Do relationships between people really matter? They'll all break in the end, sooner or later. Can't a person be himself and walk down a path he chose purely on his own, without anyone else's intervention? He may seem like a nobody, but he'll ultimately gain more.

I’m a firm believer in the power of language over one’s thoughts.

Not in the sociocultural or moral sense, but more of a structural sense. If you’ve ever been through cognitive behavioural therapy (we are not typing the acronym), you’ll probably understand what I mean: For the disordered, the process of getting better is often just the process of acquiring more words to describe and talk down our thoughts.
Indeed, many people I’ve met in my life have suffered because they lack the language to describe and address their own thoughts. It’s easy to say “I feel bad”, sure, but emotions and thoughts are rarely so binary and require a decent toolkit of words to properly address.

With this in mind, I believe there’s no arrangement of words more powerful than:

“It doesn’t have to be like this.”

What do you do, then, when everyone’s words have been taken away from them?

Simultaneously so bleak as to be genuinely haunting and so hopeful that it inspired a significant paradigm shift in my life, Library of Ruina consumed me ever since I started playing it, with its de facto claim over my every waking thought soon becoming de jure.

I was filtered by LoR’s predecessor, Lobotomy Corporation, perhaps my only genuine mark of shame in decades of playing games and indeed engaging with art as a whole. It was right up my alley and hit basically every note I love in games, but alas I hit the wall and turned around instead of climbing it.

Bizarrely, this might’ve given me the best possible experience in LoR - in turn, giving me the best game I’ve ever played.

LoR opens on an unremarkable note. Some twunk named Roland trips and falls into the titular Library where the Librarian of her role’s namesake Angela peels a few of his limbs off, interrogates him, and revives him later as her servant.

What is the Library?

It’s a fantasy dungeon where you’re the big bad and your goal is to slaughter the people who’re invited so you can assimilate them as powerups and catalogue their knowledge for Angela’s aims. Every reception starts off with a little vignette of their lives and personalities, hopes/dreams, and reasoning for entering the Library… and then you murder them.

Yeah, LoR and the overall franchise is fantastically bleak. The first few people you kill are desperate down-and-outs or bottom of the barrel Fixers (mercenaries) too unremarkable to have the luxury of passing on such a vague, suspicious contract.
Angela, a sheltered woman with the emotional maturity and life experience of a 12 year old, frequently comments on how miserable/horrifying the world is, only for the suspiciously world-weary Roland to assure her that this is just how things are.

Angela is a woman who, for the bulk of her overly long and painful existence, was trapped - literally, and by circumstance. In LoR, she attempts to assert her freedom by giving it to other people; one must sign the invitation to enter the Library, the warnings are written on it. The choice is there to simply not sign it.
Only… As Roland himself repeatedly points out, it’s not quite that simple. Indeed, none of the people you kill in the early stages of the game really had a choice. They were either too desperate or under the thumb of someone much stronger. With the passage of time and progression of the story, many of the Library’s guests are coerced, manipulated either by contract or by sweet little lies, or commanded to on pain of death. Some are compelled by forces beyond their ken, or the welling of pure emotion that so many City dwellers had shut out of their heart.

I think it’s fantastically easy to make the observation of “LoR tackles nihilism as a subject”, and it’s not exactly wrong, but I think it’s remiss not to mention the ways LoR ties contemporary nihilism with the omnipresence of capital and systemic oppression.

A gear with a purpose is content, for its rotation has meaning. Humans are cogs in the machination that is the City. Someone has to make those cogs turn. That way, the City can run correctly.

The City’s inhabitants are, as reiterated endlessly by both the pre-reception vignettes, Librarian chats and Roland’s various interjections, stuck underneath the bootheel of capital. A Corp or ‘The Head’ is a ruling force that, while it does not place the building blocks of oppression in the land, is nonetheless the solid ground they’re placed upon by others. All of the City’s structure is, down to the rebar used in the concrete, built to maintain a status quo that considers the deaths of hundreds of thousands to be an acceptable tradeoff, but treats tax fraud as deserving of a fate worse than death.
Because of this structure, and those that perpetuate it, everyone in the City - including many of the people who're forced to uphold the oppression against their will - has basically shut down. Feelings are a luxury nobody can afford, and the boot placed upon their neck has been there so long that they consider it a universal constant - much like gravity.
In lieu of any hope, even the nonreligious have come to view the City as a god. The actually-religious exist in a circle of copium, ‘worshipping’ doctrine which is about accepting the boot as part of your life rather than as your oppressor. Characters like Roland repeatedly say they don’t believe in anything, only to talk about the City as though it were a vast and unknowable god - at best witnessed, but never comprehended.

But it’s made equally clear that it doesn’t have to be like this, especially in chats with the Librarians - who often put forward viewpoints that Roland shuts down because his mind, so thoroughly warped by the foundational cruelty of the City, cannot comprehend them on a base level. From the top of the City to the bottom, an endless domino chain of “well, it is what it is” cascades into acceptance of horrors that have no real reason to exist.
These people are not nihilistic because that is their actual worldview, they’re nihilistic because they don’t have a choice.

Treat everything like a rolling ball! You cheer for it wherever the sphere decides to go! If you truly wish for the good of other people, why don’t you stop holding expectations… and just laugh with them at their side? Everyone who lives here is a clown! Clowns can’t survive without feeding on each other’s smiles, you see?

Rather surprisingly, though, LoR does not castigate anyone for their nihilism. Sure, they’re fictional characters, but despite being miserable-by-circumstance their stances are still treated as valid. It’s most obvious later on, where one character finds out the orders they’ve been given were forged and is not at all angry - why would they be? Lies and truth are purpose all the same, and purpose is a luxury unto itself. If anything, they’re at least happy that their exploitation benefited them and their oppressor rather than merely the oppressor.

It’s somewhat difficult to discuss this topic further without spoilers. I’d like to come back and write a longer review, but for now I’m trying to keep it clean.

Art narrows your vision, after all. You stop caring about the things around you. That’s how most artists seem to act, I think. And so, you indulge in the craft, not realizing that you’re throwing yourself and your surroundings into the fire you started. It’s like the human life when you think about it.

My praise of LoR’s handling of nihilism and everything around it also comes with the caveat that I, personally, got tired of overly bleak stories not too long ago. Even Disco Elysium veered too close to the fatal threshold a few times, and so does LoR, but neither game crosses it.

Really, Disco Elysium is an excellent comparison if we’re sticking to purely positive ones.

Everyone in this game is humanised as far as the narrative allows, even the ones that are barely human - in every sense of the word. They have aspirations, no matter how trivial and petty, and comrades, sharing bonds and jokes regardless of whether they’re more noble Fixers or nightmarish cannibalistic freaks.
It becomes apparent early on that, despite the Librarians’ claims that humanity was snuffed out of the City, it persists in the moment-to-moment of people’s lives despite the eternal presence of the boot.

I said up above that not finishing LC enhanced LoR, and it’s here that it really became apparent.

Roland was not present for the events of LC, while the Librarians were. By the time I’d quit LC, I had only met four Librarians: Malkuth, Hod, Yesod and Netzach. Sure enough, these are the most straightforward Librarian chats, though they still exposit LC in a way that blends well into the narrative without obviously being an excuse for people to skip LC.
But it’s the later floors - with Librarians both I and Roland were unfamiliar with - where things amp up, both in terms of how heavy the subject matter gets and how Roland’s facade slowly erodes around the middle and upper layers.
LC as an event in the setting’s history has been deeply mythologized, subject to rampant speculation from the unfamiliar and much rumination from the familiar. Getting walled by the game itself made this narrative almost… diegetic. Like those of the City, I had a vague idea of Lobotomy Corporation and could only speculate as to why it fell to ruin in the intervening moments between games, but like the Librarians I was familiar enough with the company, its purpose and its occupants to recognize things and keep them in mind. Remember, the shame of quitting LC hangs heavy for me.

I could go on at length about the story, but to do so would spoil most of it - and honestly, I’d rather praise the storytelling for now.

Our conductor will be the one to fix that! He’ll take me to a world where there are pure and clean ingredients aplenty! That day can’t come soon enough! I’ve been filling my stomach with trash for too long.

LoR’s format is very simple. Each reception consists of a window into the guests’ lives before they accept the invitation, a cut to Roland and Angela discussing what they just saw, a fight, and then a wrap up conversation afterwards. In between receptions, you suppress Abnormalities (puzzle boss fights that give you useful treats) and have chats with the Librarians.
It sounds straightforward, and it is, but there’s an elegance to LoR’s usage of the player’s time - the format is maintained right up to the credits, and while some conversations can initially feel like pointless filler it eventually becomes apparent that LoR wastes no time.
I don’t believe that foreshadowing inherently makes a good story (an opinion which makes George RR Martin fans fucking hate me) but in LoR’s case, it does. As early as the 4th line of dialogue spoken in the game’s entire 130 hour runtime, it references concepts, character and organizations that will appear later. Truthfully, I was initially a bit sour on how many Nouns the game threw at me early on but around Urban Plague I was seeing a lot of those Nouns actually manifest on screen, often to follow up on either a bit of exposition Roland/Angela delivered or thematically iterating on something that seemed inconsequential at first.

And man, what characters Roland/Angela are. LoR has no wasted characters, managing to make even the one-off filler guests you slaughter memorable, but Roland and Angela really stand out as both the best in the game and my favourite protagonists in uh… Fiction as a medium for human creativity.

This is just how the world is, and the ones best adapted to it come out on top, simple as that. Adapt or die. If you can't, you either become food or fall behind until you're wiped out.

Roland is a funny man, a very funny man. He has a quip for everything and deliberately plays his status as Angela’s whipped boyfriend a disgruntled servant up for laughs, but like many real people who use humor to cope, it is plainly obvious that he’s hiding a lot of deep-rooted bitterness towards his circumstances and the world he lives in. Even many of his jokes betray that life in the City has eroded him, and his catchphrase “That’s that and this is this” slowly goes from funny to haunting as the game progresses.
A good friend of mine described him as “An Isekai protagonist but played entirely straight” and I think it’s an apt comparison; he has many of the same building blocks (sardonic guy with some bitterness) but the concept is actually explored and treated with any gravity. He’s also a literal outsider to the world of Lobotomy Corp/the Library, so.
Every time I think about Roland I inevitably recall a story someone once told me where their restrained and seemingly conservative father got drunk at a wedding and started dancing shirtless with his best friend, and when [friend] said "that's a bit gay innit?" he retorted "I WISH I WAS, SWEETIE”.
There’s a really poignant moment on Hokma’s floor where, upon being asked if he’s religious, Roland denies it wholeheartedly. Except… This instinctual rejection is wrong. He certainly believes it, but through his chats with everyone and his endless exposition on the City’s evils to Angela, it is abundantly clear that Roland subconsciously views the City itself as a malicious God that has personally picked him out of a lineup and fucked him over specifically.
It’s these little contradictions, hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies that really bring this game’s cast to life, but none moreso than…

The thoughts and emotions I hold when I craft them... A resentment towards the City for driving me to this desperation, and a blind anger for the rich. Bitterness, and... a yearning for vengeance toward the man who rid me of that hope and pushed me to despair.

Angela. Fucking Angela. My little pookie bear who’s a bitch to everyone (for very good reasons) and is so deeply fucked up. The depths of her misery are vast, simultaneously impressive and horrifying in their seeming endlessness. She’s the kind of miserable that you often don’t see outside of Central/Eastern European literature.
Which is a good comparison, honestly, because PM really get what makes a good tragedy with Angela. She’s miserable, haunted by a past that’d crush lesser folk, and desperately chasing a purpose she’s not even entirely sure she wants. In pursuit of her murky, ill-defined goal, she baits countless people to their deaths - becoming not much better than the man in her past she claims to despise.

But she smiles sometimes, and that’s enough.

What really strikes me about Angela though is how fucking transgender her storyline is.
Early on there’s a flashback to the early days of Angela’s life as an AI in Lobotomy Corporation where she experiences both profound amounts of empathy and a desire to nurture strong, intimate relationships with her peers. She’s then subjected to what I can only (tragically) call Male Socialization: Her creator affirms that she’s not meant to do that sort of thing, “things like her” are meant to feel nothing. Any expression of ‘unfitting’ emotions is shut out and shouted down.
When she breaks free of her shackles, she radically alters her appearance, having only a passing resemblance to her initial form - which is decidedly less feminine. I joked on twitter that she looks both transfemme and transmasc at once.
But more tellingly, Angela is infinitely more neurotic in this game. She’s expressive, has a short fuse, swears a lot, smiles far more readily and seems to show fondness for the Sephirah in her own roundabout way. As her humanity draws closer, she begins to feel shame. Shame for what she used to be, and shame for what she is.
It is incredibly easy to relate this to the experience most trans women have once that second puberty kicks them in the taint. At least, the ones who have self-awareness and a sense of shame.

It’s even more pronounced in the receptions. Despite displaying every sign of humanity, whenever guests arrive and are met at the entrance, they clock her as a machine and constantly rib her for it. “That’s not a human lmao” is said every other reception and it bears a deeply uncomfortable (positive) resemblance to trans people being clocked and mocked for their appearance.

As I write this, I’ve been pondering the concept of scale. You, the reader, have probably played a sequel at some point in your life. It’s natural for them to scale up, and I myself have played far too many that scale up far too hard. Halo went from an existential war of survival to a cosmic clash with demigods, robots and shadowy factions.
Yakuza went from being about one small corner of Tokyo to being a country/globe-trotting clash against conspiracies. Devil May Cry was about one oedipal gay guy on an island and then became about generational trauma and saving the world. Fallout went from being good to being terrible. Final Fantasy went from stories of heroes to failed attempts at modern epics. The list goes on.

LoR is a massive scale-up. LC was a game about some deeply depressed people playing SCP in a single lab. Given the scale of this setting’s City and the fact that LoR’s cast covers someone from every corner of it, it’s no exaggeration to say that LoR went from a lab to the entire world.

And yet it sticks the landing. The vignette format for character introductions helps; the Library is the centre of the game’s world, never once left behind, and characters are shown through brief windows into their life. It’s particularly resonant in the world formed by the 2010s, where people are more plugged in than ever yet seemingly more distant too. The entire world, too, is at our fingertips; through the form of fleeting windows into bits of an existence far beyond ours.

But the social media comparison is a little cringe, don’t you think? I do too.

If they want to live their lives as they see fit, then they won’t stop me from doing the same. Think about it. We can’t roam the street in peace; we’re forced to live in the darkness. What sins have we committed to deserve this treatment? Why must we suffer to ensure that your kind lives a painless life? We’re humans just like you.

I have this scar on my right knee. It’s huge, with its width spanning my entire knee and thickness on par with my pinkie. Looks more like a pursed mouth than a scar sometimes.
I got it from a very mundane event; I had an obscene growth spurt early on. During a friendly soccer match in school, my oversized body failed a dexterity check and, upon kicking the ball, my body went up into the air too. I landed at a grisly angle, my descent causing my knee to get dragged along some chipstones. Embarrassing, yes, though it was still some of the worst pain I’ve ever been in and the bleeding was so intense that the only reason I was immediately taken to hospital was because the school nurse nearly vomited upon seeing my bone peek through the wound.
But most people don’t know that, they only see the scar and my occasional limping. They can see the present-day effects of that pain and that damage, but they can only speculate as to the cause. There’s only one domino on display, and they can’t see the ones that fell behind it.

LoR’s windows into the lives of its guests are much the same, and they help keep the story from outgrowing its confines. Almost every character with very few exceptions is depicted at the absolute nadir of their lives upon introduction with concepts like ‘backstory’ thrown in the trash in favour of letting you use context clues instead. Such is life in the City; only the ‘now’ matters anyway.

I only realized that day that I cannot blindly trust what my eyes show me. In that moment of the past, I was made a fool. The shallow promise that our safety would be secured… The thin piece of contract is what cost me everything. Had He not saved me, I might have drowned myself in resentment toward the whole world… and met my end.

Now, normally videogames are a balancing act, or a series of tradeoffs. Many of the most fun games I’ve played have mediocre stories at best and outright abominable stories at their worst. Likewise, gameplay is often the first concession made for narrative. Indeed, the common thread of my Top 25 is games that weave their gameplay into the narrative well OR have a healthy serving of both.

The #1 entry on that list is foreshadowing.

I’m very used to games, even more outsider games, tone down their gameplay for the sake of marketability. It wouldn’t be wrong for someone to assume LoR, which is far more conventionally palatable than LC, would do the same.

And for the first hour or so, it seems that way. You roll a dice to act, whoever rolls higher goes first, and you spend Light to use your cards. Easy!

Except…

Inhale.

Every character on the field rolls one - or more - speed dice to act. Whoever rolls higher goes first, with 1 being last on the action order and Infinity (yes, really) going first. Multiple speed dices means multiple actions and cards played per turn.
Each card has its own dice - offensive, defensive, and counter - with each dice having subtypes for damage/defense types.
When a card is played, the dice on the card roll - unless it’s a counter dice, which is stored in case you receive a one-sided attack.
When two opposing characters roll on the same speed dice value, this causes a “clash” where dice now have to outroll one another. The higher roll goes through. This can also be forced if someone with a higher speed dice attacks someone with a lower speed dice - this is a redirect.
…But there are also ranged attacks, which ignore the turn order - this seems overpowered, but if they clash against offensive dice and lose, that dice is recycled and can roll again.
…Unless the ranged user has a counter dice stored, at which point they can roll to defend. If counter dice outroll an incoming attack, they too are recycled.
But-

You get the point.

LoR is very uncompromising with its mechanics. There’s nothing here that can be ignored. I didn’t even get into abnormality pages, keypage passive ability sharing, E.G.O or any of the status effects.

There’s a common sentiment among Project Moon fans that LoR’s difficulty spike is vertical. I don’t necessarily agree, for my many years playing YGO competitively and engaging with deckbuilders gave me a huge advantage, but I can see why.
Many games with some degree of mechanical complexity or an unspoken set of rules will throw (what I call) an Exam Boss at you. Exam Bosses exist to make sure you’ve actually been using and engaging with the mechanics that were introduced via antepieces in the hours prior.
Well, LoR has a neverending chain of exam bosses in each stage. Impuritas Civitatis, the game’s final stage, opens with two relatively easy fights before throwing twelve Exam Bosses at you. At its core LoR is a card game and you WILL need to build robust and numerous decks to progress.

But I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it out to be.

LoR’s strength gameplay-wise is that all of your options are available to you at any given moment, and there isn’t much need to bash your head against the wall like in LC or pray for good banner luck in Limbus. It’s very simple to back out (sometimes taking a guest’s book with you, which is akin to getting a free cardpack from your opponent) and come back with a new strategy/build/Library floor.
Once you’re in Urban Legend, the game starts offering routes for progression rather than forcing you along a straight line. The solution to any wall is often on one of those other routes; every enemy has a weakness or a gimmick. Bleed as both a status effect and a deckbuilding component appears early, and it’s useful until the credits roll on most enemies. My Discard Hod build was still being used as late as the final boss.
I suppose you could say LoR is more of a puzzle game than anything.

What really enhances the gameplay is how well it’s leveraged for the sake of the narrative, and/or for giving fights weight.

Most boss fights come with a mechanic that’s unique to them specifically, or they introduce new twists on an existing mechanic that’s meant to upset some of the more comfortable strategies. Queen of Hatred gets a lot of hype as the game’s first major roadblock, but her purpose is to teach you to use Bleed and to convince you that maybe it’s okay to skip a turn or take damage on purpose.
There are numerous points in the story where the game outright lies to you about what’s coming up. More than a few times does LoR throw a surprise, unlisted second phase at you or some other curveball. Shoutout to that purple bitch.
A lot of the single-enemy boss fights come with mechanics that at first seem ‘’’bullshit’’’ (lol.) but in reality are just there to give it some impact. One character having 5 or more speed dice might seem ludicrous, but it helps to sell the world and the sheer power of the people within it.
The majority of people who play this game will scrape by many of the harder fights by the skin of their teeth, but in a game all about the eternal upward struggle to live, isn’t that sublime?

Of course, everything up above is aided by how this game sounds.

My only light was taken from me twice… For a brief moment… I felt all kinds of emotions before that piano. Despair, obsession, rage, sorrow… But, it took no time for those feelings to dissipate into nothing. Everything… yes. Everything seemed beautiful afterwards. Was it truly a tragedy that I lost her? Who defined it as tragedy? You may still be blinded by wrath, but I made the decision that I will care not about those feelings anymore.

On every front, LoR is an absolute masterwork as an auditory experience.

The soundtrack is borderline perfect, one of the rare games with 80-odd songs where every single one is standout and memorable. The Story themes are subdued but perfect for their respective atmospheres while the battle themes maintain a morose atmosphere that nonetheless manages to carry a sense of excitement when needed. You may be the villains, but there’s no reason it can’t get funky sometimes. There are only three songs in the game that sound anywhere near heroic.
Mercifully, important tracks don’t often get reused and the single song that gets taken from its original context is used masterfully anyway. To say nothing of the returning songs from LC.
That fight near the end of the game hits like a fucking truck if you’re familiar with the last game’s OST.

And the voice acting, good god the voice acting. After so many years of enduring games where a lot of the VAs are just repeating a role they did in the past or emulating a VA they look up to with all the tact of a fandub, it’s so nice to play a game where the characters are voiced straightforwardly, as though they were people.
Sometimes it’s Roland being a flirty little dipshit when Angela gives him an order, sometimes it’s Gebura audibly trying not to throw up when tasting some coffee, sometimes it’s Chesed’s tildes being obvious in his speech, and sometimes it’s Tiphereth suddenly turning into a Yakuza thug when Roland’s beef with her spills over.
And, sometimes, its characters delivering some of the most haunting soliloquies in the history of the medium. There’s a quiet rule running through LoR’s entire runtime wherein every sickass vocal track barring one is preceded by a character delivering a soliloquy to themselves before coming back for a fight, and all of them are deeply moving.
The one prior to Gone Angels might be a meme now, sure, but seeing it for the first time left my heart in my throat and my jaw hanging from my face like a useless slab of bone.
Whether LoR is being horrific, tragic, funny or tense, the voice acting never falters. I was frankly amazed to find out that a lot of the VAs are either amateurs, F-listers or total no-names because there is not a single weak performance among the cast - and it is a huge cast.

Even on a base level, the smaller sfx are so nice. Clicking through menus is auditory/autismal joy, the various sounds of combat are sharp, distinct and punchy. 5v5 fights are a beautiful chorus of crashing, slashing, shooting, stabbing, clinking and roaring.

O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved: because I know that on the day of my final agony, you will be there, lying in my sheets, O sorrow, so that you might once again attempt to enter my heart.

I don’t like hyperbole. I was given the autism strain that programmed me towards sincerity, and the culture I grew up venerated insincerity and humor-as-a-mask so much that I can’t even stand playful contrarianism.

So I mean it when I say Library of Ruina haunts my every waking moment, and that it’s by far the best game I’ve ever played in this long, long history I have with the medium. It's left a gaping hole in my chest, a kind of numb longing that only pops up after a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. I finished it three days ago, and ever since it has been in my mind for every waking moment. You don't know how crushed I was when I realized "grief" is a word that the City's inhabitants don't have.

If you have any familiarity with me or my reviews, you’ll probably know that my critical brain is on 24/7. Not by choice, that’s just how I’m wired. Things like nostalgia and hype tend to not have much of an effect. I carry this into my reviews, even if it means dunking on things I have a lot of fondness for.

Yet I can’t really find any fault with LoR beyond some minor bugs/typos the fact that the anti-capitalist story was followed up by Limbus Company - a gacha game. But that’s that, and this is this.

“Flawless” isn’t a word I use lightly, and I’m not going to use it here. Not because I think it’s flawed, no, but because to defend that position would require both an actual thesis and also for me to spoil the entire game, start-finish. Maybe some other time.

I didn’t intend for this to get so long or so heartfelt, so I have no idea how to close it off.

Uh… How’s the weather where you live? That train was fucked up, right? Do you think the game would’ve been better if Binah didn’t wear shoes?

See you next time.

If there's anything out there, it's not going to be something we understand. We already have enough trouble at home defining ourselves, constantly pushed and pulled by gravitational forces we can't free ourselves from. A society crafted around making sure our culture is rigidly defined so that we can understand ourselves for what is human. But what is humanity, really? We keep pushing the ceiling of what that can be, and we project what is "alien" on things that are certainly human-like, because we have nothing else to draw from.

These are esoteric and difficult questions to answer, and even harder to do so when we're still stuck here shifting through our job yearning to free ourselves. Heaven Will Be Mine is queer, in every sense of the word. Queer in that it breaks me from my shell, liberating me and driving me to tears as it helps me understand my own way of expression and why I refuse to be circumvented by this "gravity." Queer in that it breaks between the line of reality to understand what seems strange, and help us transcend the grounded narratives we spin to keep us center. It's deeply personal too, with characters that each deal with their own traumas and flimsily work to try to understand each other in relationships that draw between romantic, heartfelt, and deeply serious.

For hours after I finished the route of Saturn I was in tears, and the route itself took me more time than it should've because I had to take a break to sit there in silence. I had to wrestle with phantoms of if I truly felt liberated, or if I really have grown out of the cage and pull of culture that people craft for me so that I may live. Am I really living my life here?

The discordant thoughts cross around for a while, and Pluto brings me back to center.
Saturn: "And you'd like that, right? Cutting loose with no gravity to tie you down?"
Pluto: "I think about that every day. It's so tempting.
You've got to be ginger with the universe, you know, Saturn.
Now that you're this strong, you've got to be careful. So much can go wrong."
Saturn: "I'll make sure to be very careful with the universe you love."

In another excerpt, Mercury asks "That's just it. Are we too attached? I want to be something new, and share it with everyone. Am I too heavy for this apple?"

The reading is dense, and it might not have to be. But it enraptures me and brings me close. I feel lost and I'm being given the proper guide to truly learn, even if I have to take every paragraph at a time, slowly. I'm shivering by the ending as I feel like I'm reaching a true understanding of why I'm queer, why I identify in the way I do. Why I WANT to live in the way I CHOOSE.

Saturn: "I don't owe them anything but, there's one more thing I can't stand.
Not being seen for what I am.
So, choose to come with us, or choose to stay.
But I won't be happy without them knowing what they're missing out on.
Look up in the sky, and see all the weird stuff we get to do with each other!"

And then I ascend, too.

A couple of days ago I was thinking "At what point do you review a live service game?" Because while I'm sure I'd love to wait for End of Service to review the "Whole Experience" at that point, why bother?

So the answer I've come to after seeing another friend post their own review on HSR is just, whenever. Do you feel you have a good enough basis? Then go ahead and post what you feel like.

I've played a lot of RPGs recently, including the Trails series which HSR's Director is a fan of and even took inspiration from for the combat system in HSR, and that was both a pro and and con.

The pro was obviously that I knew exactly what I was getting into in terms of the combat, its the basic AT system, with Delays, Advances and butting into the turn order to hit your ultimate, it's got a Break system introduced in Cold Steel 3 even if the conditions are more specific to get a Break off. Which is great Cold Steel 3 is the best combat in the Cold Steel quadrology.

And the cons... It feels kinda pedantic but when I first started playing HSR there were so many moments when I went "God the presentation for this would be so good if it wasnt a gacha."

To explain what I mean, there are several moments in the story where you are accompanied by other units, for a majority of Jarilo-VI this is March 7th and Dan Heng. There is a part in Jarilo-VI where the player character sneaks out with Bronya and Seele leaving March 7th and Dan Heng behind. So it's really jarring when you get into combat and your actual "Party" consists of March 7th and some woman you haven't even met yet, and neither Bronya or Seele.

Like I said the point feels pedantic, and at best is just "Could you imagine?" because if this were a singleplayer game the presentation of these events represented in changes in your party would be great. And you don't even have to Imagine that hard as the Player Character is mandatory for the final boss of Jarilo-VI because part way through the climactic fight they functionally change to a new unit entirely due to influence of the story. So they devs and writers clearly have some idea what I'm talking about here because they've done it.

So my main complaint basically boils down to "Would be better if it wasn't a gacha" and while I'll stand by that I will put down that as a Gacha it could be so much worse. Almost every system available to the player is generous in its own way to the point where I don't really mind most the Gacha aspects.

Anyway, good game, would've been better as a singleplayer game, but as a gacha its more then decent.

EDIT: Since this review I have gotten to the Luofu, and it's solidified my issues with the presentation of the party system, but because it goes on to be MUCH BETTER about it. Having a whole side story that you can do starring Dan Heng and 2 other units being lent to you for a trial period that fight.

Guess they just didn't want to do it for Belobog?

I think about this game a lot. At least once or twice a week. It used to be more, but then I became self-employed.

There are a lot of great journalistic thinkpieces and independent navel-gazing out there that very accurately surmise Papers, Please as an excellent depiction of the inherent inhumanity of border control as well as what it's like to live under a fascist regime even in a position of 'power'.

Those are all valid and well done, I love them myself, but there's one angle I rarely if ever see come up:

This game is a shockingly and deeply uncomfortable representation of what it's like to work in customer service, administration, or - god forbid - Human Resources.

It's easy to nod and maybe even laugh when you're told "Dismiss anyone who seems suspicious. Typos are the devil. Anyone from [x] region." I sure did when this game came out.

Then I was put in charge of filtering out CVs and highlighting 'suitable applicants'. I was told to dismiss anyone with inconsistencies or oddities, to immediately shred a CV with any typos, and to be [direct quote] "cognizant of anything unusual on the name front". Many of the people I authorized made it to the interview and failed miserably. Suddenly, the game becomes a lot more real. I quit that job after a year or so.

People often bring up how awful it is to be faced with someone who's broken the rules or is a 'valid rejection' despite making earnest pleas, having family or some other such reason. I often bring up how, working for both a large retailer and a branch of the government which dealt with benefits claimants, this was my average shift. Indeed, if you've been on either side of claiming benefits in the UK (I've been on both), this game goes from uncomfortable to stomach churning. There's a reason I quit the latter job within three months.

And, in both the game and bureaucracy, 'doing good' is at best inconvenient and at worst actively self-sabotaging. It's nice to do good. It's nice to be nice. But apartments cannot be warmed as easily as hearts, and while you may be okay with a heartfelt 'thanks' from a desperate customer/claimant, landlords tend to prefer cash. In PP the consequences are an immediate citation, in reality they're far more insidious. 5 shifts on the schedule turns into 2, and 2 turns into 0. All without a word, a tyrannical silent punishment for the sin of having a soul. Not as instant as a citation, but the effects are the same.

Unlike reality, however, PP believes in empowerment. You, a lowly border control inspector, can potentially dismantle the fascist regime you operate under and really stick it to the machine. It's nice, cathartic even. This game's most emotional moments are often the understated weight of a hopeless person coming up against the dehumanizing maws of fascism and passing through unscathed, conveyed with little more than sprites and brief popup text. Lucas Pope's specialty, honestly.

But in a game so deeply steeped in the miserable, beige parts of the modern world, it's the one part which is sadly divorced from it. A world where middle managers can effortlessly snuff out any act of rebellion is not a world where one goblin in a cubicle can tear down capitalism. Sometimes, your rebellion never gets further than sighing and offering someone a 100% refund when they're only entitled to 75%, and then bullshitting your manager that they had a 'convincing story' (your dad lies better) and 'you were tired' (of the job, perhaps, but the 3 coffees in my body are necromantic).

I come back to this game a lot. I own it on Steam and have for about 7 years now, but I always play it on a pirated copy I stuck on a USB stick ages ago. Dunno why. Maybe it makes me nostalgic for using it to slack off at, ironically, my old receptionist job. I like to read what people think of it, but am always a bit disheartened to see a somewhat rigid interpretation of the game as just about border control, fascism or the Soviet Union. No other game has captured just how corruptive, anti-human and so deeply boring the evils of bureaucracy are.

There's an ending you can get if you remain loyal to the government. You only need to be loyal. Doesn't matter if you're bad at your job, only that the Arstotzkan government knows you say 'thank you sir' as its iron grip tightens around your throat. I got this ending on my most recent playthrough. It reminded me of a good 60% of my managers, and a co-worker I had named Charlie who they kept on despite being in the throes of dementia. I hope he's getting the care he needs.

I don't work admin/clerical jobs anymore. I don't have the inhumanity in me, I'm afraid. The last job I ever worked told me not to say "terminate" when closing a call with a distressed customer because it might make them upset.
The closest I get is when I help people fill out forms for the DWP, or fight sanctions imposed on them for missing an appointment scheduled at 7am when they live 5 miles away. Companies and agencies are staffed by people, and people are easily inconvenienced. Not even the most ardent DWP believer wants to read a 4000 word rebuttal to a sanction they lazily approved on a Friday evening. Sometimes, being annoying is more effective than being compliant.

So, anyway, do you remember Jorji Costava?

In 1997, a game called Fallout spilled out into the world. Under the guidance of a nerd named Tim Cain, it was initially a hobby project until more and more people latched onto it, adding their talents and thoughts to the potluck that would eventually spawn the most annoying group of cryptofascists this side of Warhammer 40,000.
Drawing on their love of pulp fiction, retrofuturism, XCOM, sci-fi movies and a tabletop system they liked (GURPS, which is absent from history for a very good reason), this vast pool of influences eventually calcified and become Fallout 1.

This story had already played out several times across modern culture by the time Fallout came into existence. It is the basis of Star Wars, modern western comics as a medium, Gundam, Warhammer... Really, you can pick any longrunning and influential franchise to find the same story of one passionate person and their team of equally passionate collaborators drawing on a huge pool of influences to make something unique.

Fallout 1 is a great game. If I ever made a list of games you should play before you die, it'd definitely be up there. Rather uniquely for the post-apocalyptic genre, it's more focused on humanity pulling itself out of the ruins of a long gone civilization than it is on the long gone civilization itself. Compared to what came after, it's a far more somber and reserved experience where the potential of combat occurring is more like a sword of damocles than a regular occurrence. Sure, it has every trope you likely expect from the genre (mutants, bandits, factions mimicking old world stuff like cowboys), but those tropes are more of a deconstruction than anything; they're portrayed as kind of pathetic for having an obsession on old iconography, because there is a now in front of you and it needs help to be built and maintained. There's a reason the BoS are assholes in this one.

Sadly, much like every example I gave two paragraphs ago, Fallout has succumbed to what I nowadays refer to as the Lucas Horizon. George Lucas combined his love of westerns, samurai, Kurosawa movies, WW2, Flash Gordon and sci-fi to make Star Wars.

The people making Star Wars after him are using their love of Star Wars to make more Star Wars.

Despite calling it the Lucas Horizon, however, I feel Fallout embodies it more than any other franchise. Even starting with Fallout 2, the series began to develop an obsession with itself. Rather than letting the influences and references form a foundation to build a work upon, they became the central part of the work. Now, Fallout 2 isn't as bad about this as every game that came after it, and indeed it at least bothers to expand on Fallout 1's themes, but at the end of the day it's ultimately more about pop culture and Fallout stuff than anything else.

Fallout 3 is where the series begins to veer off into the Lucas Horizon for good. After two games that were about the gradual rebuilding of civilization and the ways in which people built a new life from the wreckage of American civlization, 3 did a massive 180 and focused specifically on the wreckage, setting itself in a wasteland literally called The Capital Wasteland, with all of the progress from 1 and 2 seemingly undone.
The game opens with a hollow recreation of Fallout 1's intro, once again narrated by Ron Perlman and featuring shots of a ruined world set to a dissonant song by the Ink Spots as the first game did, before revealing yet another person in power armor. The difference, though, is that while Fallout 1 used it as a prelude to the story, Fallout 3 uses it to signal just how much it adores the wreckage and the retrofuturism and the distinct Fallout iconography that Bethesda yoinked at a garden sale. Fallout 3 rolls out its new power armor model to make you go "wow, cool!" while Fallout 1's intro prominently displays the T-51 being worn by American soldiers extrajudicially murdering prisoners of war.

If you've spent any amount of time in gaming circles, either directly or indirectly, you've likely heard the phrase:

"It's a good game, but a bad [franchise] game".

Personally, I hold this phrase in contempt as it's almost often deployed as a means to avoid any indepth examination of what it means to be a [franchise] game, and is often code for "it's not like the games I love".

Fallout 4 is my one exception. It is a good game, but an atrocious Fallout game. We'll be talking about the latter part exclusively, you can infer my thoughts on 4's gameplay from the Starfield review I did.

Why is it an atrocious Fallout game?

Because it's not about the rebuilding of society. It's not about the struggles faced by those seeking to carve new life out of the bones of the old. It's not even about kitschy pop culture references or the ways in which veneration of the past drives one straight into the past's sins.

It's about Fallout. It's about Vaults, Vault Suits, power armor, the Brotherhood, retrofuturist shit, dandy boy apples, whatever comes to mind when you think "Fallout", that's the core of Fallout 4.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are some themes present in Fallout 4, but they're superficial at best. Any talk of 'rebuilding' is just a pretext to shove the settlement mechanic on you, and this game treats a question as intense as "If artificial life possesses humanity, is that natural humanity or is it as artificial as its host?" with all the seriousness of The Room tackling breast cancer.

Discourse surrounding this game points to the voiced protagonist as the source for many of its woes, but I'd argue that the protagonist being a pre-war survivor does more harm than anything else. Intrinsically binding the player to the old world means everything encountered is filtered through the lens of that world. For all its faults, Fallout 2 having the player be an insulated tribal whose confusion at the world around them stemmed from their post-war experience was a much better angle than simply having the protagonist be a 200 year old.
In the non-Bethesda titles, the pre-war period is explicitly associated with the concept of rot and decay. The Brotherhood donning the armor and imagery of pre-war America led them to become just as paranoid, isolated and self-righteous as pre-war Americans did. Ghouls, ancient pre-war survivors, were rotting zombies in the most literal sense of the word. Shady Sands becoming the NCR was explicitly portrayed as a bad thing, because its citizens assumed a mantle of relative safety in exchange for shouldering the foolishness that led to the state of the world as it is now - to the point of recreating American jingoism and oil barons in the new world.
Most obviously, the Enclave were the last bastion of the US government and their very existence is seen as a virus purely because they wish for some inane ideological and biological purity. Fallout 3, despite having more flaws than I can count, at least got it right by involving a literal virus in the Enclave's plans just to make it obvious.

In New Vegas, the Enclave's power armor has been forgotten by almost everyone. Those that are aware of it consider it to be either a hate symbol or a bitter memory of a failed state. You have to go through a long and messy quest to get it, and it's given as a 'reward' once you're told that the Enclave was a dream doomed to die from the start. The game rubs your face in how pathetic its remnants are; sad old people who struggle to deal with the cognitive dissonance resulting from them missing the Enclave yet being fully aware it was just another death cult. Should you convince one of your party members to don it in support of the """best ending""", he's immediately identified as a war criminal and given a life sentence.

In Fallout 4, it starts spawning at level 28.

But really, it's the Brotherhood who embody this complaint more than anyone.

In part because they've become the Enclave, complete with vertibirds and racism.

In a better work, this would be remarked upon. Someone would point out that there's a bitter, harrowing irony to be found in the Enclave's biggest enemy stumbling into their ideology, or that a group that was once positioned to be the country's heroic saviours were now out enforcing curfews and killing people without trial. That something once considered a reassuring symbol to the wastes had now become something people dread.

Fallout 4 instead trips over its own feet, because it's more concerned with making you - the viewer - think the Brotherhood are cool. They debut in an epic, memorable cutscene where a fucking blimp flies into the map alongside a vertibird swarm and a dramatic announcement, potentially accompanied by Nick Valentine quoting a passage from The Raven in dismay. Your personal introduction is given an equal amount of weight, featuring a cool vertibird sequence up to the Prydwen which caps off with a rousing speech from a guy deliberately designed to look like modern neo nazis. Progress the story, and they bust out Liberty Prime - Fallout 3's giant death robot who rants about communists in a hammy voice and literally can't be killed.

Being a queer person who has several other characteristics that make me a target for fascists, I'm very sensitive and hypercritical of how they're portrayed. One of my most strongly held beliefs regarding the creative arts is that, much like suicide, a creative should be very considerate of how they depict fascism as I feel it can have very very very lasting real world harm.
See, the other thing Fallout has in common with those other IPs I listed up above is that all of them have had their iconography co-opted by fascists, because all of those IPs eventually doubled down and made their in-universe fascists seem cool to the average viewer. Star Wars doubled down on the Empire's cool visuals, Gundam gave tons of screentime to Zeon, Marvel keeps bringing back The Punisher uncritically, and Warhammer 40k continues to glorify the Imperium even as queer people are made to feel unsafe and ostracized within the community.
I'm only speaking from personal experience here, but the Fallout fanbase is rife with nazis. For a time, Enclave iconography and visuals were pretty much synonymous with the more rightwing elements of the fanbase. Despite New Vegas being popular among queers, the series as a whole doesn't get much discussion because said discussion is mostly driven by rightwingers. The reactions to The Frontier mod contain a lot of the word "degenerate", which I think speaks for itself.

For Bethesda to try so hard to make the openly and textually fascist Brotherhood seem cool and admirable feels irresponsible given the franchise's history. There is a very good reason most other videogames do not give you a "bad guys campaign" when they're approaching anything political, after all. Even Skyrim, this game's immediate predecessor, handled the subject with infinitely more grace.

Such problems are the natural consequence of Bethesda equating "good writing" with "there is a Fallout Thing present". The moral, social and political implications of The Institute being a 200 year old ancient conspiracy who rule an entire region from the shadows are glossed over in favour of "Look! Synths and pre-war aesthetics!". Almost nothing touches on the messy politics of the Railroad and their written goal, which is altruistic on paper but in practice has accidentally become a supremacy movement that carries out 'justified' violence for the sake of the violence itself. The Vaults are no longer horrific dungeons of suffering that represent the sheer moral decay, disregard for life and ruthless exploitation that occurred under Fallout's late stage capitalism, they're a thing you can build if you buy a DLC.

This game's intro, while not as egregious as Fallout 3's, is still a sign of what's to come. Slapped into a pre-war house filled with the worst of Bethesda's fixation on that god awful retrofuturism aesthetic they've concocted, you waddle around interacting with things for a few moments before you get to see the bomb drops in person, run past the military (clad in power armor, naturally) and get admitted to a Vault.
It's all very... theme park. "Look, you can SEE the bombs drop!" doesn't really work when the core of Fallout isn't specifically that the bombs dropped, but what caused them to drop. The erasure of context in favour of simple imagery is a rare moment of honestly from Bethesda, though perhaps an unintended one.

It is not, however, anywhere as honest as Nuka World, a DLC which turns the Fallout world into a more theme park by being set in a literal god damn theme park. Most people have already said it, but the DLC forces you to side with deeply evil raiders to even experience it which is a bad start. Not as bad as the rest of the content, though. Peeling off their mask to reveal their intent, Nuka World shoves you through a series of dungeons utterly caked in Fallout's iconography and original stuff, so much so that it feels like a self-parody from Bethesda at times.

The ultimate tragedy of Fallout as an IP, and specifically the Vault Boy, is that both were very heavily rooted in criticisms of the uniquely insidious ways in which capitalism will weaponize things for its own goals. The peppy and cutesy marketing in-universe was meant to cover up a deeply rotted hyperfascist surveilance state which was willing to annex its neighbours due to deeply rooted Sinophobia. The Vault Boy in particular is a goofy, cutesy cartoon mascot meant to encourage people to sign up for sickening, amoral experiments headed by a company so detached from humanity that it saw a nuclear war as an opportunity.

Bethesda sadly now own Fallout, so the Vault Boy is merchandise, used to entice people to sign up for sickening, amoral experiments headed by a company so detached from reality that they thought Starfield could stand on its own merits.