ENTRYWAY
thirty second par
but how could anybody
want to leave so soon

initially my plan was to write a series of 32 haikus, one for each level, with the intention of succinctly boiling things down into a heartfelt gesture. the problem there's that doom II's anything but succinct; it's a towering, monolithic game that bears down on you at all times. breathless formatting, increased enemy numbers, more byzantine, avant garde mapping, chaotic texturing, new enemies, and a one-of-a-kind fan community that's opened up an endless limitless world of More Doom and turned it into something you could spend a lifetime emerged in without seeing everything worthwhile or learning all its finest details. to try to sum things up poetically is a fool's errand; doom II can't be boiled down into 544 syllables, least of all by me

REFUELING BASE
this from the man who
put 95 spawns into
quake episode 4

a narrative has developed that suggests doom II's second half is something irredeemable — not just underwhelming, but outright bad — and it's a load of shit. if you don't like TENEMENTS or COURTYARD that's an indictment of your taste, not the quality of the mapping present here. the way sandy in particular maps with such expressive, inventive, and experimental brushstrokes is something we should relish and appreciate; doom and quake wouldn't be what they are without his contributions, and he's one of the genre's most important level designers hands down

that the game feels like a fever dream is largely a result of his 17(!!!!) maps and their wild refusal to adhere to conventional logic or standard. people out here begging and crying for euclidian techbases when my man barfed textures in a pile and turned it into something as good as TRICKS AND TRAPS. "SUBURBS ISNT REALISTIC" you scream into your pillow while I smile big with my cute dimples showing cos I'm enjoying a really fun map. "CHASM IS BAD" you shriek so loud you get evicted while I enjoy some first person platforming and reminisce about turok dinosaur hunter being the best game on the N64. no one, and I mean No One advanced the space for creation here more substantially. fuck verisimilitude, let's dance

SUBURBS
welcome all neighbors
to our annual cookout
bring your own bodies

they could've called it perfect doom: an evolutionary step that marked its final form and near-complete status as a standardized toolset. they could've dropped the number and signaled it as just being a big ass messy sloppy cuhrazy megawad and called it a day and 99% of the shit talk would be stopped in its erroneous tracks. really, I don't even think there's a good argument that doom's better unless you're looking at it as some hermetically pure retail project rather than a couplet of frameworks or stepping stones to greater ideas. hindsight is 50/50, but we're graced with enough distance now to know that any assessment of the material should be done while understanding what it wrought; that none of this exists in that Big Box Vacuum and never really did — shareware being the first and last exposure many, many people had in the first place, and doom always being a game that's chopped n screwed in as many ways as possible. doom is ragged and raw; it's tendrils, it's wild kudzu and overgrowth and every idea every middle schooler ever jotted in a notebook. to appraise this in a sanitized quarantine is geek shit I simply can't abide by. this is an immaculate vessel that had the good grace to show up with 32 mostly sick maps

THE FACTORY
fifty indie games
that look exactly like this
steam early access

if any game exists as some kind of broad communal accomplishment, it's probably doom. opening with an open source branch to the community, and closing long after we're buried in our technograves. ads for lotions interrupt our epitaphs while someone named grizzlyguzzler releases the cacoward winning "scronky bonky II" and sets neo doomworld ablaze with passionate discussion. Did You See The Part Where. I Can't Believe That. How Did They Even...

billionaires in bad suits pump sicko dollars into metaverses and games-within-games-within-games; some eternal platform-slash-cenotaph is conjured by the world's most killable humans; disfigured 3D models waggle and wave in cyberspace trying desperately to create something as remotely meaningful, intravenously sucking on your wallet to please money perverts before being sent to the scrap heap

good luck

DEAD SIMPLE
perfect little map
the homages will go on
past our life and death

tim willits is a fuckin loser bro. man made some good doom maps (with theresa chasar, his often uncredited sister) and did great work on quake pre-champions, but he never should've been elevated into the position he was by the end of his tenure at id

american mcgee calls him a "serial credit thief" and sandy petersen attributes the collapse of id to his meddling and refers to him only as "snake"; this guy's slime. man was making claims so erroneous that he managed to get both johns to team up on his ass which is saying something. saying he invented DM-only maps for quake when anyone can go check when idmap01 or cross.wad came out for doom, or better yet just think about how goofy it is for five seconds

so what happens when this rat fraud bitch teams up with soulless automaton john carmack? awooga. the most dead eyed fps ever made. together these two men really brought the heat and redefined what it means to be vacant and empty inside. one driven only by a love of machines, the other by cynical careerism. the result would be a tech demo that has virtually no redeeming qualities; even john goodman sounds like he'd rather be anywhere else, and how can you blame him

forget passion or heart or whatever fever drives the average person to create. forget anything that resembles human input. this is referential slop; echoes of better media, better games, better products — cos that's all this thing is at the end of the day — as interpreted and executed by pulseless weirdos. subpar linear shooter, even worse pseudo open world shooter; artless aesthetic sensibilities; internally and externally ugly borderlands gopher bullshit; fallout 3 brown and bloom mad max mcnugget slime created to advance tim willits' career

if I ever write another review this mean it means tim willits just put out another game

boy oh fuckin boy. we finally got a 40K game that adequately captures a world bigger than snoozy bottle episode conflicts and positions its tonality closer to original intent than unironic fascism endorsement. remember this shit was supposed to be satirical? well,

landing on a new planet, having your lackeys introduce you rather than deign to do it yourself, and behaving like an all around prissy idiot is the vibe here. I know you could play as the emperor's lapdog or a chaotic evil heretic, but I'm always gonna be a condescending, drink swirling, eye rolling, "crime lord" brat if given the opportunity. I like to think when I align with any sorta dogma it's with a camera mugging wink. I'm JUST lying; I am literally always lying; I have no convictions outside of demented egoism. don't think there's an rpg in recent memory that more convincingly backs up your inherent desire to choose the best/funniest/optimal outcomes with a player character that's canonically shitty enough to do just that

it's all pretty much age-of-sail bullshit: show up, colonize, reap the benefits of your exploitation, manage your fucked up evil empire, engage in ship battles; that sorta thing. while I don't think it gets into being as much of a commentary as the material naturally lends itself toward (and was designed to be) — likely cos games workshop's afraid of scaring off the nazis — it's certainly a game that's at its best when it understands just how awful you and your companions are and leans into it further. there's often an Aw Shucks do-gooder option, but it feels more like a genre vestige than a path worth pursuing; a consolation prize for those who don't mind how much it clashes with all the kidnapping and murder and backstabbing the game expects you to do. no one gonna convince me the "lawful good" bit works in this setting at all, let alone a game where the friendliest dialogue choice might involve threatening to execute someone on the spot, but sure

combat feels real good, real thick and chunky with gratuitous slo-mo and turning people into red goulash via all manner of awful implements. instead of being a fetish monument to baldur's gate (1/2) style prebuffing, RT's homebrewed ruleset focuses more on integrating that stuff directly into the general flow of things. you can make quite a few actions on a given turn, and a good portion's likely gonna be dedicated to setting up wild chains of buffs and debuffs so you can trigger a series of stacked bonuses or maluses — delicately setting up sequences in advance before seeing the plan snap together in a quick burst of catharsis

character progression works similarly: hypergranular in all the right ways to make tinkering fun; a slow roll snowball where you gradually build up passives and synergies with level ups. you never hit X level and get something like a fireball that gives you the popeye spinach all at once, it's more like minute, incremental improvements that inevitably add up to something fucked up down the line. balance is totally out the window, and it's easy to trivialize even harder difficulties with certain roles, but it's a joy to piece everything together and if you (understandably) want more control than something like 5E allows, this is the antidote to that. even before getting into the itemization and all the avenues it opens up, this is 100% math porno for build perverts

on the other hand the encounter design's a mixed bag. owlcat's always been studied devotees of the infinity engine, and these still feel like rtwp fights despite being designed from the ground up for a turn based system. it works on the basis of its core mechanics being (mostly) solid, but owlcat still seems uninterested or unable to take a more economical tack with these things for whatever reason

when its firing on all cylinder's it's fabulous; when some "electro-priest" (me when i listen to drexciya) drops from the ceiling and says something about the "motive force" I don't know what it means, but I know it's pretty sick. and when I parry them six times in a row and hit em with enough debuffs to make an SMT fan puke that's sick too. the bosses, setpieces, and event fights rule, and I'd put at least a handful up there with the best in recent memory, but you could cut out a solid quarter of the lesser fights and no one would complain a bit. trash mobs work in rtwp cos you can carve thru them like it's diablo, but when an equivalent fight take significantly longer and each turn requires 6-12~ actions, the approach starts to look a lot less sound

elsewhere we got the colony management stuff which isn't my favourite thing in the world. it's necessary and consonant with the themes and setting, but as a mechanical endeavor they drag it out in some unpleasant ways. i need a way to throw up Do Not Disturb on my shit. silent mode on my shit. every two seconds I'm getting phone calls. rogue trader, we hate to bother you, but we need your help. rogue trader, is the dress blue or gold? rogue trader, there's this girl I like...

buddy, I'm here to subjugate you. clearly I've made some sort of error if you think I'm going to solve your problems. worst bit is that you gotta warp on over to the colony and the choice will be something like GET AMBUSHED BY 100 DARK ELDAR CBT SHIPS or PAY ONE (1) PROFIT FACTOR. I'm feeling a lot like ricky every time these freaks roll up and it's exhausting

ship combat absolutely rules when you're not outnumbered to the point of losing before getting a turn though. nothing fancy, just the most cozy balmy breezy vibes. you don't know what satisfaction is until you get into a situation like this and I'd buy a standalone spinoff that iterated on this stuff no questions asked. I'd throw on a giant sweater, chug black coffee, and lose an entire winter plinking away at it, easy

but it's about time we get to the biggest issue by far: this game's buggy as fuck, ranging from cute little cosmetic nothings and wonky skills to full on softlocks and run enders. I've managed to avoid the real gamebreaking nightmare outcomes so far, but it'd be real disingenuous not to emphasize how raw it gets — especially when the tutorial's longer than a given 2h refund window

at first I thought the tactical knowledge skill was broken (didn't work at all) but then I realized it was broken (line of sight/tooltip bugs), and then I realized it was broken (obliterates game balance). there's a lot of stuff like this in here; stuff that either works incredibly well, doesn't work at all, works different than suggested, or a mix of the above

I've seen misaligned inventory grids that make entire rows of items inaccessible; t-posing, animation stutters and weird cosmetic glitches; fights that go down to an average of 5 fps on a 3060ti/i5-10400 pc; enemy turns idling for 30+ seconds; ships flying away from the battle and taking 20+ turns to catch up to; zone transitions and movement not working; keyboard disconnections; major fights where allies are stuck with 0AP; combat templates carrying over to the world map; fake cover; and a host of other issues I've forgotten by now — and that's without getting into how quirky line-of-sight and allied AI are on average. you have a better chance of winning the lottery than avoiding friendly NPCs mercilessly unloading full automatic bursts into your party members' spinal columns every turn. enemies WILL shoot you through walls with impunity out of nowhere from time to time and you're gonna have to suck it up when it happens

rogue trader is the most crpg crpg I've played in a long time. a sort of time capsule of busted rulesets, buggy launches, total freedom to break the game over your knee, and some truly great roleplaying and combat hindered by outsized ambitions and developers who might be a little bit too passionate for their own good

a throwback to a bygone era of black isles and troikas making messy masterpieces that sputter and clang and crackle with manic enthusiasm and strange and bizarre malfunctions while being the first 40K game to really nail the setting and show off just how interesting the worldbuilding and lore is when its not being constrained by narrow, unimaginative storytelling

for all its problems — many of which are severe and hard to pardon — it's a weird dream game for me. if owlcat can wrangle it into being a functional piece of software I'd bump the score in a heartbeat, even assuming everything else remains completely deranged. takes all the promise of the setting that I'd been dying to see properly realized in a game and blends it with classic crpg design at its most jittery and electric, proving further (as if there was any doubt) that this style of rpg isn't going anywhere, nor should it

so my "rampage" themed set bombed at the last comedy club I played at... an audience member said it made them want to ralph

laughter

I mean, the only thing those freakazoids are destroying... is my wallet

extremely laughter

the only "rampage world tour" i want to see involves millions of dead cops

knew I was deep into touhou when the most hype moment of a game I played this year was seeing aya from shoot the bullet show up as the boss of stage 4

bomb mechanic is iffy (as it often is) and I miss grazing, but everything else here's lovely so it's hard to complain. there's a celebratory whimsy and playfulness that's above and beyond even perfect cherry blossom; the kind of joyful bombast that just feels cozy and makes it easy to sink into effortlessly

the bosses are as good as ever, the backgrounds and portraits are better than ever, and the soundtrack might be the best one yet, but what stands out most to me is how much zun's honed his talent for giving even the smallest, faintest moments their own charming flourishes. little swerves like hina's introduction or nitori fleeing from her own initial midboss encounter before it starts are delightful, and tracing the lines as the series gets more and more confident with conveying personality thru mechanical and structural means has been an absolute pleasure; nearly every frame of a character's presence — thru danmaku, dialogue, or lack thereof — being used to fullest effect by this point, leveraging elegant, iterative design perfectly

it's time to admit zun's the most accomplished auteur in the medium and it's not even close

inhabits the sense of childness better than most things; the third graders here being utterly unhinged in their expression in a way that rings far more true than either the naive or precocious archetypes that children are often chained to in fiction. in third grade these kids wrestle with mental health, death, and the eternal cudgel of generational trauma; they respond accordingly with coarse jokes and catastrophic outbursts and reflection; they seek companionship, they try to wrangle their feelings, and the outcomes are mercurial and messy and ugly and dumb and real. in third grade these kids are about what I remember of being in third grade — an impressionistic, heightened portrait, if not always a direct doppelganger

it uses its own status as remake as an opportunity to carve up the format with broad, erratic cuts. equally crushingly earnest and sneering at its own earnestness; irreverent humour picking at its own skin. embracing a need for warmth, kindness, and compassionate understanding while burning its own history with a magnifying glass for fun and interjecting frequently with self conscious fourth wall breaks and edgy non sequiturs

plumbs the depths of rpg maker design to pull elaborate gotchas; a puckish sprit overtaking the game's more perplexing asks; saving a life only by being impossibly hypervigilant to the point of psychic phenomena or counter clockwise time travel. scenarios get increasingly unmanageable and more brazen in their expectations, forcing failure and having you reckon with an endless parade of "what if"s while simultaneously showing an undeniable cleverness for these kinds of punji stick designs

the queasy true ending is the elaborate last showcase of the game's dueling philosophies. telling us what we already know, it sets the table up for unconditional love and understanding before the dealer flips their cards to reveal some things are immutable; the participants bowing out with a hideous BANG, canned laughter, and the wistful murmur of those who want to be better — to themselves, and to those around them

rest in peace parun

your dumb ass:
randy pitchford is covered in a thin slimy film! he's a greasy pervert! he's a little creep!

reality:
the year is 1999 — randy "anti US hegemony" pitchford directs the first expansion to half-life. you play as adrian shephard, a villain sent by the USMC to assassinate all witnesses to the black mesa incident, including gordon freeman. but before you can be briefed your helicopter is shot down and you're left stranded without heads or tails of your sinister purpose

knowing you play half-life like everyone else under the sun and that you'll gun down civilians without care, pitchford creates a ludonarratively consonant scenario that incorporates known player behaviours into narrative conceits with trademark grace; one where the participant likely fulfills much of adrian's goal before they're told what it is. pitchford provides commentary on the military's success with breeding more aggressive, violent soldiers, understanding that in WWII only 15-20% of polled soldiers reported firing their weapons, whereas this number raised to 55% in korea and 90-95% in vietnam due to manufactured contempt. blending these two ideas he bridges the gap between player and character and entwines the two in an inseparable double helix mirroring both participants; nature born of accursed nurture

you and shephard are funneled along a narrower path; shuttled from combat encounter to combat encounter, and granted "tacticool" tools to make the violence more thrilling than the previous game while puzzles and horror elements are sanded down extensively. you command other soldiers who speak in garish barks and exist solely as expendable resources, the setting is treated with a heightened parodic touch, and gordon himself is depicted as "employee of the month" despite it being his first day, lampooning his impossibly grotesque ubermench status

eventually your arsenal is overtaken by alien alternatives, more explicitly showing shephard as being more monster than man, the futility of his battle, and the lack of freedom he has by design. he's then left detained where he can do no harm nor receive it, and g man closes out the game by saying "I'm sure you can imagine worse alternatives" — an acknowledgement of the struggle many veterans experience upon returning home, and the lack of support they're given from their government once they've outworn their intended function

randy, I kneel

babe, that's our song!!! I say to my beautiful wife while the DOS soundscape sputters and gurgles out the crustiest percussion samples of all time in the purest arrhythmic expression of ambience yet composed

my goons have been punching vines for a while now and I thought they were ready to take it to the next level when I ran into approximately 15+ brigands and rogues. their bitcrushed jeers and exotic slowdown-inducing dances were the last thing my party saw before the death screen hit with what can only be described as a screamer

better save before you open a door. save before you unlock a door. save before you even think of a door unless you want to be hunting down keys from rng drops from rng spawns from random encounters. I can hear dw bradley cackling in the distance as I jam the lock and reload the game again for the nth time in a row. you won't be going a single second without thinking of keys. copper keys, silver keys, iron keys, chrome keys, sour keys — if you're not sniffing for keys at any given time you're all fucked up and doing everything wrong. when you're laying in bed at night with your beautiful wife, thinking about that time the game played your song, you best be ready to start dreaming about keys

which is to say it gets real in the weeds with the circuitous adventure game stuff. of course, sir-tech knew that at the time which is why it came with a 104 page "clue book" complete with annotated maps, walls of hints, and puzzle solutions — we're talking a full on nintendo power guide. much as I'm not fond of the old Roberta Williams design philosophy of making everything as incoherent as possible on a lark, if you're gonna do it you might as well admit it up front and capitulate to common decency. I may be hexen's strongest soldier but even I have my limits

being the first "Save/Rest Anywhere" wizardry — the first where you don't need to make trips back and forth from town, afflicted with grisly ailments or saddled with corpses — marks a significant divergence from previous games. on its face it's more dungeon more of the time, but the lack of separation between the two poles makes for crawling that has a blurrier, softer focus, demolishing the wall between safe and unsafe, and making just about anywhere an acceptable rest spot if you reload your save often enough

the main counterbalance is that you get one save slot. so sure, you can save whenever, but you better think long and hard about it. the potential when hovering over the DISK menu to accidentally click SAVE GAME & QUIT instead of QUIT GAME - NOSAVE is the biggest source of tension in the game, and I think it's caused me to develop a greater level of mindfulness. I am vibrating significantly higher; more serene and in control of my destiny as I go from blitzing thru menus to moving at geological speed on a dime. so far I've only made an error once twice, and I felt terrible both times; sitting there wide eyed in the saddest stupor knowing I've sealed a dark, deserved fate for myself

the other wrench in the gears is that it allows itself to be completely unhinged more or less nonstop. there's a bit of a chicken and egg thing where it's hard to tell whether the game fucks you over constantly because you can save scum, or you're given the option to save scum cos it's constantly fucking you over. it bounces between such extremes that virtually any situation you find yourself in could be drastically different on a second go, be it enemy compositions, stat increases, items in chests, whatever. it's not a stretch to suggest that if you were inclined to min max (couldn't be me) you could find reason and method to shape nearly every situation you find yourself in toward your desired outcome

and really, some of the time you won't be given much of a choice. I don't care who you are, unless you're pulling metagame multiclass shenanigans and stacking hide/criticals you're probably not fighting four full stacks of nightgaunts — you're either reloading the second you see that unholy sight or wishing you did. after hours where six trillion mosquitos and goblins going bananas were the best case scenario I feel like I've seen the most callous design games have to offer. go easy on me fellas, I'm a dumb guy. you see my faerie samurai? the mark of a man with no clue what he's doing. he can't even wear his own gear! his little head is too tiny for kabuto!!!

of all wizary vi's changes and additions to the formula, dw bradley's writing is probably the most significant direct improvement... for the most part (foreshadowing). the game has like one unique tile that's used on every single wall of the castle, caves, river, forest, etc , but by the time I was done exploring each area and reading the sparse flavour text I felt like I had been there myself. quietly spooling just enough information for your imagination to paint it all together over time. you don't even realize how effective it is until it's wormed its way into having you imagine mundane stuff like furniture of your own volition; just sitting imagining the woodwork on some chair. the belfry in particular takes very simple, clean mapping and uses it to perfect effect by coupling it with a touch of descriptive text, onomatopoeia, environmental interaction, and handplaced encounters — all in the span of a couple minutes. it's fabulous, honestly, and while you may not like it, this is peak ambience

but then there's the amazulu. when they were introduced as "very strange looking black women" carrying spears and crossing ravines with vines I had a good idea of where this was going, but then I saw their sprite and then I heard the yipping sounds they make in combat. the internet tells me they're not racist but I am gonna say... seems pretty racist to me!

even if we're being extremely charitable here and attribute some of the more suspect aspects of their portrayal to general fantasy schlock, deriving the name of your stereotypical "tribal" caricatures after a real ethnic group they have nothing in common with is real bad, and having them only exist to be monsters you do a wall-to-wall murder on so you can pillage and plunder their dungeon isn't helping things either

I'm here to delve into a spooky ooky cenotaph, give a lich the stone cold stunner, steal his favourite shirt, and smash two beers together like WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? and this is decidedly not that

eventually you move past that and return to the stuff you're here for: the crypts and temples, opaque npcs, incoherent quest item sequences, and tooth shattering random encounters. the last third really benefits from being leaner and more propulsive, and it helps that you finally get some idea of what the game's even about (a special pen, maybe incest) and what your goal is (kill dracula) and if you're a little smarter than I am your party's probably turned into a wrecking ball by then

alas, about three tiles away from the final dungeon I was struck by divine inspiration and sabotaged my samurai by changing his class to ninja without the gear required to make it worthwhile — and then to a monk to try to salvage the smoldering mess. naturally, this occurred after I was past the point of no return, after I relinquished all my gold, and after I lost access to all the equipment shops. not my best work, to be sure; I was so driven to capture EXO's missing potential that I lost sight of who he really was, and perhaps who I really was too

it's not about having 100 NINJUTSU and KIRIJUTSU on every character. it's not even about having a samurai that can wear armour. it's about exploring some of the greatest dungeon designs of all time, enjoying the robust character system, using your imagination, and the appreciating the friends who stand by your side while you do it

I can't shake the feeling that while wizardy vi wouldn't top my list of games in the series, nor games inspired by it, it's something I'll inevitably return to. perhaps the gorgeous SNES version, perhaps another go of the DOS version. who knows. there's a magnetism here that already has me wanting to try other party compositions, or to subject myself to Expert mode and finally break my spirit for good. maybe scam the multiclass system until the game absolutely crumples beneath it

hell of an adventure — sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. the binding thread between classic wizardry and the far more expansive, ambitious follow ups; a singular entry in both the series and genre that showcases dw bradley's immense talent as programmer, designer, and writer, and the transformative nature of his larger than life influence. might be a while til I get around to vii again, but I'm very much looking forward to whenever that may be :)

no way I'm bringing these clowns with me when I do tho

my inclination when faced with writing about this thing is to shovel hyperlinks of images, gifs, and cutscenes into a giant mound and call it a day. I can't think of a more brevitous or appropriate solution to the impossible problem of translating its astonishing presentation into words, and if that doesn't convince folks nothing will. they are men and women of unflinching granite; golems or homunculi or some unfeeling other. it is not my problem if they remain unphased by true beauty, they can blame themselves or god

in a medium where Best Looking discussions often come down to how many pores you can see on a gruff white dude's nose or how many subdermal triangles he has beneath it, this shit is transcendent; one of those reminders like okami or killer7 that going for SSS style ranks is what it's all about. I don't care about horse testicles shrinking in cold weather, I don't care about HairWorks, I don't care about RTX bullshit — I want this

I want goofy minigames, I want somber paintings, I want cute chibi spritework, and seedy VHS filters. this thing looks amazing, and not a single menu, loading screen, animation, or scene transition shows its face without some unique detail or stylistic divergence. there are AMV interludes, buddy — everyone else needs to pack it up and hit the showers, it's OVER

rarely are visuals this striking leveraged with this much grace and consideration; rarely do aesthetics slither and shapeshift so confidently in aid of such varied goals and tones. that it looks incredible is one thing, but that it's elevated so substantially by its employment is another thing entirely. it takes great pains to bring a work that's equal parts German Folk Horror, Lesbian Dating Sim, Resource Management Plate Spinner, and RPG Maker Adventure to life, and it does so to fabulous results

a fable of desire and longing fittingly made as sumptuous as possible

creating tension requires uncertainty, whether it's about where to go, what to do, what you might stumble into — whatever. it requires that there's some chance you might not make it through the next encounter, you might not have the resources to get to the next safe area, or that your victories might be pyrrhic. there has to be some reason to believe you have something to fear, and that has to be based on something of consequence

lunacid does a few things right, but it lacks that uncertainty. it's too generous, too tidy, and too easy to ever push you out of your comfort zone. despite ostensibly drawing heavily from king's field and shadow tower it lacks the backbone necessary to make a dungeon crawler work. to do these things right you have to be willing to give and take from the player in equal measure, you can't just coddle them

the design should be holistic: each component working in tandem with one another to accomplish the same goal. wear you out. run you down. disorient. disarm. overwhelm. the bread and butter of all these games, regardless of subgenre. combat, attrition, and navigation being individual threats that ebb and flow at different rates, but always in the same direction

this feels like a game where that wasn't considered at all. or if it was, it wasn't considered particularly thoughtfully. everything's weaker than you, and everything loses to kiting. the math is too player favoured, the environments are never leveraged meaningfully, and enemies can't compete with your movement or options. that you'll defeat your opponent is a foregone conclusion; it's practically deterministic. there's no threat of loss, no threat of failure, and no lingering doubt that you might not be prepared for what comes next

naturally this affects attrition because if there's no pushback there's no worry about dwindling resources. status effects could've helped a bit if they didn't disappear on their own, antidotes weren't 6 coins — three snails worth of cash — and bleed wasn't solved by kiting like everything else, but here we are. enemies won't hit you much anyway, so it doesn't really matter, but it's another bizarre decision in a game loaded with them

barely any traps, ambushes, unavoidable enemies, long uncertain treks, environmental damage, or anything. I walk from one pink crystal to another, I tear ass the entire way. I get to choose what enemies I engage with, I get to choose how I engage with them, and I'm always at an advantage. it's bewildering, and while I don't expect this to be some hard bone crunching experience, I do expect a pulse

the interconnected world is neat, and the levels are alright, but with everything inside them being so compromised it's just not enough to maintain my interest. hope king griffith, patches, siegmeyer, the moonlight greatsword, and the titanite demon do ok against the old one without me

love the soundtrakc tho

daniel mullins' One Weird Trick is a little insufferable, and this felt closer to three undercooked games than anything resembling a coherent three act structure, but in the most grudging ass way I gotta say I sorta admire how hard it goes toward being exactly the thing that it is

mechanically it's a mess: three rulesets, none of them fleshed out or balanced past first glance; all of them crumbling to powder under the slightest scrutiny or (god forbid) munchkinism. each very promising but failing to make good on that promise cos its fascination with cartoon dynamite self sabotage is too heavy

one of those fucked up tonal and pacing exercises that feels like someone starting and stopping a car abruptly over and over for like ten hours. when you finish you unlock "kaycee's mod" — a mode that repurposes its first act as a standalone roguelite — which gives the impression of a white flag or acknowledgement that everything past that point is nowhere near as compelling; some conciliatory gesture that shines a light on the dueling self satisfaction/consciousness that permeates the entire experience

when the smoke and mirrors are set aside it's hard not to be disappointed that its primary feature is an inability to see anything through long enough for it to be meaningfully substantiated. maybe that's the point, but I'm not the kind of poindexter who gets off on that stuff, and aside from a genuine love of card games, ARGs, and fucking with people there doesn't seem to be any meat to latch onto. my good friend Morris always asks me how art makes me feel, and this makes me feel like I'm watching someone prove how clever they are at their work's expense. a series of parlour tricks and sleight of hand routines that amount to very, very little and prompt only the most basic ruminations on Games and Creation — and only as a smokescreen for more bullshit artist wizardry. for my next trick I will saw my own game in half~

but like I said, I do like how strongly it commits to absolute derailure (made this word up, which is my iconic gimmick). takes some sizable measure of guts to unrelentingly make your art worse for the sake of a bit, I just wish that bit was in any way as charming or compelling as it thinks it is

that time kazuma kaneko + shoji meguro summoned a whorling liminal space that tricked jrpg fans into enjoying meat + potatoes (teleporters + pitfalls) dungeon crawling. same shit your grampa plinked away at on his apple II a century ago, same shit your grandkids will plink away at on their apple II a century from now in their neofeudal bunkers

and much like your relatives, I love that shit; I love a big ass maze with a million dead ends, and if it ain't broke don't fix it, lest we end up with whatever the fuck those P3 + P4 dungeons were

at its best and most confident it understands the simple things — things like teleporters originally being designed to thwart manual graphing; that automap needs to be accounted for with appropriately disorienting, discordant layouts and structures; and that imbuing a sense of doomed futility is non-negotiable. there's a desire here to smother, obstruct and impede; a love of mazes that reveals its hand in slow motion, peaking with twinned monstrosities — the labyrinth of amala, and the tower of kagutsuchi — that crank the pressure inch by excruciating inch

complimenting it is the arrival of press turn serving as an antidote to blobber slugfests and the sedentary JRPG-isms that descended from them — the dynamic action economy shifting combat from sludgy attrition to a revolving door of lightning round encounters closer to puzzles than math problems. it's no surprise that many of the bosses took up hallowed positions in the genre pantheon, nor that the sinewy party building was so lauded — few games in the genre that succeeded it would be so mechanically accomplished, to say nothing about those that came prior

all of this is further defined by an aesthetic sensibility befitting a "vortex world"; a collage of textures, words, images, sounds, and ideas — from solipsism to darwinism to occult esoterica — delivered in broad, painterly strokes, flickering past rapidly in service of potency and immediacy above all else

the sensation is one of extraordinary emptiness, intentional and otherwise; nihilism born from its themes as much as the capricious relationship it has with them. a fugue state drive through half-conjured nouns and adjectives that recede at the slightest touch; worlds, people, and ideologies just fuel for ephemeral spectacle

nocturne feels like it's trapped in amber: a static image of a bygone era for megaten, atlus, and the medium as a whole, still shadowed by fables and folklore about its difficulty, opaqueness, and bizarre allure. newcomers still looking over their shoulder for matador and finding themselves lost under waves and waves of dead ends and instant kills, further prolonging its mythic qualities

far from perfect in any sense of the word, it persists nonetheless as an object with no clear analogue. atlus will assuredly try and fail to replicate its appeal until heat death of the universe, but it's telling that even they can't quite pin down what happened here, why, or how — and who could really blame them?

brief thoughts on the remaster:

can't say I'm happy about the JRPG Paypig Tax or the crusty ultra compressed 128kbps OST, but it seems few people are mentioning the one inclusion that makes the remaster worthwhile: the option to play the original pre-maniax version of nocturne — previously unreleased outside of japan

while most won't be interested in seeing the game in what's widely understood to be an unfinished state — no fiends, no labyrinth, no dante raidou, or True Demon Ending — it's exciting to have the option to return to the game at its most rudimentary and see how the differences affect an experience long since overwritten by a slew of rereleases and additional material that recontextualize many of its design decisions

unfortunately, it's only present on the PC version, but credit where credit's due: atlus didn't fuck something up for once, and that's a miracle. I'd still rather eat gravel than pay full price for this thing, but it's a big, quiet win nonetheless from the least likely of places

"worst guy you know" etc.

kirby's been my favourite little nintendo dude since smash bros first let me suck up my opponent and hurl us both to our doom, but I never spent much time with their games. that's gonna change... this could be the year of the kirb

despite the lack of colour, kirby's dream land feels vibrant; bursting with jubilant charm. so well realized thru expressive spritework and sound design that the limitations of the gameboy's colour palette seem to melt away

very short + syrupy sweet, it packs about as many imaginative ideas as possible in the 30~ minutes it takes to finish a standard run. from the distinct air mobility, to the iconic suck, to warping on stars, hollering into microphones, spitting fire, doing synchronized dances, dropping bombs, fighting an STG boss, and being shot into the clouds by a whale — kirby arrives remarkably fully formed, and does so with an abundance of trademark chaotic whimsy

while power thieving would end up being the final piece that brought the character together, it's hard not to think of this as a resounding success — a sugar rush that hits on everything it intends to and then leaves as quick as it arrived. my limited exposure to subsequent games tells me it only gets better from here, but here is a pretty lovely place to be too

bye-bye