look i'm SORRY i really am but like i'm having a lot of fun checking in on all the stuff i remembered as a kid, this just so happens to be one of them LMAO

I don't have any fun tales to tell or any vibes to reminisce on like I did in my EYX review, which is unfortunate because that means I actually have to try and figure out what I'm supposed to say about "Sonic.EXE" and his game.

But I don't wanna be too negative about it. I actually have some nice things to say, though it's more so just me being surprised and not actually anything I'd call any good. My memory of this game was purely what it started out as, walk right and watch these characters die in about 15 or so minutes. To my shock and surprise, there have actually been some very major changes made in the 11 years since that original release. You are now given the option to, uh... I dunno, see a little more? You can fulfill certain requirements (walking left instead of right) to find extra stages that provide something of a story that I don't care about, culminating in one last little walk to the right as the blue blur himself. Blur as in he's being covered in static, nothing speed wise, he's still just walking. Aside from that, Knuckles can punch now, Robotnik lost his ability to slide (sad!), and sometimes you need to jump instead of it being purely a walk to the right. The art at the end is different, frankly a little more silly looking than the original, but shit I know there's not much you can do about that.

Was fun to see what's new, but it's still a shitty story written by a shitty person turned into a shitty game. As much as I got to gush over the community aspect of it all before, I still can't deny that much. Still not a 1/10 though lmao

there were maybe 3 lines that emanated annoying-twitter-queer-person, despite what the title and cover art may suggest. no "girl dinners" in sight. video game feminization hypnosis is actually a porpentine video game manifesto for people without horrible trauma/a guide on how to think more critically about the media you enjoy/a study on how male-dominated gamer culture ia. the writer didn't use the word bl*haj a single time. i'm proud of them. the reason this has so many .5s is because people felt challenged by it, which is good- that's the point. no, the exaggeration that "all video games should be forcefeminized" is not literal (by definition), it's exaggeration to make a point about how many gamers act as if the mainstream should only cater to men ie the common denominator. how about y'all try having media literacy for a change?

backloggd user @Cjer gets a 25% revenue cut of this review

April 13th, 2023, I begin rereading Homestuck, to honor it's 14th birthday, and to add to some of the nostalgia I've been reliving over the past few months.
May 16th, 2023. I had made it just past "[S] GAME OVER." the previous day, and I was fucking ready to go. I would spend the next several hours (albeit with a bit of a break midway through) reading over 1,200 pages, finishing up the webcomic just over a month after I started.

After Homestuck ended in 2016, I spent the next several years sort of forgetting about it, only looking back on it through unfortunate events that made it's way outside of the fandom and into my vision. This would eventually lead me to believe that I hated Homestuck, for some strange influence. I would hear these terrible stories, watch the similar reactions of others, the disgust from all of them, and I wanted to make sure I was nowhere near it. Any sight of the story or characters I came across over the years made me believe it was all a bunch of "terrible memories" or something that I would never look back on, pushing away something I had loved so much, I didn't want to be associated with any of it.

But this year was different. I gave up on that heavy belligerence toward the series, and I gave it another try, despite my assumed hatred, and by God I loved it just as much as younger me did.

Homestuck provides such a high fantasy world, dragons, aliens, supernatural death powers, so much miraculous bullshit, and pulls it off magically, with a cast of characters that I find amazingly enjoyable to read and voice. I started the first 2 acts through the website, before learning of the Unofficial Homestuck Collection, an archive made to preserve some of the other features and side pages that the original mspaintadventures website held, as well as keep some of the fucking awesome Flash Player tricks that the old webcomic had that just can't be replicated through the site's YouTube redirects. So many chilling moments, seeing the animations interact both within and out of the panel that was supposed to be surrounding them.
That's the first thing I love Homestuck for, it's innovative use of the Adobe Flash Player. So much of the story loses its magic without it, including interactive pages, the aforementioned sort of "boundary breaking" animations for the real big moments, even a few flash games allowing the reader to take control of certain characters. I believe this is one of the things that makes Homestuck so special, in a format that you wouldn't really expect so much from.
Accompanying all of the [S] pages signifying each flash animation is some amazing music as well. Cascade, Carne Vale, all of the tracks in [S] Collide, and obviously the works of the big name, Toby Fox, every song, somehow with so many different genres present, fits in with every situation they're used in, and can really add so much more to the feeling of the page.

But out of everything I love Homestuck for, I think my favorite is just the sentimental value I hold towards it. About 8 or 9 years ago, I had moved to a new place, new school, didn't know anybody. I would soon start talking to somebody, I wanna say maybe a year later, and they would introduce me to Homestuck. That was, I believe, one of the first interactions I had with one of my now best friends of nearly a decade. I don't want to associate this comic with such bad memories anymore, I want to associate it with the things, and especially the people, that I love now. Homestuck brought me into a group that I was proud to be a part of for so long, I enjoyed being there for the long waits between pages, getting so excited with every new batch dropped, and being there on the day of the end, seeing it all culminate in its highest quality of animation yet, and one of the coolest and most satisfying motherfucking endings I have still ever seen to this day. I enjoyed watching it grow while it was still ongoing, the fan content created by other talented people so passionate about the story.
I still enjoy the company that Homestuck has allowed me to be around for so many years, and I feel things would be so unbelievably different had I never once found out about it all that time ago. I fucking love this series, and while I regret being so spiteful towards it for so long, I'm also somewhat glad that allowed me to re-experience it all for what felt like the first time again, 7 long years after I had abandoned it.

...but damn I do kinda wish my zodiac troll got a bit more screen time, preferably outside of that weird little fusion near the end.

Kinda went into Pentiment expecting to have to "eat my vegetables"; its aesthetic being artistically sound, but not really the kind of thing I'm generally into, and its premise sounding intellectually invigorating in a games industry that's arguably in arrested development when it comes to making mainstream experiences for adults, but maybe not enough to keep me personally going for a playtime of over 20 hours. And well, I was pretty fuckin' wrong! And not even in the Disco Elysium way where after I got over the hurdle of the first hour or two that it finally clicked (not to say that Disco Elysium's intro isn't basically perfect in its own way), Pentiment managed to sink its teeth into me right away. The game's art is also a lot more affective and unique than I would've expected just from the couple trailers I'd seen, and despite the entire game taking place across only a handful of screens (contextualized as pages in a book), there were many times that I found myself stopped in my tracks, contemplating the beauty of a specific moment.

It's also just as real as fuck without succumbing to either condemnation or romanticization. Pentiment's perspective on history and the people who shaped it is complex without cowardly labeling every participant as a morally grey agent -- there are unabashedly terrible and evil people in this world, people who are deceptive in their self-servitude, and even inarguably cruel entities like the Catholic Church house individuals who really do want to make the world a better place in their own way and even people who are in the church due to societal forces beyond their control. Pentiment is a game that tries its best to be honest about the world. It's also a game that's absolutely more intelligent and worldly than I'll ever be, and I really don't think I can do it the full justice it deserves in my own analysis of its setting and themes, so I'll just leave it there.

And yeah, Pentiment is also just a great example of how to make a dialogue-focused adventure game fun. Like, part of that is probably because I chose hedonism as one of my skills and made Andreas into a terrible little boyslut, but you know how it is. The dialogue never bored me, every character feels truly alive -- and that's without voice acting! I actually appreciated that there wasn't any honestly, it's a double-edged sword in a lot of games like this, and it only would've detracted from the bespoke aesthetic decision to give every character's spoken dialogue in "their own handwriting", in quotes because I'm not entirely sure what the implication was for the characters that are by their own admission illiterate (but I did love that Claus the town printer's dialogue is the only one that uses an actual typeface, accompanied by the satisfying thuds of a printing press).

By the end of the game, Tassing really does begin to feel like your home as well, not only because many pivotal events in Tassing's recent history are influenced by the player, but because you've grown close to the town's citizens and watched them grow and change as well. Pentiment isn't a power trip in that sense -- you cannot save everybody or give everybody a happy ending, not that you'd want to with some of the assholes you run into honestly -- but it does manage to encapsulate the warm and fuzzy feeling that despite the world being dogshit, we can still do our best for those around us, be a part of a greater whole with honest fervor. The player and Andreas will inevitably fuck up a lot, but it's something we have to live with, something to learn from. Things like that feel self-evident in the real world and are rarely explored properly in games, but the fact that Pentiment lacks a manual save function really sells that feeling. But even if we can't meta-game Tassing into the perfect little Bavarian town suffering under feudalism and religious oppression, the Tassing we end up with is undeniably ours. I think that's probably why I might never replay Pentiment, which is rare for me, since I tend to replay games I love quite often.

Also the "third act" is pretty good! Saw some people criticizing the shift in gameplay focus, but it was a nice change of pace and was probably my favorite part altogether. Don't normally recommend games on here, but honestly, check it out for yourself. I can't really think of many demographics that'd be outright disappointed by Pentiment. It's good. :)

I can barely form a coherent thought about what I just finished but I feel weirdly seen by Final Fantasy VIII and its protagonist in particular as this understanding of specific feelings of capitalist alienation that I've been unable to articulate for the longest time. I don't have any official diagnosis and especially do not want people I barely know armchair diagnosing me online but Squall's struggles to process the most basic social interactions in terms of anything other than capitalist obligations like school or work, "shut up and get the job done" mentality, and specific jaded outlook are core parts of myself I never expected to see reflected in this fashion. While I narrowly prefer the basic bitch choices of VI and VII in terms of Final Fantasy games, this surreal response to the cultural zeitgeist of the latter game and weird as fuck (complimentary) use of Marxist theory (specifically the "annihilation of space by time" described in Grundrisse and expanded upon over a century later by David Harvey) in the same way that most RPGs use religious/mythological concepts solely because it sounds cool is a game that will no doubt have a special place in my heart from now on.