neon white posited itself as a game By Freaks For Freaks in much of its marketing. not to take away from how excellent that game is but it's published by annapurna for gods sake. flywrench is actually the ultimate freak flag game. you really have to be of a certain mind to get the most out of how this game works. the soundtrack is so killer it's unbelievable how many artists they got to contribute bangers to this thing. both nidhogg and flywrench are the only games I can think of that go for this really distinct simplistic style and absolutely nail it.
flywrench is an unlockable character in super meat boy and messhof also made nidhogg but still no one's ever even heard of this game. what the fuck!!

i make a lot of shitty mods for bad games for one specific friend i have for no reason other then i think it's really funny. i think i'm super hilarious. video games are the only thing i ever think about and so obviously i have aspirations for designing one someday, creating these mods is a good way for me to indulge in that impulse while also not letting me fool myself into putting "makes games sometimes" in my twitter bio. one time i made a house party (2017) mod that had a ton of bespoke, branching paths with unique endings based on really minute player actions and decisions. when i watched my friend play i was in agony seeing how often he had to restart the entire run because it was just impossible to create convenient save points where he could quickly branch the story to a new ending. i think who's lila suffers from this same problem most of it's playtime. you'll end up in the interrogation room for what feels like 2/3s of the endings but the path to getting there has to be meticulously played out ever so slightly differently each time. each time you finish a story you feel like you're building up to a conclusion that ultimately never arrives.
i've never played another game (or read a story or watched a movie for that matter) that parlays this kind of an anticlimax into the main themes in a really elegant way. it's not a particularly revelatory experience, and the whole Deal with the story is kinda obvious and slightly overdone in general. but it wraps itself up nice and feels like it said what it wanted to say and got out. my biggest beef with the whole package is the obsession with working in 'Lynchian' imagery and items for no reason other then this guy probably likes lost highway too much. it's good and normal to draw on your inspirations but at a certain point it dilutes the actual author's voice and style. and i'm just super sick of david lynch i have to be real. he made like one movie that i can fuck with and everything else is just so over referenced and uninteresting.

hard to find anything about this game sincere considering sony gutted japan studio shortly after the ps5 launched and its ""classics catalogue"" is laughably barebones months out from release. attempting to cash in some cheap goodwill off your legacy titles this way feels extremely slimy. on top of it all the game is just total ass. bone dry platforming where the controller is constantly screaming at you and shaking so violently that sometimes i was worried the triggers would break. the rumble often doesn't even correspond to what's happening on screen, there's just a constant low-level vibration that occasionally gets more intense. it's like there's really a sandstorm happening in my controller!! it's as though my hands are trapped in a cold blizzard with the wind gusting against them while the rest of my body is normal and sitting in my chair!! you can't even invert the camera.

i sort of bristle at the way people talk about this being "The First Game To Be Art" or "Finally Games Are As Good As Movies With Alan Wake 2," if only because this title deserves more robust discussion then the sort we were seeing in 2013 gamefaqs posts when the last of us came out or in 2023 magazine articles when the last of us came out. those kinds of sentiments are also just stupid and annoying on their head.
outside of all that i think this game is absolutely delightful. a solid and compact cube of game design. there were some weaker or underserved mechanics (case board) and a few moments i did genuinely hate (both musical numbers) and by the end both are recontextualized in ways that i absolutely adored. the last 30 minutes are the only thing that drag the entire experience down. so agonizingly close to the end when it seems like the game is about to nail everything it becomes a children's cartoon about going to therapy before dropping you into two lukewarm encounters and that's it. however the game does get an extra star for being finnish so it's back up to a perfect 5.
i will probably end up getting this on xbox at some point because i hear it runs 1% better and i would be happy to replay

more influential and ahead of its time then most people realize. this game was released 12 years ago and it was already doing so many of the presentational flourishes that people are still playing with in things like the backrooms or those old slenderman videos, and those projects are often doing it worse then kane and lynch 2. i wonder how much the uncountable multitudes of angry joe-esque big rant videos on this helped lead to its unintentional cultural proliferation. the ways in which io was able to use shaders and post processing magic to turn decidedly xbox 360 era models and animations into something that feels entirely unique and often contemporary is the coolest part of this game. what really jumped out while playing was the dedication to the acoustics of early cell phone videos. the subtle ways in which the audio will crush itself depending on the size of the room you're in or how loud the explosion you're next to is is remarkable. this is a game made by io and published by square enix but it feels more experimental then a good many indie games i've played recently. outside it's presentation the game is brutally difficult and often not that engaging, but i kinda don't care. i'm sure a ton of people have called this game "style over substance," but so much work and care was put into the style that it can't just be written off over other aspects of the game.

i liked going back to this game having played every other fromsoft souls type beat. each modern fromsoft game has systems and areas that are built from lessons learned in previous titles, but it's accessing the matrix code seeing how much of what they do is this weird endless spiral of repeated game design. you'll come across the tower knight in bloodborne or the capra demon in elden ring almost entirely unchanged from their original incarnations outside of the reskins and it never feels like it's ""recycled content"" in any way. riffs on bosses and levels and very specific ideas that they think are cool and want to do again with a slightly different flavor and very little tweaking because, somehow, they usually got it right the first time anyways. boletaria palace a place so nice they did it thrice for dark souls 3 and elden ring.
this one is the cleanest of all the ""SoulsLikes"" excluding bloodborne. the humanity system is simple and unobtrusive and letting you level from any bonfire rather then a nexus (or a majula or a dream or another firelink shrine) works perfectly for the kind of compact level design they were going for. intensely satisfying to move through even though it had no real secrets or surprises for me thanks to the endless and inescapable lore and pvp videos that were sprayed at me like a firehose back in the 360 days.

the mega man x collection for some reason took out save states and rewinds so this one actually filtered me lol. as it stands i think this game is just kinda ugly. every sprite looks like it came out of a lego duplo set. the audio is so lame too. behold the world's most embarrassing riffs that all sound identical. compared to doom it's certainly the weaker effort in its attempt to digitize a guitar. a generally slower paced title compared to the previous 5 nes games which isn't a bad thing, just stacked on top of the bulky ass sprites it makes this game feels like it's covered in bubble wrap.

continues to copy respawn's homework and is better for it. after stealing most every movement mechanic from apex (aside from the broken stuff like wallbounces) they've moved onto swiping evo shields (evocrhome is technically last season) and supply bots. i do appreciate that every big update to fortnite keeps adding to the movement systems to the point where you can basically just consider it an arena shooter with one really big map. every change is well considered but the whole experience (at least in terms of gameplay) is just slightly too polished off to give us some really good exploits that really bust the whole thing wide open. there are enough systems at play on their own and getting around is smooth enough that i'm never truly bored in the transit times but the best Gaming Locomotion is always unintended by the developers.
they tightened up the graphics on level three. i didn't think it would be that noticeable but i moved from pc to console just to get all the fancy new bells and whistles. it is really really nice to look at. i truly loathe temporal artifacting, every time i see ghosting outlines of my character or the level geometry i feel like someone is dragging my brain across pavement. but there's something incredibly charming about the artifacts coming out of these early ray tracing engines. it feels so raw and grainy and weirdly analog. like you're seeing every little photon of light dotting your character whenever you're under the shadow of a tree. i imagine how i feel about this is similar to how most people get nostalgic for affine texture warping in old ps1 games. it's more genuine then temporal ghosting in my eyes. i think this is gamer brain damage really kicking in at age 26.

i've never beaten vanilla demon's souls before and that's made it really hard to work out my feelings on this remake. my most concrete thought is that demon's souls (2020) is existentially terrifying. demon's souls (2020) and shadow of the colossus (2018) feel like they've taken a major step beyond something like the twin snakes, the total separation between bluepoint and the original developers is extreme in a way that i'm just not comfortable with. superseding a studio's original vision with your own is aggressive even if the intention isn't actively malicious. it's not even a question of "does bluepoint 'understand' the original purpose of a specific texture or line of dialogue." even if there was a perfect, 1:1 understanding of the source material, demon's souls (2020) would still look radically different from its original incarnation as the new developer would express these understandings differently, in ways that make the most sense to them. so we have a refraction of demon's souls (2009) through the lens of an american company who's first and only original creative output was a game called Blast Factor. (most of) the levels are great, the visuals are weird and sometimes out of place and occasionally beautiful. the bloom has been filtered out. some bosses now look like diablo 3. some of them look like league of legends. some of them look like mortal shell. some of them look the same. the box art is terrible now. the game runs at 60 fps (unless you check the box to make it run worse for no reason) and that feels very good. spells have punchy sound effects that are mixed with really accentuated lows so they sound like a marvel movie. the character creation theme has been done so dirty that bluepoint should be dissolved just for changing it. i think i like demon's souls (2009), but i won't know for sure until i play and beat that game. i think i like demon's souls (2020) too, but i can't help getting sad whenever i think about how it was made.

i love playing through mass effect again and making the exact same decisions as i always do. the real trick of the series is you'll be going along laughing at every single line of dialogue and suddenly you hit ilos and the menu theme starts playing and you're instantly in tears. maybe that's a symptom of my brain problems more then anything. the asset and layout reuse is egregious at almost all times but it never grates in the ways it can in other titles. a sprightly and quick game that's probably the best introduction to a world that i've seen across any medium. still ultimate kuso though lol

it's so fucking good lol. this is the only game to earn the title of Western Excellence. a game of setups with no payoffs but that only serves to strengthen the experience. every choice feels appropriately weighty and distinct without knowing that only like 3 decisions actually matter in me3. the whole game feels so meticulously put together. a beautiful structure for a title that is essentially one long training arc. i'm honestly even fine with the reaper baby because it's just funny. dead space does the same thing and it's so bland and uninspired but with me2 all i can think is "so true bestie 💋" while fighting him. killer soundtrack too. there's like 5 nightclubs across the entire universe and they're all sick