Getting into Splatoon 3 about a year after launch, I've heard much about the game's apparent mishandling. Starting the game up, the pure amount of stuff thrown at you from every angle is overwhelming in a way the first two games never were. A dizzyingly big hub, seasons and challenges and the catalogue, so many different little currencies, all the objects to collect and a locker that can clearly be customized to be bigger and colored but who knows how that's done. So much stuff to spend money on with the feeling of knowing how long it would take to even begin catching up... it's so much to take in and feels so tangentially plagued the same way more monetized GaaS games are, it puts me off from wanting to engage with the multiplayer systems entirely.

Luckily for me, I've never really been able to get super invested into Splatoon's multiplayer anyways. The base game campaign of 1 was the highlight of the entire experience, and 2's, while I understand the flack it gets for its general derivativity, was still a really solid time. And of course, Octo Expansion is one of the best single player campaigns Nintendo has ever made. I got 3 almost exclusively to try out the campaign (and have it for when Side Order releases) and--surprise, surprise--its another one of them!

The campaign builds off Octo Expansion akin to 2's campaign built off one, also in a way that feels a tinge derivative. Fortunately for the game though, there's a LOT worse things you could be derivative of than Octo Expansion. The bite sized level system is a joy, offering a ton of variety in its use of all the weapons the game has to offer. It's a refreshing treat to go into a level and the only thing on your squid is a sub weapon or a super, and you get to explore that item in novel ways you never would've been able to in a normal multiplayer battle. One of my favorite levels in the whole game gave you a single Curling Bomb in each section that you had to carefully aim to maneuver through enemy ink. The game never stops offering fun, new ideas to play with, even into the secret level after finishing the game, and I appreciate it a lot.

Keeping secrets out of levels was a boon to the pacing; it never was much fun scrounging every nook and cranny of the levels to find a Sunken Scroll. Scrounging every nook and cranny of the hub however... now that's a lot more enjoyable. Each one is laid out almost like a little puzzle box, slowly chipping away at obstructions by completing stages, finding little items dotted everywhere, trying to find the path to new areas in the hub. It's a fairly simple joy, but it led me to really appreciating the construction of each hub, especially towards the end of cleaning up, once I've cleared enough goop to be able to do the balloon challenge that laps around the area.

Despite all this, the strain of the series' relative inertness is becoming fairly apparent. This is the fourth Splatoon campaign and seeing the same core set of enemies with a new texture on them has gotten incredibly dull and knowing Side Order is going to be utilizing them essentially-unchanged for the fifth time is the only real knock against my anticipation for it. Even going into this game's finale gauntlet, it was just a bit frustrating realizing--oh, this is just a carbon copy of how Octo Expansion handled its finale. The entire game felt a bit of a retread of Octo Expansion, but just a notch lower (probably because the prior one was a dedicated campaign vs one made as more a tutorial for a general audience of the game). Again, Octo Expansion was incredible, so this isn't much of a knock against the game, I just hope Splatoon 4 offers something that feels truly new single-player wise. The series needs it.

I've had my eye on World of Horror for a long time now, patiently waiting for the game to come out of early access. It feels pointless to even discuss what pulled me into the game; it basically sells itself 'cause... just look at it! Look. at. it.

Every single screen of this game drips with one of the most incredible aesthetics I've ever seen in a game. The 2-bit art works so perfectly at making its gruesome imagery and overload of information put upon you at all times so evoking to look at. Even opening an item's submenu and seeing 20 different icons I can't click on and don't know what they do is interesting here. Combined with a really well-done soundtrack, it's hard not to be completely enraptured by what's in front of me at all times playing the game. I can imagine how the simple art allowed for the solo developer (who apparently made the game part time while being a dentist?!) to flesh out a lot of unique scenarios, which is of course vital for a rougelike.

Indeed, the game has an immense amount of things going on throughout the five different mysteries you tackle each run. So many different encounters with a breadth of different, often very precarious effects, a stupidly high number of unique enemies, and different permutations of survivors, old gods, and backstories to shape the entire way you have to play, there's a lot unique going on. I've beaten 3 runs of the game so far, with 2 more I fucked myself out of victory in the very final stretch out of greed and bad memory (and very precisely those two things!). Even as I slowly work through the game's systems, it's kept up the feeling of being arcane and dangerous.

Indeed, the world never lets you breathe for too long, constantly having to keep up the spinning plates of your two different health meters, injuries you can sustain, and an almost ever-increasing DOOM meter that does exactly what you'd expect it to if it ever reaches 100%. (Spoilers: You're doomed!) This is where most of the game's horror comes in, constantly under stress of being just a couple of bad decisions away from all of reality crumbling away. The game definitely has a couple of scares and plenty of unsettling things as you'd expect—a few of the DOOM-based game over texts have been lingering in my mind since I've first read them—but it's all very manageable and interspersed with a solid layer of shlockiness.

At first, I was really unsure about the game's structure, as the genre's fatal question lightly flickered in the back of my mind: "would I have liked this more if it wasn't a roguelike?". The way each case you take lays out is admittedly strange. Each case's story advances when you explore a certain area, but the encounter you get while exploring is not one tied to the case and you can go explore other areas at your... something vaguely approximating leisure. The case stories are fun little experiences, but of course with the roguelike nature, you'll be seeing these cases several times over (more often than the individual events for certain), so what's left?? Then I realized, even as the exact case events fade into the background on successive runs, so pops out the natural stories of a playthrough.

Getting a particularly bad skill check roll and catching the attention of a being known simply as [SOMETHING TRULY EVIL], a constant presence just out of sight throughout the run, slowly getting closer... When I tried to save and quit out of the game, all I was told is [YOU CANNOT RUN FROM SOMETHING TRULY EVIL]. When I tried to rest at my very own home, I was threatened with [SOMETHING TRULY EVIL KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE]. When the mysterious figure finally lurched upon me, the screen glitching nonstop, all I could do was [CRY FOR IT], [BLEED FOR IT], and finally [DIE FOR IT], and in my struggle against these options, I was forced upon the third one. I later found out that this series of events ruining my entire run were something I could have survived through, but it still left it an incredibly visceral, awesome experience.

Contrast that, on one of my last runs, I came out of a boss literally as close to death as possible, getting rid of all my items and spells in a play that I'm still surprised got me out of the fight alive. I spent the rest of the game getting by on the skin of my teeth and then, by the highest grace of god, that ended up a run I won. All of the stress and fear of what could destroy me around the corner in the face of glorious victory. It's the best rougelike feeling you could ask for.

So, the game works really well as a roguelike, one that keeps pulling me back in the more I think about it, like it's an elder god of its own. Sure, there's a couple of small issues I have with the game that I could elaborate more upon, namely the limited feeling combat system with defensive options that feel like they cost too much to be worth using. I'm sure as I play a bit more the repetition of the 24 cases will start to grate on me and I will start to really see the seams of repetition and eventually I will get bored of continuing it, just as I do with every game. However, even if I stopped right now, the time I put into the experience would be more than satisfying. It's all not a very big deal though in the face of everything else feeling viscerally unique and interesting. Definitely one of the best games released so far this year.

Playing Clock Tower really cast modern technological freedom in a harsh light for me. It’s so interesting that a game so limited by the technology of its day tried so hard and managed so well to capture the aesthetic and stylistic overtones and moods and vibes of giallo cinema and very specifically of a couple of famous Dario Argento movies, but because of the SNES tech they were working with it was impossible to fully rip that filmmaker off in a 1 to 1 way, and they created something that has a clear and obvious influence but still a distinct and powerful identity of its own. Today it’s so much easier to just, mimic the thing you want to mimic, and it’s easier to get away with that without a clear understanding of what makes the thing worth mimicking. A lot of AAA games or big studio games are these empty facsimiles of other popular media and it’s hard not to yearn for a day where this was impossible to accomplish but trying led to interesting things instead of boring, repetitive hash.

Clock Tower isn’t a perfect game, and indeed the more time you spend with it (and its structure does encourage multiple replays) the more the sheen comes off the apple, but it synthesizes a lot of standard gaming stuff with its filmic inspirations in ways that are very cool and even occasionally novel in 2022. A point n click adventure game that is also a lurid slasher film, it incorporates action and stealth sequences that are a combination of proto-quick time event, stamina meter, timed stealth section, and trial and error puzzle solving that feels tense and enigmatic initially. Of course, once you realize the points where attacks are scripted and where you can hide and how to solve the environmental puzzles ahead of time, the game’s charm naturally expires as you check the boxes of various easter eggs and alternate endings, but that first time is always electric, and the tension of discovery on a second or third remained enchanting for me.

The thing I found most exciting about the game is the modular way the events of the story play out. It’s this cool schrödinger’s cat universe where events only happen if you see them happen? Like one of the first things that will happen is you’ll go into a bathroom and see one of your friends get murdered, which is the first time the famous Scissorman will appear. But if you don’t go in there she won’t die that way, or maybe not even at all! She might be thrown from a window (which won’t happen if you don’t look out the window when you hear a scream when you walk by it), and Scissorman might instead make his entrance crashing with another corpse through a stained glass window in the main foyer. If you know what you’re doing and you play it smart, you only HAVE to see that guy twice in the entire game, and only one of the many teenaged girls visiting this spooky boarding house will die. This is an interactive horror movie where how closely it resembles its gialli inspirations depends entirely on how much you the player opts into acting like a Horror Movie Sucker, and that’s a really cool approach that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen done elsewhere.

Of course the events that are here are an almost textbook Mid 20th Century Italian Horror Checklist, with the gaggle of beautiful women being stalked and murdered in gruesome and violent ways by a sicko dude, a subversion of the good will and power of authority figures in the lives of young women, intense and striking color pallet affectations in key scenes, last minute overarching supernatural implications, a deeply rooted investigative nature to the story, the emphasis on the unstable mental health of the protagonist and her parallels with the villain in this regard, delusions and hallucination, etc etc. These things don’t sound specific to any particular strain of horror on paper but Clock Tower is deploying them in a very identifiable way and it’s clear there’s a lot of intent behind the aesthetic choices the game is making.

Clock Tower was utterly surprising to me, even as a game that stuck hard in my vague childhood memories of being really really scared of the Scissorman lol, who is in fact quite scary, at least as scary as he is ridiculous. This is a premium example of a game that will not have “aged well” and while I think that on closer and more earnest examination it does have a lot of seams and rough edges, it’s also an obviously passionate and successful piece of horror media and a rewarding and ambitious experiment in the adventure game genre. Would that more games had aged as poorly as Clock Tower.

In my infinite wisdom I decided to marathon this game in one sitting needless to say that was a giant fucking mistake 8 hours of concentrated trash is too much to bare in one sitting.

The only reason this game even has one star is that it has some extremely hilarious moments with it's incredibly shitty enemies not a single enemy design stands out they all look incredibly generic and have the AI of a retarded lobotomized monkey on acid.

the first enemy you encounter is a shitty monster lady with small claws now why would that be funny it sounds boring right? I would say yes if the game developer didn't have a bunch of these ladies in a damn cop car patrolling the streets and coming out of the car to beat the shit out of you in the middle of the street and that's just one example of the stupid ass shit this game pulls.
Boss fights also don't exist besides the one at the end where you pull some tubes out and you win.

what about the story? Silent Hill is all about the psychological state of it's protagonists minds so that should lead to some good story telling right? NO nothing makes sense and no one gives a shit about anything. They give you some choices that alter the ending but they they always play out the same way making them virtually meaningless.

Music which is usually one of the highlight for a Silent hill game barely exists in this damn mess of a game so there goes that avenue.

What about puzzles? Yeah those exist and they range from stupid easy to "guess what I'm thinking" which is a shitty way to make any puzzle feel difficult.

This game was just miserable from start to finish save from just a few funny bits with the enemies and how they work.