Note: this review will be written in the hypothetical scenario that, this was 2009 (barring the multiplayer I can't speak on) and the rest of the series does not exist yet. Why? Because I think I can indicate why I feel so strongly about it, and why I feel the opposite about later entries only with a certain context. With that said...

It's rare to see a game this solid just out there without much appreciation, and the appreciation it does get doesn't go the full mile for what makes it so good. It's an unconventional action-RPG, pretty much anyone could recognize that, but Demon's Souls isn't the best action game, nor the best RPG, yet I prefer it to anything I've played of those genres other than itself. Weighty, slower combat, methodical exploration and an extreme variation in landscapes characterize a sensation of exploring its world in a way that isn't something you frequently see these days. Ranging from a vast sea of blood in a murky green haze filled with Lovecraftian monstrosities, to a stormy landscape populated by flying stingrays which blast you from above, I never got tired of the landscapes. But what really makes it great is the way they tie into the gameplay at hand, thanks to the unique systems the game has that are very experimental on the whole.

Recognizing that it's a weird game is one thing, but Demon's Souls best strength isn't actually its combat or complexity as a choice-driven RPG, because it'll continue to beat you down no matter what path you pick. In-fact, it's not even an action game in my eyes - it's a game of preparation. The moments of high thrill and intense action have their fates usually already decided before they begin, by the environment, by the number of enemies, by the items you have on hand and the items you have directly equipped at this moment. All this means a lot since you can't pause, an utterly bold choice, yet a meaningful one. Before several boss fights, I found myself having to choose between weight and fast movement, between high magic defense or slow regeneration, between landing lots of hits or maintaining range, knowing I wouldn't be able to pause and change anything in the heat of the moment. My in-game stats didn't define me, it was my wits, and managing to outthink a world clearly out for my blood. The games most experimental edges all have a purpose, which is to add a preparative element to adventure. It's not just a matter of trial-and-error, it's a matter of figuring out what to do just as much, if not more, than execution. Some bosses I'd find would just be near impossible to damage, or would revive after I killed them, always throwing new hurdles at me I had to factor in. I remember when I was around the Leechmonger Archstone, I found myself consistently getting pushed down no matter what I did, so I found myself going to other areas (which you can access in a non-linear fashion) and exploring there instead. After conquering those worlds and accumulating rings, I managed to get enough poison resistance to muster my way through the poison swamp, utilizing my Soul Remains to lure enemies away as even with my best gear I could never take out that many, but I had another challenge on hand, which was that thanks to my own failures of dying here after entering my human form, the world had changed. The landscapes of Demon's Souls often change ever so slightly in regards to things like enemy placement tied to your own direct failures, and while I think more could have been done with it, it's such an ambitious idea that I can't help but praise it anyways and love how it feeds into that notion of being careful every step of the way. Other games may put you on scripted adventures, but Demon's Souls non-linear exploration and gruelling difficulty saw me taking things at my own pace, yet simultaneously going with the flow of how much the game would punish me for failures. Learning and discovery are necessary to overcome the greatest challenges, because a fight means nothing if the outcome is predetermined by what you know.

Demon's Souls true greatest quality is that most games punish exploits and trickery, but Demon's Souls fully expects you to utilize them to overcome how much it exploits and tricks you, the player, in an act of unfair-fairness where both sides play dirty. What you gain on your adventure and what you learn is what carries it, you go at the order that suits you yet it'll always have something in store to clobber you down with, even if you're finding one area more comfy than another. Checkpoints are far from where you need to go? If you get far enough, you can mitigate the trials of the map via using interconnected level design to create shortcuts. Enemies are damaging you too much? Distract them, or alternatively, use long-range to immediately kill them without them standing a chance. Everything that would be disincentivized in another game under some idea of the game designers valuing honor amongst their own systems is thrown out the window here. You play in a cruel world, and you will play cruel to the world. Everything you find on your journey benefits you and balance is wishy-washy in a way that somehow only serves to make the game better rather than worse, as I was constantly weighing out what I needed; especially thanks to the system of Souls being both money and experience points, leaving even my ability to level up in the air. It's not a flawless game but it's an enchanting one to get lost in. I just hope for a sequel that utilizes some of the mechanics more, perhaps less focus on the RPG elements and more focus on the scavenging for tools and exploits side of the game given builds don't mean much? Some of the bosses were a bit too straightforward too, I'd kill for more bosses that make me think outside the box almost like they're puzzles. World Tendency could affect the world even more when you die, perhaps having entire environments warp. Hell, given the existence of the Thief's Ring, maybe just a full-blown ability to sneak around enemies, more variation in the quality of the AI could be good for this too; with some enemies being smart and snooping you out, while others are equally as mindless as is. All just ideas, but for a game brimming so full of possibilities, who knows what one could expect from a sequel?

I would recommend playing this game blind if possible, so before reading, know that I give it my highest recommendation, though I have tried to keep this light on spoilers.

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Experiential games seem to have a troubled relationship with their mechanics. Most games I've played that aspire to convey deep emotions or truths primarily rely on techniques established in other mediums such as cinema and literature. While these are obviously powerful and effective, it bothers me that they aren't really leveraging their key distinguishing feature: their interactivity. Either the mechanics are clumsily grafted on to a tangentially related narrative experience, they only resonate along some dimensions, or they simply aren't engaging enough to hold attention. Even when a game does mostly succeed, it's hard not to see it as an incomplete realization of its own potential.

Rain World does not struggle with this.

Slugcat is simple to control on a basic level: movement stick, jump button, grab. But the influence of momentum, some intricate Mario 64 esque techniques, and a pinch of QWOP style soft body physics makes quickly maneuvering around uneven terrain tricky, especially with the heavy gravity. There's a real physicality here: you'll feel it when you scramble to clamber Slugcat's body over a ledge, or when your frantic hopping gets stopped stone-cold by a crack in the ground. Holding objects will weigh Slugcat down, which subtly changes the arc and height of jumps, and landing a spear throw on moving targets is easier said than done.

This is paired with a dynamic creature simulation that you'll need to constantly adapt to. A Lizard's bite is deadly, but their bulky bodies have even more trouble maneuvering than you do, and they'll switch focus if threatened by something else. Creatures eat and hunt and flee based on their needs and what information is available to them, something you can work around and exploit by pitting them against each other, or taking advantage of distractions. Death is common and can be punishing, but the yellow flower, which negates this penalty if you can return to where you died with it, rewards those who show caution and savvy.

This is simply to say that the mechanics in and of themselves are intrinsically engaging; there's a good reason this game has extensive modding and speedrunning scenes. But what makes Rain World truly special is its unflinching, all-encompassing commitment to its most central idea: inducing the experience of an animal within a natural world. Developer Joar Jakobsson repeatedly mentions in this interview that the game was conceived as a simulation foremost, with no special privileging of the player character within the game's systems. Every single mechanic exists precisely to push you to behave as an animal would: eating, fleeing, seeking shelter.

Bats flitter, lizards prowl, vultures swoop. Everything needs to eat, not be eaten, and hide from the inevitable rain; they roam within and between screens to these ends. Where a Slugcat fits in is simply a function of opportunity and happenstance. Almost all other games would make some sort of concession to "fairness", but not this one. Sometimes you'll wake up and find a lizard staking out your way forward; other times a usual hunting ground will be empty and silent. That's just how this world is: that's life.

Seeing animals wrap and squish around the terrain, pushed and pulled by their own muscles or outside forces through procedural animation, conveys a certain life-like feeling. There are fundamental physics in this world, even if they are different from our own, and everything must obey them. Struggling with the controls is reflective too: we are born unfamiliar with our own body, and grow into its capabilities with time and knowledge.

It's the game's tremendous success in immersion, only possible through holistic devotion to its goal, that allows it to meaningfully ask you questions about nature, and for you to feel those questions. Why is nature so beautiful? Why is nature so cruel? How much are we animal? What does it mean to be animal? What does it mean to be part of nature, and know that you are part of it? These are thoughts etched deep into our psyche across millennia, which have only recently been allowed to slip from our minds.

In some regions of this world there are colonies of tentacles that coat surfaces and feed by pulling in anything that comes near. Touch only a few, and you can easily rip free; touch too many, and you'll be swiftly sucked in. But touch a handful, and you'll be locked in a futile struggle: you're strong enough to resist their pull, but not strong enough to escape. For the game to immerse me so much that it's able to convey even an inkling of that real situation, of a doomed animal desperately trying not to die, is a monumental achievement.

The clarity of artistic vision in Rain World makes its predecessors look almost primitive by comparison. If there is any justice, this will be looked upon in time with the analysis and praise it deserves, among the highest echelons of the canon. For my own thoughts, it's simple: there is before Rain World, and there is after.

CW: Critical Waffling on Gaming as an Artform, Mental Health Discussion

Est. Read Time: 14 mins
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A twine game in which you as the unnamed player character have 10 seconds left to express all your love to nameless lover before everything ends. Refreshing in how absolutely information overload a romance in the face of desperation is.

Game is actually sort of simple and what you would expect here, there's no ending or bit of information in an ending hiding that 'reveals the whole story', instead you just scramble to love as fast as possible. Love turned into a warioware game with high replayability 'kiss me', 'love me', 'fuck me'', 'just look into my eyes'. It's all the same in the manic compression of the apocalypse, all action drowns into 1 and speed reading is the name of the game.

I wont say I have anything particularly novel or unique to add to this but I do want to hone in on 1 point. In particular, when you strip back the queer traumabonding innate to this there's one other factor the game here reveals upon play. On a mere ludomechanical level, the game is a meditation on how the size of a games possibility space is maybe one of if not the core aesthetic axis on which a game functions as an aesthetic argument to the player that they assess from.

In the gaming mind, games with a low amount of possibility space and games with high ones often seem to be deeply at odds. In a derogatory sense you have the perception against works with a low possibility space as being insulting. What I'm referencing here is not genre locked at all. It can be walking simulators, kinetic novels, 'waiting games', as long as its keeping the players input actions minimal thats all that matters. For a lot of gamers this lack of optionality, of having to wait out a story prepared for them, is deadly similar to a tutorialized hand holding. It's despicable in the sense that it robs the player of seemingly the only 'point' of the interactive simulation, the ability to interact.

In direct contrast games that are highly dynamic and have high possibility space require an actively information comparative effort on the behalf of the player. This can be anything from playing a game with a high number of multiple endings, or trying to make use of limited information on the fly in a rouguelite or an FPS game, at the end of the day it seems that a lot of games criticism is about assessing the relationship of possibility space in the form of immersion.

The conclusions drawn from this are not obviously 1 size fits all, and it would be easy to problematize the point I've made, after all a lot of people including me appreciate low possibility space games. However, on a base level the sentiment seems to be that a kinetic novel or a walking simulator is 'less of a game' (or at least quarentined as an 'art game') and that those high information vector prediction and/or comparative assessment points are 'more of a game'. Within the twine genre for example 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds (2016) which has you solving a problem with 16 outcomes is 'more of a game'. That on the other hand, another in the same engine, The Tower (2018) with its 1 button used to forward the momentum is perceived really more as a slightly interactive art piece than a game. Thus the way both are engaged with in terms of how much it speaks through the possibility space or lack thereof is what the mechanically focused critic takes note of.

At the end of the day it all seems to be assessed in terms of these possibility functions, does a game live up to the promise of its dynamicism or is there 1 player dominant strategy that kills the illusion? Is a walking simulator about to use its 1 interaction point to powerful effect and immersion is it just boring? Is the RNG in a game helping enhance the player possibility space or it is hindering it? In my view in the race to treat games as an artistic self contained medium this tends to be the reference point that most critics I come into contact with focus on.

I have actually no direct interest in challenging this relationship. Without treating game design in this way as a cornerstone for understanding the medium, there's a high risk of otherwise equating its abilities overall as synonymous with Film or Literature. As only ultimately a personal computer version of what those mediums can do, the interactivity here matters a lot, in fact its probably mission critical.

Instead, I want to make this claim: the 'artfulness' of a game in terms of a high possibility space and its cognitive effects (stress, anxiety, disorientation, etc.) is often mitigated or overlooked. A lack of knowledge about how high that possibility space really is usually not taken seriously as an effect for one simple reason, people talk about games comprehensively in the terms of a past experience. As such the fact that at one point a player didn't know all the options of the effects of play is part of the immersion regardless of how 'true' they all are. Maybe a game gives you 20 choices and 14 of them just change a single sentence if that, but the fact there's a direct sense of being overwhelmed by choices is a meaningful point of analysis. The fact of the matter is nothing novel in terms of a rich story is 'hiding' in any of the branch choices in this game, its all the same rush to love at the end of the day, but the illusion of the possibility spaces' effect is part of it. Finally, there is one last point here, whether or not your experience is being 'timed' or not effects your choices a lot to and your sensation. Being pushed to make options quickly enhances further that illusion of being pressed on possibilities, the inability to pause and totally assess whats in front of you is a rather important distinction to that cognitive mirage. Choices made under a stress of time are always going to feel more important than choices made with a lot of time, this is just a result of how thinking works. It probably also explains the variable relationship with games as art in some regard because if you have less real life time than another player for the same game you'll be assessing the impact of the choices more openly.

Maybe this thought means something to somebody, or maybe it's all just exhaust to people that already know but now allow me to say this. 'Gaming' in terms of possibility assessment incentivizes trying to screen as many options as possible for the 'right option'. I can't help but notice how this agitation to 'decide' can play out in mentally corrosive ways. By being unable to recognize the manifestly stressful cognitive elements of trying to assess a possibility space and glamorize them we can risk harming ourselves with feelings of regret or self loathing that we haven't made the "right decision" in real life situations to. True often we do make suboptimal plays, but there's nothing suboptimal about say expressing love here. If the other person feels loved and appreciated the company in those glimmering moments that's enough. If we are unable to assess that the world shouldn't be about trying to make the 'best choice' for some ideal 'win state' we risk causing mental health problems for ourselves. Similarly, games with high or low possibility spaces simply require certain cognitave relationships out of you, and you're not a better or worse person for not being in the right mood for them at every moment in life equally. That would be impossible.

We really do need to try better both as critics and as lovers to actually assess that. Nobody is a better or worse person for having choice paralysis in a game or in real life. The whole point of mental health awareness has been about how sometimes those affects are completely out of control so its ideal in my view to try and see a connection point between both worlds. There is a degree to which this rush to say everything to somebody or do everything with them is not really just a game, its a simulation of a genuine struggle within the possibility space of relationships as a whole.

To conclude here, if the 'best game' is one that is cognitively taxing me as much as possible at all times then I cant say with high confidence I'm much of a gamer at all. Every game has its utility, place, and preference but on some level I think this discussion of what it means to feel 'overwhelmed' by a simulation or the effects of trying to bring the aspects of 'gaming' to the interpersonal world are discarded without consideration. Sometimes, playing games/being in relationships that expect minimal input from you is actually more than anything else a genuine form of self care, and its worth keeping that in mind :3

Accompaniment

The strong appeal of Pizza Tower style has already been spoken for. Its caught on like wildfire to the point of rampant fanaticism, friend of mine Appreciations articulates with a frenzy that

"I really think this game is one of the best indie games ever made and just like pizza in general, nobody dislikes all pizza. You will find something to enjoy here and odds are, you'll love it." Link

In more specific terms, Jenny accurately relates the appeal here to that of crass 90s cartoon animation.

"At its core, Pizza Tower is an ode to all that 90s stuff that I love. It's a bit ugly in style, but in that deliberate Ren & Stimpy or Ed, Edd n' Eddy kinda way, and I warmed up to it almost immediately." ending her sentiments with "At the end of the day, yeah this is really fucking good. Believe the hype, etc etc" link.

Along with this I've felt the sensibility of Pizza Tower's strong appraisal in a lot of the rest of my online life to be it social media use, internet discussions, algorithm content praising the game, streamers enjoying it, etc. The hype seems neverending, it's a shame though because after completing it with a 66% mark I feel entirely disconnected from this perspective. The title overall feels like all style and no substance. All cheese and no sauce.

There are so many glaring flaws with Pizza Tower's (2023) fundamental design in my view that it leaves me baffled nobody else has spoken for them yet. In order to vent my frustrations most effectively I want to first take a step back and say that even though people have been laudatory it would be false to say there has been no criticism about where it falls short. To turn back to Jenny and Appreciations for a moment they've both offered something in this regard. Appreciations mentions that the down attack is finnicky as sometimes it will input a swipe attack over a ground pound, and that they felt no motivation to go 100%. In a more controversial post ponders on bigoted jokes that the developer plays into highlighting his sense of offensive stereotype as a form of humor. Meanwhile, Jenny focuses more on hit detection and the deception of health, particularly for her in the case of bosses though I should say I experienced this outside of just boss fights as well.

While I could quibble on the ways in which these are accurate or not (the one on stereotypes for gags is especially accurate, unfortunately, you have the happy merchant grabbing you (semitic stereotype), and large 'crosseyed' baseball player that mistakes you for a ball (retardation visual stereotype) just to name two. However I want to shelf those concerns and focus on the issues I have with the design fundamentals.

Pizza Tower tries to use a 'ranking' formula of design to motivate player engagement, something that you might be familiar with from 3D sonic titles like Sonic Adventure (1998) or platinum action titles like Bayonetta (2009). The problem is this badge mastery system contrasts with the nessecity to check in nooks and crannies for secrets, thereby slowing you down and killing your combo. No matter what you do your first run of any level is probably going to be around a B at best because you'll be trying to comb for the 5 ingredients on every level, which are necessary to complete the story. The idea here is that in freeing them it works as a reward motivator, but due to the fact that they and the secrets are often tucked out from a linear runpath, even slightly, they instead become a collectible you have to remember and stop for. More to the point this combines with digging for secrets and 'poking' for an optimal route. Unlike the concise 1 minute platforming tests like Dustforce (2012) or Super Meat Boy (2010), Pizza Tower's levels go on for anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes. This sets in a sense of fatigue at individual level mastery where you have to try and fail constantly to get it precise. The problem is that there's no tangible reward for getting better at the individual levels besides an overall progression mark. If you 'P' a boss or a level the number percent goes up, but nothing cosmetic or informative happens as a result of doing well or poorly, there's no unlockable content as an extrinsic motivator. NPCs in the tower don't comment on your performances. No clothing options are unlocked. Peppino doesn't calm down or gain confidence. It's just an achievement for achievements sake.

This is an issue because the 5 off path collectable ingredients you have to catch arent as optional for completion as they first appear. In the beginning the threshold ratio between ingredients needed from each level to unlock a new floor is 50%, one might think based on that that you may need to pick up ingredients but not worry about them too much but you'd be wrong. By the end that percentage rises to a dramatic 90%. The issue is since there is 5 ingredients per level you have to find you actually have to be thorough on each level in finding them. Based on whether the player knows this going in or not makes a big difference because the end you're going to be forced to go back to levels you had skipped over or didn't get all the ingredients from.

Putting the ratio threshold for completion this high is frustrating because its easy to miss an occasional ingredient, and many of the levels themselves are frustrating. Once you get near the finish line the story is practically begging you to climb back down and finish it out a little more through this padding mechanic. End game backtracking is meant to play into that sense of nostalgia and wistfulness, 'I came this far and now look, I'm so much better'. However, because of the amount of gimmicks and gags per level there's not a fundamental sense of player improvement. What happens instead is just a fetch quest followed by, to be vague about the ending, an effusive celebration of itself 'remember this boss? remember this mechanic?' it's ultimately shallow though, because you unlock nothing from being good at the individual levels themselves. This creates a contradiction where you are rewarded for doing the bare minimum but almost not at all for exceeding expectations, as the range between both becomes smaller as the game goes on. The S and P ranks for non boss levels are functionally 'challenge runs' of the game, you're likely to get a B or better without even trying. So by the end all you end up feeling is that you know a few more mechanics. There's no sense of growth or player immersion.

Contrast this to another platformer like say Celeste (2018) where the window of player ability to complete the game is incredibly large. There's a wound rope of difficulty around optional yet visible cherries and toggle accessibility options. Celeste respects the players time by outlining that the Cherries serve no explicit function, they are a side challenge that implicitly build a sense of character for the player, focusing more on building its story elements instead. On the other hand then Pizza Tower deceives the player by telling the them the collectibles matter but not making it clear how much they do. By keeping the rewards of its goals ambiguous it relies on the player to feel that desire to explore its levels and master them. When the player finds out that they don't get anything for doing these side quests it taints future experience of play. When I restart playing Pizza Tower again I know despite all the stats and checklists thrown at me that only the ingredients matter. The secrets, rankings, and achievements are meaningless. However since they aren't treated that way, since they are conveyed as important visual stimuli it becomes a part of play that gets in the way rather than enhancing it. In Celeste the cherries don't mean anything besides knowing how much goes into the pie at the end, but since you were always told that and then the story keeps quiet about their inclusion for the entire run, you can adjust on a new playthrough how much or little you feel like caring about that.

This was really difficult to word properly but the end experience is that I felt like I was being needlessly graded and told to backtrack rather than feel a part of the world. Something needed to have changed in this system for me to feel comfortable, either:

1. Easier: The levels needed to be overall shorter in length so I could master them

2. Less Grading: Less visual information about how 'well im doing' needed to be conveyed to me

3. More Lore: The secrets and rankings needed to unlock cosmetic or lore content in the world for me to feel more immersed for doing well

4. Less Padding: The ratio of ingredients need to complete needed to be a stable reasonable threshold 50 - 75%, and the final level needed to be cut

5. Less Obfuscation: The eye secrets needed to be removed entirely so that I could focus less on 'combing' levels for extra points and more on actual execution

Without any of these taking place this experience has become 'style at all costs' which while amusing in moments becomes distressing as a design philosophy. It feels like a design philosophy chosen to keep the player playing as much as possible so you can see all it has to offer. As nice as it looks, it comes off as desperate and frustrating.

Less abstractly a few other miscellaneous issues

-Proximity score doesnt matter since its just about collecting as much as you can and keeping a chain, so the score should only show up at the end

-Camera needed to be zoomed out from the player a bit more because you end up just flailing at high speeds as it is

-If you turn the HUD off a -5 still ticks in the top left corner during the runback portion which is very distracting

-The bosses only test your postitioning and not your ability to execute running maneuvers which feels not in pace with the point of the game

-They put the best song in the tutorial, a catchy bass song with tons of fancy hi hat use, the other songs aren't half as good so they feel weaker. Probably just shouldn't have even used it because it makes everything feel disappointing

-The levels that kill you based on time have an unreasonably high completion threshold compared to end level runbacks, meaning you'll have to repeat them more than you would a normal stage

-there needs to be more discreet 'Grading thresholds' between A and S rank for non boss stages. S Rank forces a 2nd run through the level out of a player which borders on challenge mode feeling. Adding a couple more ranks around this point in the scale would do a lot to implicitly reward the player for doing better.

-The happy merchant bit in the Slums really bummed me out, like what the fuck man

I want to end on one last note. Appreciations nailed one thing I agree on, they noted that "You've got yourself a winner in Pizza Tower and that winner here is adrenaline." My qualm is that rewarding adrenalinic high intensity action response puts a person in a more impulse driven mode. I'm not sure that mode is 'good'. Anecdotally, this specific form of adrenaline puts me in a state of frustrated anger once I start to feel like I cant do better or the game is fucking with me. That anger boils me up and tends to make me dysphoric as a result. I'm not sure how much this applies to other people but I'm not too convinced that rewarding a surplus adrenaline hormones on tap like this from titles like Sekiro or Pizza Tower etc is actually good for us? It certainly isnt good for me, that's why I tend to play 'non difficult' story focused titles. I've noticed people say I'm not trying hard enough, but I wonder especially looking at how social media rewards impulsive thinking if its possible people have it backwards. Maybe everyone else is trying too hard to get that spike, and telling me I need to, as well.

Look, I'm not saying that it's healthy I respond to action input with the rage I do by any means, but I'm far from the only rage gamer. Like, I've never seen somebody rage quit a visual novel for example. It's always the people fucking up in rhythm games breaking stuff, its always the League mates freaking the fuck out about not having place down a ward etc. It's never the Final Fantasy nerds having fits. Again these are all anecdotes but its just food for thought. At the very least it explains my preference against it and why I tend to be so critical of finding design harmony in it.

I think we can all agree there's that one old game of our personal choice that we think people give too much praise due to novelty (presentative quality or gimmicks) and not due to design. You'll hear the term "ahead of its time" a lot in the case of other games, but Prince of Persia fits exactly within the timeframe it was released and yet games still have a lot to learn from it.

There's two core tricks Prince of Persia has up its sleeve that make the retroactive "cinematic platformer" label go from an implication of novelty to a legitimate stroke of design genius. The first is the timer; throughout the entire runtime of Prince of Persia you are constantly fighting the clock to do anything and the entire game was built around this. The reason for the style of movement games like Oddworld would later go on to adopt was not just for the sake of realism alone, but because it makes sense within the confines of needing slow, careful movement that you have to constantly weigh the actual value of applying due to it constantly wasting your time with even the slightest misstep. This drastically changes the game as even grabbing health upgrades could be seen as "too risky" in terms of wasting your time as opposed to just rushing through. The second trick is that Prince of Persia is a game of logical consistency and learning, and not a game of actual precision or high difficulty. Prince of Persia is brutal not because its systems are that hard to master but because what you do and don't know defines everything. The game doesn't give you a single scrap of information so learning what you can and can't do really shakes up how you play it. This is obvious when it comes to things like level layouts with the timer, but the game constantly toys around with how it feeds you information. In Stage 3, you fight your first skeleton, there are not many of these across the game but they serve to teach the lesson of environmental awareness; they must be killed via environmental hazard, thus reinforcing the idea that your realistic movement is a logical consistency and enemies can be killed with the environment due to realistic limitations too; a major factor in late-game time management as enemies start taking longer and longer to kill normally. In Stage 7, you must make a tile fall from the ceiling to reach a new part of the labyrinth. This requires jumping up to bring the tile down as you hit against it, but an observant player will note that every other flimsy tile in the room shakes too when you jump, thus meaning you can pre-emptively spot falling tiles via jumping before you enter a room. In Stage 8, there are several screens you'll enter twice, first from the bottom going right and afterwards from the top going left. As you do this, it'll become apparent there are several guards on the upper side of the screen as you're coming in from the lower sector, and during the process you'll notice the guards shift directions based on where you run. This can become frustrating as often guards will just immediately ambush you when you're going through the screens on the upper sector, but in actuality, this can be avoided by simply using any movement abilities that just don't make noise. An extremely basic game mechanic, but relevant in that anything that might at first seem overtly gamey or archaic ends up being mostly a realistic extension of the mechanics at play, and this focus on knowledge coupled with the time turns Prince of Persia into a very different experience to anything else.

Prince of Persia is a game that wants you exploring its dungeons not just as gamey constructs but as things you need to evaluate and carefully move around while the clock constantly ticks out of your favor. There is a constant consideration going on of what actually is relevant to you and what isn't given the circumstances that mean wasting even a single second is a big deal, as you know you'll probably die further on ahead anyways and be struggling with what would otherwise be a short game because you just don't know the fundamentals of what's coming. This takes Prince of Persia from merely being a platformer into being something... different, it's not just about learning to pull off the tricks, it takes the form of a game that requires genuine problem-solving in a still retroactively unique way. Prince of Persia is a slow-burn as it wants you being completely attentive, and it left me hooked by the end. In spite of how old it is, finally reaching the Princess at the last minute still manages to be one of the more cinematic and memorable moments I've had in a game, and for anyone who wants to have something they can genuinely sink their teeth into without feeling like it was all for nothing, this is the game to play.

It's everything I've ever wanted out of a tabletop game. The rolls and skill tree are present enough to feel like I have a real input and customization in the actions of the character. Just enough interactivity to separate it from a visual novel.

Which is all good and gravy, but the main appeal is in the excellent setting and narrative.

Tabletop games like DnD have plagued me for a long time. I love the concept of them. Immersing yourself in a role and telling a group narrative. Unfortunately they never actually play out that way. The sessions I've experienced always turn into a frantic rush to the nearest dungeon or fight and then 5 hours of trap checks and the absolute slog that is tabletop combat. This of course is all dependent on your group and your DM, but for me, these sessions were a nightmare and have completely soured my opinion of games like DnD.

Citizen Sleeper gives me a taste of what I've always wanted out of DnD. I played the game from start to finish playing the role of the sleeper and doing what I thought my character should do and I was rewarded with every step. The world is easy to immerse in, the multiple narratives are all excellent, the rolls of failure and success effectively simulated the failures and successes of real life that tabletop dice rolls are supposed to simulate. My motivations were one to one with my character. I didn't do stuff so I could min/max my engineering stat line. I did stuff because I needed to eat, I wanted to help my friends, I had to pay off a rough customer. When I eventually got to a point of comfort, where I could make a steady income and survive, I felt a weird sense of pride. The Eye, in real time, began to feel like a home.

The creator of this game in a recent interview said he could keep making games and stories in the Citizen Sleeper world for years and if that's the case I'm ready for it.

Eons of memes and bantz about many portrayals of, and commentaries on, gods and religion in Japanese pop media all threaten to frame Quintet's debut as a schmaltzy creation myth. The last thing I expected was a translation of Japan's cosmogony into a commentary on the monomyth, hiding its version of the pre-Imperial hero god Okuninushi (or Onamushi) behind a Judeo-Christian façade. But that's the level of creativity and innovation that the studio's founding staff and contractors strived for. Set aside the simple yet subversive premise and you'll still have one of the most fun and clever hybrids in console software history. ActRaiser's influence never traveled as far as it ought to, largely materialized in series like Dark Cloud, yet it's more than earned its cult classic reputation. Not that I'd call this the Velvet Underground & Nico of xRPGs, but it's a valid comparison. Few if any video games marketed for a wide audience tackled such a broad, charged set of themes and sensations in such a formative period for the medium, no matter the imperfections.

As unwieldy as it sounds, this fusion of two strongly contrasting genres—side-scrolling action platforming and the primordial god simulator—likely couldn't have been bettered in 1990. Bullfrog's seminal Populous had only arrived on Japanese PCs in March, and I've found no evidence of PC-98 developers working with Peter Molyneux's blueprint. We know, however, that the founding members of Quintet, having left Nihon Falcom during the development of Ys III, had finished 70% of what became ActRaiser before having second thoughts. Whether or not they'd seen or played a certain PC-based god game is yet unknown. (Ironically, their former employer's own Lord Monarch shows Yoshio Kiya's own infatuation with Western imports like Populous, though that game's an early real-time strategy wargame.) The group's growth and frustrations while working on Ys and related PC xRPGs might have pushed them to do something risky for a console audience they hadn't yet catered to. Why not bring the essence of a complex Japanese PC simulation title to a workmanlike action platformer a la Dragon Buster or Castlevania?

The waxing and waning divine works its wonders amidst spirits and sovereigns. It takes on forms both distinct and recondite, like shadow to light. Beyond the waking minds of souls freed into a bourgeoning world lives the idyllic hero, desirable yet unknowable, a paragon which leads through belief up until that faith is no longer needed or traditional. Such tales of good versus evil, or many shades past, endure across time, often as aspirations, warnings, and the subject matter of popular art and entertainment. It's this fascination with mythology, and what it means to people and their worldviews, which anyone playing ActRaiser (among other games letting you "play god") must engage with.

Now the goal was to evoke that feeling of playing god, a paradox given the player's inability to shape the game outside those possibilities which developers set for them. They compromised with a dual-avatar story, where both a chiseled holy warrior and boon cherubic messenger shape separate but linked sections of the world. Main writer and planner Tomoyoshi Miyazaki wisely chose to represent this god's duality of presence. In the sky castle, we are without form, and the angel merely a presenter for this abstract interface set among the clouds. But it's not long before the player descends, their guiding light inseparable from the extra-textual, animating a statuesque warrior into action, all to smite and vanquish the dark. On the flipside, the winged child soon becomes our vessel with which to reinvent this realm we've conquered, swapping out fantastic inhabitants for mundane, moldable men and women. Both characters exemplify the almighty in ways we can bond to, but never deny questions about the powers, limits, and mysteries behind what's sublime and what's imagined. To "play god" is also to probe one's identity and ability in context.

Though we're ostensibly the alpha and omega, mortality still matters to us, as The Master incarnates on this Earth in a limited extension of being. Nothing in this game holds back from trying to kill you, whether it's insta-death pits and lava or just an odd thing flying from the side of the screen. ActRaiser plays nice, though, particularly in its NA and EU versions with reduced difficulty and added extra lives. Most levels have smartly-placed checkpoints, letting you learn each segment without running out of time that easily. There's only a few collectible power-ups, either for score or health and 1-ups, but finding those breakables and wisely rationing magic use for the tougher fights is critical. Even if you can't ever Game Over for obvious reasons, starting the action stages from scratch can feel crushing, the good kind that encourages skill and concentration. The "fail state" in sim mode comes from your angel losing all their health to enemy attacks or collisions, at which point you can't fire any arrows. Overworld nasties will take advantage of this temporary vulnerability, snatching up residents, destroying homes, and even razing all your hard work with earthquakes (damn those skulls!). All these challenges and setbacks mirror those of the families we're fostering, or even the monsters one slaughters for that juicy high score. It's a piece of humble pie to counterbalance these grand themes.

All this came to mind as I flew from one region to another, enjoying the safe game loop that ActRaiser makes the most of. On their own, neither the action or sim sequences rank with the best in those genres, even at the time. The Master's stiff controls and lack of mobility options (my kingdom for a Mega Man-ish slide!) often don't match the severity of enemy attacks and zone control later on. I'd be hard-pressed to call the town management engaging just on its own, with very few means to affect what villagers build and very straightforward terraforming puzzles. If one really wanted a top-notch, side-scrolling action game for SNES, let alone other systems and arcade boards, then there's no shortage of options. SimCity might not exactly classify as a god game now, but it fit the earliest definitions back when most started playing it on PCs or, of course, Nintendo's enhanced port. It's the mutual interactions between these modes, simple to understand and swap between, which creates that vaunted positive loop of advancement. The game's main coder and director, Masaya Hashimoto, had figured out with Ys that you could mix even a decent graphic adventure and Hydlide-like action RPG to create something special. No wonder it works here!

The salad of once contradictory, now inter-weaving ideas continues with ActRaiser's locales and cultural tropes. Fillmore's mysterious, metamorphic forest of foes gives way to a city-state in the making, with one of the shrine worshipers playing oracle and then martyr for The Master's cause. Way later on comes Marahna, a Southeast Asia-like region whose darkest jungles and ornate temple of evil clashes against the hardy, pragmatic people you guide to self-sufficiency. Enemy and boss designs range across typical European and Asian fantasy faire, from dwarfs and lycanthropes to serpents and tengu, with big bads like the centaur knight and ice dragon playing to regional theme. These entities would seem banal and rehashed from competing games, but regain some staying power when framed via this conflict between them and amorphous monotheism which you embody. One can sense the sensory and conceptual distance between this god and its subjects, either those it subjugates or the civilizations it cultivates. No one prays to you from the comfort of their own homes; all must congregate in shrines to communicate with the great beyond, something they can imagine but never fathom. Only by your actions does the world change, reflecting values of nurture over nature and other Abrahamic virtues. Any dialogue between this universe's denizens necessarily involves upheaval.

In this way, the final level, a boss rush much like any other from the era, becomes more than just content reuse. It's the cataclysm of God vs. gods, a refutation of polytheism. But it's just as likely a nod to the religious lore Miyazaki would have been most familiar with, the Kojiki and its narrative of Japan's beginnings. Following in the wake of Susanoo, that hero of chaos, Okuninushi emerged from exile in the underworld to defeat his evil brothers who had forced him there. In its manual, ActRaiser draws a direct parallel, with The Master having fallen in battle to Tanzra (or Satan in the JP version) and his cunning siblings. Only after a period of recovery does our god return to the world, long forgotten but ready to reassert a moral order of society and positivity. The Master and Onamuchi both face trials, personages, and climactic battles to unite their lands and usher their peoples from prehistory into history. As such, the dynamic between The Master and Tanzra, already Manichean and inextricable by definition, is also a less than didactic allegory for the national myth Miyazaki & co. (and players) were familiar with.

Quintet uses these devices, both subtle and obvious, to motivate your journey as expected, and to pull the proverbial rug out from underneath. Imagine doing all this hard work, slicing and jumping through obstacle courses, then sparing villagers from demonic intervention as you pave new roads and fields for them, only to become invisible, beyond recognition. Onamuchi himself acquiesced to this fate, ceding the earthly kami's rulership of Japan to Amaterasu's heavenly lineage. The concept of divinity you brought to these societies was once pivotal to their survival and eventual growth, a uniting force transcending the chaos surrounding them. But in a stable, almost arcadian state of affairs, this godly example now has each and every human finding faith in themselves and others, not in The Master and its herald. ActRaiser ends with a striking inversion of the game's most iconic cinematic tool, the constant Mode 7 zooming in on each action stage you visit. Finally, after the bittersweet revelation that no one visits any shrines anymore—that your own creation has moved on from you, emotionally and ritualistically—the game zooms out, the continents shrinking into nothing as this reality ceases to consider you, or vice versa.

I was genuinely agape when this happened. The game had shown some forward-thinking use of video games' formal elements, mainly to emphasize the uncanny gulf between the clean user interface and what diegetic actions/consequences the buttons led to. But this moment went well beyond those little touches, demonstrating how Miyazaki, Hashimoto, and others at Quintet sought a novel style of storytelling, moving on from the face-value imitation of manga and anime in previous works. For all its issues and missed opportunities, ActRaiser nails these once one-of-a-kind twists that shake you up, simultaneously indulging in new audiovisual potential while using it to the medium's advantage. These surprises aren't as common as I'd hope for throughout the game, but when they happen, oh do they succeed! Moments like Teddy's bad luck in Bloodpool, the archetypal albatross appearing both in Kasandora and Marahna, and the implied Sigurd-Gudrun couple reincarnated by the world tree in Northwall all stick out here. Everything of this sort is still all too simple compared to ye olde Disco Elysium of today, yet effective as a kind of heightened fairytale in-between the melee and management.

The word I'm looking for is alchemy, the transmutation of ordinary elements into a greater whole. It describes the very compound term ActRaiser, a portmanteau I'd expect to see in a game jam ditty. What distinguished this amalgalm of systems from others around the turn of the '90s was this focus on story, not just another player-fellating genre hybrid for its own sake. It's because this adventure makes a micro-critique of our indulgence in power fantasies, and their relation to founding myths, that the individually unpolished bits you interact with remain fun and worthwhile. Perhaps the harvesting and trading of offerings between the cities is a fetch quest underneath, but it rarely feels that meaningless. I just want to gift the Kasadoran a far-off tropical remedy for their troubles, or clothe the citizens of icy Northwall in wool from Aitos. And yes, the final platforming gauntlet might as well be a greatest hits of the adventure's most irritating design quirks, but damn does it push all your skills and patience to the limit. This potion Quintet's concocted leaves a mysterious aftertaste.

Debut software on vintage PCs & consoles could often vary wildly in robustness. Every developer getting something to market on Day 1 has to learn a newly enhanced architecture as quick as is feasible, a feat many can't achieve. ActRaiser stands toe to toe with ritzier, more sophisticated SNES classics that were still on the drawing board in 1990. Koji Yokota and Ayano Koshiro of Telenet & Falcom heritage, among a host of talented artists, go ham with color schemes that the PC-88 and Famicom could merely have dreamed of, enriching the greebles and decorative patterns of dungeons and biomes. Tasteful use of parallax scrolling, alpha-blending transparencies, and other visual effects works in tandem with clean yet florid art direction, bearing the hallmarks of paperback book covers and Dungeons & Dragons. Ayano's brother took up the mantle of music and sound design, a daunting role considering the SNES' new sample-based sound chip. I'm more a fan of Yuzo Koshiro's orchestral work within the confines of FM synthesis, another tall order for musicians and programmers of the day. But this remains one of the system's most memorable and defining soundtracks, with melodious militant marches and more pensive ambiance in abundance. Figuring out how to cram so many instruments, pitch and volume bends, etc. must have been an ordeal for him. My ears tell me it was worth it.

It's a shame, then, that the Koshiro siblings only helped Quintet again for this game's long-debated sequel. The rest of the company continued to evolve, recruiting new talent to develop more ambitious xRPGs dealing with stories and personalities both grandiose and relatable. Hashimoto and Miyazaki's startup had firmly diverged from their old employers' conservative milieu, and future triumphs like Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma, Brightis, and Planet Laika are testament to Quintet's longevity. Us players, having embodied the holiest in both mortal and supernatural ways, can only look back on the studio's works and progeny, subject to critical reverence and dismantlement alike. Somewhere, out in the cosmos, The Master could be liberating new planets, or perhaps dooming them to the curse of civilization we're all too familiar with. That builder's spirit, a lathe of heaven…it's rarely if ever about reaching the end, but savoring the stops along the way, those flips in perspective. ActRaiser toys with players and the perspectives offered to them, engrossing us in the champion's cause while suggesting that this isn't the best of all possible worlds—just the one we must cherish.

Suffice to say, I'm not looking forward to all the gratuitous changes I'm spotting in ActRaiser Renaissance. The most I can gather is that its deviations can't harm the original ex post facto. Until next time, I'll just be listening to Fillmore's FM-synth beta version in the green room.

What should one expect from a JavaScript game jam exercise less than half the size of a mid-'90s Doom WAD? That's the question Phoboslab and other js13k participants try to answer each year. Some contest entries successfully provide a full game, often a puzzler like Road Blocks or something more adventurous like Greeble. Minimal logic, procedurally generated assets, and ingenious reuse of game systems can go a long way in reducing your program's size. But there's also something to be said for demaking a larger, well-known title into something pushing the limits of this coding paradigm. That's something Q1K3 accomplishes with aplomb. It's not even the first throwback FPS to rank high in a js13k roster, but only this one's received a Super Special award just for its technical achievements.

Q1K3 offers two levels and a few of the original Quake's items, enemies, and weapons to play with. While the opening map largely recreates E1M1, from its dour tech-room intro to the spiral ramp descending towards a slipgate, the second map smashes together memorable parts from other shareware levels. Everything's rendered in the browser, a lo-fi yet convincing facsimile of the source material when viewed at a glance. Sure, the textures and models are way simpler, and the lighting model leans heavily into color banding, but I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking "yep, it's Quake" for a couple of seconds. Pulling this off in only around 13kb must not have been easy!

In fact, a seasoned Quake player can spot all the cuts and simplifications no doubt needed to cram the essence of such complex software into this demo. For example, players can't bunny hop, dive underwater, use Quad Damage and other power-ups, etc. What's here is as minimal as a Quake demake can get in a recognizably modern 3D framework. I'm reminded of the much older but still impressive .kkrieger, a multi-level, well featured FPS packed tight into 96 kilobytes. With less time and less breathing room, Phoboslab's 2021 creation manages to match that preeminent demo in most ways. Player agility and weapon feedback could understandably be a lot better, but damn does this play well for a 10-15 minute romp through a hazily remembered vision of gibbed soldiers and Nine Inch Nails.

There's still some nitpicks I can't ignore, though, mainly with regards to the concept itself. I really didn't need to go through yet another faithful take on E1M1, especially when the map following it diverges from that goal. Swapping out the more predictable bits of the opener for set-piece areas from E2M1 & E3M1 would have made this more compelling to me. Same goes for the weapon selection, which may or may not have simply been curtailed due to the size limit. Shotgun, nailgun, and grenade launcher ain't half bad an arsenal, but I'd have loved to try out the lightning gun too. AI complexity here obviously couldn't match Carmack's work back in the '90s, yet the enemy placement's lacking a bit in attacking you from all angles, or challenging players to move around for better line-of-sight. That extra bit of finesse would go a long way here if Phoboslab ever revisits the project.

If anything, I find it odd that we don't see more low-filesize demakes like this. Maybe the js13k event's involvement with crypto sponsors, including a whole Decentralized prize category in the last couple of years, has turned away interested developers. (Hell, I know I wouldn't mess with anyone giving oxygen to Web3 creeps.) I love the recent Bitsy scene and how it's democratized making games under the most minimal restrictions, but more projects like this pushing the limits of common programming languages are always neat. Of course, nothing but demakes would get boring, yet I think they're a great way to showcase how far this level of extremely efficient coding can push one's creativity. Q1K3's a very short but very fun delve into how low-level this high-level Web technology can reach—play it on lunch break or something, it's that breezy. I ought to give POOM a go now, too, or whichever mad scientist recreates Deus Ex on the Atari 2600.

Getting Over It might be the smartest application of rage game design out there, because as much as it's focused on enraging you, it understand its players mentalities and actions in a way not many other games attempt to. The control scheme here might be the most natural control scheme I've ever utilized but it takes time to figure out and deliberately punishes anger, as fast sloppy movements just send you all the way back down, and Bennett Foddy's half-sarcastic half-genuinely thoughtful comments play to belittle yet motivate you. If there's one thing I can really say about Getting Over It, play it during a time of stress or when you, well, need to get over something, and you'll learn to appreciate what it's trying to teach you.

For the people, it was just another exhilarating day, punching and rocketing through a deformed, deranged B-movie. For a decorated Pangea Software, this was maybe their most passionate, prestigious creation. Brian Greenstone and his frequent co-developers had the notion to refine their previous Macintosh action platformers, Nanosaur and Bugdom, into nostalgia for cheesy, laughable Hollywood science fantasy films. As the 2000s got started, this studio wasn't as pressured to prove the PowerPC Mac's polygonal potential, but Otto Matic still fits in with its other pack-in game brethren. All that's changed is Greenstone's attention to detail and playability, previously more of a secondary concern. This Flash Gordon reel gone wrong doesn't deviate from the collect-a-thon adventure template of its predecessors, yet it delivers on the promises they'd made but couldn't quite realize. Greenstone had finally delivered; the eponymous hero had arrived in both style and substance.

Players boot into a cosmos of theremins, campy orchestration, big-brained extraterrestrials, provincial UFO bait humans awaiting doom, and this dorky but capable android who kind of resembles Rayman. Start a new game and you're greeted with something rather familiar, yet different: simple keyboard-mouse controls, hostages to rescue, plentiful cartoon violence, and a designer's mean streak hiding in plain sight. The delight's in the details, as Otto has an assortment of weapons and power-ups with which to defeat the alien invaders and warp these humans to safety. It's just as likely you'll fall into a puddle and short-circuit, though, or mistime a long distance jump-jet only to fall into an abyss. What I really liked in even the earliest Pangea soft I've tried, Mighty Mike, is this disarming aesthetic tied closely with such dangers. I hesitate to claim this mix of Ed Wood, Forbidden Planet, and '90s mascot platformers will appeal to everyone (some find it disturbing, let alone off-putting), but it's far from forgettable in a sea of similar titles. It helps that the modern open-source port's as usable as others.

The dichotomy between Otto Matic's importance for modern Mac gaming and its selfish genre reverence isn't lost on me. One wouldn't guess this simple 10-stage, single-sitting affair could offer much more than Pangea's other single-player romps. On top of its release as a bundled app, they turned to Aspyr for pressing and publishing a retail version, followed by the standard Windows ports. Accordingly, the evolution of Greenstone's 3D games always ran in tandem with Apple's revival and continuation of their Y2K-era consumer offerings. His yearly releases demanded either using the most recent new desktop or laptop Macs, or some manner of upgrade for anyone wielding an expandable Power Mac. Fans of Nanosaur already couldn't play it on a 2001 model unless they booted into Mac OS 9, for example, while the likes of Billy Western would arrive a year later solely for Mac OS X. The studio's progress from one-man demo team to purveyor of epoch-defining commercial games feels almost fated.

So I think it's fitting how a retro B-movie adventure, celebrating a transformed media legacy, dovetails with Apple letting their classic OS fade gracefully into legacy. OS X Cheetah and Puma were striking new operating systems aimed at a more inclusive, cross-market audience for these computers, as well as new products like the iPod. Otto Matic pairs well here by offering the best overall balance of accessibility, challenge, and longevity in Pangea's catalog—matched only by Cro-Mag Rally from 2000, a network multi-player kart racer that would one day grace the iPhone App Store charts. Maybe taking that year off from a predictable sequel to Rollie McFly's exploits was all Greenstone & co. needed to reflect on what worked and what didn't. The first two levels here evoke Bugdom's opening, sure, but with much improved presentation, player readability, and overall pacing. Better yet, stage two isn't just a repeat of the opener like before; you leave the Kansas farming community for a whole different planet!

Never does Otto Matic settle for reusing environments when it could just throw you into the deep end somewhere else, or at least into a boss arena. We go from the sanctity of our silver rocket to scruffy cowpokes and beehive hairdressers, then to literally Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and other mutated comestibles. Next we're chasing down our hapless primate friends across worlds of exploding crystals and elemental blobs, or an airborne theme park of clowns, avian automatons, and four-armed wrestler babies! Pangea practiced a great sense for variety and charm with their thinly-veiled take on A Bug's Life, but the idiosyncractic sights and sounds here feel all their own. I'd even say this game avoids the trap of indulging in the same trope-y xenophobia its inspirations did, mainly by avoiding or at least muddling any clear Cold War allegories. Otto's just as much an interloper here as their sworn enemies, a metallic middleman acting for peacekeepers from beyond. Both your post-level results and Game Over screens show a striking comparison, with humans treated like cattle by either party. Granted, we're not the ones transmogrifying them into jumpsuit-adorned cranial peons.

Parts of the game are actually a bit more challenging than the harder bits in Bugdom, but tuned to give players more leeway and options for engagement. For starters, the jump-jet move works even better for these maps than the ball & spin-dash did previously. It helps that you've got a lot more draw distance throughout Otto Matic, the most important graphical upgrade beyond just particles and lighting. Whereas the rolling physics could sometimes work against player movement and combat, boosting up and forward through the air has enough speed and inertia for you to feel in control. Punching's not too different from Rollie's kicks, but all the pick-ups, from ray-guns to screen-clearing shockwaves, have more immediate utility. (Part of your score bonus also comes from having as much ammo as possible, incentivizing skillful usage!) But above all, the game genuinely encourages you to play fast and risky, sending UFOs to snatch humans away before you can.

I think back to something as loved or hated as Jet Set Radio, which similarly has a less-than-agile control scheme one must master to get an optimal outcome. Frequently using the jump-jet ensures you can reach those cheerleaders and labcoats in time, but drains your own fuel, requiring engagement with enemies and breakables to replenish that gauge. Both games have you watching your resources while finding shortcuts to dive into the action, which in Otto's case means farming baddies for rocket fuel to leave the stage. It's not all that removed from grabbing graffiti cans and kiting the Tokyo-to police, and that reflects how much fun I had on every stage. A couple bits still irritate me here and there, like the unwieldy, tediously scarce embiggening potions on the jungle planet. (The bumper cars puzzles are annoying at first, but straight-up funny after a time.) It's still a somewhat janky piece of work on the fringes, like anything Greenstone made with his '80s design influences chafing against newer trends. But I can recommend this to any 3D platformer fan without reservation—neither too insubstantial nor too drawn out.

And I find it hard to imagine Otto Matic releasing for the first time today with its mix of earnest pastiche, technological showcase, and quaint sophistication. Mac OS X early adopters clamored for anything to justify that $129 pricetag and whatever new components their machine needed; Pangea was always there to provide a solution. As my father and I walked into the local Apple store early in the decade, we both had a few minutes of toying around with Otto's Asmov-ian antics, no different in my mind from Greenstone's other computer-lab classics. But playing this now has me asking if he'd finally done real playtesting beyond bug fixes and the like. No aggravating boss fights, ample room to improvise in a pinch, and worlds big enough to explore but never feel exhausting—their team came a long way while making this. The lead developer's estimation of the game speaks volumes, as though he was on a mission to prove there was a kernel of greatness hiding within what Nanosaur started. Nowadays I'd expect needlessly ironic dialogue, some forced cynicism, or concessions to streamers and those who prefer more content at all costs. Players back then had their own pet complaints and excuses to disqualify a game this simple from the conversation, which is why I can respect the focus displayed here.

Confidence, then, is what I hoped for and gladly found all throughout Otto Matic. It's present everywhere, from Duncan Knarr's vivid, humorous characters to Aleksander Dimitrijevic's impressively modernized B-movie music. Crawling through the bombed-out urban dungeon on Planet Knarr, electrifying dormant doors and teleporters in the midst of a theremin serenade, reminded me of the original Ratchet & Clank in a strong way. And hijacking a ditched UFO after evading lava, ice, and hordes of animated construction tools on Planet Deniz was certainly one of the experiences ever found in video games. (Yet another aspect improved on here are the vehicular sections, from Planet Snoth's magnet water skiing to Planet Shebanek being this weighty, easter egg-ridden riff on Choplifter where you use said UFO to liberate the POW camp.) Factor in the usual level skip cheat and it's fun to just select whichever flavor of Pangea Platformer Punk one desires, assuming high scores aren't a concern.

Just imagine if there were usable modding tools for this version, or if the game hadn't sunk into obscurity alongside neighboring iPhone-era releases of dubious relevance. It's so far the Pangea game I'd most enjoy a revival of, just for how well it captures an underserved style. A certain dino and isopod both got variably appreciated sequels following this and Cro-Mag Rally, but nothing of the sort for Greenstone's own favorite in that bunch? That's honestly the last thing I'd expect if I'd played this back in Xmas 2001, seeing the potential on display here. If I had to speculate, maybe the fear of a disappointing successor turned the team away from using Our Metallic Pal Who's Fun to Be With again. Same goes for Mighty Mike, an even more moldable, reusable character premise. Sequelitis never afflicted the startup like some other (ex-)Mac groups of the time, particularly Bungie and Ambrosia Software, but then I suppose any game releasing in the wake of iMac fever, not within it, couldn't justify the treatment. Otto Matic never reached the notoriety of its precursors, for better or worse, and that means it retains a bit of humility and mystique all these years later.

The OS X era heralded tougher days for Pangea and its peers, as its backwards compatibility and plethora of incoming Windows ports meant these Mac exclusives weren't as commercially savvy. That one company making a military sci-fi FPS jumped ship to Microsoft, the once great Ambrosia shifted direction towards productivity nagware, and Greenstone had his tight bundle deal with Apple to thank for royalties. As a result, I consider Otto Matic emblematic of the Mac platform's transition from underdog game development to a more homogenized sector. I spent most of my childhood Mac years playing a port of Civilization IV, after all, or the OS 8 version of Civilization II via the Classic environment. Neither of those really pushed anything exclusive to OS X or Apple hardware; I'm unsurprised that Pangea hopped onto the iOS train as soon as they could use the SDK! Times were a-changing for the Mac universe, so flexibility and letting the past go was important too. At the end of it all, I appreciate what Otto Matic achieved in its time just as much as I enjoy how it plays now.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023

     ‘He was alone in the centre of the clearing, alone except for a little group of larvae huddled beneath a dandelion leaf, the last survivors of all his kin. He knew he had to save them, or all was finished.’
     – Robin Hawdon, A Rustle in the Grass, 1984.

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Mar. 7 – Mar. 13, 2023).

Shortly after the release of Nanosaur (1998), Brian Greenstone, having been prevented by his immediate superior from working on a new project in order to focus on OpenGL, decided to resign from his position at Apple to create a game that would offer a glimpse of the next generation of video games. More ambitious than Nanosaur, Bugdom was intended to be not just a technical showcase, but a complete platformer experience, with different mechanics and a real sense of progression. Bundled with the iMac DV 2000 and the first iBooks, the title was a huge commercial success, introducing video games to many families.

     What ambitions for a 3D computer platformer?

The player assumes the role of Rollie after the king of the red ants, Thorax, has kidnapped all the Ladybugs, leaving the hero to embark on an adventure to rescue his friends and defeat the enemy king. The adventure is divided into ten levels, which either require reaching the end-level log or defeating a boss: Rollie starts in a relatively peaceful meadow and progresses through increasingly hostile environments, be it a garden lawn with oblivious humans, a hive of aggressive bees or a pseudo-volcano. Rollie can jump, roll and punch, but is still a relatively weak creature compared to the other insects, and must tread carefully.

After a brief introduction, the player can start experimenting with the controls, and Bugdom manages to be particularly intuitive in the way it works, but its ambition soon suffers from the technical limitations of the time. Although the game is vibrant and features decent 3D, the comparison with previous platformers is rather harsh. Brian Greenstone is certainly right when he mentions Bugdom's colourful look, which was quite unique for computer games at the time, but the same effect was achieved by Super Mario 64 (1996) – and to a lesser extent Banjo-Kazooie (1998) – with a much more subtle balance between a dynamic camera and a wide range of movement.

Bugdom remains particularly simplistic and is not bothered by its multiple collision problems or the relatively illegible nature of its levels, due to the repetition of graphic elements without any variation and the rather poor viewing distance. It is easy to miss a corridor in the camera's blind spot, as in Level 3. The emphasis is more on the other secondary elements of the game, which help to demonstrate the new potentialities of the computer games. Rollie's roll is particularly fast, allowing him to traverse entire sections in a fraction of a second, before bouncing off a wall and heading in the other direction at full speed. Similarly, the Water Taxi and Dragonfly segments are reminiscent of racing and flying games, but without any real consideration for level design: it is easy to get stuck in the scenery or be punished for going outside the boundaries of the level.

     Gameplay dissonance and tedious exploration

The charming and cute nature of the game soon disappears and is replaced by a more creepy and frightening atmosphere for children. The red ants have a violent stance and are difficult to kill, but the player will quickly learn to also watch out for bees and other flying insects, which can be particularly vicious. Bugdom does have an easy difficulty mode, which makes it more accessible to a lay audience, but the problem lies less in the damage that enemies can individually inflict than in their sheer numbers and the deadly platforming that the camera never facilitates. The game occasionally features creative ideas that were somewhat impressive for the time – such as dynamite that detonates when enemies shoot flames at it – but the execution is generally rather weak. The lack of a map and visual clues provides little incentive to explore beyond the bare minimum, lest one gets lost again or takes unnecessary risks, while the Level 7's boss battle is simply a design disaster.

Speed, which seems to be the hallmark of exploration in the early levels, is traded for extreme caution towards the end, rendering a whole section of Rollie's gameplay ineffective. In Level 8, Fireflies can force the player to restart an entire section, after having transported them backwards for several excessively long seconds. They can only be avoided by deliberate and careful exploration, as far as the controls allow. The platforming also suffers from this problem in Level 6, where a mistake can easily cost a life, one that the player does not necessarily have the leisure to lose at this stage. Exploring in Bugdom is not necessarily unpleasant, but it does suffer from the presence of aggressive enemies that put undue pressure on the player. While the crawling insects are generally harmless enough and never unduly disrupt the gameplay experience, the later enemies are particularly cruel and often unwelcome.

Nanosaur managed to charm with its rather benign nature and short adventure: the twenty minutes allotted to the player quickly become superfluous once they know the map. Bugdom, even if it remains quite concise, can be much more punishing than its predecessor. While it serves as a charming and unique first experience for anyone new to video games, its technical limitations and level design oversights prove frustrating and regrettable. The title remains an important entry in Mac video game history, but struggles to stand comparison with the console platformers that truly established new standards.

"Peter, which is better: Antz or A Bug's Life?"
"Doesn't matter, Uncle Ben; Bugdom's better than both!"

If Nanosaur was the standard-bearer for Apple's rescue, then this 1999 pack-in pint-size platformer was their marketplace mascot. Pangea Software had delivered them one impressive playable demo, and it stood to reason they'd ask for another. But this go-around would be different for the developer, with lead coder and designer Brian Greenstone had a choice to make. As Cadensia mentioned in her write-up, either he'd keep his current job helping Apple's QuickDraw 3D team, or he and his contractor co-developers would make a successor to their '98 game as bundled shareware for the next generation iMac. He chose the latter, for the better it turns out. (Considering he'd just about bailed on Mac software publishing entirely prior to Nanosaur, all because of Apple's managerial incompetence and imminent failure, this amount of caution makes sense.) Rollie McFly's quest to save the titular 'dom from King Thorax's red ants and accomplices became another windfall for Apple and Pangea, the kind of game even a picky Steve Jobs could feel proud of. Still, I felt a bit of fatigue and disappointment after finishing my playthrough, wishing it had been more of a leap in polish and consistency.

Today it's a solid romp, more ambitious than its predecessor; it also hits higher highs and lower lows. Playing it now's pretty easy thanks Iliyas Jorio's modern PC/Mac port, too. Compared to Nanosaur's 20-minute single stage, Bugdom puts you through 10 untimed ones, with three of them mainly focusing on boss fights. To account for the longer playthrough, players get three save slots, plus the usual assortment of tweaks and control settings found in other Pangea works. Our goals aren't all that different from those games, either: collect rescue the trapped ladybugs, dodge or destroy the realm's disgruntled inhabitants, and use items like keys or power-ups to reach each level's end. But I think Greenstone's able to recontextualize these fundamental elements appropriately, keeping his earlier games' arcade-style antics while opening up the world you explore through both layout and mechanics.

Players start under a blue sky amidst grasses, fungi, and a healthy forest of dirt and foliage. Bugdom manages to cycle through several types of environments, so it's apt that we learn the controls, game loop, and objects of note in a friendly setting. Rollie's most useful technique, beyond just a basic jump and kick, is his Sonic-like ball roll (pun intended), a move that lets the plucky pill-bug dash across most areas in a flash. Careening into enemies damages them, and I had a lot of fun just zooming off of hills and cliffs to clear gaps or leave clumps of baddies in the dust. It's overly sensitive to analog controls on my gamepad, however, making a case for manipulating him and the camera with keyboard & mouse. Unlike Greenstone & Harper's earlier designs, this game does a much better job of using said peripherals, which now included Apple's infamous Y2K USB mice. Both configurations having such pros and cons is an improvement for sure, as the keys-only approach in Mighty Mike and company was less comfortable. I didn't feel a lot of jank or awkwardness moving Rollie around these environments compared to the raptor or knock-off G.I. Joe in those precursors.

However, it's when you reach the water taxi and dragonfly levels that Bugdom shows off its less than pleasant side, starting with hit-or-miss collision detection. The opening two rounds only required that players get through doors and light sections of water or trenches, with little precision platforming needed. Moving into the mosquito swamp complicates things, as fish leap into the air and can easily one-hit-kill you with all their aquatic speed. Getting a token and riding the silt strider's quite fun, but also noticeably chaotic due to a large hitbox and, sure enough, misleading level geometry you can get caught on. Thankfully it goes both ways, as no enemy's gonna knock you off this ride easily. Same goes for the next map, a twilight flight in a garden where humans trample and caterpillars crawl through bramble. Greenstone wisely gives players an invert toggle for the dragonfly section, which is a nice change of pace from dodging huge feet and kicking spear-toting, rock-throwing ants in the kisser.

Collision issues also crop up with combat and the momentum rolling, which isn't too much of an issue until later in-game. See, many of Bugdom's foes take multiple hits to defeat, a given since Rollie's more about agility than pure offense. Continuing the circle of life in this violent manner often leads to tense close-quarters combat, whether it's dodging flies with boxing gloves amidst a maze of deadly Pikmin-esque slugs, or eventually manipulating Thorax's fire-breathing soldiers into detonating cherry bombs around them. The player could try and just kick the whole time, as reliable as that is, but there's extra risk & reward from headbutting the baddies in ball mode, which even lets you sink them into deadly water, honey, or magma. Hell, the final non-boss level punishes players for not punting troops into the fiery goop, as killing them on land just lets their ghost come back to haunt you! Learning how to deal with aggressors while platforming and exploring each maze keeps the pace up, only devolving into molasses towards the end.

After the game's first half concludes with an initially confusing but thrilling dogfight against bees as you shoot down their hive, Pangea starts to seriously challenge anyone who's hoped for a gauntlet. The hive's insides, now wrecked and abuzz with angry apidae, present a series of tunnels, molten honey caves, and dead ends where you must jump on conveniently placed plungers to bomb your way open. This had some irritating, less than clear moments—namely how landing in the sweet stuff ends your life, but grabbing an invincibility drop lets you wade through for a time—but otherwise I consider this Bugdom's finest 15 minutes. The difficulty's just right, and Greenstone wrings a lot of blood from the level's concept, with hordes of drones kamikaze-ing you in vain while you snoop out both hostages and lucky clovers for extra points.

By this point I'd gotten a couple hours in and could really appreciate the audiovisual splendor, at least for the hardware Pangea had to work with. 2nd-gen iMac desktops and laptops weren't a huge leap in power or functionality over the previous year's models, but Bugdom was built to push ATI's newer Rage Pro and Rage 2 GPUs, as well as increased color depth on these displays. Sure, the vibrant hues and more rounded modeling wasn't all that unexpected from a high-end N64 platformer like those this one measures against, but who am I to complain? Kids saw these memorable critters and a decently realized world at a higher resolution without compromises, stripped from the fuzzy TV signal defining console peers. I can even forgive the short draw distance here, as it's improved over Nanosaur and extends far enough to facilitate fast rolling without bumping into everything. Mostly. There's also generally better music and sound design, from jaunty jigs and polkas at the beginning to moodier marches and electronica as one reaches deeper into the evil king's dominion. I vaguely remember fiddling around with a store demo version back when my old man brought to the local Apple store, immediately taken with how much it resembled and evoked the Dreamcast games I was enjoying.

Sadly this level of quality doesn't quite last through to the adventure's conclusion. I can appreciate the increased steps to completing every threatening area across Thorax's ant hills, with so many bombs to explode and dodge while evading those intimidating cockroaches and Floormasters fireflies. But it's here where Bugdom turns rather mean, not providing enough 1-ups and other pickups to compensate for abrupt first encounters with these puzzles. Nor are there a lot of checkpoints to prevent needless runbacks, something I rarely had a problem with earlier. It feels like Pangea fell into that classic game dev trap of testing earlier content with less experienced players, camouflaging the more unfriendly bits later on as testers had practiced so much they'd fly past said tough spots. Perhaps they went a bit too far in demonstrating Thorax's power, with such recalcitrance manifesting as overstuffed rooms with a few too many things going on.

The penultimate stage really goes off the rails, though. It starts off fine, introducing firefighting puzzles where you must locate and turn valves to quench the deadly embers. But then come the Tarzan leaps over lava, beset by unclear jumping angles and timing. I only had to restart any level once before this after biffing it right at the last anthill above-ground, but I had to end this last stretch early rather than suffer several loops of deaths I felt were unwarranted. Moreover, the player's actually punished for using the level's gimmick without prior experience, since new water pools can prevent you from breaking open nuts lying on the floor and thus getting extra score and power-up items. Having to route the best, least risky path through these miniature Moria is just asking too much on a first run. At least the final boss fight's much better, as Rollie just has to get Thorax all soggy via the broken garden pipes and then headbutt him for victory. Contrast that with level 7, the Queen Bee duel, which quickly becomes an unintuitive slog as you try to spin into her abdomen while staying out of honey globs which slow you down. Bleh…what a messy climax to a once spick-and-span undertaking.

Ending Bugdom on such a sour note means I can't rate it as high as I'd hoped, but I'm hardly at a loss for praise elsewhere. Adapting the appealing parts of Mighty Mike and Nanosaur into a mascot platformer took Greenstone & co. much longer than previous projects, eight months vs. a few at best. And I think these efforts pay off in a sometimes frustrating, but generally satisfying small-sized sojourn. It soon graced the raster fade-in of monitors in bedrooms, computer labs, and trend-chasing venues like museums across North America, sustaining plenty of attention. Pangea made so much profit and mindshare from this classic of Mac gaming that Greenstone could effectively run it full-time, no longer having to make his shareware titles when free time or contracting allowed. The new millennium saw not just Bugdom 2 for Apple's long-awaited modern operating system, but Pangea's next take on the action-platformer adventure with Otto Matic, among other early Mac OS X notables.

In a way, Bugdom was Mac OS' most accessible swan song—far from the esoterica of modding scenes for Marathon and Escape Velocity, the literary depths of Riven and Obsidian, or the now aging but ever present HyperCard scene that early-to-mid-'90s Mac owners subsisted on. Whereas Pangea's earlier dino romp dovetailed with an unexpected revival of the Apple brand, Rollie's handsome have-at-you with the king's unending formicae presents the Cult of Mac's commercially coherent legend, with Jobs returning hope to a land ransacked by corporate hatchet-men and the PC world invading and overriding this ecosystem. I'd like to think of Rollie less as Jobs, though, more so Greenstone taking on the visage of mascot platformer classics to stretch and refine a winning formula. I only wish that he hadn't feel this obligation to remake the same game so much, even if something as "out there" as Xenocide on Apple IIGS could only have worked all those years back, before genre codification mattered to more players.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023

Oh how I love to squid around, showing Ironhead who's the boss of this swim. It's not much larger than a single part of Cave Story, but this little game has an identity beyond just demoing Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya's future works. (Let's also deem this a doujin classic, just like its successor which is so often only called an indie game.) Our unlikely hero has no grim backstory or workmanlike mentality, just the earnestness and intuition to do what's right for this troubled underseas enclave. Jetting around caverns, helping out the residents, and eventually rescuing them from certain doom makes for one exciting hour-long adventure. It's like if Lunar Lander had a story, boss fights, cute characters, and an inimitable style that set Pixel apart from his peers. Squidlander, if you will! Just don't waste your time on the 3DS port, let alone the money Nicalis doesn't deserve.

I'll spare you any more puns and set the scene. The turn of the millennium saw rapid flux in Japan's doujin game community. Widespread adoption of Windows and the Internet meant the old BBS days were fading. Anyone could hop onto Vector.jp, Enterbrain, or another host site to spread their work, get feedback, and maybe get a booth at Comiket or some other big event. All but the most prominent circles were moving on from the PC-98's strict limits in pursuit of new technologies, online multiplayer, and even more niche stories to tell. The conventionality of prior years, a need to design your game for easy transmittal across pricey phone minutes, gave way to the World Wide Web's promises of creative freedom. Only later did programmers, artists, musicians, and designers the world over realize how little had changed. This brief period of Y2K WWW optimism hadn't yet given way to paywalls, community siloing, or the reality distortion fields emanating from social media today. Coteries talked, created, and shared with each other like there was no tomorrow.

Within this primordial soup of an always-online doujin world came Ikachan, hatched out of Pixel's early efforts to make what would become Cave Story. By his own recollection, that better known title started from one of his roommates teaching the future indie legend some game development basics, sometime in 1999. The existence of even earlier micro-games like JiL JiL from 1997 puts this story in question, but it's true that Pixel's earliest software was much smaller in scope and ambition. Pixel's aims of making a multi-hour, consummate experience wouldn't show until this plucky underwater kid graced the Japanese web, using a bespoke engine and music format to massively compress its filesize for distribution. He's mentioned in multiple interviews how keeping these games small, accessible, and ideal for replays has always been the priority, something I think Ikachan exemplifies better than its spiritual successor.

Fittingly, your squid-ling journey begins in an isolated nadir of a small cave system, accompanied only by a smaller starfish fellow trapped behind sponge. This section introduces you to the game's conceit: you can only float and propel left, right, or up, with gravity in effect at all times. Cave Story starts out very similarly, forcing you to learn the base mechanics or face a swift and humiliating demise. I shuddered at the sight of spikes this early on, knowing how fatal they are at the start of the 2004 game, but Pixel's too kind here, letting you survive just one puncture. It's not even a couple minutes or so before you reach the first of many cute urchin friends, each sharing small tidbits about the setting and player goals. And the story tension's made clear right here as you learn about dangerous earthquakes threatening to collapse the whole place. Time's running out to stop the tremors or simply escape, and the player's only just wormed their way out of a craggy prison cell!

Ikachan doesn't deal with time limits, though, nor is it ever what I'd call challenging. Maybe that's because I'm used to the classic gravity platformers that inspired this one, but it's only a matter of patience to navigate these tunnels and bop enemies with your soon acquired mantle. Attacking is never that easy, even once you acquire the jet propulsion ability. Enemies have simple but somewhat jarring movement patterns one must track in order to time floats or boosts, and side attacks simply aren't possible until you get the Capacitor after the first of two bosses. The item & ability progression here is quite satisfying due to said simplicity, at least until after you defeat Ironhead. More than just bopping one or two starfish at a time with easy ways to dodge them, the iconic head honcho requires timing to reliably hit his underside and avoid those charges. Being such a short, restrained design exercise of a project, Ikachan kind of just ends after the big fight, with no new abilities or areas to test your skills. It's a bit of a letdown since the escape sequence could have benefited from even a light 3-to-5 minute timer, just to put more pressure on players.

Pixel compensates for these scant few mini-dungeons and set-pieces with a quality-over-quantity approach. Every critter you meet is memorable, either through appearance or interactions. Neither the PC freeware or 3DS commercial translations feel all that polished like Aeon Genesis' work on Cave Story, but they succeed at conveying the blasé dialogues and economic storytelling you'd expect from this creator. What small areas you dive through, and the mini obstacles you must overcome feel good to surpass. For all I've nitpicked about the game's ending, it's fun to do a kind of victory lap around this netherworld, rescuing each NPC before rocketing off into space, wondering where the hell they're going to end up. And Ikachan has a bit of worldbuilding mystery, too; why were the protagonist and Ben trapped down in the depths to begin with? Were either of them originally from the above world? What kind of bony-finned dumbass would request you deliver them raw blowfish, knowing it'd be poisoned?!

Of course, we can't forget how sumptuous the game looks and sounds even today. This was the debut work featuring Pixel's, uh, highly pixelated and textured artwork, and his catchy PC Engine-like chiptunes in turn. At no point was I ever confused about where to go, a function of a highly readable tileset and use of negative space in these environments. Wise coloring and immediately recognizable character silhouettes gave Ikachan the identity it needed to stand out amidst other, more detailed doujin games of the time. I've always considered this and Cave Story more than just retro throwbacks in both style and substance. They're two of the best examples of minimalist 2D dot visuals I know, and just as impressively coded for efficiency. Performance isn't super smooth due to the 50 FPS limit, but frames never drop and the controls always feel as low-latency as they should. So, despite its rough origins, the game's engine and presentation has more than survived the perils of Windows' evolution.

I wish I could be as glowing and partial to the 3DS version, though, which I acquired through Totally Legal Means and used for a quick replay. Nicalis has a history of making changes and additions to Pixel's work both welcome and dubious. In this case, I'm torn on the level design alterations, which range from adding more rooms to house new enemy types (none of which are much different from the originals) to straight-up padding out runtime. A couple of the routes players take to upgrades are now a bit too long for comfort, but there's a cool change to the Pinky rescue area where you now have to navigate a partially-hidden rock maze. Some nice new details like the shiny claws on crabs help too, yet I can't help but feel all of these changes are either too slight to matter or too irritating to ignore.

Worse still is the new localization, which interferes with the more humble themes and characterization of the original. See, Ikachan was never that much of a hero, nor destined to save the village from destruction. We start from the bottom and then, through our actions and honesty, do the right thing. But the revised character lines point to Nicalis' interpretation of the story, where Pinky becomes a Lisa Simpson type upon and Ironhead's no longer as hostile as he ought to be. The original English translation presents more fitting voices for each NPC and distributes the plot details better across the playthrough. Here it's more haphazardly presented, with Pinky's dad being much more mean to you for no good reason, or the upper tunnels sentry no longer being a pathetic bully like the pearl carrier back below. And there's still no added, meaningful new bits of plot or development here that would justify these liberal rewrites.

The 3DS port is otherwise very faithful, perhaps too much to justify the $5 pricetag. But that's a problem Nicalis faces with Cave Story, too, except they very likely brought ikachan to the eShop as a quick cash grab most of all. No extra sections, bosses, or challenge modes sends a clear sign of "we think you're dumb enough to buy this freeware". Enough's been said about Tyrone Rodriguez's downfall into exploiting Pixel's games and prestige for his benefit, and I hope everyone else who worked on this release got paid properly (or are eventually compensated despite the company president's asshole actions). I still hope this romp gets a proper custom engine or decompilation in the near-future. A level editor exists, and I presume there's gotta be at least one mod out there, but so much oxygen goes to a certain later title that everyone's kind of slept on this one's potential. Well, be the change you want to see in this world, I suppose. This wouldn't be my first time modding a fan favorite game just for my own pleasure.

Until then, Ikachan is a fun, unassuming Metroidvania channeling the better parts of the genre and its legacy. So many doujin and indie works have long since achieved much greater things, yet this would have been my favorite Flash-/Shockwave-ish PC game if I'd stumbled upon it in my childhood. Most importantly, this was something of a missing link between the quaint J-PC doujin period and the increasingly cross-regional, indie-adjacent paradigm that circles and creators now work in. Without this and especially Pixel's next game, so much pomp and circumstance around the revival of the bedroom coder dream may not have worked out as strongly. That's enough reason to try this ditty! It's definitely a case of untapped potential, justifiably viewed as a taste of Pixel's games to come, yet I can boot this up anytime and come away with a smile.

I finally beat this on Hurt Me Plenty difficulty today with a drifting Nintendo Switch Pro Controller and it felt like a greater achievement than a lot of Ultra-Violence pwads I've beaten on PC over the past year.

It took me almost a year to beat this, and I don't think that was simply down to my insistence on pressing onwards with a controller instead of giving up and switching over to PC. The maps are huge, sprawling affairs that can sometimes take upwards of an hour to beat (if you know where you're going) and just about every switch-press or item pickup triggers a huge monster ambush, which adds up to a gruelling marathon search-and-destroy loop that often left me more exhausted than other infamously difficult wads like Sunlust and Plutonia that have the good graces to make a solid level last only a little longer than the average coffee break.

The grind is exacerbated by the insistence on theming all 20+ maps with the exact same texture pack and style guide, leading many levels to blur together into an unremarkable treadmill of glammed-up METAL1 and SUPPORT3. Despite being a community project with dozens of mappers in the credits, homogenous texturing strips many levels of their identity, and that's more of an issue to me than believing that the whole wad is a cohesive adventure through a single installation. Every level is impressively detailed and architected, but about halfway in I stopped being impressed with air vents and shipping containers and lifts with accurate mechanical details because the wad was offering me nothing else in between.

When things are good though, they are very very good. It's worth noting that this is a pwad that's fully compatible with the original DOOM2.EXE from 1994 - there's no additional coding tricks or source port wizardy or anything else of that nature enabling the sprawling space vistas and underwater adventures. Many sequences really highlight the genius of the Doom engine in ways that the game's original programmers and designers didn't even come close to realising - every enemy type is used in increasingly devious ways and paired up with other members of the bestiary to challenge the player into maximising use of their arsenal and the environment. It's an eye-opening example of what Doom II is truly capable of, and effectively demonstrates why people are still making maps for a game that launched on MS DOS almost 30 years ago. Cool!

I think Mikami understands to an unnatural degree that video games are fundamentally about problem-solving. Unlike an academic interpretation of "problem-solving" though, Mikami understands that the exercise of problem-solving is less about solving the actual problem but of learning new ways of thinking. Sure, other video games are problem-solving in a base sense, but Mikami's problems have that magical "Oh Shit" element to them; everyone who's done one playthrough of this game will instantly remember all three wolverine encounters, the first time they encountered Regenerators, the Krauser section, the entire 4-4 homestretch, etc. Consistent to all these amazing sections is that the game feels like it's adapting along with the player--as if Mikami was a math tutor guiding us along the workbook. "Ok you know how to deal with Wolverine now, but what if we stuck in you a locked cage with one of them? What if we put two of them in the same room? How would you adapt then?" You have to recontextualize and reinvent constantly, without forgetting the fundamentals that got you there. One of the fundamental pillars of a conservative mindset is the idea that change is risky--the problem might get worse if you approach in a new way, so it's safer to keep doing things the same way. RE4 looks at this mindset, kneecaps it, then gives it a head-exploding suplex--change is necessary, even if it is risky; use more of your resources, resupply, be more precise, exploit another weakness, or use a goddamn rocket launcher if you have to--just don't think the old way is the only way if you want to make it through. It's a constant escalation of gameplay, and that the narrative matches this escalation tit-for-tat is just aces. Literally one of the most radical games of all-time, in every sense of the word.