peripeteia is about to be on some LEGENDARY SHIT. i spent 15 HOURS exploring this demo - and i only played the first 3 levels, not even touching the final one (which is bigger than all of the previous combined). the elevator pitch is gloomy anime girl deus ex with fun platforming and like 50 different weapons. derivative? sure. doesn't mean it's not awesome. i can scale the biggest building in the game and then run across the rooftops of the city for zero (0) reason. there are so many areas and details in this game that serve no gameplay or narrative purpose other than to be cool. so climb buildings! look at stuff! any game that allows me that kind of kinetic freedom is an all-timer in my book. the soundtrack and audio design are on point too. idk, i don't wanna say to much already, but now that we're able to leave reviews here i really wanted to say how excited i am about this project.

oh also marie is very cute and murderous

Lowering the bar.

Black Mesa is a fan remake-cum-reimagining of Half-Life, and it shows. It’s a very technically impressive game, extracting just about everything it can possibly wring out of the damp towel that is the Source engine. It’s a fairly well-designed game, by virtue of most of its elements being copied over wholesale from the original Half-Life. It’s obviously made by people who are very, very passionate about Valve’s work. But Black Mesa forgets, omits, or changes enough of what worked before that it ultimately commits the mortal and unforgivable sin of making Half-Life kind of boring, a crime for which it must be punished by making it boil upside-down beneath the lake of ice for all eternity.

I like Half-Life a lot. I hardly love playing Half-Life, but it’s a game that I both enjoy and respect, which is a sadly uncommon combination. I’ve never existed in a world without Half-Life, a statement which I’m hoping will make some of you wither into dust, and that makes it a bit difficult to personally gauge the impact it had. Obviously, there are hundreds upon hundreds of reports detailing exactly what made Half-Life so special. There are articles and videos and commentary tracks all recounting all of the little quirks and nuances that later shooters silently adopted because it was what they were expected to do now. I can appreciate it from a sort-of dispassionate, outside perspective; as far as I can tell, shooters before Half-Life were mostly just copying Doom’s homework, for better and for worse. If nothing else, you can absolutely tell that a big shift to a more cinematic style was emerging with Half-Life — again, for better and for worse.

Regardless of the finer details, Half-Life is now a very old game. Twenty-five years old, in fact. And the neat thing about games that get that old is that it inherently primes people for a remake. “The gameplay needs an update”, “the graphics look bad”, “fix Xen”, the masses say. It’s a mentality you have for toys. Make it shiny, make it new, make it talk when you pull the string on its back, make sure you add lens flares and ray tracing. It’s certainly nothing that Half-Life needs. Half-Life is already an incredibly solid game that had a fierce impact on the industry and near single-handedly made Valve the monolith that it is today. To suggest that Half-Life — just about any game, really — needs a remake is to fundamentally assign this toy mentality to art.

But, hell, a remake could still be cool.

I like Half-Life, and Crowbar Collective likes Half-Life, and a lot of other people all really like Half-Life. Besides, the game has already been made for them. If all they’re doing is porting it from GoldSrc to Source, what’s the worst that could happen?

We ultimately don’t know the worst case scenario, because it never came to pass. We do, however, know of a pretty rough scenario, which is Black Mesa releasing in the state that it’s in.

The initial few levels are actually very impressive, largely because of how close they play to the original. The tram ride is there, the resonance cascade is there, the brutal ammo restrictions and tight corridors filled with headcrabs and zombies are still there. Hell, even your first encounters with the aliens are tense and unforgiving, encouraging you to use flares to light enemies on fire in order to conserve your ammo. It’s neat! All the way from the start of Anomalous Materials to the end of Office Complex, Black Mesa feels remarkably like Half-Life fully realized. It’s all shiny and pretty, you’ve got some mechanics to play with that were originally intended but didn’t make it to the final release, and it’s a very enjoyable time. You can even forgive Crowbar Collective for getting rid of the scientist who dives through the window and says “greetings”.

And then We’ve Got Hostiles starts.

The HECU still look like they’re holding MP5s and pistols, but they’re secretly wielding Freeman-seeking laser beams. There’s no longer an ounce of hesitation on their part; if they see a hair on your head poking out from cover, they’re shooting you, and you’re taking damage. They’re like Blood cultists in body armor. Also in keeping with pre-Half-Life design decisions, their AI has been drastically dumbed down. The HECU will still at least try to flank you, but they no longer seem all that interested in the concept of their own survival. They’ll rush you down open corridors with no cover, seemingly only interested in getting as in your face as they possibly can, regardless of whether they’re holding an SMG or a shotgun. Throwing a grenade at their feet will make them loudly announce that there’s a nearby grenade, but they don’t ever seem to actually try getting away from it. They’ll do the little Source Engine shuffle that the Combine like to do — if you’ve played enough Half-Life 2, you know exactly what I’m referring to — and then blow up. This is in obvious and stark contrast to the HECU in Half-Life who, while hardly all the avatars of John Rambo, at least seemed like they weren’t showing up just to die. Combat in Black Mesa against the Marines largely just boils down to you and a grunt sprinting at one another with the fire button held down and you winning the war of attrition by virtue of being the only guy here with power armor. Compared to the earlier, more impactful Black Mesa fights against Vortigaunts and houndeyes, this is a letdown; compared to the HECU in the original, it’s shocking.

Given how frequently you enter skirmishes with the Marines, it's something you really can't ever get away from for the overwhelming majority of the game. Crowbar Collective mentioned that their goal was to "make combat more intense", and it seems as though they've tried to do that simply by flooding rooms with significantly more enemies. By my count, Half-Life's We've Got Hostiles pits you against 21 HECU; Black Mesa sends out 32. It doesn't sound like much, and it isn't at first, but it starts to add up fast. Someone on Reddit actually went through and counted every single on-screen HECU kill, and it comes out to over 550 in Black Mesa compared to Half-Life's 250. When you also take into consideration the fact that pre-Xen levels are condensed compared to the original (with On A Rail being noticeably cut way down), the enemy density is completely out of control.

It's not just that there are more of them now, either. The HECU take roughly the same amount of bullets to put down (about 60 health in Black Mesa relative to the original 80), and your ammo is even tighter than it used to be. Being able to carry 250 SMG bullets with ten grenade rounds on the alt-fire was a bit too freeing and a bit too fun, so now you're hard-capped at 150 SMG bullets and three grenade rounds. The pistol now only holds 150 rounds, instead of 250. The shotgun now holds 64 shells instead of 125. The enemy AI is somehow stupider than the one from twenty-five years ago, so it's not like the game has been made any more difficult now that Gordon's got the HEV suit without pockets; holding the MP5 at head height and clicking from a distance seems to do most of the work for you, and the HECU drop about as much SMG ammo as it takes to kill them. The optimal strategy, it seems, is to just hang back and fish for damage multiplier headshots with the MP5 and then go to the next slaughtermap room to continue the process for the next seven hours until Xen.

While Half-Life's Xen was the end product of tightening deadlines and dwindling budgets, Black Mesa's Xen exists almost as a complete refutation of the original's design circumstances; it very obviously got an overwhelming amount of development time and assets and takes up nearly a third of the new game, whereas the previous Xen was over and done with in about twenty minutes. I think Xen is where Black Mesa most obviously becomes a fan game, because it's clear that nobody in charge ever felt the need to say "no" to anything. It's incredibly long, packed to the gills with scripted setpieces and references to later Half-Life titles, and it keeps using the same wire connecting puzzles and conveyor belt rides over and over again in the hopes that making Xen longer will make Xen better. There's a section here in Interloper where you have to bounce off of one of three spring platforms to kill a Controller, and then that opens a path for you to destroy a fleshy glob maintaining a force field. You would think that the fact that this is split into three very distinct paths would mean that you would thus have three very distinct encounters, but they all play almost identically to one another. All three of them are circular rooms with a Controller floating around, and you break his crystals in order to make him vulnerable to your attacks. It isn't a difficult fight, and it isn't a complicated puzzle, and ultimately just winds up being the exact same thing three times in a row. This happens constantly throughout Interloper, which mostly consists of you sprinting down long conveyor belts and then jumping off of them onto other conveyor belts for about two straight hours.

What burns me most about Black Mesa's Xen, however, is that the entire borderworld has had the personality sucked straight out of it. Xen used to be a Giger-esque hellscape, all bone and speckled carapace. A lot of the level geometry textures were taken straight from reference photos of insects, and it did a great job selling Xen as something of a hive; lots of gross, fleshy, chitinous pockets carved into the walls, pale white and red moving parts that are clearly both artificial and organic. It makes sense, contextually, because the Nihilanth is itself a hybrid of flesh and metal, and the home that it's made of Xen is reflected in its design. Black Mesa's Xen, in its deepest parts, is way more heavy on the machinery angle than the organic one. Through the thick, red haze, it's hard to tell what you're even looking at. The glowing blue lights leading you by the nose sit next to what are very clearly just steel girders and pistons, which is immensely boring when you compare it to the almost-living Xen from two and a half decades ago.

Old Xen's inspirations were obvious, but it still managed to carve an identity out of them. Black Mesa's Xen, on the other hand, looks like fucking everything else.

I want you to look at these two pictures and tell me that they don't look like they were from the same game. I want you to look at this screenshot and tell me that you can't picture the SSV Normandy flying straight through it. I want you to look at this image and tell me that it doesn't look like a Destiny raid map. Whatever identity Xen once had is gone, stripped bare to make it completely indistinct from any photobashed ArtStation "outer space" drawing to be used for padding out a portfolio and nothing else. Originality is both overrated and unimportant, but when you throw out something neat in favor of something bland, I'm going to be hard on it. Gordon Freeman crawls grunting to his feet after going through the Lambda Core teleporter and walks through blue bio-luminescent plants until he sees the Eye of Sauron looking down on him and a woman starts singing over baby's first synthwave.

On that note, Black Mesa has entered itself into the club of Media that Needs to Shut the Fuck Up, given how it starts playing some pretty mediocre tunes from the word go and never ever stops. Music is playing constantly throughout the game, never giving you a single quiet moment or a chance to drink in the layered soundscapes, and it hardly even has the decency to be good most of the time. For every decent pull that fits the action, there are two tracks that clash so hard that they spoil the scene they're in. Blast Pit 3 plays during the sequence in Blast Pit where you have to sneak past the tentacles back up through the missile silo. The incredibly loud, chugging guitars that lead into the How to Compose Dramatic Music For Film tinkling piano keys don't fit the sequence at all. Again and again, these amateurish tracks keep leaching into the game like pesticides into groundwater. The intro to Lambda Core where you uneventfully ride a freight elevator for two minutes is punctuated by steel drums and pounding synths in a moment that should be quiet and introspective; Blast Pit 1 legitimately sounds like a recording of somebody warming up before their actual performance; every single track on Xen inevitably leads into the exact same fucking ethereal female vocals "ooh"ing and "aah"ing over the instrumentation. It wasn't enough for Xen to look like everything else on the market, so all of its songs sound identical to one another, too. It's rough. It's so clearly a collection of just about every thought the composer has ever had in the past two decades, all strung together end to end without much of any consideration as to when it ought to be playing or what ought to even make it into the final game. I can't remember the last time that a game's music annoyed me this much.

Peel away the layers and poke your fingers through the flesh, and Half-Life is still at the core of Black Mesa. Enough of it is still present that playing Black Mesa isn't a completely miserable experience. All it managed to make me feel, however, was that I'd rather just be playing the original instead. Black Mesa can't manage to be anything more than a slipshod imitation of Half-Life, and the moments that it does well are the moments that Valve already did better twenty-five years ago.

Xen was never bad.

In Dan Olsen's recent video "Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft" he brings forward a distinction anthropologists have been digging at for years between Free Play and Instrumental Play with the primary focus being how game systems often trend towards the optimization and mass adoption of Instrumental Play. Instrumental Play is playing with an explicit purpose and optimizing towards that purpose as best possible, and free play is playing without an explicit goal in mind, usually for emergent entertainment experience.

How a self limiting role play character is often seen within these systems is usually they are the first to be scorned. This rejection of the Roleplayer is exactly what makes games like Space Station 13 so important as it's a game where being good at roleplaying is the optimization. For example, when I play as a Security Officer in that game I'm adopting the role of surveillance and control, but the important thing is that I need to be lenient and at least a little bad at my job in order for emergent gameplay storytelling to come out of it, for the antagonists to be able to bring necessary creative friction and conflict to the story. Meanwhile if I play as the occupation of a geneticist my occupation is to mess around and change the DNA of random people who want it.

This is not a write up about Space Station 13, or WoW, this is about Eco. In Eco, you are tasked with playing a 1 month long MMO experience where the primary goal is to get to a level of technology and knowledge that defeats a looming meteor within 1 month. You have to work in solidarity with at best around 30 people in a large market economy trading and selling products in order to help get your own profession. If you run into trouble with other player behaviors like for example massive deforestation, you can have representative create policy around it. This policy network is a fundamental building block that transcends the game beyond just a mundane market simulation as the coding allows for you to make ridiculous automated stimulus and taxations, and allow for for example hunters to hunt on anybodies property etc. It also gives a vector for people to express power, at least in theory.

If you can follow what I'm saying so far, and you're a long time reader who tends in agreement with me, you might notice where the friction here starts. Specifically through who gets chosen to wield this executive power, the checks and balances, but also in how non-cooperative free market economies tend to be. In order to have a large factory in the game you need to set the price for factory goods like say a Car well beyond the value it actually is, so that with said profit you can build more room for more machines. But before you can get the small room for the automobile machine, you need to attain money and materials from strangers through either spending a lot of time and labor to do so, or by selling food stuff you've gathered higher than their value. You can usually find a few people who have not priced their goods mindfully and you can usually get an advantage that way. People are also hilariously bad at regulating the economy as its often seen as 'unfair' and can turn players away, so the free market system because the default expectation which isn't ever questioned due to the fact the game is so easy that disaster states never happen.

This is fine but there's a few problems with the game as it is at the moment, the game is only difficult because you have to rely on strangers in order to do their professions to beat the meteor. Which means that people who have grouped up with different professions can actually speed through this system. If you're sharing stuff, you don't have to pay taxes for the goods you are sharing in every server except one official one called White Tiger. That means that all it takes to break the game in almost every server is a group of 5, and thus usually means the threat of the meteor isn't a threat at all, and once that conflict with the meteor is gone the server dies.

The other issue is that the wielding of power or acting in behavior that would be seen as inventing conflict is also unacceptable on most servers. The server owner is always there to basically dictate the play experience and in a mad rush to pull as much of the player base as possible, these server owners have to dictate conflict immediately rather than let it play out through the government policy systems. You can think of this as the equivalent of playing in another kids sandbox wrong and explicitly told if you don't play it right, you will be kicked out. The hard power of conformity set by these guys pretty much ruins the possible fun of the game.

Again, the official servers, including White Tiger, don't suffer from this issue, as long as you follow the minimal rules against hate speech etc. there is no overt guiding light. However, every server that isn't White Tiger still suffers from the group speedrunning trick (not to mention the difficulty as it is is way too easy anyway) since White Tiger is the only place that has systems to prevent this in place it's the only place that is worth playing. However, the amount of legal information you have to read makes it inaccessible to most of the playerbase which doesn't in itself make it mediocre, but it does mean you'd be spending a dozen hours over a month to grasp the basics of the system in a server with these Sandbox Dictators only to prepare for the 'hard mode' of Eco in 1 server where joining the Eco official discord is defacto necessary in order to play.

But here's the real issue: Due to the length of the game and the focus on tasks, Instrumental play becomes so dominant that Roleplaying withers away. There is no RP scene in Eco, and the result is that you become a clown for trying to engage in RP when everyone else is just trying to mine rocks. RP is treated with suspicion in this game as its seen pre-emptively as a set of actions and values that by themselves create conflict, its seen as rude. In Dan Olsen's video he gives the example of a barefoot dwarf that walks around everywhere which pulls the players away from working as efficiently as possible to finish the raid. This is the similar experience any Roleplayer has when trying to play games in which optimization is valued. Being someone you clearly aren't is not optimal. This becomes especially true when considering the fact that over the month less players are around and the ones that remain become increasingly tired with your shit.

The other issue, at least in my case, that being trans itself is seen as a sort of 'bad roleplaying' by most cis people (the majority of people). So I have no 'authentic' self I can retreat to that would satiate the patriarchal expectations of the much older player base (around early to mid 30s), in order to play as a man it would already be a form of roleplaying, so why not stress that falsity further for entertainment? If I were to be trans, for them, it would be going from 1 form of annoying roleplaying to another even if people aren't being openly transphobic, this is how its viewed. They want me to roleplay in a way that doesn't stress their preconceived biases. Thus I've always saw roleplaying in itself as an act that can support queer acceptance, and a safe haven for us. As it lets people get used to being around others that act far outside the scope of expectation you are used to.

The lack of RP or RP acceptance in Eco is my main issue with it, I think the main way this would be fixed by the game being more popular and advertising the game to younger people. By doing that there would be enough different players engaging with the game that there could be RP servers. This is the ultimate blueprint for an RP game in many ways but its squandered by the the player base and needless incentivization of Instrumental play. I've struggled with articulating this tension for why I spent 1000 hours playing a game I don't really like. I think I thought I could get joy from play by becoming good enough that the RP could be seen as not a detriment, but this was always a fruitless goal. This is a system built entirely for trying to reflect society, and it has effectively done that in its incredible ability to repress flamboyance. If you see people RP'ing in a game you wouldn't expect them to, you can probably guess that person is LGBT. It's free play we go to in order to almost get away from the bigotries against ourselves. That being said, I will never bother voicing or RPing in a space that clearly doesn't accept me. I despise these people and this community, the patriarchal normativity is more toxic than league by far and I have nothing but contempt for the rigidity these people abide by.

There are moments where I can shine through, but nobody wants to play on RP terms, so it just ends up an exercise in social self isolation. Just go play Space Station 13 instead.

Instances like this are exactly why I believe that games can become tools of repression and be cultivated for that reason, and why I think it's important to be so critical of them. Unlike Dan Olsen I don't just see this system as 'recreating the real drama of life' but instead the disjunction shows the failure of a system to allow for creative play. Without creative play you're left with rote compulsion loops and patriarchal normativity, and I think it's important as players and designers to move away from that as much as possible.

Do you like music? Me too, man.

One of my favourite albums of all time is Devin Townsend’s legendary prog metal musical, Ziltoid the Omniscient. It came out on May 21st 2007 and it’s something of a marvel, being an album developed entirely by Devy himself. Instruments, recording, mixing, cuts, you name it, he did it. It’s really special to me, and I go back to it every other month. Clocking in at just under an hour - a rarity for prog albums - it has a peerless blend of chunky riffs, auditory storytelling, comedic timing and pacing. Before I gave up on tattoos (don’t have the skin for it - literally), I really wanted the Ziltoid logo on my upper arm.

7 years later, after much begging from fans and several other albums, Devin Townsend came back with Z², the sequel album. Boasting a fucking massive production posse, a much longer runtime and a whole other album packaged in, it’s… Fine. Despite everything being bigger and grander, it’s only a little better than the first album and lacks a lot of the zest which came from being a solo production. By no means a bad album, it’s upstaged by a solo project from 2007 in a lot of ways and for many people it revealed that the original album’s limitations might have bred a greater final product.

Dragon’s Dogma 1 came out in 2012 after a now-notoriously agonizing development process that resulted in a vast majority of their ideas being cut out to meet the deadline set by the suits and an ever-shrinking budget. Capcom really wanted DD1 to be the start of a big series, capitalising on the then-rising popularity of Western RPGs like Skyrim and The Witcher 2. Naturally, it was a flop and the ‘franchise’ was silently canned despite the game attaining cult classic status.

I have been playing DD1 for about 11~ years now. I own it on every single platform it was ever released on and on each of those platforms I have near-perfect saves with both the postgame and Bitterblack Isle cleared in their entirety. I’ve played that game so often that, if I were so inclined, I could do a full playthrough in my mind because I know the game world and quest flow off by heart. I have, and frequently do, give people directions around the world without any need to consult a map or a video or boot the game.

To potentially state the obvious: I am something of a Dragon’s Dogma megafan.

Among people like me, who’re so hungry for new morsels of DD content that we begrudgingly consumed (and loathed) the Netflix series, the hypothetical Original Version of DD1 has attained something of a mythological status. The idea of a ‘complete’ DD1 with Elf villages and beastmen and a whole other continent and the like is just so endlessly intoxicating to a group who’re already enamoured with the best-attempt game we already have.

Dragon’s Dogma 2, judging by the year of comments Hideaki Itsuno has been making about the game, is that mythical Original Version. Complete with Elves, Beastmen, other continents, and more! The prevailing sentiment among older fans was that, given a proper budget and all the technical prowess of the RE Engine and enough time, Itsuno would finally make a True Dragon’s Dogma successor!

Instead he… Kinda just made Dragon’s Dogma 1 again? But bigger, and naturally with the problems that come from increasing the scale and scope.

My first sight upon booting the game was the title screen which rather curiously calls the game “DRAGON’S DOGMA” without any numbers. This, sadly, turned out to be an omen.

I normally like to open with a game’s positives before I get into the issues, which is a problematic methodology to have with a game like this. I’m not going to get into it now, but a lot of what’s good about DD2 is also really really bad when viewed holistically.

On the combat front, it’s better than ever. It’s snappy and responsive and the addition of Vocation Actions (block for Fighters, dodge for Thieves, shoulder charge for Warriors, etc etc) adds a lot to the overall flow of combat. New core skills really help too; Sorcerer gets one to speed up cast timers in exchange for a huge stamina drain which I’m really fond of.
It is DD1’s combat, but better! Especially now that stagger is a mechanic and melee classes can now deal respectable damage without spamming either ‘the damage skill’ or mashing attack.

Vocations, too, have seen a tweak. Realizing just how redundant most of them became in DD1, hybrid vocations were binned and now everyone uses just one weapon - which might seem bad at first but everything is so much more fleshed out and roles more clearly defined. It’s easy to miss Assassin for a bit until you sink your teeth into Thief and realise it’s still there, baby.
Archer and Thief both benefit the most; no longer awkwardly fused to two other vocations they’re now allowed to shine and they’re honestly phenomenal. Warrior meanwhile has had a near-total rework into a more tanky DPS class (rather than the weird and seemingly unfinished mess it was in DD1) which comes with tasty charge attacks, a timing mechanic for faster hits and lots of juicy interactions with the game’s stagger mechanics.
And god, the unlockable vocations are a dream. Thief capitalises on the more gamey world design to allow some utterly amazing stuff with lures and traps, Mystic Spearhand is an intravascular injection of Devil May Cry into the game, Magick Archer is mostly untouched from DD1 and is still a blast, and Warfarer is a joy just for having a high skill ceiling compared to every other vocation - also it lets you wear basically anything which is great for the fashion obsessed.

Likewise, the world design is excellent. It’s very, very gamey; the entire thing is a series of ambush spots, winding paths, sharp turns to hide enemies, precarious ledges and unsubtle platforming spots. It is, somewhat ironically, a better fusion of FromSoft level design philosophy and open world design trends than FromSoft’s own attempts on that front.
Traversing it is a joy both because it’s beautiful and because there’s a decent amount of pacing to the environment that stops excessive amounts of holding forward + sprint. Not to mention the distribution of side stuff. I noticed more than a few places and distractions that were hidden on the way towards something, but clear as day while backtracking. That’s good world design right there.

Pawn AI might be the biggest improvement though; they’re not geniuses, but they’re no longer actively suicidal and grossly negligent. They use curatives, have defined priorities based on their (NOW IMMUTABLE, CONCRETE) inclination, are much less likely to use charge-up skills against an enemy that dances around constantly, and for enemies like Golems they’ll bother to target weak spots. Hurrah!

And, above all else, I need to admire Itsuno’s commitment to his vision for a bit. This is a decidedly old-school RPG, I’d honestly argue it has more in common with Wizardry and Ultima or whatever tickles your fancy. The Eternal Ferrystone is gone, even as a reward. You get oxcarts for diegetic ‘fast travel’, Ferrystones are lootable and Portcrystals are doled out sparingly to give you some fast travel points. Otherwise, you’re walking everywhere. Every bit of damage you take slightly reduces your max healable HP, meaning that even effortlessly stomping trash mobs on the overworld will gradually wear you down, necessitating resting at campfires - using consumable camp kits that’re at risk of being broken.

For the first few hours and much of the first reason, none of these were issues.

Which, in itself, became an issue.

Much of my earliest time in DD2 was defined by me saying just how much they kept from DD1! The encounter placement, the stuff tucked away, the way every NPC speaks in that weird faux-medieval theatrical cadence, the way quests unfold and silent tutorials are dotted around the land…

My later hours in DD2 were defined by me realizing that the game, in most respects, is just DD1 again but bigger.

Just like last time you start in a near-wilderness and go to an encampment where you get one diversionary quest and your main pawn. Soon after you make your way to a big city where 10-15 quests pop up in the first 15 minutes and then no more. After a lot of exploring, some of which involves a shrouded forest and a hidden village and some politicking at capital, you’re shunted off elsewhere because the plot demands it and fuckery is afoot.

The problems start to arise when one considers the scale of this game. I can forgive a lot of the above in DD1 because it’s a very compact experience. Like I said before, the world map was comparatively tiny.

DD2’s is huge, but the content density hasn’t changed at all, which makes the game feel like a ghost town? When you first arrive in Vernworth you get a lot of quests immediately, which might imply the game is a lot denser than its predecessor, but the ones that aren’t “go here, come back” are mere fetch quests that occasionally have a boss enemy at the end. Not a unique one, either, but ones you’ll likely have already found by exploring or even on the way there.
NPCs are… Basically the exact same, too? I wasn’t expecting in-depth CRPG-esque interactions with them, but nothing has changed from DD1. They dispense a quest and, when done, return to being random voices among the crowd of their home turf.

And the world itself… You know, the word ‘friction’ comes up a lot in discussions around this game and rightly so. It’s very obvious from the get-go that even the mere act of exploration is meant to induce friction. Enemies gradually wear you down on the world map, necessitating avoidance of some fights if you can help it due to finite resources, and the world is structured to make detours risky due to deliberately awful lines of sight.

The problem is that there still isn’t any friction because the game is comically easy.

Even before getting into the actual gameplay, camp sites are scattered around the world with reckless abandon which allows for nearly unlimited free healing and buffs so long as you have a camp kit & meat. Much of the hypothetical friction dissolves once this becomes apparent and it completely annihilates any feeling of being ‘lost in the wilderness’ that DD1 sometimes had.

All the changes and buffs to combat up above mean that the player and their pawns are more powerful than ever. There are plenty of panic buttons, fast-casting nukes, evasive options and counters alongside a relatively high amount of free gear.
But what’s really worse is the enhancement system. Each culture has its own smithing style: Vermundian is balanced, Battahli is Strength/Defense focused, and Elven is Magick/Magick Defense oriented. There are two others, or one if you discount dragonforging.
This seems cool on paper, but what it really does is cause a serious amount of stat bloat. Weapons only use one stat for damage, meaning it’s easy to just hop off to the appropriate merchant and get +100~ damage for a pittance of effort and money.
Money, too, is surprisingly commonplace. Simple expeditions into the wild or even A-B-C-A trips would see me coming home with full coffers, which in turn meant mass gear purchases and upgrades.

Together, nothing can pose a challenge. It’s trivial, with even a modest time investment, to reach 500~ or so in your offensive stat by the midgame and hell, compared to the first game it’s actually a smart idea to kit out your hired pawns rather than cycling them - money is just that commonplace.

A lot of these can be considered the developers ‘fixing’ perceived issues with the first game, especially when one considers that vocations now come with their own base stats to prevent accidental softlocks, but in ‘fixing’ these non-issues they’ve made the game a joke.

My first Drake kill wasn’t triumphant or cool. I rolled up to it and killed it in about 5 minutes. End of the Struggle - this franchise’s fantastic ‘YOU’RE ALMOST THERE!’ theme - barely got to peak before it dropped dead. I dread how they’d balance any DLC.

The enemy roster is near-entirely pulled from the first game and its expansion, with many of the ‘new’ enemies being simple reskins of existing enemies, meaning you’ll get tired of Harpy/Bandit/Saurian/Goblin variants that permeate the world. It was harrowing to get to the last region and find out that my ‘new’ threats were Saurians but red and Harpies but black.

As for boss and miniboss enemies… God they could’ve used some sub-variants or something. The Volcanic Island, this game’s final region, still throws Ogres/Minotaurs/Chimeras/Cyclopes at you. The relative lack of variety leads to the game and its exploration rapidly becoming exhausting, because it’s a gigantic swimming pool but the bag of tricks meant to fill it is the size of a teacup.
I praise Bitterblack Isle a lot despite it being a combat gauntlet because there is so much going on there, and so many enemies. Even its reskins add new layers to the fight - like my beloved Gorecyclops. DD2’s brand-new enemies are cool, and your first fight with them will usually be a treat, but after that they become rote. Speedbumps, not triumphs.

Dungeons are basically gone now, too. Nothing like the Everfall, Gran Soren’s Catacombs, the Greatwall, or the Mountain Waycastle. Just caves and mines, caves and mines, caves and mines… caves… mines… the odd ruin… Fuck. There’s so many. It’s like Skyrim but with worse design, somehow.

As I trudged through DD2’s main story, I found myself longing for the postgame. I’m really fond of The Everfall and Bitterblack Isle for being steep hurdles designed for more devoted players to test their builds and equipment on, but… There isn’t one? Postgame has some new boss fights but there’s no final dungeon experience or final exam. The world state change isn’t as intense as DD1’s either.

To speak on plot for a bit, I feel it occupies a really unfortunate place. If you’ve played DD1, you know what’s going on. There’s no real surprises here. If you haven’t played DD1, then you’ll be surprised to find a plot that’s underbaked and somewhat anticlimactic, driven more by excuses than anything of substance.

I think about Pookykun’s Baldur’s Gate 3 review a lot when it comes to RPGs, and doubly so while playing this game.

There are moments in this game that’re outright magical, immersive without peer. All of them are quiet moments with unsheated weapons: Traversing Battahli roads at sundown and seeing the vast temples of Bakbattahl pierce the skyline. Stumbling upon the Ancient Battleground and poking through wrecks from a cataclysmic event long before my time. Seeing the glimmer of a campfire stick out from the trees that dot Vermund’s many forests. Oceanside strolls through the Volcanic Island.
I'm especially fond of the road to the Arbor, which was the first time the game really wowed me and made me excited for the game ahead.

They are phenomenal, a testament to the team’s ability to craft a world, and… I hate them. I really hate them.

Because, without fail, they’re always pierced by another repetitive combat encounter. The 50th Chimera, the 10000th Goblin, the next of a million Harpies. Over and over, I am reminded that I do not exist in this world to explore it, I exist to kill everything in it as though I were American.
My quests are nothing of the sort, for they might as well be called bounty targets.
Other people will likely praise how reactive this game is, and its propensity for ‘randomness’. I would argue that, as all the ‘randomness’ is purely centred on killing, there isn’t actually much the game can do to surprise you - especially considering the enemy roster. It’s neat to see goblins and cyclopes invade a town the first time, but afterwards it’s just more free XP and a slight obstacle in the way of you spending 60k gold on new shoes.
There's an irony to be found in just how badly the world feels claustrophobic. There are always mooks around every corner, and you're never more than a minute away from a fight. Looking out into the distance from a vantage point betrays an endless hamster wheel of caves, mobs, chests and seeker tokens.

All of these complaints might seem quaint, and any DD oldheads in the audience might be wondering why I’m lambasting it for things the first game is guilty of.

The issue is twofold.

First, I try not to have expectations for games. I don’t fuck with trailers or press releases and avoid streams or whatever. It helps keep me grounded, and I think stops me from hating games based purely on them not meeting my hype - Metal Gear Solid V taught me that.

With DD2, I faltered. I was excited, and I lapped up everything about it. Articles, streams, trailers, you name it.

But I don’t really think the issue stems from the game not meeting my hype. Rather, I think it’s because the game was sold on a very specific vision, the one I mentioned up above: This was meant to be “DD but for real this time”, and in reality it’s just the first game but stretched far too thin.

Secondly, I don’t think every sequel has to be a grand, innovative experience. I play musous and Yakuza games after all. But I do expect there to be some iterative improvement, some signs that the developers have grown and improved at their craft. In simpler terms: Sequels should be a step forward, even if it’s a miniscule one.

DD2 is sort of an awkward step to the side. Could’ve came out ten years ago as a mission pack sequel and been lauded for it.

I don’t like to be prescriptive with my critique, I really don’t, but if this game was 1/4th the size and half the length I think I’d be a lot kinder to it. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed about 2/3rds of my time with it, but I can’t really recommend DD2 specifically because a lot of what I enjoyed is just stuff that DD1 not only did 12 years ago but does better.

In the end, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is Z². It’s by no means bad, and for many people this will likely radically alter their preferences for fantasy RPGs. Hell, I still think it’s amazing this game even got made, and a lot of what I think is bad or problematic still runs rings against most of its peers - this is the closest you’ll get to a modern Wizardry game.

But I look back to the past, to Dark Arisen sitting in my library, and I think about all the limits imposed on that game. All the rough edges, the flaws, the executive meddling and the cut content, and all I can think is…

Ziltoid was the better album.

there's an unfortunate number of people whose knowledge of the citadel stops at "retro pervert fps". so we're gonna get this out of the way first: the guro is subtle enough that if the creator wasn't an anime artist much fewer people would been suspicious. i know a game where your modus operandi is "gib bitches" doesn't scream subtle, but the violence is standard fare for graphic shooters like postal 4. you'll be fine. you can also disable gore in the settings! point is, if you find guro gross, don't let that stop you.

despite what the boomshoot mcretro artstyle is immediately going to activate in everyone’s neurons, the citadel is NOT a doom clone! (or a quake clone!) personally, i identified more dna from that of the shadow warrior series, which the creator themselves cites as inspiration for the over-the-top gore, so you can’t call me racist for comparing two of the only first-person shooters to star japanese people.

you play as a freakishly agile anime chick with adorable hair. being a human in a world of robots (who are not all women, doekuramori just likes his characters andro), you will get curb stomped if you attempt to run and gun. in a post-ultrakill landscape where most of the popular indie shooters boil down to overstimulating power fantasies, i was excited to find that this game pushes you to take your time. soak in the level. manage your health and hunger bars. use your aim down sights and lean from behind corners to take out baddies stronger than you. when you do get to go fast, its in controlled, cathartic bursts. that slower pace reflects every aspect of the citadel’s design. for example, rather than aggressive wubs or shitty djent guitars, the soundtrack opts for melancholic piano & synth arrangements as well as ominous drones. even when it is aggressive (see: e3m4 - the downfall), it evokes desperation rather than testosterone. certified anime teardrop shit.

the detailed gore is another point i'd pin in the game's slow design tenants. in retro first person shooters, the gore tends to be homogenized. shoot a fucker and red blood spurts out as they fly back. explode a fucker and they are reduced to red chunks. it's a simple visual language where red=dead. in the citadel, things are a little more complex; the style here is dismemberment. on hit, enemies lose limbs or fall to the ground wounded, often with organs exposed in a very grotesque manner. hit an enemy hard enough and you’ll expose their insides completely, littering the ground with intestines. like, a lot of intestines. in a game like dusk, this would create visual clutter and lag as you mow down hordes of enemies. but this isn't a game like dusk. you're not intended to dash through every level like a lunatic - there's a stamina bar restricting you from doing that. the unusually elaborate gore provides, if nothing else, some extra moment-to-moment entertainment.

i've noticed complaints about the repetitive visuals, likely as a side effect of the slow pace. i get where they're coming from. the limited tileset doesn't change. yet the levels had so much going on geometrically that i didn't even notice the repetition until these reviews pointed it out! there's an interesting emphasis on verticality not only in liberating moments ("video games peak at jumping from rooftop to rooftop"), but also in restrictive ones. the game is littered with facsimiles of buildings, like a less underwhelming version of doom ii’s city levels. it never feels the same, even if it all looks more or less that way. the use of negative space here is also great. shoutout to e3m5! doekuramori knows how to get full mileage out of their building blocks.

we’re 600 words in and i still haven't mentioned the guns in this shooter? shit. uh, the shotguns in this game. there's two of them. they're my beautiful twin babies. yeah, there's like an assortment of weapons with an upgrade system and alt fires and - do you really care about all that when the game has TWO SHOTGUNS and BOTH of them are good? the sequel is going to have even more shotguns, so you better play that when it drops too.

conclusion paragraphs are for posers. play the citadel or my autistic ass will break into your house and eat your dog

Yes, it's weird as fuck that I'm giving an idle game a 5* score, especially one that reads so relatively dry compared to many others in the genre. But this game does something that many other idle/incremental games would never dare to do, and it massively succeeds for it: It strips down the Idle Game to the bare metal formulae and numbers that keep the game machine going, and then allows you to try as hard as you can to exploit those formulae and systems and make your numbers go up as fast as possible.

This is where the "exponential" part of the game comes in. As you break the systems and progress through the layers of game by manipulating the coefficients and exponents and variables themselves, the barriers of entry increase exponentially. You consistently find yourself leaping between orders of magnitude to the point that "orders of magnitude" becomes your base unit of measurement and you instead start making order-of-magnitude level leaps between orders of magnitude, and that cycle continues to repeat in perhaps the most numerically satisfying way possible. This game broke my conception of "big numbers" a million times over, and I fucking loved it.

The best part of this game is that it really understands that the core appeal which it offers is in this progression of scale rather than progression of numbers -- an appeal which is, ultimately, true of the vast majority of the genre, but the games rarely seem to be so explicitly aware of it -- and as such, this appeal is capitalized on to the maximum possible level. Every single time you think you've reached the last level of progression, the last layer of numbers going up, the absolute extent of what the scope of this game could possibly be, you cross the threshold into yet another higher layer and realize that the impossibly massive scope which you just mastered was nothing but the beginning of your journey. This kind of recursive shift fits perfectly with the shape of my brain, so to speak, and as such I cannot help but love how well it is executed. You get to shift from manually making second by second choices about how to maximize formulaic growth to automating the ideal growth to automating the automation of the automation of the automation etc. etc. and the layers just continue piling up but never, ever manage to become too heavy or busy for the game to hold its own.

And even better is that the game does not allow itself to decay into just being the same thing on each layer but with different variables -- the typical experience you would expect from an idle game -- but instead, that itself is the first layer of many. At each turn, the way that you play the game and interact with the formulae and numbers (and at times, actual math!) that controls this game continues to change and morph in ways that keep it interesting at all times.

Exponential Idle is a masterclass in the genre of Idle/Incremental games. For several years, I was obsessed with this genre, played all of the big staple names as well as every single indie title I could find on the internet (I still miss the one that let you write Javascript code to automate systems in the game, perhaps the most ingenious twist I have seen in the genre), and without a doubt, this game tops them all. Since finishing my month-long semi-active playthrough nearly a year ago, I have had exactly no temptation to return to any other game in the genre. They may have pretty graphics, nice lore, good design, but they do not grasp the fundamentals of the genre like this game does. If this game went on forever, I would continue traversing each and every level of exponential power scaling for the rest of my life.