutter as a result of moving towards an open world. The environment design is stretched thin by taking a very blunt modular approach as a result of attempting to pad out the vast expanses of rooftop between quest markers. The City of Glass is slavishly built for Faith and her moveset, every canopy littered with pipes and platforms and grappling points with the intent to allow the player to maintain an unbroken sprint across vast expanses. I can’t help but prefer the simplicity and muted realism of the prior game’s world, one that felt almost hostile to the existence of the Runners, which necessitated a more thoughtful approach to the moment-to-moment - scanning the environment for ways to use your moveset to reach places you shouldn’t. Catalyst’s city is Faith’s playground - but who can deny the simple joys of swingin on da jungle gym.

I’m not going to shit on the game a whole lot - the core intent is very different, focused on player retention through endless sidemissions and jiggies, but it’s pretty great when you meet it halfway. Brushing aside the fluff content and focusing on the story missions allows something of a rush through what the game has to offer. It’s bigger, it’s crazier, it’s bombastic, Faith goes crazy scaling wacky luminescent architecture that doesn’t even pretend to feel like places built for civvies. Assault course game design. It even follows many of the same beats as the original game, you just can’t help but compare how differently things come across here. The combat buckles very quickly with miserable enemy variants, but I enjoyed the focus on using the environment against baddies by paddling them around/into each other, it's pretty slapstick but a damng lot more dynamic than what was in the original game.

I dunno, I’m middle of the road on this. Catalyst feels like the flipside of the same coin, Mirror’s Edge but hopped up on Ubisoft Juice. You couldn't convince me that Mirror's Edge needed bandit camps if your life depended on it, but the speed and flow and scale is intoxicating but it all rings kind of hollow when it feels like you’re just playing Aesthetique Temple Run. Maybe all I need to be happy in this life is seeing bullets go through Nvidia PhysX cloth & dats why this game isn’t doin it.

I am not so ignorant as to sweep Blizzard's malpractices under the rug for the sake of my own enjoyment. Even ignoring the well-known laundry list of human-facing controversies in recent years, their products have dwindled in appeal to me for over a decade. As lamented in my retrospective on Wrath of the Lich King, much of the core identity of World of Warcraft has languished as it is torn apart at the seams by its players, and haphazardly sewn back together with every expansion. My favourite part of Overwatch was quickly dismantled in favour of supposed balance, a Sisyphean treadmill. Hearthstone crumbles under the weight of its power creep and enormity of knowledge required. Heroes of the Storm was left to wither on the vine. And Diablo III dropped from the heavens with a wet thud. So imagine my shock when Reaper of Souls rose from its ashes like a phoenix that hasn't gone out for over nine years now.

My love of World of Warcraft in particular was two-faced until the release of Shadowlands, the nail in the coffin for any fondness I still had for Azeroth. After completing the core expansion, I deleted Battle.net and never again felt the urge to revisit my account.

But Diablo III continued to call to me. And in a moment of weakness, finally bursting through my mental dam with the early access period for Diablo IV I caved, and felt and feel horrible for it. My scruples, irrelevant! Nothing has ever come close to the specific gameplay of Diablo III, and Diablo IV's beta suggests nothing ever will, not even Blizzard's own offerings.

What I adore about Diablo III is exactly what, arguably, makes it a bad ARPG. The combat is largely meaningless. Everything is item driven rather than character dependent. Builds are largely prescribed and difficult to tweak. There is next to no consequence outside of playing on Hardcore (which I have always exclusively done). Adventure Mode and its bounties are so linear it might as well occur in a hallway. Enemies might as well all be the same. Bosses have no interesting mechanics in end-game scenarios. Legendaries inundate the player to the point where you stop even picking them up. The grinding for Primal Ancients is absurd.

I love it all!

Diablo III is a constant that has been with me for over a decade, through good and bad. I have always known I could return to it for a few days or a week, click things, have them explode, and revel in its own chaos. My characters' deaths rarely bother me, if anything they instill in me a drive to do it all over again. Take bigger risks with my build to get back to speed. Try new gear sets with radically different modes of play (even if the end result is always one-shotting everything even on Torment XVI). In an era of games which try for balance above all else, Diablo III has leaned entirely into the fact that a game of its sort is unable to be balanced. Each Season amps up the absurdity of some small factor, showering the player in loot or damage numbers or some other quirk that widens my eyes. And this latest go around, Season 28, has taken this to what must be a maximal realisation. The new altar destroys any remaining shreds of balance and gets the player as close as possible to basically using a trainer.

I adore it, and I truly missed it. My time with the season is probably at an end, but I will likely return. If not for the next one, then some other season down the line. I'll shake my head the whole time then, just as I did now, so everyone knows I disagree.

It's a difficult ordeal to review a game from someone you know, especially if they're among the first friends you made on BL. After all, what good are my thoughts if I don't give a concise look without being biased? I never want to potentially hurt anyone's feelings, and I feel like I'd be pulling their leg if I gave them five stars just for being someone I talk to on the regular.

I'll try my best to be constructive with this shmup, while also being as uplifting as possible.

The presentation hits me as hard as the Mega Drive instruments in the soundtrack, where I play an inner game of "I heard that sound somewhere" as vocal soundbytes from The Hybrid Front ring out. Gendy Tartakovsky-esque style of art that reminds me of cartoons I watched overnight back in ye olden times, as I was being assaulted by bullet patterns both familiar and new to myself. I adored the little enemy logs with in-character excerpts and pencil sketch artwork that I viewed after completing the game, letting me know of the care given to crafting this universe that Cycle Chaser H-5 resides in.

I imagine that difficulty balancing is probably one of the hardest things about game development, especially when you playtest your own game so much that you must rely on others and gauge from there. It's even a tad difficult for me as someone who just played this, is it a bit easy? Well, for someone like me who was commonly brutalized by Super R-Type during their childhood, I ended up never getting the game over achievement in my two runs in Basic and Advanced. Suffice to say though, I think everyone aside from the most masochistic of sweaty humans will agree that they would rather have something that was fun than agonizingly unfair and difficult. Personally, I would say it's a lovely shmup for someone who is generally scared of the worst that STGs have to offer and are looking for an entry point. I do quite look forward to your own version of "DEVIL" difficulty in the future, you don't need to call it that, but well ya know.

...and after all this, all I can say is that the game might be easy for veterans of the genre? Well, if that's the only complaint that I have for something I only needed to lay down eight dollars for, then I think you succeeded. I knew you knew your stuff with these kind of games. All I recall asking was that you make a better shmup than Gaiares, and instead you made a shmup I liked more than Thunder Force III. I appreciate how much you overdelivered on that, and I look forward to more of your work.

Just let me know when I can buy your soundtrack, okay?

A game that could very easily have fallen into any number of pitfalls in the messages it tried to convey or they ways it tried to convey them, but deftly dodges every one. A game about numbers and systems and relationship values that is steadfastly against the idea of gamifying life and relationships, that asks us to value each other and the in-between moments of life.

On my good days, I’m here. On my bad days, I’m still here.

Losing parts of ourselves and our identities are as essential to the experience of living as growing them is. Individuals can only do so much but they can still be so much for each other, and that’s worth as much as anything else. In a world where there is no ultimate victory for ideology or faction, where there is no intrinsic value in any one outcome that is ultimately worth more than any other, we’re still gonna find ourselves in each other.

I’m still here.

French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir argues in her 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity that 'existence precedes essence;' that the personality and the core beliefs of each human individual is defined through their environment and their actions, and that the challenges that allow those personality-shaping events are the ones that truly test the scope of the limits between their limitations and potential, their past against their future, the comfort of familiarity against the fear of the unknown.

"I Was a Teenage Exocolonist" is a quiet meditation on this and other questions asked by de Beauvoir and her fellow existentialists, packaged stealthily in the wrappings of a Solarpunk-themed dating game. Beneath the cotton candy colored environment of Vertumna and the egregiously tumblr-era character designs lies one of the best narrative experiences I've had in years, one that manages to succeed at the challenge of remaining both replayable and emotionally impactful. IWATE introduces the concepts of string theory, mortality, identity, collectivism, and on and on and on as each character you meet lives, grows, dies, lives again, and becomes a different person entirely.

When asked about the passing of her lover, the famed philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir simply said "His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.” Vertumna asks you to spend ten years with it before it lets you go, and readily welcomes you back again for the next loop of a cycle that continues on into infinity. But each of those cycles of ten years creates a unique you, and the life you live with its people is truly splendid.

ps: rex is best boy, even with the dumb tattoo, fight me

“Whatever he’s planning, it’s going to happen, and I don’t want to be here when it does. If there’s one thing I’m sure of; everything’s about to fall apart”.

A couple days ago, I was calmly and cooly lamenting the way Half Life 1’s cinematic setpieces still remain somewhat unique through to today. There’s something I find incredibly cathartic about cataclysmic things happening to a gigantic facility while the player Mr Bean’s their way through falling platforms and rubble, all the while gormlessly operating critically important, high-powered machinery you have no qualifications for. Everyone wants their FPS to have a shotgun with lots of recoil or something, but I want an elevator shaft sequence with massive casualties.

INFRA is a rough-around-the-edges little anomaly of a game - if it isn’t outsider art, it skirts dangerously close. It’s just so rare for a title to lean so far into its own neuroses alongside such genuinely impressive production values.

Tasked, as a structural analyst, to do a routine survey of the crumbling water treatment facilities on the outskirts of the fictional city of Stalburg, there is little more for the player to do mechanically than take photographs of OSHA violations and flick switches. Even still, the average first playtime of INFRA is 22 hours long. An oftentimes painful linear first-person adventure where the common roadblock is the odd wildly cruel puzzle and level design. It truly begs belief, the shit they make you do in this to earn a crumb of progress.

I really do love the good majority of what this game accomplishes - there’s an engrossing sense of scale on the journeys between the puzzles. Though the game is linear, there is a lot of wriggle room for alternating paths and solutions to key events, all the while the set designers filled every nook and cranny with surprisingly mindful details and assets that make the city feel lived-in and rewarding to poke around. It’s even replete with intense large-scale destructive setpieces that remind me of something like Disaster Report, and the player character's dialogue has that tired in-over-his-head everyman energy that I luvv. Navigation requires careful deliberation as you have to scan the environment for the most subtle nudges in the right direction; finding keys, notes containing passwords, manuals explaining how to operate machinery. Dizzyingly many things here are purely optional and only affect your playthrough way down the line, if at all.

Where INFRA loses me is in how rotely demanding it can be. The kinds of puzzles here are these legitimately tricky logic tests that tend to be sprawled out over a large playable area - often obscured by too much detail and not-enough lighting - meaning that to even test out a hypothesis, the player has to do a not-insignificant amount of travel between inputs. The developers have this undeniable keen interest in civil engineering, the way these facilities and utilities are connected to one another in a grand network of city planning and infrastructure…… but it’s the sole thing that extends the playtime, and it fucking wore me down. There’s a grand conspiracy element to the game’s overarching story and I could hardly pay it any mind because I just wanted the water on the floor to stop electrocuting me. It wasn’t until the game entered its closing act where I finally felt as though I had clocked to the designer’s puzzle logic. I wanted INFRA to kill its darlings, cull extraneous sections and give me more simple problems to solve - but the game’s more interesting with the sheer friction it poses. Imagine you turned the difficulty of Half Life 1 to the max, only for it remove all of the enemies and guns, & make Black Mesa more annoying instead.

While the game routinely lost its balance on the knife’s edge between demanding and frustrating, I found myself completely enamoured by the way Loiste Interactive hyperfocuses on the spectacle, genuine lived-in immersion, of the decaying infrastructure of the fictional city of Stalburg. Allegedly inspired by watching a documentary on the crumbling network of civil engineering that the USA relies heavily on, INFRA is a game about corruption and decay. It’s a crude image, one of vainglorious despots causing corporate neglect to eat away at the infrastructure we rely on, cataloguing the rebar and cabling that protrudes the crumbling concrete like scabs, but it’s truuu.

INFRA ain’t a game for everyone, but there’s a lot here for folk with saintly patience to appreciate. If you do give it a miss, please at the very least say “tyvm :3” to the overpass you drive under for being kind enough not to fall directly on top of you. It’s very tempted, I’d be too.

Astonished at how much I enjoyed this considering the disdain it has harboured from many whose opinions I hold in very high regard. Its eschewing of Sans-Serif Corpo committee-design in favour of a maximal exploration of bombastic and obtuse peculiarities from the aesthetic to the mechanical warms my heart. The sincerity on display strikes a chord of 'cringe' within me less because of its actual writing content, and more because it is a contemporary parallel to the endearing, honest, whimsical edgelordiness of video games past. Neon White is the Shadow the Hedgehog, The Bouncer, Vexx, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Bomberman Act Zero, Dante's Inferno, Jak II, BMX XXX of the 2020s in tone, spit and polished to a shine. It forgoes the failings of mid-2000s muddy and ruddiness, where landscapes and gameplay blended into green-brown smears, and proudly proclaims that games can be capital-C cool and fun as hell. Every skip is the descendant of Ulillillia's Spyro oddities. The soundtrack is the vague memories of Ape Escape and ChainDive, the vibe the immaculate remembrance of youth. It is Lovely Planet with accuracy replaced with speed, speed, speed.

Neon White is unabashedly itself, for good and for ill.

absolute hall of fame endgame idec how rushed it was. mechanisms and items stripped of any intuitive meanings outside of feeling around in the dark w your verbs, harnessing adventure game puzzle indecipherableness to have you completely in tune w the total dissolution of curtis's semiotic world. and no one cared or even thought it was worth evaluating outside of "bad fmv game puzzle" so that proves i deserve video games more than most of you. MY denpa eroge, MY documentary of my life where curtis is literally me and all of this actually happened

Good morning.
This farewell is as sad for me as it is for you.

I’ve prepared a goodbye party for tonight. A game competition will be included as well, so please feel free to participate.

The difficulty is small, but not to be trifled with.
As this will be the last opportunity, why not take part yourself?

Written in 1928 by S. S. Van Dine, the article “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” is a fascinating collection of 20 writing regulations that could, in theory, elevate a given investigation tale to its best possible iteration. Described by close friend and timeless author T. S. Eliot, as to one day having a nervous breakdown and spending the following 2 years in bed reading more than two thousand detective stories, the poet argues that during that time, Van Dine methodically distilled the genre’s formulas and began writing novels, to which he considered them to be masterpieces.

Out of his absurdly strict rulings, some may argue that most of them can in fact improve the narrative such as (10) stating that the culprit must play a role in the story and (15) stating that the truth of the problem must at all times be apparent, giving so a chance to the reader to decipher the story alongside the detective and not having to rely on hunches from time to time. The reception for his failed jurisdiction on the detective genre became a moderate success from the makers of such stories but not so much by the fans. It rejected possible clichés such as (11) servants not being able to be the culprits, and narratives that were not explored around enough at time such as (12) multiple culprits. People like clichés what can you do...

Over time however, reception of it started to get even worse, not only because of what was mentioned before, but in no small part due to the release in the following year of a much more CHAD reasonable article dissecting the mystery genre and its inner workings, called Knox's Decalogue, written by Ronald Knox. In one of literature's biggest middle finger ever, his 10 points were almost 1 to 1 with half of the Twenty Rules, prioritized giving the viewer a fair challenge of a tale, but this time allowing cliché tropes and creative liberties about its possible cast. Imagine Van Dine’s reaction seeing that become overwhelmingly more praised from writers and viewers alike. Take this big fucking L, nerd.

And while we get gaslit into thinking that the viewers rights to “fight back” in the intellectual game wasnt started by Dine, he will probably keep seething in his grave over the fact that some rules are obviously made to be broken at times, simply for fun. Even looking at the books in "golden age", some break fundamental rules that are praised nonetheless for it's creativity, as sometimes you can fix this unfairness in the game by using foreshadowing effectively (hats off to Disco Elysium). I am here solely to add to his perpetual torment in the history books arguing that his ruling number 3 in particular, is fundamentally why people like me and other highly sexy and intellectual individuals preffer the CHAD reasonable Knox's Decalogue more.

COMMANDMENT 3:
THERE MUST BE NO LOVE INTEREST. THE BUSINESS IN HAND IS TO BRING A CRIMINAL TO THE BAR OF JUSTICE, NOT TO BRING A LOVELORN COUPLE TO THE HYMENEAL ALTAR

It’s easy to just stop here and think about how many great mysteries would have not existed or be less impactful had every writer followed up on that, but we have to remember that this comes from someone living in what was soon perceived as the “golden years” for said genre. While you could argue that love could bypass any resemblance of a logical reasoning to which it would be the ends but not the why’s (aka when love devolves into lunacy with the killer incessantly screaming “I loved her” while being taken away) these are far and few between to be argued on Van Dine’s favor. Human affection can and will lead to insanity, but if the ultimate end goal is also one, was it really love?

The important element about love as a reason that has failed to be comprehended here, is that it can take many forms that I simply wouldn’t have time to begin describing here, as with just the change of a simple word in “love for others” becoming “love of others” you can turn tragedy into fortune. While the advent of romantic love that is heavily implied here does mean that the amount of plausible given possibilities are diminished, lesser infinities are still endless.

Now I’m sorry, but will there EVER be a better motive to kill, murder and slaughter someone, than the reason that brings up the loss of reason itself?

I will go further. There CANNOT be a single plausible reason for a murder in a tale that values the life of its characters and doesn't treat them as pieces waiting to fall off the board, other than actions relating to the innate fondness of others that we so desperately need. A given character in a tale that has their own romantic life all figured out should never be the killer nor suspect, as the most impactful and sincere motivation, from the bottom of their hearts, cannot be present.

Van Dine’s precepts make it very clear that (17) crimes by house-breakers and bandits are the province of the police department, not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. If you fail to treat your victims and killers with the same amount of respect for an action that isn’t guided by an illogical leap-of-faith that seeks adoration of some sort, was it really a murderer or an overly intricate common burglar?

Love is the reason we sin.

Love is the reason we go further.

Love is the reason we are humans.

And to put it extremely bluntly.

Love just makes us do some stupid ass shit.

“ Love is generous, love is merciful.
Love does not envy, it does not boast. “ - Zepar & Furfur

" At times, love can make the invisible visible. " - Featherine

“ The love we give away is the only love we keep. “ - Ushiromiya Ange

“ To fear love is to fear life, and vice-versa.
One must never embrace death as long as love persists. “ - Ronove

“ Without love, it cannot be seen. “ - Beatrice

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Welp, I’ve used all my pretentiousness for now.

I know someone really special will be reading this soon so I’ll be brief now.

Merry Christmas Audrey.

I love you so much.

Do you want to be my girlfriend?

My Policy Guidelines

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Abstract industrial calamity on the struggle of the repressed queer youth against the forces of theocracy described through electrical wire pulses.

I beat the game and moved over to NG+ difficulty which is where the story really starts to expand and show itself. Considering the length of the game itself (3 to 5 hours) this is already a really cool approach, because it allows for the disinterested player not to be as burdened by the interstitial storytelling elements (told usually through text flashes of on screen poetic language) while operating as a way in which the invested player can reach further into the heart of the world without the burden of excess irritating content. The overall effect is an electric rave of great combat fundamentals set to a blast of haze and color. Great for a satisfying a gamer's midnight.

The game's premise is one of trying to beat a timer, a percentage ticker counting up to your demise, but unlike UNSIGHTED (the last game I spoke about) the only person you overtly have to worry about saving is yourself.

One thing I absolutely have to commend the game for here is the feedback on attacks and the sound effects. Each of the various weapons you use have a 'pacing' to them and the industrial electronic whirls and whips make the fights feel extremely satisfying. This game similar to UNSIGHTED also has a parry mechanic but there's one integral reason which bothers me much less here: The rewinds. At any point during a fight you can use one of your 'rewinds' to set the fight back to the starting health and healing items you had going in, this means that you have plenty of time to both practice and attempt to progress. Learning the mechanics of parrying no longer come as a sacrifice, and for bosses you have a much looser leash for getting the attack patterns right. Adding onto this while parrying does improve your damage output significantly, what an effectively timed parry really does is 'break' through the enemies defense. This 'break' mechanic can come from simply pressuring with your own damage irregardless, using your close range attacks until you run out of stamina and then using your long range familiar to pressure while you recharge stamina. It's never so heuristically clear to try for a parry or punching a lot of damage because most enemies will do a mix of ranged attacks and close attacks meaning waiting around near an enemy in order to parry ends up making no real sense. The result of this is that every fight transforms into a dance, especially when there is more than one enemy you are fighting. Each fight becomes a rhythmic sway of dodges and attacks rather than either frustration or mindless sweeping of enemies outright.

Most people would be quick to compare this game, with its bonfires, lack of explicit hub, stamina management, and parry mechanics as similar to dark souls (ie, being a soulslike). However, I'd like to argue due to the speed of play and importance on not getting overwhelmed by enemies, along with the ability to switch your weapon loadout to provide for incredibly unique play to something more like a top down Bayonetta. Soulslikes for me at least are usually indicated by having high risk systems (like dropping/losing a lot of materials on death) and by having a focus on death as an important force in the play experience. Lucah deeply roots for you not to die, you can't spend 10 attempts on a boss because each failure is not a learning moment in itself but a threat of losing entirely. The game is largely balanced around that fact, the bosses are challenging without being needless health sponges, in part because they too are involved in the dance to 'break' their defenses. Once you break their defense you can usually chip out over 20% of their health if not more, and god damn it's damn satisfying every time. The CRACK sound feels like you shattered a bone. The item management is also simplifyed to great effect to, you have some heals and some rewinds that reset at a bonfire, but unlike the souls series which this system may seem most comparable to thats it. As much as I like Dark Souls 1, my least favourite aspect of that game and many games like it is that when you fail in a fight after using an item, for example pine resin, you don't get that item back. Meaning that if you are doing bad you end up having to waste time farming for materials. Inversely those same items can be so strong as to turn fights into complete jokes, which is why the Souls community have termed using these accessibility options disguised as items as 'resinous behavior' or referring to it as 'resin'. Unlike many jokes in the gaming community around difficulty oscillation this one is not as filled with the scorn of overt ableism, because the issue is not so much that you are using an item to make the fight more accessible but rather than its found through a specific niche in game item of utility which would only work in that area/boss or which register the game on the whole so easy as to end fights before you even hear more than 15 seconds of their theme play. People dont harbor nearly this same judgement and humor about equipping armor or increasing the number of flasks. In Lucah, these power imbalances are avoided simply through item simplification making each fight feel that much more cathartic.

One thing I do really like here is that none of the enemies in the game have enemy collision damage. They only hurt you when they attack. It's only on playing games like that I begin to realize just how stupid and damaging to gameplay enemy collision actually can be for a lot of games. The intent of a lot of these systems with their parrying and aggressive play is to be as close to the enemies as you can. In theory then, enemy collision seems like a great way to add a 'risk reward' factor similar to say grazing against bullets in touhou. The reality however is that it incentivizes players to keep their distance and not even bother. Imagine for a moment a fighting game when even touching the enemy player would emit passive damage, that would be immensely unfun right? I believe a lot of game designers probably looked at how a lot of early games like the metroid series did enemy collision damage and assume outright this is the best way to do things, but it barely even makes much sense. It's not like they are covered in thorns so why is that happening? On top of all of that, the 'collision' of enemy hitboxes are not always clear so it becomes yet another irritation. For platformers this system makes a lot of sense but not so much for action fighters. Overall what I'm complimenting the game for is reducing and simplifying its systems of play.

Now I want to move to a few slightly passive criticisms that have halted the game from getting a perfect score. The games length is quite short so while these criticisms may seem petty I think they are overall justifiable since they are much more likely to stick out like a sore thumb. I will also double these issues with recommendations to players in order to alleviate these potential issues.

Firstly there's an area in the 4th verse where you have to input a code in order to open a door. If you don't have the code insanely strong enemies will appear and wreck your shit. My issue here is that there's no way to leave the fight once it started. This system of sticking you in an arena cage match with the other enemies usually is great, but the problem here is that the only way to leave this area is to die and lose a lot of time on the clock. You can also beat through the enemies if you're good enough and I did but 2 new problems present itself if this happens. The 'code' for unlocking takes significantly less time than it does to brute force through the lock, registering it a waste of time, and because the only way to leave is to die it takes away from the perseverance. Simultaneously even if you do brute force, there's still more enemies on the other side and if you die to them before reaching the next bonfire the code resets and you cant get through. The way to fix this is simple: just let me leave the area after I trigger the code! Anyway I had to close the game and reopen it after I found out the code reset because I didn't want to waste time dying. Not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things but certainly felt like a bit of an oversight. If you play the game yourself and activate that code by accident just die and then go somewhere else, it'll be fine.

There's a colosseum arena in verse 6 in which you have to dispatch enemies in order to proceed. Most of these fights are so easy that they register as a complete joke, with usually only 1 'phase' to them. It's possible that this is meant to have some thematic implications, as it also doubles as a way to introduce the ranking system. If you do excessively well in a fight you get a ranking at the end (similar to Bayonetta's medal system) which becomes deeply important on replay. However you can already get tutorialized through this system by an optional set of challenge fights from a trainer, so I feel like the actual colosseum portion could have been made significantly more difficult. I'm thinking particularly here of how rewarding the length and multiple phases were in something like Hollow Knights colosseum, and while that length wouldn't work for this game it would have been a great way to add more timer anxiety to the back half of the game.

Another issue is the end game fights. In the 8th verse your timer is automatically set to 75% to add extra tension. The problem is that this final area is a tower climb through an arduous gauntlet of about 6 demanding fights in a row, bookended by a long elevator ride so if you start running into problems here and die even twice it's not unlikely you will lose to time before you can see the end fights out. This didn't happen to me but I can only imagine losing at this point in the game would be deeply irritating and disappointing. My recommendation here is to use the accessibility options to make the game easier (particularly adding health and making enemies weaker) at this point if the idea of losing in the last act in this way would feel unfair or bother you. This goes ditto for the final boss which I have to admit here is the only point where the accusations of a boss feeling like a health sponge has merit. One aspect I don't like about the game all that much is that it hides from you the actual health of the bosses you fight, the enemies 'power up' at the end of clearing a health bar and resets. Instead I feel like they could have just rolled it all into 1 health bar with those threshold points so that you know how sparingly you need to use rerolls or healing. This is the functional difference for why say Radahn felt like a cathartic and rewarding fight and Elden Ring whereas a lot of the other 'power up' bosses felt frustrating and bullshit. It's this old mechanic of introducing spectacle and awe at the expense of player fairness, and my appreciation is very much in the latter camp. I will say that the final boss isn't timer based but it makes it even more awkward when you die. Usually you're rolled back a bonfire and time is added but at this point it gives you a prompt of whether you want to fight the boss from this 'scene' or start again which really feels artificial. They could have just put a bonfire at the start of the final sequence on the walk in to alleviate this, without breaking the narrative much at all.

That being said, one 'weirdo opinion' I started to gain from playing this, is that maybe players are given so much knowledge and information in the first place that its spoiled us a little. Every piece of player information fights with the immersion of the game environment, and this is often why the 'games' I talk about the most tend to be walking simulators and visual novels, because a subconcious part of me wants immersion over bland information mechanics. To bring this back to Lucah, when you attack enemies numbers fly out as if you're playing some SHMUP, with the indication being to let you know comparatively how much damage your weapons are doing, you can equip a virtue (basically the modulated 'skills' using a maximum point threshold). That tells you how much health they have. For me I got so enamored with the games sketchy abstractions and electrified colours that these number pop ups got on my nerves and so did actually the bosses health. In a lot of the early final fantasy games, the enemy and boss health wasn't given at all and in contrast to this feeling of frustration it instead felt tense and unique. You would be able to approximate just how much damage it takes to kill an enemy you've seen before but every new enemy would feel authentically bizzare and unknown. This thrill from player non-knowledge also did not really affect the player negatively much at all since for the most part there would be enough tools that taking down fights wasn't that hard regardless. I recognized that maybe both in pursuit of simplicity and immersion over 'information' I turned off the enemies UI. While I would actively recommend people give turning enemy UI off a try, a part of me also thinks the game should have had this turned off automatically to start anyway leaving this instead as yet another accessibility option. It would have a thematic effect to, with the themes of surveillance allowing for the enemies to seem like they know more about you than you do them. With all that said though, just due to some of the attacks the final boss of the game gives its less an issue of 'unfair health' so much as it is that the final boss can burst out damage and give you no reasonable room to pressure, especially in its 'third phase'. This may seem like a paragraph of pure contradiction considering what I said previously, but perhaps the best was to settle this contradiction is to say that I care about immersion but dont care about 'spectacles' of difficulty. The multiple phase difficulty with a 'burst' of difficulty at the end lies both to the 'information' player and the 'immersion' player. For the immersion player, one of the best things that Fromsoft actually revealed to the player in their early work, and to gaming culture as a whole. Is that bosses dont need to get stronger in order to be rewarding to narrative function. Bosses like the phenomenal Maiden Astrea in Demon Souls and the Great Wolf in Dark Souls indicate that a boss getting weaker can be deeply cathartic for both players. That's not to say that every boss should get weaker, but not every boss needs to be increasingly demanding through concealed information. What having a lot of multi phase boss fights in a game does is make players play with far too much caution and distance. In a game like this the last thing you want to incentivize is passive play and distance which is why I find these sorts of bosses so irritating. With that said outside of the final boss this issue is mainly a non problem as the reset item allows you plenty of time to practice out those fights. You may end up losing once or twice but you probably wont get hardstuck by any means. If you do though feel free to use the accessibility functions liberally.

Finally I want to touch on the NG+. The NG+ is awesome in concept. New story information is given to the player, the timer goes much faster because now you know where everything is and dont need to fish for items (since all your weapons and virtues roll over), and the ranking mechanic returns with force here. You can get rid of time from adding to the timer by doing really well in fights, with bonuses for not getting hit and completing the fights quickly. But the problem is you can farm fights out by resting at a bonfire and then redoing the easy fights, allowing you to make the timer a non issue during replay. Now I think that there's a punish system for this, as it means that your rank from your last attempt is mitigated to a bit less than before, but its still useful enough for farming time that it doesn't matter enough. The best way in my view to amend this would have been to prevent respawning enemies, as the 'failure' for death adds such an extreme amount of time (one tenth of the bar) that respawning the enemies would be unnecessary anyway. The way it is not renders the NG+ sort of mostly a joke.

With all that said, the combat fundamentals are incredible here, and the story itself is abstracted and yet traumatic in a way that can be emotionally effective without being bleak. The mystique of the game here is to die for and I can't recommend it enough for that reason. There's clearly a lot of focus on the trans experience here in repressing for higher powers and a more interesting 'trauma at the center of the world' framing which just begs to be read into as a literary function. There's no puzzle mechanics to be stressed out by, its a sleek telephone tower of a game in terms of its presentation and effect. While I would usually spend some time analyzing the queer repression themes, due to the already length of this piece, metamorphosing the end of the write up into literary analysis would be at best awkward. A lot of the themes and characters are made overly anxious and edgy, with several of them wishing openly to be dead. I think its probably most comparable in tone to We Know The Devil, a game also about queer repression under theocracy. I would definitely recommend that Visual Novel instead if you want a characterized direct intimate relationship with the plights of youth trauma, but if you're a fan of We Know the Devil already this more mystery oriented dream parable might work as a great double feature there. Overall this is a great diamond in the rough of a game and I'm incredibly excited for the sequel Death of a Wish. The only real filter here is the early game patience you have to have, once you get past the train section in particular its a great ride from there.