from the developers who brought you.... seemingly nothing other than a similar shitty "WOW SO VINTAGE" game also heavily inspired by quite possibly the most overrated game in existence, here's Bloodb-i mean, Nightmare Kart.

do you like mediocre indie games developed with childhood nostalgia for like 3 different games, all trying to be mixed into one hideous mass powered by "DAE remember [POPULAR SERIES]?"
if so, this is the game for you!

the most impressive thing about this game is how symbolic it is of the disease that is eating up the indie scene, sensationalism, according to this invisible force, games shouldn't be expressions of art, they should be a means to an end for a gimmick that immediately looks cool in trailers. thousands of great indie titles are slipping through the cracks because the indie scene is being viewed the same way that the AAA industry is, everything is in the immediate presentation and marketing, nobody wants to search for anything and they're encouraged to by social media attention, garbage like "GUYS CHECK THIS GAME OUT, YOU CAN PARRY EVERYTHING!" or "LOL WHAT IF [GAME] but... IT WAS FLIPPED ON ITS HEAD?!!?" or just "HEY DOES ANYONE ELSE REMEMBER [POPULAR GAME]"

it checks most of the boxes for a mediocre indie game that only took off due to face value appeal, it's got a shitty mix of fifth and sixth generation console graphics presumably because like the reason of the old name for the game, it was done purely because the developer though it was a cool aesthetic, this will make your experience frustrating as you struggle to see around you, through the obnoxious CRT filter, poorly done models and texture-work, and ridiculous fog, it's the type of blinding visuals you'd expect from a shitty horror game trying to make you feel like your agency as a player is lost, and causes the characters to be overdetailed in design yet everything on them is shitty low res pixel art.

past that it's just dull, typical generic kart racer gameplay but just feels sloppy, you've got shitty boss battles that aren't fun and that's about it, that's all this game is, the item selection is limited, areas are generic, the soundtrack is completely unfitting sounding more like a bunch of EDM castlevania remixes that you'd only ever see in a montage edit for a fighting game or FPS and the sound design is just awful.

so yeah, here's a shit idea that only made it to the finish line because the creator was making a living off slow burn developing the game off patreon and selling merchandise of themselves, i couldn't imagine why you'd be given a request to stop using the brand, it's not like you have literally exploited it to rake in tens of thousands of dollars on a "fangame"

i have absolutely zero respect for a creator exploiting the brand of a AAA game to taint the waters of the indie scene even further by blurring the line between evolved fan-games and just asking for money to make games with an IPs name and likeness, i wouldn't have had an issue if they hadn't been harvesting money off of their patreon the entire time, which was given to them mainly over interest in bloodborne kart.

doesn't help that they eventually thought they were the hottest shit alive even though realistically they were just "That one person who made those weird Bloodborne spin-off fangames"
trying to make a larger than life persona out of 3 simple elements, being a goth, being a furry, and being trans.
clearly they think it's the secret recipe to a loveable personality as they post their OC edited over popular memes or posed to recreate them constantly, and selling plushes of their OC, this is just total egomaniac behavior. it shouldn't be encouraged as it'll be all the more painful when the hype fades. prove your worth not as a personality, not for how good you are at imitating aesthetics of successful titles, but as a developer.

express yourself in a way that is specific to you, in a way that will actually hold strong after the gimmick fades, something for people to remember you by, not commodification of the hype over an aesthetic.

and for the love of god, instead of waiting for the next trendy indie game to latch onto due to a lack of personality traits of note, just look for something, look for creators that go through obscure titles, dig through the reviews and highly rated games of other users on this site, even just search on your own through tags on Itch and Steam, don't let bad actors ruin the undying soul of the game industry.

A challenge can be anything that’s difficult to achieve, but to be challenged, in the sense of being called to action, carries a much more complicated set of implications. The most distinct is a sense of inescapability, that there are no alternatives but to rise and give your best within a certain set of limitations. The difference between the two is core to what I found lacking in Elden Ring, but it’s also what I think lies at the center of the game’s unprecedented appeal. In a game like Dark Souls, you could find yourself at the bottom of Blighttown with no way to easily boost your weapons, no way to upgrade your flask, no way to try a different weapon, nothing, you had to either press onwards, or do what no player wants to do, climb back out and redo the whole thing when more prepared. For lack of a better term, it was a challenge in both the intransitive and transitive senses; it was difficult, and it also confronted players with that sense of inescapability. Elden Ring’s wide open world with unimpeded access to weapon upgrades, weapon arts, summons, physick flasks, alternative progression paths, and so much more means that the only time the game presents an active challenge is an hour from the end, in the final couple bosses. The rest of the game is a wide open space where you can always go where you’re prepared, and snowball without pressure. The Souls games always let players do this to some extent, but the ease with which this can be achieved in Elden Ring is its unique selling point, and thus why I think it’s so appealing to newcomers. An open space dotted with intransitive challenges allows players of all skill levels to enjoy themselves in the way they want to, and never hit any brick walls. For me though, the most memorable parts of the series were the times like Blighttown and the drop into Anor Londo, when I knew that my only real choice was to press onwards against all odds. Elden Ring is clearly an artistically ambitious game, and I can applaud and respect it for that, but now that I’ve finished it, I’m left without any similar moments to remember. I’ll certainly recall playing it, but that's a lot different from an experience hoping “to be remembered”.

Elden Ring gets caught into the trap of the open-world design: bigger always means better.

There is a sense of discovery in the first 20 hours or so, where you slowly uncover the elements that form the world (characters, enemies, levels, systems...). Many of them are well-known by now, as everyone has pointed out, given their iterative nature. But it's in how is iterated that I think lies the magic of those first 20 hours. The caves, dungeons and mines are my favourite part, having to keep your lantern with you at all times, not knowing where those little assholes will come you from. Little passages, some secrets, a nice boss battle at the end and out. A little adventure in the midst of all that grandiosity.

Sadly, those 20 hours of discoveries and secrets comes to an end rather abruptly, when the iterative becomes repetitive. The same locations, the same enemies, the same bosses, the same items, the same strategy, the same vistas. A boring mosaic. All the magic got swept away for the sake of squeezing all those hours that become junk.

There is much more than just small dungeons, of course. The rest is an extension of dark souls 3, not dark souls 1, with very big and intricate castles, and at the end a stupidly giant mega boss awaiting to be slayed and make a fucking super epic moment, which in many cases read as very similar encounters. I would lie if I'd say that i didn't enjoy (very much enjoy) some of those battles, mainly Radahn and Rennala. They offered something more varied and interesting than just battle, and very refreshing.

Dark souls games have been compered to Berserk ad nauseam, pointing at all the homages and references to Miura's biggest work. It is considered that Dark Souls 3, even this one, kept some of the spirit of the manga faithfully. Recently, I was once again listening to Susumu Hirasawa's ost for the anime while re-reading the manga, and when this song started https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZa0Yh6e7dw, I realised that we view Berserk through different lenses, because there is no moment in all Elden Ring that even resembles this.

If that wasn't enough, I've also been replaying Dark Souls 1 at the same time, and it's really jarring the comparison. People destroyed Dark Souls 2 for not capturing the essence of the first one, but I now think they only meant the world wasn't fully interconnected, because Elden Ring is nothing like the first one in the worst ways! DS1 gets much better the spirit of Berserk, the melancholy of a dark and twisted world, full of violence but with traces of hope to continue. Some of the characters you meet along the journey are too cynical to keep going, some of them still hold the will to go forward, many will fall into despair, madness and death, but every single one of them are bound to the strength needed to dream a different future. The idea that the world is not going to die this time. Some still believe it, some stopped believing a long time ago. You yourself keep persevering in a world that has died so many times that it doesn't make sense anymore. Buildings are not going down, but the concept of architecture itself is fading. Ugliness can be felt in the colors of the walls, in the faraway trees and landmasses. Elden Ring is too concrete and clean to show that ugliness, and is too convoluted with power plays to make character interactions tragic or memorable (also, maybe having much more characters doesn't help). The only exception is the woman's hug in The Round Table, something that could perfectly have been in DS1.

I read someone explaining the game as "imagine the moment in DS3 when you saw Irithyll for the first time. That's Elden Ring all the time", implying that it was something great. For me, it's not. I got saturated of so much "beauty", so much brightness, so much clarity, so many perfect compositions that it didn't strike me anymore. Since you are going to be traversing a world for a long time, they decided to make STUNNING VISTAS all the time, every time. An attempt to naturalistic open-worlds. In Spanish, there is a word that perfectly describes my sensations: relamido.

Yes, the gameplay is obviously good. Its the previous games with more weapons, which translates in fun ways to approach fights. But I find pretty underwhelming that the thing this game has going for is what people criticise constantly: polish. A bigger and uniform forest with polished trees.

Maybe I'm being more harsh with this game than with any other, but seeing the comparisons with previous games and Berserk, and spending maybe 70 hours with no moving or alienating experiences unlike the previous ones, has made me more bitter towards this spouting of thoughts. Beware games, don't make me play for that long.

It's truly baffling to me that you can make a game about dreams and perception of reality and have such a huge proportion of it be just making the player walk down bland hallways, the same uninspired motifs plastered everywhere over and over, whilst the player desperately hovers their cursor over everything they come across to find whichever object the game arbitrarily deems interactable.

It feels like so many developers misunderstood what made Portal great, thinking that it was just the light spatial and physics puzzles accompanied by silly, fun voiceovers, when actually it was the fact that that game pushed into territory that felt legitimately experimental, surprising and exciting in the context of mainstream videogames fifteen years ago. There are a handful of cool moments in Superliminal, more than my rating really implies, but it genuinely left my imagination feeling sapped from the experience as I longed for it to stop telling me to think outside the box until such a point as it had actually done so itself.

Animal Well really is a thing you need to experience with a controller in your hands and full focus because it is a living, breathing art piece that sucked me in. I bought this game 5 hours ago and I haven't put it down since. The way everything animated is like drinking cool water on a hot night. Refreshing.

Seeing the previews of this game, I thought "ok big youtuber videogamedunkey is firmly in his 30's and wants to expand beyond making shitposts and make money by becoming an indie publisher". I wasn't moved at all by any of the promotion for Animal Well. I am bored to DEATH of 2D platformers and this game only teased a pleasant art style which is not enough to make me care. Most 2D games all mostly play the same. I'm sleep.

Thing is I got 24.68 on my Steam Wallet, so why not give it a try.

It is a Metroidvania logic puzzler. There are no tutorials in Animal Well. You are left as to guess how you progress forward. It's not Baba is You go FUCK yourself hard. It is quite simple and natural gameplay that leads to bigger and bigger "ah-HA!" moments. The kind where you feel dumb and smart. Smumb. Darmbt. I felt like I was one of those things.

The gameplay mixed with the environments and ambient music just clicked with me hard. I was 45 minutes into the game after being cynical about the whole thing and my brain just snapped after a certain puzzle solution and I realized this game has a hidden power level of cleverness. It is so meticulously well thought out. It's not trying to reinvent the wheel. It just was catered for you to have a good time.

I recommend this game for everyone. I've been in a gaming slump where no new game releases has really excited me, but Animal Well is the game that pulled my brain out of that fog. Not saying it will do the same for you, but if you give it a shot, it just might.

It ain't as good as Hollow Knight, but this is right under that (so far) as a jaw dropping 2D game with content that keeps upping the ante in amazement.

Jamal Dunkey picked a banger to kick off his publishing venture.