There's all kinds of games that are a piece of the creator's childlike wonder, glee, beauty, et cetera. I'd find it difficult to name one that has the same kind of resonance this emanates from start to finish. Gentle, elegant, earnest and bringing you along the ride through a wonderfully crafted landscape of dreams. Sour, dance, play and gymnastics your way through the circus stage made for you. Fears and anxiety are formed only to melt away in the light.

I'll keep thinking about it as the music swells and shifts over the coming days. A lasting impression, of which Oshima himself noted that above all else, they wanted a character and an experience that someone would look at and think "the future looks bright." I'll dance atop that spire of hopeful joy they made.

Immortal images

Anyone who's played a Resident Evil for more than a few hours will come to understand the game as a series of discrete short and long-term trades - collecting smaller items and using them to complete a bloody and violent Art of the Swap in pursuit of some higher goal. For example, to open a door with a snake on the front: Dodge zombie -> Collect herb -> Collect 5 handgun bullets -> Combine handgun bullets with handgun -> Use 3 handgun bullets to take down the zombie who is standing in the way of a brain in a jar -> Collect brain in jar -> Collect shotgun -> Trade some hitpoints to use the shotgun on a bigger zombie who is standing the way of a statue -> Use brain on statue -> Reveal a key shaped like a snake -> Use one herb to replenish health spent fighting the bigger zombie -> Use snake key on snake door -> Use remaining bullets on snake boss hiding behind snake door. A real time Dungeons & Draggers campaign, a constant evaluation of inventory and comparison with the variables in the current equation of the puzzle box, where skilled play tasks the player with thinking further and further ahead in order to secure flawless success.

As the series has moved forward, the complexity of these sequences has expanded and contracted in all shapes and sizes. Games like Resident Evil 2 have tried to run multiple sequences in parallel, finding replayability for players in the ways it allows you to plan multiple interdependent logistical movements in the same manner one would plan a camping trip to the countryside; games like Resident Evil 4 have tried compressing the sequence into shorter spaces of time, tasking you with minor maths calculations while running from a chainsaw; games like Resident Evil 6 have tried to more or less throw the sequence concept out of a thirtieth-story window in pursuit of cinematic success (no one is counting this bullets in an action movie).

Resident Evil 7 is probably at its most interesting when these sequences simply do not exist. Perspective is key here - whereas most Resident Evils of yore used fixed-perspective views to create a voyeuristic distance between player and hero in a manner evoking the giallo and j-horror of its era, biohazard does quite the opposite, and places The Ring on you (literally you, an amnesiac with no face), directly within the Final Destination of a skull that is being Sawed right this second. A video tape early on has you assume the role of a cameraman in a Louisiana Ghostwatch-type scenario; it's almost 15 minutes of "gameplay" that constitutes nothing more than self-amusement (depending on how amusing you find fear) derived from roleplaying as a gonzo cameraman in the depths of a deserted hell. Not a herb, handgun or key in sight. Just undead dudes dying in the moment.

Imagine my joy when I was forcefully guided into a sequence later in the game where you watch a VHS tape that lets you watch someone watch an mp4 recording of a different VHS tape on a laptop. The game is clearly obsessed with its own movement to the first-person multiple, constantly taking advantage of perspective and changes in perspective through a Connection of videodromic mediums - the eyes, the CCTV, the TV, the eyes of others, the eyes of others watching the TV, the eyes of those filming the TV. Kudos to Capcom for not just blithely saying “Resident Evil is an FPS now” and rather choosing to explore the true implications of horror as experienced first-personally vs. the 3rd-person-protective of Resis past.

Resis past are ultimately the game’s (partial) downfall. In a truly linear sequence of events like this, I don’t think there’s that much value in having the player take on the burden of inventory and item counting/combining. We all hate that feeling of a game requiring you to be an actor - stand here, press this button, watch this cinematic, stand over here, pick up the gun, shoot it now, step backwards to dodge this scripted animation or you will be replaying this sequence again and again and so on, etc., and Resident Evil 7’s insertion of one-way this->that->those sequencing problems too obviously reduce the concept of a video game down to a series of predetermined outcomes. Jack and Maggie carefully matching the pace of pursuit with the player is a perfect exemplar of this - everyone’s on rails; the Baker House vis a vis It’s A Small World; you and the CPUs just playing terrified roles on Capcom’s stage. It’s a wonderfully horrifying performance, though.

this noreason fellow is an interesting character. in comparison to his more crafted and measured works like death in excess or disparate realities, nosp3 is an effigy of slaughter & megaWAD motifs with scribbled Crayola crayon marks and protruding nails. here lies 32 1000+ monster count maps where the bestiaries of valiant, eviternity, scythe 2, and probably some other shit all mix together with some of the most excess combat you can design while being boom-compatible. 'fuck it, we gotta fuse now' is the siren's call: not only is the bestiary getting an exponential increase but so are your ammo limits (200 rockets and 440 energy cells that double with a backpack, can i get a hell yea), your health totals (megasphere brings you to 400% health and 400% armor, 100 dollars on the chain n its not no game), and your weaponry (Plasma Rifle + RL + BFG are often your first 3 pickups, and occasionally an infinite ammo RL with cave's auto fire enabled...i see the opps outside less go catch em 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️). ion think a doom wad has felt like this much of a bootleg since the original chillax, so that noreason is able to craft something mostly coherent out of the 100 different cogs at work? very impressive sir very impressive. i say mostly coherent though because the core combat here is actually being sprite-to-sprite in a monster horde with BFG in tow n holding onto mouse 1 for dear life, until you hit the next megasphere or energy cell pack, then skirting around the edges of the crowd to hit the next objective point. i have and will make a lot of hyperboles bout slaughter but this is the most salmon-swimming-upstream, Ys-bump-combat, kusoge-idea-kamige-execution headass game i played this year, even as i write this 7 months out of my completion. prime example of what im talking bout is map 23, you don't even gotta fight a whole lot in this one the finale is just to light the infighting dynamite and hope you don't die when the hordes start self-combusting. made me feel like riley with the steel chair effect. map pack is low down n dirty but ingenious; i didn't even mention the fact that there's cacodmeon variant here that shoots cyber rockets, but the only visual difference is that its a slightly brighter sprite than the regular one. like what is blud even cooking up in this wad 😭😭😭. crusty & rusty ass game get a tetanus shot after every play session.

Simultaneously easier than DD, but also more insane and significantly more illegible. I kind of hate it much much more, and also can't help but respect it more. The biggest issue is that I am personally tired of treating the game as half a manual, things especially here are so counter-intuitive that even the training mode is simply teaching you how you're 'kind of' supposed to be playing at the very minimum. This sort of compounds into a glorious but sort of fucked combo shooter that desires to be as ultimately incomprehensible as possible for you to pass over.

That's kind of sick, but it leaves me rather in the dust. It doesn't induce the panic that Devil Daggers does to me and instead feels like a sense stress test. For its modus operandi of some utter hellish ultraplanar fight against some undefinable deity I can't think of many things in general that's such a perfect match. It absolutely continues on its predecessor of being a congruous entity that you have to fully understand in order to survive and even progress. Its arcadey nature asks for creating clarity out of unwatchable madness.

So as a realized vision I have to like, sort of stan it! But I also feel an utter bone to pick, a sledgehammer I want to take to this sort of approach. From a personal note, for one, this game is absolutely irresponsible. The steam page fine print has an epilepsy warning but the game should fucking start with one, if not more, as should its creator be saying such shilling this game past twitter and youtube. When I first streamed it in front of a friend they felt so unwell they had to tune out for a solid 15 or so minutes because they felt like they were going to have a seizure and they're not epileptic. It's rudimentarily so overzealous in its mission that it genuinely hurts my eyes after a little bit of time to play, and its mixing and sound design just hurts and nails on chalkboards but all of those are Intensely Important Indicators to play. To be blunt I almost feel a sort of noxious "loves its ingroup and hates everyone else" vibe from all that.

But idk, it's like mostly fun past all that. Things connect pretty smartly and it can lead to some intense fun, and it'll certainly satisfy those who REALLY REALLY like Devil Daggers and this uncompromising way of creation. Which is totally valid. It has got crazy good game design top to bottom.

The big war troll with an Australian accent is called "Brûz". Get it?

GET IT?!

The game is fine. More of the same, and I got RAPIDLY tired of the nemesis system this time. Story feels like nothing then suddenly ties into the films. I thought I had finished it when it told me to "Keep Mordor in a state of perpetual war. Only then can the Free People of Middle-earth prepare for the War of the Ring". Sounds like standard post-game shit to keep you playing. Thus, I went looking to see what folk thought of the ending, and discovered a final cutscene you get for holding the forces of Mordor back. You need to withstand 20 sieges in a row, and losing one of them sets you back to 0. You can fuck that sky-high.

!!!TRUE ENDING SPOILERS BELOW!!!

The cutscene shows that Talion held back the dark for decades before succumbing to it and joining the Nazgul, taking Isildur's place. Meaning he was there stabbing the empty beds, and chasing down Arwen. Then later when Mount Doom went nuclear he was riding a fellbeast and got clipped by a flying boulder, and for some reason in that cutscene he has his mask off and we can see his face. Cut to him looking normal again walking in a nice field, dropping his weapons, and no doubt going to rest with his family.

Wow, I care so much now that I know some jobber Nazgul who got murked by a rock was actually my good friend Talion.

Look at this.

A solid experience, all in all. Taken in a vaccuum I think there's quite a lot about Endwalker that can be seen as outright superb and completely unparalleled in its execution, especially considering the state of JRPG storytelling since the mid-2010s or so. Still, there's an elephant in the room that I don't think is addressed often enough: Endwalker is so rife with retcons that it ultimately ends up disassembling more or less everything that made Shadowbringers into the unbelievably and unprecedently amazing narrative that it was, and it makes Final Fantasy XIV into a weaker story for it.

One of these retcons and adjustments stands out above all the rest, however. The fanbase's endearment to a particular faction results in a framing and writing shift that portrays them as less of an unambiguous evil and more of an unambiguously sympathetic, benevolent bunch and results in a rare example of cut-and-dry "good vs. evil" conflict being more interesting and satisfying than something that attempts to be complicated, morally gray and devoid of condonement and condemnation alike (due in large part to the fact that Shadowbringers has some particularly unique, interesting and complex things to say about what it means to be "good" and what it means to be "evil"). This is compounded by the fact that those in opposition to this faction are likewise defanged and portrayed as completely good and kind, creating a frustratingly toothless situation where nobody is wrong and as a result Final Fantasy XIV doesn't really seem to stand against anything (particularly bothersome in a story that prides itself on the strength of its political storytelling).

It still has quite a lot to say when removed from its hesitation to boldly posit that you cannot possibly be a good person in any sense if you're guilty of genocide, no matter how noble your intentions in doing so may be... complete with some particularly poignant and weighty commentary on what it means to live with despair and grapple with the inevitability of pain and sorrow in one's life. Even so, I can't ever really shake the feeling that Shadowbringers was building up to a finale that was simply going to be better than what we eventually would get in the form of Endwalker.

With all of this said, and still holding to it all firmly as can be in my heart - this is still a fairly tight wrap-up to ten years' worth of storytelling, with all the emotional payoff you'd expect from such a long and heartfelt story. It was a particularly bittersweet experience for me in particular, as Endwalker is effectively the conclusion to the character arc of the Warrior of Light - who is for me and countless others a character that has been built up over hundreds if not thousands of hours of story content, gameplay, roleplay and gratuitous self-indulgent interpretation of the game's story. I love Final Fantasy XIV, and even with (if not especially because of its flaws) I can't really think of anything more representative of what this game is fundamentally about than Endwalker and what it so sincerely believes in and wants to convey to the player.

As I trekked alone through the game's final zone, knowing that not only my journey would soon come to an end but that, in many ways, so too would the halcyon days of something I'd found a home of sorts in and bonded with my friends over for far, far too many sleepless nights and spastic Discord calls... I didn't really care about inconsistent storytelling, or frustratingly unaddressed and unresolved character arcs, or the fact that the game engine was clearly starting to fall apart, or that they still hadn't fixed Dark Knight's lack of ability to sustain itself in combat, or that Paladin was a shitty pick for a poster boy job but was perfectly representative of my problems with Endwalker as a whole. There was but a single thought in my head, a thought that still echoes whenever I hear the opening notes of Close in the Distance:

I love Final Fantasy so much.

"An epic story based on the theme of love..."

On startup, there's just a black screen, and music. Some names appear, a fade to black. A black and white render of a character or place from the game, a fade to black. The play experience of Final Fantasy VIII is defined by punctuation. When I told a friend of mine I was playing the game, he assumed I meant the remaster; when I clarified that I was playing the original PlayStation version, he replied "How are those load times?" It's consistently shocking to me how people assume that the load times in these old disc based games were just universally bad, when it usually has more to do with how the program itself is designed than the limitations of the hardware. In any case, the fading in and out between each screen transition is an important part of the game's feel. Each seam is an opportunity for a shift in scale, a shift in mood, a new song to set the stage, a new perspective when the visuals do present themselves.

At the beginning of the game, the player is able to name the main character, Squall, whatever they like. Afterwards as Squall talks with Dr. Kadowaki, she ponders the name of Squall's instructor, there's a heavy pause. It's as if the game is about to bring up a second menu, where the player will name this character as well, but it doesn't happen. Kadowaki says the character's name outright, Quistis.

The first choice you're really given in the game, aside from your character's name, is whether or not you want to use your desk terminal in the classroom. It contains quite a bit of background on the world, including things I would have otherwise considered "twists", and even things I didn't really absorb in my first several playthroughs. It has the student guidelines for the Garden, information on what SeeDs are, and a somber announcement that the school festival is almost certainly not going to happen. Throughout my life I played through this opening section of the game at least half a dozen times without looking at this terminal at all, and I imagine I'm not the only one who ignored it. On Disc 3, probably more than 20 hours into the game for most players, someone says "Of course monsters live on the moon, didn't you learn that in school?"

There's an idea I've had for a game for a long while, a setting inspired by Fullmetal Alchemist, gameplay inspired by what I imagined Shin Megami Tensei would be like when it was first described to me, an RPG with absurd customizability where the only way to win was to indulge in a high risk-high reward gamble inspired by Battle Network's dark chips. A world where magic exists, but almost nobody is any good at it, a game where even the best party setups would be cyclically robbing Peter to pay Paul. If I had been a better student, if I had actually read the terminal at my desk, if I had actually learned how to play the game a few playthroughs earlier, I could have realized that Final Fantasy VIII is the closest any game I'm familiar with has come to being my dream JRPG.

Final Fantasy VIII isn't a game where you grind enemies for experience points, and it definitely isn't a game where you repeatedly draw the same spell from the same enemy until you can't anymore. Final Fantasy VIII is a game where you play card games and answer quizzes and spec into certain skills so that you can buy a stock of easily obtainable items and turn them into high level magic and quadruple every party member's HP by the end of Disc 1 without leveling up at all. The worst part of every JRPG is the grind, the amount of time it takes to improve your characters, the amount of time you spend waiting for your turn. The interesting part of a JRPG is rarely the fight, it's the preparation, and Final Fantasy VIII knows this. It's a JRPG that asks you to work smarter, not harder. It's a game where turning every boss fight into a coin toss that ends on the first turn is a strategy that is not only possible, it's completely valid.

Final Fantasy VIII is cinematic in a way that few games have been able to be. By the time I first played the game, nearly a decade after its original release, its graphics were still not so deprecated to be distracting. My first experience with game environments made predominantly of prerendered background was Universal Theme Parks Adventure on the Gamecube, and the Wii wasn't much more visually impressive than that, so to me this likely didn't feel as antiquated as someone more accustomed to the 7th generation consoles or high end PC's from the time might have thought. Sometimes there are transitions between scenes with 3D characters on a static background, to 3D characters over an animated prerendered scene complete with shifting perspective, to a prerendered cutscene.

While these moments are impressive, they are also some of the moments where the issue with the remaster become most glaring. The versions of Final Fantasy VIII available on modern platforms are apparently based on the original PC version of the game, which has no support for analog control, nor rumble. Using a D-pad was a bit more acceptable in Final Fantasy VII, with its city blocks and industrial catwalks; however, in Final Fantasy VIII even the manmade locations have a swooping curved Y2K futurist aesthetic that makes navigating them at straight angles just plain cumbersome, and it's even worse when the camera is given an opportunity to move around. The lack of rumble in these modern versions makes it more difficult for the player to discern whether they have successfully timed their Paper Mario-esque gunblade critical hits when doing basic combat. I'd recommend either playing the game from the original discs (which aren't particularly expensive because apparently Square Enix still prints new ones from time to time), or perhaps there's a mod for the PC version that can fix these issues.

Balamb Garden is initially presented with this light, airy music, like the music Haruomi Hosono apparently made for convenience stores in the 80's. Beneath the uniforms and the combat exercises, Garden is home. A bit later in the game the team visits another Garden in Galbadia; defamiliarized, the same elements of Garden are now characterized as sterile, as cold as a waiting room, its fascistic character laid bare. The apparent death of Seifer lets the banal reality of the world set in. When the player is finally able to return to Balamb Garden hours later, they find it has erupted into chaos, students splintering into separate factions and killing each other over a conflict that many of them barely understand. Balamb Garden becomes this games equivalent of the boat in other Final Fantasy games, Trabia Garden is destroyed, and the party collectively remembers the orphanage on a coast in the middle of nowhere, the place where they all grew up together. Homes destroyed, homes we take with us, homes we leave behind, homes that aren't ours, that aren't safe anymore. Balamb Garden too is eventually left behind, most players likely leaving it docked at Fisherman's Horizon from Disc 3 onward.

Where do I even start with Squall and Rinoa.

Aside from Squall and Rinoa, most of the party members take a backseat for a good portion of the game. Aside from Squall, Rinoa is the only character in the game that the player is able to name. You name her because she isn't just another party member, she's the other player character. Her goal of Timber's independence is what actually gets the plot of the game moving, while Squall merely settles into his role as acting leader of Balamb's SeeD. She has agency, and the worst thing that can happen, the lowest point of the story's arc, is for her to lose that, to be forcibly closed off from the rest of the world by a force beyond control or comprehension. And here, Squall realizes that this is exactly what he has done to himself. This is why the other party members don't have this sort of role in the story, why they can't be named, because they don't have this connection to Squall, to the player, they know not to try.

When I play RPG's old and new alike, I often think about a moment in Chris Davis' review of the original Fallout wherein he says that the dialogue in a game like that couldn't work in a modern game, it couldn't be fully voice acted, it couldn't be delivered with a straight face, it couldn't be taken seriously. Consider the moment in the game where Edea, free from Ultimecia's control, explains the villain's plan. To progress, the player has to talk to Edea several times, and attempt to leave the room. The screen goes black, Squall's thoughts appear in transparent text boxes in the center of the screen while solid text boxes pop up around them. He catches bits and pieces of the science fantasy technobabble but all he can really think about is Rinoa. If they had tried to communicate this with facial expressions, motion capture gesticulating, voice over, I genuinely think that the game would have suffered for it. The way that the user interface elements typical of a JRPG are used here communicates the emotion in such a tangible, potent way, just trying to semi-realistically animate Squall with a pensive face wouldn't be able to capture it.

There's quite a bit of Oedipal stuff here, isn't there? The concept of the sorceress as a sort of interdimensional primal mother, Squall's apparent estranged father cloistered away, leader of an invisible isolationist nation, not to mention Cid's role as adoptive father. The whole world have contorted into some kind of grand familial conspiracy to keep the mother and father a secret. There's an a sort of half-implied pseudo-incest, the ambiguity of which characters are whose children; Rinoa is most likely simply the daughter of Squall's father's first true love, but for much of the game there's a nagging question.

In Disc 3, we drop everything and leave our post, leave the planet itself, in the pursuit of restoring Rinoa's will. Squall calls out to her, she can't hear, and under control of the sorceress she is thrown into the vacuum of space, utterly alone. Ellone brings Squall into her memories, into her mind, eventually into the closest past to the future, the present. He joins her in the endless void, and they stow away together on a derelict spaceship. Once outside of their spacesuits, Rinoa asks for a hug; despite the risk he took to save her life, despite perhaps knowing her thoughts more intimately now than any other person, he refuses. The encounter with the xenomorph-like aliens on this ship is so distracting and so on-the-nose that I feel like it can't possibly be anything other than intentional. That surely this is representative of how even now Rinoa is still terrifying to Squall, the alien, the other. How do you share your self with someone?

The first time I played this game, I was aware that there would be a needle drop of a pop song complete with vocals, but I didn't know when or what the context would be. I was kind of taken aback, confused as to why it played here. As Rinoa completely opens up and tells Squall that he provides her the kind of comfort she previously only associated with family, he ignores her, the heightened emotions of his heroism deflate as the two literally descend back down to earth. This song, "Eyes On Me", in the context of the game is written by Rinoa's mother, about Squall's father. This song doesn't play here because it's the grand happy ending, it plays here because it's the climax of Squall's inner conflict. Are you really going to make the same mistake your father did? Are you really going to refuse to open up? Are you really going to keep lying to yourself, to everyone else, and keep that stupid stoic look on your face and pretend you don't care because it's "cool"?

I just hate hearing people talk about this game. Nobody gets it. It's as if Squall is just some whiny brat who won't get in the robot, or he's an incel and Rinoa is his manic pixie dream girl. Or the whole game is just reddit fedora child soldier badass mall-ninja military aesthetic. With all the dumbass Channel Awesome-tier takes I see people spouting about this game I could hardly believe any of the people saying that shit have even played it, or at least not beyond the first few hours, if it weren't for the fact that it took me like 4 playthroughs to really get it myself. I can hardly believe how few views on youtube some of the songs from this game have, how it's actually kind of hard to find recordings of the version of Eyes On Me that can play during the Garden Festival in Fisherman's Horizon, that one of the few recordings I can find has only a few hundred views and is interrupted multiple times by screenshot sound effects.

How could you think so low of the game when the song at the core of it all, the song whose phrases echo through at least half a dozen of the game's background tracks, is contextualized as the other half of the player crying out "Don't you know I'm a person? Don't you know I'm just like you? That I have my own thoughts and dreams and desires?" I genuinely believe Final Fantasy VIII is one of, if not simply the best written narrative ever told in a video game, and one of the best coming of age stories of the past few decades. I don't understand how someone who has actually experienced it in full could walk away from it and so totally ignore the obvious character development that occurs, that Squall is more than the brick wall we see in the games opening chapters, that Rinoa is more than just a wish fulfillment "romance option".

Still, Squall's indecision means that their ship touches down, Rinoa turns herself in to the Esthar soldiers to be sealed away in the sorceress memorial for the safety of the world. At virtually the last possible moment, Squall chooses honesty. It is at this moment that the player gets this game's airship, the spaceship Ragnarok. The music that plays during flight, the freedom it offers, the uniquely satisfying way that it handles compared to all other movement in the game, this is the ultimate mechanical and emotional payoff.

I said in a previous review of this game on this site that this is the only video game I own which features its narrative theme as a bullet point on the back of the box, and that says it all, doesn't it? Final Fantasy VII touts its size, its audiovisual spectacle, but it gets no more specific than a vague gesture towards "a good story". Final Fantasy IX, as good as it is, is Square admitting defeat; in its appeal to nostalgia it reveals an internal sense that this format is already as archaic as the SNES games which came before. Final Fantasy X was the real future, with its voice acting, facial expressions, and full 3D environments rendered in real time. Final Fantasy X was the point where these games just utterly lost something, they stopped feeling like Final Fantasy. From the first to the ninth each game in this series truly felt like a world, as though even with its tricky sense of scale and perspective the player could truly feel as though they had explored every nook and cranny of a massive place. Final Fantasy VII was sort of properly primitive, abstract through necessity, struggling to convey itself through multiple discontinuous styles. Final Fantasy VIII was perhaps the absolute pinnacle of a kind of game that we simply don't see anymore and may never again, and it was all in the name of love.

Anyway, this is where I reveal that I'm actually a fake fan, I've never beaten this game. I've gotten to the final disc at least 4 times, I have never beaten the final boss, I have never seen the credits. The entire first three discs of this game are actually just the tutorial, they're baby mode, once you have literally the slightest idea of how to build a decent party the entire game up until the final dungeon is a complete cakewalk. Then, the final dungeon, the entire 4th Disc, is a Resident Evil mansion full of super-bosses, each of which basically requires you to completely reconfigure your party to meet some hyper-specific criteria. I haven't touched my current save file in months, maybe I'll beat it next playthrough, maybe the payoff will feel so great that I'll add that last half star to my rating, but I wouldn't bet on it.

It's kinda fucked up how Sheb Wooley gets relieved that the Purple People Eater only eats purple people. Sure he came to be in a rock and roll band but if he ever gets to a purple person it's over. And he isn't even that good, to be honest. I still think he easily beats Alvin and his devilspawn brothers, we truly live in the worst timeline possible.

In his seminal work, "スペインはアメリカから鉱物を返還しなければならない (Supein wa Amerika kara kōbutsu o henkan shinakereba naranai)" Liquidrocks calls this game a love letter filled with anthrax and after thoroughly playing it and barely paying attention to it I tend to agree with him. This isn't game as much as a shoutbox for Suda51. He's at his most caustic here, going through a list of grievances and screaming and each and everyone of them.

The only place he really holds back is in regards to what I assume he considers his peers, the indie game scene (specifically the western one, and predominantly Devolver at that), constantly showing how they have come to inspire him, narratively speaking at least. Playing this made me remember fondly the times when I started playing videogames, being utterly enthralled by the magic of computers and consoles. There was a whole summer where I pretended to be a Warcraft 3 unit, clicking the ground in my mind to move around the house and looking at the sky wondering if the aliens would get me like in the Sims 2.

This acidic tirade can be a doubled edged sword since it looks like the list that includes you, the player. Simply put, this is not enjoyable to play roughly 70% of the time, with mediocre beat em 'up action and barebones rgp mechanics with skills and yadda yadda. It also doesn't help that you all of the six stages feel like they are about double the lenght they should be and barely use the gimmick of the game they take place in. The only break in monotony are some visual novel segments with their own highs and lows, exceeding at criticizing the medium but in my opinion failing at making the self references to Suda's previous work feel anything but reculer. This was a dissapointment to me, as I expected to vibe with this part of the story, but I ended up looking at what felt to me a man masturbating inside his own game about how cool his other games are. Granted if I ever finish making any of the projects I envision I would do the same 24/7 but it would have class, baby.

All in all a really mixed bag to me, saved by the charm of it all and the pretty well done message of pain inflicted upon the creator. Also Boneface fucking rules, straight A on the designs. 9/11 didn't happen.

In Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s philosophical science fiction novel Roadside Picnic, scavengers investigate hazardous zones that exist outwith linear space-time in order to steal extraterrestrial artefacts for profit. The scavengers - known as stalkers - develop seemingly illogical and nonsensical methods of navigating these zones: throwing wing nuts into streams; lying face-first in grass; whistling at rocks. Paratopic emulates Stalker in many ways, but allusions to the film and its source novel are most immediately felt when attempting to move around the game’s most paranormal environments. Certain sections require a divine sense of the invisible and immobile in order to be navigated smoothly, and knee-high ledges frequently kneecap progression. This isn’t the first time an interactive arthouse experience has irritated me in this way, but I’m coming up blank when considering methods of guiding a player that don’t literally or figuratively involve train tracks. The game developer, acting as a stalker for tourists on a gameside picnic, has an impossible task in attempting to build a controlled environment that doesn’t violate the laws of nature with leading green drapes or obstructively instructive red exit lights. In its best moments, Paratopic evades this problem by timeboxing activities and strictly limiting the scope of interactivity, but when you want the player to explore open forest, it’s easy for trees to obscure the woods. Perhaps impatience was at play for me here - like the lady in the apartment, I was hungry to consume another juicy videotape and got lost in the zone, another tainted soul with a wish left ungranted. The irony of this game being a constant feature among the piles of Nintendo eShop £0.89 shovelware is not lost on me.