diaugupul
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This review contains spoilers
"And that is the tale of how the time of the Shapers came to an end and of how the people of Terrestia began to look for new ways to learn and advance. A journey from a small forgotten island to the farthest extent of the known lands."
When I played Geneforge 5, the final game in the series, the same question kept occuring to me over my 60 hour playtime. How do you end an rpg series like Geneforge? Each Geneforge game exists both as an narrative elaboration and enrichening of the universe long term players have invested in and as an entry point for new players. With Geneforge 5 this balance is made all the more precarious because of its finality. How do you provide a satisfying goodbye for a universe that by design encourages players to make their own diverging interpretations of it? There is no carried over save between Geneforge games and each entry has its own distinct factions, ideological conflict and endings so that by the time of 5, there are many different types of players who have created their own distinct expectations for 5, a game that somehow has to account for these without any crutches in the form of save transfers or increases in length or scope (it was made in the same amount of time as its predecessors and has roughly the same scope too).
Of course this same question is applicable towards a lot of other RPG series'. But I really only started thinking about it with Geneforge is because I have yet to play an rpg series with the same degree of thematic and mechanical consistency. It's serialization arguably has more in common with novels than video games. More times often than not I find video games to be ill suited as a medium for consistent and coherent long form storytelling. The nature of AAA software production in conjunction with the influence of capital, both of which reduce the craftperson's creative autonomy, can make game development a poor environment for the survival of multi-game stories. Most series' I have played tend to settle on a looser, standalone and overall safer approach to multi-game storytelling and in many cases their thematic potential is disrupted by material realities. To move away from the faux theorizing and speak more bluntly, this greatly hinders the capacity of most video game series' to reap the benefits of long form storytelling. I love fantasy as a genre and especially so in the form of big stupid epic fantasy series like say Malazan. Yeah, Malazan is sometimes sanctimonious, preachy and distasteful in certain scenes but as a complete and densely interconnected work, a passionate and sincere expression of someone who genuinely it would be his last chance to truly make something meaningful. I adore it. I could never see something like Malazan surviving a typical gaming publisher.
Naturally there is a big asterix to my above spiel in the form of Indies. Indie devs do not necessarily have to worry about publisher interference and consequently enjoy much more freedom in creating what they want to create. Vogel in particular had already been prolific in the shareware scene for a half a decade when the first Geneforge was released. He already released the Exile trilogy which over the course of three games portrayed a broad narrative of imprisonment and revolt. And though he never initially intended for Geneforge to be a series and each game is intended to be friendly to newcomers, there's a quiet yet thorough commitment to serialized world building. From 2 onwards each entry both deepens the setting while also wrinkling it so to question and complicate assumptions. People, groups and places naturally change and adapt both before and during a long and devastating war. So much time passes between 1 and 5 that people view the poorly documented events surrounding Sucia Island through a legendary lens that has contributed to the construction of new group identities. Indeed, one of the most revolutionary ideologies introduced in Geneforge 4 and iterated in Geneforge 5 has its real origins all the way back in the original game. In this regard, it achieves a real impression of depth as even the most novel movements and ideas have some textual origin. It's the sort of confident and thorough iteration that one would expect from someone who was able to work uninterrupted on a universe that was in all ways his own.
Geneforge 5 then is able to reap the benefits of such a rich and thoroughly developed setting. In that regard it is most rewarding for series veterans who can appreciate the final evolution of ideas played around with in earlier entries. Yet Vogel still threw new players a bone by framing the protagonist as an amnesiac. Such an archetype is deeply formulaic yet its usage in 5 serves to reinforce core themes of the setting while also providing a beginners insight into the complexities of the world. 5 smartly never makes the mystery of the protagonist's identity become central to the plot at risk of overshadowing the setting. Rather it serves as a natural guide towards the various factions making up the world so that the player's natural curiosity of their origins is gradually molded towards a more ideological interest in the various groups vying for hegemony. It ties in nicely with the conceit that the Player's amnesia is the result of extreme shaping. In the end whoever the protagonist was is overshadowed by the protagonist to be, the one whose actions will help decide the future of Terrestria.
Indeed, more than any prior entry since 1 at least 5 makes the setting in all its accumulated facets the center of the experience. It does so by synthesizing the sandbox structure and factional interplay of Geneforge 1 and 2 with Geneforge 3 and 4's emphasis on a more guided and slightly abstracted continental scope. To elaborate on that, each Geneforge gradually moves closer and closer to the Shaper heartlands and 5 brings this process to its conclusion being set in Western Terrestia where the ruling Shaper Council is located. Rather than heavily guide the player's journey as was done in 3 and 4, after leaving the White Spire Mountains, the player is free to engage with the various factions of Terrestia not withstanding some soft barriers. By this point in the series, the war has reached a point of near stalemate as both the Shapers and Rebels lack any decisive edge over the other. Consequently the failure of conventional warfare and tactics to resolve the conflict in addition to the radical dislocation and devastation of the war has shattered the political consensus and prompted Shaper and non-Shaper elites to seek alternate paths to peace. It's a rich, multifaceted setting that's only rivaled by Geneforge 1's Sucia Island. Like that game, 5 deeply humanizes all of Western Terrestia's inhabitants and parallels their experience with their historical forebearers. Before the arrival of the Shapers, the peoples of Western Terrestia made up many independent groups. The Shaper empire was built upon their conquest and assimilation into the Imperial project and popular memory of the pre-Shaper past interwine with the devastation of the Shaper War. In truth, this aspect of 5 could have been fleshed out as the agency of the region's political elites are favored over the fate of its ordinary inhabitants.
This focus on domestic politics interweaves seamlessly with the greater emphasis on factional conflict as the backbone of the game's structure. It navigates a fine line between giving the protagonist some agency in who they decide to align with while also preventing them from quickly rising through the ranks to become leader. Ultimately, Geneforge 5 makes the protagonist work for factions instead of them working for the protagonist and it is all the better for it. The various people you meet hold deeply rooted beliefs informed by their life experiences that are not uprooted just because of the Protagonist's charisma and likewise each faction and their collective tenets are never compromised in the face of the player. Geneforge 5 lets you be an agent and engage in genuinely interesting espionage and diplomacy but it sets a limit to how much the player alone can actually do. Its telling that the only way to get an unequivocally 'bad' ending is to lock yourself off of every factional storyline so that the one thing everyone agrees upon is that you are better off alive than dead. But that's fine because I love being an agent. The range of factions you can join widens in tandem with the range of locations you can access. First you're limited to being the lackey of Shaper Rawal in the Whitespires and then Agent Astoria of the Mera Tev and many more beyond that. You quickly find yourself caught between several factions at a time. Furthermore, several quests revolve around an item sought out by multiple interested parties and a definitive choice has to be made that impacts factional reputation. Even beyond those quests, nearly every opinion you express and quest you do gradually increases hidden formulas and moulds how other factions see you. That sounds rather banal given how common 'reputation' is in sandbox rpgs but there's a refreshing minimalism to it in 5. It's a more organic approach to choice and consequence that eschews arbitrarily filling up a meter and instead a more gradual and uneven self-fashioning that naturally opens up some doors whilst closing others.
The factional conflict comes into full bloom in the second half of 5 when you gain access to Southern Terrestia and thus all five factions. Unfortunately there is a slight lessening of quality after the halfway point that was not present in Geneforge 4. The first half of 5 is densely built and interconnected, the Whitespires, the Mera Tev and Okaveno Fens is densely interconnected in both geography and questlines so that you are always doing something meaningful that affects something else. There is still some of this in the Storm Plains and Dera Reaches but these regions are overall sparser and lacking in the careful attention to detail demonstrated earlier. At least the factions are as interesting here as in the Northern Terrestia. Whereas the somewhat more sheltered Mera Tev has allowed Astoria to parlay with the Rebels, the Storm Plains are the frontline of the Rebellion and its defender Alwan, returning from 3 and 4, has become more idea than person in his uncompromising and fanatical defence of traditional Shaper ideals while his colleague further south experiments with a plan that reveals Shaper politics at their most nakedly fascistic and genocidal. Though I wish there was just a bit more here in terms of density the second half of 5 shows how rich and multifaceted this fictional universe has become and the ease in which it facilitates the playstyles and ideological leanings of the many types of players this series has accumulated.
I was somewhat disheartened playing through 5 knowing that there would be no more Geneforge after it. Yet when I reached the credits I felt the same sort of satisfaction that I associate with a good series of books that comes naturally to a fitting conclusion. There could have been a Geneforge 6 but what purpose would it really serve? This series reinvigorated my love of rpgs after a long period of time where I thought I had outgrown them. There were ups and downs but across my hundreds of hours playing this series I never grew exhausted with it the same way I grew exhausted after only 30 hours of Starfield. Even though there will never be a new Geneforge there will be remakes and more significantly replays where I can enjoy these games in whole new lenses. And even then I'll be able to cherish the many wonderful memories I have made with this series. There's so much more I could talk about like all the effort that was put into playing as a Servile or the other stupid stuff I talked about in my logs. I barely even mentioned the gameplay (its quite unbalanced)! I guess I'll conclude this overstuff review with something sincere.
Thank you Jeff Vogel.
"The characters in this history are all gone now. But the results of their struggles, of the risks they took, the fears they overcame, and the decisions they tried to make wisely. the product of their labors continues to this day.
For us to understand, to endure, and, if needed, to change."
When I played Geneforge 5, the final game in the series, the same question kept occuring to me over my 60 hour playtime. How do you end an rpg series like Geneforge? Each Geneforge game exists both as an narrative elaboration and enrichening of the universe long term players have invested in and as an entry point for new players. With Geneforge 5 this balance is made all the more precarious because of its finality. How do you provide a satisfying goodbye for a universe that by design encourages players to make their own diverging interpretations of it? There is no carried over save between Geneforge games and each entry has its own distinct factions, ideological conflict and endings so that by the time of 5, there are many different types of players who have created their own distinct expectations for 5, a game that somehow has to account for these without any crutches in the form of save transfers or increases in length or scope (it was made in the same amount of time as its predecessors and has roughly the same scope too).
Of course this same question is applicable towards a lot of other RPG series'. But I really only started thinking about it with Geneforge is because I have yet to play an rpg series with the same degree of thematic and mechanical consistency. It's serialization arguably has more in common with novels than video games. More times often than not I find video games to be ill suited as a medium for consistent and coherent long form storytelling. The nature of AAA software production in conjunction with the influence of capital, both of which reduce the craftperson's creative autonomy, can make game development a poor environment for the survival of multi-game stories. Most series' I have played tend to settle on a looser, standalone and overall safer approach to multi-game storytelling and in many cases their thematic potential is disrupted by material realities. To move away from the faux theorizing and speak more bluntly, this greatly hinders the capacity of most video game series' to reap the benefits of long form storytelling. I love fantasy as a genre and especially so in the form of big stupid epic fantasy series like say Malazan. Yeah, Malazan is sometimes sanctimonious, preachy and distasteful in certain scenes but as a complete and densely interconnected work, a passionate and sincere expression of someone who genuinely it would be his last chance to truly make something meaningful. I adore it. I could never see something like Malazan surviving a typical gaming publisher.
Naturally there is a big asterix to my above spiel in the form of Indies. Indie devs do not necessarily have to worry about publisher interference and consequently enjoy much more freedom in creating what they want to create. Vogel in particular had already been prolific in the shareware scene for a half a decade when the first Geneforge was released. He already released the Exile trilogy which over the course of three games portrayed a broad narrative of imprisonment and revolt. And though he never initially intended for Geneforge to be a series and each game is intended to be friendly to newcomers, there's a quiet yet thorough commitment to serialized world building. From 2 onwards each entry both deepens the setting while also wrinkling it so to question and complicate assumptions. People, groups and places naturally change and adapt both before and during a long and devastating war. So much time passes between 1 and 5 that people view the poorly documented events surrounding Sucia Island through a legendary lens that has contributed to the construction of new group identities. Indeed, one of the most revolutionary ideologies introduced in Geneforge 4 and iterated in Geneforge 5 has its real origins all the way back in the original game. In this regard, it achieves a real impression of depth as even the most novel movements and ideas have some textual origin. It's the sort of confident and thorough iteration that one would expect from someone who was able to work uninterrupted on a universe that was in all ways his own.
Geneforge 5 then is able to reap the benefits of such a rich and thoroughly developed setting. In that regard it is most rewarding for series veterans who can appreciate the final evolution of ideas played around with in earlier entries. Yet Vogel still threw new players a bone by framing the protagonist as an amnesiac. Such an archetype is deeply formulaic yet its usage in 5 serves to reinforce core themes of the setting while also providing a beginners insight into the complexities of the world. 5 smartly never makes the mystery of the protagonist's identity become central to the plot at risk of overshadowing the setting. Rather it serves as a natural guide towards the various factions making up the world so that the player's natural curiosity of their origins is gradually molded towards a more ideological interest in the various groups vying for hegemony. It ties in nicely with the conceit that the Player's amnesia is the result of extreme shaping. In the end whoever the protagonist was is overshadowed by the protagonist to be, the one whose actions will help decide the future of Terrestria.
Indeed, more than any prior entry since 1 at least 5 makes the setting in all its accumulated facets the center of the experience. It does so by synthesizing the sandbox structure and factional interplay of Geneforge 1 and 2 with Geneforge 3 and 4's emphasis on a more guided and slightly abstracted continental scope. To elaborate on that, each Geneforge gradually moves closer and closer to the Shaper heartlands and 5 brings this process to its conclusion being set in Western Terrestia where the ruling Shaper Council is located. Rather than heavily guide the player's journey as was done in 3 and 4, after leaving the White Spire Mountains, the player is free to engage with the various factions of Terrestia not withstanding some soft barriers. By this point in the series, the war has reached a point of near stalemate as both the Shapers and Rebels lack any decisive edge over the other. Consequently the failure of conventional warfare and tactics to resolve the conflict in addition to the radical dislocation and devastation of the war has shattered the political consensus and prompted Shaper and non-Shaper elites to seek alternate paths to peace. It's a rich, multifaceted setting that's only rivaled by Geneforge 1's Sucia Island. Like that game, 5 deeply humanizes all of Western Terrestia's inhabitants and parallels their experience with their historical forebearers. Before the arrival of the Shapers, the peoples of Western Terrestia made up many independent groups. The Shaper empire was built upon their conquest and assimilation into the Imperial project and popular memory of the pre-Shaper past interwine with the devastation of the Shaper War. In truth, this aspect of 5 could have been fleshed out as the agency of the region's political elites are favored over the fate of its ordinary inhabitants.
This focus on domestic politics interweaves seamlessly with the greater emphasis on factional conflict as the backbone of the game's structure. It navigates a fine line between giving the protagonist some agency in who they decide to align with while also preventing them from quickly rising through the ranks to become leader. Ultimately, Geneforge 5 makes the protagonist work for factions instead of them working for the protagonist and it is all the better for it. The various people you meet hold deeply rooted beliefs informed by their life experiences that are not uprooted just because of the Protagonist's charisma and likewise each faction and their collective tenets are never compromised in the face of the player. Geneforge 5 lets you be an agent and engage in genuinely interesting espionage and diplomacy but it sets a limit to how much the player alone can actually do. Its telling that the only way to get an unequivocally 'bad' ending is to lock yourself off of every factional storyline so that the one thing everyone agrees upon is that you are better off alive than dead. But that's fine because I love being an agent. The range of factions you can join widens in tandem with the range of locations you can access. First you're limited to being the lackey of Shaper Rawal in the Whitespires and then Agent Astoria of the Mera Tev and many more beyond that. You quickly find yourself caught between several factions at a time. Furthermore, several quests revolve around an item sought out by multiple interested parties and a definitive choice has to be made that impacts factional reputation. Even beyond those quests, nearly every opinion you express and quest you do gradually increases hidden formulas and moulds how other factions see you. That sounds rather banal given how common 'reputation' is in sandbox rpgs but there's a refreshing minimalism to it in 5. It's a more organic approach to choice and consequence that eschews arbitrarily filling up a meter and instead a more gradual and uneven self-fashioning that naturally opens up some doors whilst closing others.
The factional conflict comes into full bloom in the second half of 5 when you gain access to Southern Terrestia and thus all five factions. Unfortunately there is a slight lessening of quality after the halfway point that was not present in Geneforge 4. The first half of 5 is densely built and interconnected, the Whitespires, the Mera Tev and Okaveno Fens is densely interconnected in both geography and questlines so that you are always doing something meaningful that affects something else. There is still some of this in the Storm Plains and Dera Reaches but these regions are overall sparser and lacking in the careful attention to detail demonstrated earlier. At least the factions are as interesting here as in the Northern Terrestia. Whereas the somewhat more sheltered Mera Tev has allowed Astoria to parlay with the Rebels, the Storm Plains are the frontline of the Rebellion and its defender Alwan, returning from 3 and 4, has become more idea than person in his uncompromising and fanatical defence of traditional Shaper ideals while his colleague further south experiments with a plan that reveals Shaper politics at their most nakedly fascistic and genocidal. Though I wish there was just a bit more here in terms of density the second half of 5 shows how rich and multifaceted this fictional universe has become and the ease in which it facilitates the playstyles and ideological leanings of the many types of players this series has accumulated.
I was somewhat disheartened playing through 5 knowing that there would be no more Geneforge after it. Yet when I reached the credits I felt the same sort of satisfaction that I associate with a good series of books that comes naturally to a fitting conclusion. There could have been a Geneforge 6 but what purpose would it really serve? This series reinvigorated my love of rpgs after a long period of time where I thought I had outgrown them. There were ups and downs but across my hundreds of hours playing this series I never grew exhausted with it the same way I grew exhausted after only 30 hours of Starfield. Even though there will never be a new Geneforge there will be remakes and more significantly replays where I can enjoy these games in whole new lenses. And even then I'll be able to cherish the many wonderful memories I have made with this series. There's so much more I could talk about like all the effort that was put into playing as a Servile or the other stupid stuff I talked about in my logs. I barely even mentioned the gameplay (its quite unbalanced)! I guess I'll conclude this overstuff review with something sincere.
Thank you Jeff Vogel.
"The characters in this history are all gone now. But the results of their struggles, of the risks they took, the fears they overcame, and the decisions they tried to make wisely. the product of their labors continues to this day.
For us to understand, to endure, and, if needed, to change."
Kingdom Hearts
2002
Huh?
Way back when I was still in the target audience for Kingdom Hearts, I thought Kingdom Hearts was the stupidest thing I had ever seen. This wasn't because I was some supreme arbiter of taste at the age of eight — my favorite game at the time was Shadow the Hedgehog, if you need further clarification — but it was an initial conception that never really left me. While a lot of the media that I had dismissed as a child tended to seem a lot more favorable once I grew up and started developing a taste of my own, I've always thought of Kingdom Hearts as being this woefully lame and eternally bad series that was beloved only by children and Disney adults who had played it as children. Grown adults who liked it only did so because they'd never reached an understanding of the idea that something you liked as a kid doesn't need to be something you still like as an adult. But that's an unfair assumption. After all, there are a lot of people I respect who have said that there's something about this game that got to them. Elements that they loved, gameplay they adored, story beats that brought them to tears. There's something about Kingdom Hearts that has managed to hook people, and, as I said in my 2023 year-end list, we owe it to ourselves to get out of our comfort zones and play things we'd never otherwise think to play if we ever want to take ourselves seriously. If I continued to dismiss Kingdom Hearts out of hand because I decided that it looked stupid twenty years ago, then I'm no better now than I was when I was in the third grade. It's only fair — only right — that I investigate it for myself.
I hate Kingdom Hearts.
Either I'm just unable to see the mastery hidden behind Kingdom Hearts that everyone else is, or I'm the only sane man in the madhouse. It hardly matters which one is the actual truth, because the outcome is the same: a lot of people like Kingdom Hearts, the ones that don't like it don't seem to despise it, and I can't fucking stand it. I'm the odd man out.
This camera is atrocious. Controlling it with the L2 and R2 buttons is bad enough when we live in a world where the right stick is purely just a second D-pad, but the lock-on acts as more of a gentle suggestion. It simultaneously has very little interest in actually tracking enemies that move off-screen while also swinging around so violently that it's difficult to keep track of where anything is. Enemies seem to wait until they're off-screen to attack, which certainly makes sense for them, but is incredibly frustrating when you eat a fireball to the back of the head that you literally could not see coming nor tech even if you did. The camera is also a physical object that can't pass through terrain, which means that it's constantly smashing against walls and giving you completely worthless angles the second you enter a hallway that's just a bit too tight. It does everything wrong.
I also found the combat to be a complete mash-fest, largely just focused on getting directly in front of an enemy's face and spamming the attack button as fast as I humanly could. Hopping into the air for a moment before spamming the attack button seemed to make Sora hit things faster, so that wound up becoming a core part of the rotation. Not helping matters is how obscenely delayed most of Sora's kit actually is, with a dishonorable mention going specifically to his jump; there's what feels like a half-second of delay before he actually becomes airborne after you hit the button, which is bad in combat sections and unforgivable in the parts where you need to platform. There's a jump over a couple of mushrooms in the Alice in Wonderland world long before you get the high jump or the glide, and combined with the terrible camera was probably the single most difficult challenge in the entire game. I nearly burst a blood vessel when I found out that your partners have collision and can push you off of edges if you aren't careful. In some areas, this only means needing to hop back up to where you just were. In others, it means needing to transition through several different loading zones as you slowly climb your way back up.
It is a very pretty game, though, both graphically and sonically. Certainly moreso the former than the latter; this might have the single worst rendition of Night on Bald Mountain I will ever hear in my life. It's not hard to look at this and be impressed, especially in the original areas; the final set piece is an absolute treat, with you fighting waves of Heartless in a pitch-black room and only being able to tell where they are by the glow of their eyes. There are a lot of visual elements here that I know get expanded upon in Kingdom Hearts 2, and I think it was pretty smart of the team to keep going further down that path.
For as much shit as people talk about the narrative, I thought it was far and away the strongest thing Kingdom Hearts had going for it. Not the bulk of it, though; the overwhelming majority of the game is spent traipsing through abridged recaps of Disney movies, primarily the more middling ones that the Walt Disney Company presumably weren't all that protective of. Like, Hercules isn't a good film just because you and I and everyone else want Meg to look at us like we're living pieces of trash. Even still, Kingdom Hearts breezes right through a significant amount of plot beats, largely resulting in more of a Disney-World-tour sensation rather than one of occupying an actual world. You're going through the theme park version of these different films and getting the Cliff's Notes of just enough plot to give you an idea of what you're meant to be doing. Characters in the Disney worlds act less like characters and more as mascots. They're wildly flat and underdeveloped caricatures. No, the interesting parts of the Kingdom Hearts narrative are the parts that are wholly original to it.
I actually really like the story that Riku and Sora have got going on here, with Kairi mostly taking a backseat until the final couple hours of the game. People have spoken a lot about some of the gay subtext, and I think it's largely difficult to miss — Riku offering a fruit to Sora with the prompt that sharing it will bind their two souls together for eternity may as well have been delivered while he was on one knee — while still being pretty interesting. Sora is probably the worst fucking friend ever. I get that he thinks of Riku as more of a rival than a buddy, but he only responds to Riku openly lamenting how inadequate and lonely he feels with either literal silence or general disinterest. It's hardly a surprise that he ends up falling to the darkness when he's gotten rebuked at literally every single turn, all the while being manipulated further into thinking he has no other choice. It's neat, and it comes to a nice close when Riku manages to break free of Ansem's control and his own insecurities to help Sora close the door to Kingdom Hearts. Regrettably, he is also forced to share the conclusion of his arc with fucking Mickey Mouse.
Kingdom Hearts has an interesting story running through it, but, again, it's constantly being silenced by the game interrupting itself to say "holy shit, you're in Aladdin world". I don't fucking care about Aladdin. I've seen Aladdin. Aladdin is a fine movie that's significantly more interesting and better written as a movie, and not as this shitty pastiche with Dan Castellaneta doing Homer voice while trying to fill Robin Williams's shoes. God, so many of these actors just aren't doing a good job. It's kind of impressive that the child actors fucking crush it, and not even by comparison; Haley Joel Osment just kills it. Billy Zane's Ansem is pretty solid, as is Mandy Moore's Aerith. The rest I'm ambivalent about, or actively hostile towards. Brian Blessed sounds fucking terrible in this.
I did have a moment while I was playing Kingdom Hearts, right near the end when I was climbing back up to the top of Hollow Bastion. I had the realization that my keyblade looked like a flower. I was mostly just equipping whatever had the best stats, and it just happened to be that the Divine Rose gave me exactly what I needed. It very suddenly occurred to me, at that moment, that I never would have been using it if I had played this when I was a kid. Flowers are for girls, after all. Even if it meant equipping a strictly worse weapon that didn't do what I wanted it to do — one that actively harmed my build, even — I wouldn't have equipped the flower keyblade.
I was a bit of a fruity kid growing up. I wanted to wear nail polish, I liked watching a lot of shows for girls, I didn't really feel the revulsion that a lot of other people seemed to feel at doing things that weren't "for" their gender. Of course, it all kind of ended up making sense once I realized I liked dudes, but it was a pretty strange feeling to have while growing up when I wasn't really allowed to correctly guess the reasoning behind it. My dad made every effort to beat all of that out of me. To mold me into a Man. I think I gravitated more to a lot of these hyper-edgy pieces of media like Shadow the Hedgehog and whatever garbage aired on Spike TV in the hopes that it would impress him. Obviously, this was more than a little misguided. He would have been a lot happier had I picked up a football helmet and a drill and a cigar and acted like what people thought men were supposed to be in the 1950s, but I figured it was worth trying. It wasn't. When you're not allowed to be the person you are, you tend to do a pretty bad job of acting like the person you're expected to be. The flower keyblade was for girls, and that meant the flower keyblade was justification to be punished if I used it. Today, I equipped the flower keyblade and used it all the way until the end.
There's a part of me I lost a long time ago that's made it impossible for me to like Kingdom Hearts.
I don't know if it was a childhood whimsy that allowed me to see the good in anything, or if it was a childish naivety that allowed me to see anything as good.
Way back when I was still in the target audience for Kingdom Hearts, I thought Kingdom Hearts was the stupidest thing I had ever seen. This wasn't because I was some supreme arbiter of taste at the age of eight — my favorite game at the time was Shadow the Hedgehog, if you need further clarification — but it was an initial conception that never really left me. While a lot of the media that I had dismissed as a child tended to seem a lot more favorable once I grew up and started developing a taste of my own, I've always thought of Kingdom Hearts as being this woefully lame and eternally bad series that was beloved only by children and Disney adults who had played it as children. Grown adults who liked it only did so because they'd never reached an understanding of the idea that something you liked as a kid doesn't need to be something you still like as an adult. But that's an unfair assumption. After all, there are a lot of people I respect who have said that there's something about this game that got to them. Elements that they loved, gameplay they adored, story beats that brought them to tears. There's something about Kingdom Hearts that has managed to hook people, and, as I said in my 2023 year-end list, we owe it to ourselves to get out of our comfort zones and play things we'd never otherwise think to play if we ever want to take ourselves seriously. If I continued to dismiss Kingdom Hearts out of hand because I decided that it looked stupid twenty years ago, then I'm no better now than I was when I was in the third grade. It's only fair — only right — that I investigate it for myself.
I hate Kingdom Hearts.
Either I'm just unable to see the mastery hidden behind Kingdom Hearts that everyone else is, or I'm the only sane man in the madhouse. It hardly matters which one is the actual truth, because the outcome is the same: a lot of people like Kingdom Hearts, the ones that don't like it don't seem to despise it, and I can't fucking stand it. I'm the odd man out.
This camera is atrocious. Controlling it with the L2 and R2 buttons is bad enough when we live in a world where the right stick is purely just a second D-pad, but the lock-on acts as more of a gentle suggestion. It simultaneously has very little interest in actually tracking enemies that move off-screen while also swinging around so violently that it's difficult to keep track of where anything is. Enemies seem to wait until they're off-screen to attack, which certainly makes sense for them, but is incredibly frustrating when you eat a fireball to the back of the head that you literally could not see coming nor tech even if you did. The camera is also a physical object that can't pass through terrain, which means that it's constantly smashing against walls and giving you completely worthless angles the second you enter a hallway that's just a bit too tight. It does everything wrong.
I also found the combat to be a complete mash-fest, largely just focused on getting directly in front of an enemy's face and spamming the attack button as fast as I humanly could. Hopping into the air for a moment before spamming the attack button seemed to make Sora hit things faster, so that wound up becoming a core part of the rotation. Not helping matters is how obscenely delayed most of Sora's kit actually is, with a dishonorable mention going specifically to his jump; there's what feels like a half-second of delay before he actually becomes airborne after you hit the button, which is bad in combat sections and unforgivable in the parts where you need to platform. There's a jump over a couple of mushrooms in the Alice in Wonderland world long before you get the high jump or the glide, and combined with the terrible camera was probably the single most difficult challenge in the entire game. I nearly burst a blood vessel when I found out that your partners have collision and can push you off of edges if you aren't careful. In some areas, this only means needing to hop back up to where you just were. In others, it means needing to transition through several different loading zones as you slowly climb your way back up.
It is a very pretty game, though, both graphically and sonically. Certainly moreso the former than the latter; this might have the single worst rendition of Night on Bald Mountain I will ever hear in my life. It's not hard to look at this and be impressed, especially in the original areas; the final set piece is an absolute treat, with you fighting waves of Heartless in a pitch-black room and only being able to tell where they are by the glow of their eyes. There are a lot of visual elements here that I know get expanded upon in Kingdom Hearts 2, and I think it was pretty smart of the team to keep going further down that path.
For as much shit as people talk about the narrative, I thought it was far and away the strongest thing Kingdom Hearts had going for it. Not the bulk of it, though; the overwhelming majority of the game is spent traipsing through abridged recaps of Disney movies, primarily the more middling ones that the Walt Disney Company presumably weren't all that protective of. Like, Hercules isn't a good film just because you and I and everyone else want Meg to look at us like we're living pieces of trash. Even still, Kingdom Hearts breezes right through a significant amount of plot beats, largely resulting in more of a Disney-World-tour sensation rather than one of occupying an actual world. You're going through the theme park version of these different films and getting the Cliff's Notes of just enough plot to give you an idea of what you're meant to be doing. Characters in the Disney worlds act less like characters and more as mascots. They're wildly flat and underdeveloped caricatures. No, the interesting parts of the Kingdom Hearts narrative are the parts that are wholly original to it.
I actually really like the story that Riku and Sora have got going on here, with Kairi mostly taking a backseat until the final couple hours of the game. People have spoken a lot about some of the gay subtext, and I think it's largely difficult to miss — Riku offering a fruit to Sora with the prompt that sharing it will bind their two souls together for eternity may as well have been delivered while he was on one knee — while still being pretty interesting. Sora is probably the worst fucking friend ever. I get that he thinks of Riku as more of a rival than a buddy, but he only responds to Riku openly lamenting how inadequate and lonely he feels with either literal silence or general disinterest. It's hardly a surprise that he ends up falling to the darkness when he's gotten rebuked at literally every single turn, all the while being manipulated further into thinking he has no other choice. It's neat, and it comes to a nice close when Riku manages to break free of Ansem's control and his own insecurities to help Sora close the door to Kingdom Hearts. Regrettably, he is also forced to share the conclusion of his arc with fucking Mickey Mouse.
Kingdom Hearts has an interesting story running through it, but, again, it's constantly being silenced by the game interrupting itself to say "holy shit, you're in Aladdin world". I don't fucking care about Aladdin. I've seen Aladdin. Aladdin is a fine movie that's significantly more interesting and better written as a movie, and not as this shitty pastiche with Dan Castellaneta doing Homer voice while trying to fill Robin Williams's shoes. God, so many of these actors just aren't doing a good job. It's kind of impressive that the child actors fucking crush it, and not even by comparison; Haley Joel Osment just kills it. Billy Zane's Ansem is pretty solid, as is Mandy Moore's Aerith. The rest I'm ambivalent about, or actively hostile towards. Brian Blessed sounds fucking terrible in this.
I did have a moment while I was playing Kingdom Hearts, right near the end when I was climbing back up to the top of Hollow Bastion. I had the realization that my keyblade looked like a flower. I was mostly just equipping whatever had the best stats, and it just happened to be that the Divine Rose gave me exactly what I needed. It very suddenly occurred to me, at that moment, that I never would have been using it if I had played this when I was a kid. Flowers are for girls, after all. Even if it meant equipping a strictly worse weapon that didn't do what I wanted it to do — one that actively harmed my build, even — I wouldn't have equipped the flower keyblade.
I was a bit of a fruity kid growing up. I wanted to wear nail polish, I liked watching a lot of shows for girls, I didn't really feel the revulsion that a lot of other people seemed to feel at doing things that weren't "for" their gender. Of course, it all kind of ended up making sense once I realized I liked dudes, but it was a pretty strange feeling to have while growing up when I wasn't really allowed to correctly guess the reasoning behind it. My dad made every effort to beat all of that out of me. To mold me into a Man. I think I gravitated more to a lot of these hyper-edgy pieces of media like Shadow the Hedgehog and whatever garbage aired on Spike TV in the hopes that it would impress him. Obviously, this was more than a little misguided. He would have been a lot happier had I picked up a football helmet and a drill and a cigar and acted like what people thought men were supposed to be in the 1950s, but I figured it was worth trying. It wasn't. When you're not allowed to be the person you are, you tend to do a pretty bad job of acting like the person you're expected to be. The flower keyblade was for girls, and that meant the flower keyblade was justification to be punished if I used it. Today, I equipped the flower keyblade and used it all the way until the end.
There's a part of me I lost a long time ago that's made it impossible for me to like Kingdom Hearts.
I don't know if it was a childhood whimsy that allowed me to see the good in anything, or if it was a childish naivety that allowed me to see anything as good.
Amarantus
2023
A western-made visual novel that actually does things with the medium! And does them well. A rarity, to be cherished.
(At this point I spent a very long time staring at the draft of this post, pondering how I could write this in a way that wasn't as mechanical and wooden as my usual output, in a way that does justice to the impressive writing within Amarantus. I did not succeed. Workmanlike it is.)
Amarantus takes place in a sort of low-fantasy world where you play as a young man named Arik Tereison. The game opens with the lord's soldiers raiding his house in the dead of night, capturing his parents while he only just escapes. Arik assembles a small team of friends and acquaintances with the intent to march to the capital and Do Something About This.
The core story doesn't really change based on your choices; it's Arik's relationships with his team that do. I'd kill to see this game's internal flowchart. There's a huge amount of mutability based on what you say, and it's complex enough that I genuinely have no clue how to reach certain branches. The choices do matter and do have consequences, and they can be so small that you don't notice until they compound into a situation that smashes the back of your skull with a hammer.
The game shoves you into the deep end, expecting you to figure out the pre-existing relationship dynamics and state of the world almost purely via context clues. Thankfully, the writing is strong enough to support this approach, and the game is short as to facilitate multiple playthroughs. It trickles just enough information that I experienced multiple "oh my god, I knew it!" and "holy shit, they were actually talking about this!" moments in equal measure through subsequent runs.
This approach allows the game to squeeze tons of value out of its limited cast, who each have an impressive sense of specificity and agency. I'm used to companions in games simply following my lead and doing what I say, but would Marius stop trying to score with Raeann just because I told him to? Of course he wouldn't, he's a fucking disaster of a human being. You can't hook up with characters just by being nice like in most games with romance options (lookin at you, Baldur's Gate 3). You have to actually act in a way they're interested in.
The writing in Amarantus - the dialogue, really - is genuinely impressive. There's a heavy emphasis on naturalistic timing, taking full advantage of the Power of Computers to display things at various speeds. You know that awkward, beat-too-long pause where the game has to load the next line, even if the next line is supposed to be immediate? None of that shit here. Characters will pause to sigh, visibly hesitate to answer, interrupt themselves and others; all without waiting for player input. Words will change depending on how characters are pronouncing them.
I cannot overstate how huge this is. The classic fetter of visual novels is limited expressions and how one deals with that restriction. For example, Ace Attorney uses bombastic, hammy animations to convey character, which works well because every character is some kind of larger-than-life caricature. Amarantus has subtler writing and these accordingly subtler animations elevate it from great to amazing.
And just, man, I gotta get back in there, test every possible combination of choices. Some of my favorite dialogue in that game so far is in a scene that - according to the achievement statistics at time of writing - 2.5% of players have seen. And I can't imagine that many people are playing something as niche as this in the first place.
Honestly between Amarantus, Exocolonist, Citizen Sleeper, Roadwarden, and South Scrimshaw: Part One, I'm eatin' well from the "high-quality narrative game of relatively modest scope" table. Keep 'em coming.
(At this point I spent a very long time staring at the draft of this post, pondering how I could write this in a way that wasn't as mechanical and wooden as my usual output, in a way that does justice to the impressive writing within Amarantus. I did not succeed. Workmanlike it is.)
Amarantus takes place in a sort of low-fantasy world where you play as a young man named Arik Tereison. The game opens with the lord's soldiers raiding his house in the dead of night, capturing his parents while he only just escapes. Arik assembles a small team of friends and acquaintances with the intent to march to the capital and Do Something About This.
The core story doesn't really change based on your choices; it's Arik's relationships with his team that do. I'd kill to see this game's internal flowchart. There's a huge amount of mutability based on what you say, and it's complex enough that I genuinely have no clue how to reach certain branches. The choices do matter and do have consequences, and they can be so small that you don't notice until they compound into a situation that smashes the back of your skull with a hammer.
The game shoves you into the deep end, expecting you to figure out the pre-existing relationship dynamics and state of the world almost purely via context clues. Thankfully, the writing is strong enough to support this approach, and the game is short as to facilitate multiple playthroughs. It trickles just enough information that I experienced multiple "oh my god, I knew it!" and "holy shit, they were actually talking about this!" moments in equal measure through subsequent runs.
This approach allows the game to squeeze tons of value out of its limited cast, who each have an impressive sense of specificity and agency. I'm used to companions in games simply following my lead and doing what I say, but would Marius stop trying to score with Raeann just because I told him to? Of course he wouldn't, he's a fucking disaster of a human being. You can't hook up with characters just by being nice like in most games with romance options (lookin at you, Baldur's Gate 3). You have to actually act in a way they're interested in.
The writing in Amarantus - the dialogue, really - is genuinely impressive. There's a heavy emphasis on naturalistic timing, taking full advantage of the Power of Computers to display things at various speeds. You know that awkward, beat-too-long pause where the game has to load the next line, even if the next line is supposed to be immediate? None of that shit here. Characters will pause to sigh, visibly hesitate to answer, interrupt themselves and others; all without waiting for player input. Words will change depending on how characters are pronouncing them.
I cannot overstate how huge this is. The classic fetter of visual novels is limited expressions and how one deals with that restriction. For example, Ace Attorney uses bombastic, hammy animations to convey character, which works well because every character is some kind of larger-than-life caricature. Amarantus has subtler writing and these accordingly subtler animations elevate it from great to amazing.
And just, man, I gotta get back in there, test every possible combination of choices. Some of my favorite dialogue in that game so far is in a scene that - according to the achievement statistics at time of writing - 2.5% of players have seen. And I can't imagine that many people are playing something as niche as this in the first place.
Honestly between Amarantus, Exocolonist, Citizen Sleeper, Roadwarden, and South Scrimshaw: Part One, I'm eatin' well from the "high-quality narrative game of relatively modest scope" table. Keep 'em coming.
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
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.
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
It’s okay when FromSoft does it.
Sekiro is guilty of everything that its staunchest defenders attack other games for. An unforgivably bad camera, bosses with surprise second phases, dreadfully simple and overpowered parrying, a near-complete lack of depth both artistically and mechanically, and a thematic retread of what the studio has been doing for fifteen years now all culminates to create something that can peak at the heights of interesting but mostly just lingers in the trenches of bland.
I knew that I wasn’t going to like Sekiro about an hour into it, but I also knew that it would be incredibly easy for someone to point out that I'm a quitter and say that I just didn’t like it because I was bad at the game. You get that a lot, with FromSoft’s titles: the implication being that the difficulty is the sole reason why anyone could ever dislike it. Set aside the red-headed stepchildren that are titles like Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III, where the premier Soulsheads are often pretty harsh on them, and look instead to the darlings like Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, and Sekiro. There are a certain amount of criticisms that you’re allowed to make — farming for blood vials or spirit emblems is boring, certain builds or weapons are imbalanced compared to others — but start pointing out flaws in the underlying systems themselves, and watch the wagons get circled as you’re told that you just need to git gud to appreciate them. I’ll outline what I disliked about the game itself in a bit, but all of this preamble is required to explain why I felt so compelled to finish Sekiro, in the hopes that it’d allow me to speak with some degree of authority.
I have to wonder if Hidetaka Miyazaki ever feels like Victor Frankenstein looking at the monster he's created. The ethos of the earliest Souls games were largely about strangers coming together to overcome the challenges imposed by the brutal and uncaring world they inhabited. Miyazaki famously said that he was inspired by an icy road on a hill that he needed a stranger's help to get over, and that he himself also helped a stranger get over; it was "a connection of mutual assistance between transient people", he said, because he couldn't stick around to thank them or else he'd get stuck again. This laid the foundations not just for the jolly co-operation summons of the original Dark Souls, but certainly reflected players on a more meta level, as well. We're all transient people to one another online, and we'll talk about these games for tips and guides and then dip out to take on the challenges with new information, often to never hear from the other players again. We get what we can and give what we're able.
Yet there's been an inarguable change, I feel, in the way that fans of the newest games talk about them. The seeds were certainly first sown with the whole "PREPARE TO DIE" garbage from the western Dark Souls marketing campaign, but there's been a marked shift in the way that people discuss these games. Complain that it's too hard, and you'll now immediately be met with derision instead of advice: well, you're just bad, you need to git gud, you just don't get it. God help you if you decide to drop the game because you're not having fun. There's no faster way to prove that you're a casual who hasn't earned the right to talk about it. Sekiro discussion in particular is especially noxious, with the community that exists today largely believing that anyone who has any complaints whatsoever is just mad because bad. Even if you beat the game, complaining about it is unjustified because you're actually still bad. If you were good, you would have liked it. Your complaints are because you're bad, thus they're invalid; any praise must then be because you're good, and thus valid. I complained about the shitty camera to a friend and he immediately shot back that it was my fault for being near a wall, and that it's actually intended behavior for it to fuck up near terrain because it'll push clever players to the middle of rooms where they'll be safer. This is the level of discourse we're operating at here. A decade and a half of making these third-person action-adventure games and they still can't fix the fucking cameras, but it's actually because they're playing 4D chess against the player. Can you imagine anything else getting this much leniency?
The camera is really the thing I want to hammer home as the worst element here, because it alone has killed me more than any other enemy in the game. I don’t know how FromSoft still haven’t figured this out. I intentionally sped through most of the game, skipping a lot of the optional content primarily just because I wanted to roll credits, and even most of the mandatory bosses introduced new problems with the camera. Guardian Ape would throw me into a wall that the camera couldn’t phase through, which meant that it tried to go for a birds-eye view and got me killed because I couldn’t see what was happening in time to block the follow-up; Summoner Monk similarly backed me into a wall and brought us both so close to the camera that our models turned invisible and I had to guess what the pattern was, effectively with my eyes closed; Sword Saint Isshin’s Phase 2 jumping attack would break the lock-on whenever I dodged under it, because the camera couldn’t keep up with where he was going. Mini-bosses like the Lone Shadow Longswordsman and the Lone Shadow Vilehand would similarly eat the camera with some of their dashing moves, and bounding off the head of the latter after dodging his sweep caused the camera to get stuck in the ceiling so hard that it started flashing Electric Soldier Porygon at me for a few seconds until it freed itself. It’s so blatantly wrong that I’m astonished both that it made it to production in the state that it’s in and that it isn’t a complete dealbreaker for significantly more people than it is.
I mentioned to another friend that I was having some trouble with Owl and that I was going to call it quits for the night there, and he excitedly mentioned that Owl had his favorite boss theme in the game. It was at this exact moment that I realized that I couldn’t actually recall a single track from the entire ten or so hours I had played up to that point. Even after rolling credits, I still don’t remember anything aside from the fact that I thought Divine Dragon had a cool theme. Music is constantly playing over every sequence of the game, ambient tracks and combat tracks alike; if you aggro an enemy, kill them, and then immediately aggro another, the combat track will start, fade out, and then start from the beginning again. Moving through an area to quickly cut down enemies who don’t alert the others when they aggro can make the combat track start itself over what I managed to get about five times in a row. It’s kind of funny in how sloppy it is.
The narrative is dreck, of course, and I doubt anyone was expecting much different. It’s the same story FromSoft has been telling for years now — unnatural life and resurrection, it’s all cyclical, you can choose to either break the cycle or keep it going, blah blah blah — with the added twist of “honor culture is actually dishonorable”, which has been massively oversaturated for longer than anyone reading this has been alive, and Sekiro has absolutely nothing interesting to add to the conversation. It’s certainly present. Owl shows up after seemingly dying, decides to be evil, actually dies unceremoniously, and the game just kind of moves along without really being interested in how or why any of that happened. I’ve seen praise for the story, and I can’t honestly believe that anyone is cheering this on. This is the fourth time FromSoft has shown that time is a flat circle in class, and the irony of how they keep doing it over and over again is really kind of giving me a kick as I type it out. You certainly can’t say they don’t believe in it.
Souls combat was never mechanically deep, but made up for it predominately just by giving you a lot of options. Sekiro throws this out in favor of exclusively allowing the player to play as a squishy, dex-based katana-wielder who dies in two hits on a good day and has to perfect parry the world or be crushed beneath it. I respect, in a way, the sheer commitment to this singular playstyle, but I also don’t think there’s any depth here to actually make me want to play this over any other similar action game. You get a parry and you get some basic sword swings, and if you’re a really good boy, you get to do Ichimonji Double. The actual parrying itself is ridiculously forgiving, and you’ll just end up psyching yourself out if you read online that spamming it will reduce your parry window to about seven frames; it’s active for so long and you’re actionable again so quickly after you use it that you’re in no real danger so long as you just keep hammering away at L1 fast enough. The fact that this got a port for the Stadia — with its inherent input lag that you can count in geologic time — should indicate how core these so-called “strict reaction times” actually are. What you’re left with once you get past that mental barrier is a game where you hit R1 until orange sparks fly, hit L1 until orange sparks stop flying, and then repeat the process from the start. When the kanji for danger occasionally appears, you get to hit either the jump button or the dash button. It is fucking boring. I managed to no-hit all three phases of Isshin not because I had downloaded him and completely figured out a perfect counter for every single one of his combos, but because his AI broke and he kept spamming the thrust attack in Phase 2 and the lightning sweep in Phase 3. I was getting rolled before that, because he was actually using his entire arsenal. I didn’t outskill him, I just got lucky that he kept picking the exact same attack over and over again. It’s like I got double-perfected by a world-class Zangief player and then in game two he just sat in neutral and spammed SPD. Sure, I’ll take the win, but it’s not because I earned it. I didn’t win, he just lost. Sekiro occupies an incredibly awkward middle ground between something slow and simple like Dark Souls and something fast and complex like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. The game is instead fast and simple, and I can’t think of anything that is less for me.
Speaking of, I think FromSoft has indicated with their last few releases that they’re no longer interested in catering to players like me. That’s fine. I say this with my teeth gritted and steam coming out of my ears, but, really, it is fine. They’ve clearly found a new audience who loves them dearly, and every new game they put out sells millions of copies and sweeps the Game of the Year awards from every publication giving them out. This beat Death Stranding and Resident Evil 2 at The Game Awards! It’s the fifth highest-rated game on Backloggd of all time! It’s sold over ten million copies as of September of this year! Clearly I’m the odd man out, here. What use is it even to complain? What reason would they have to listen?
I’ve been getting this sort-of old man doom sense lately — not just for game discussion, mind, but for a lot of things — about how saying what you feel about something doesn’t actually accomplish anything if you’re not in a position of power to change it. It’s got a purpose to just let others know how you feel about any given topic, but what does it actually do? If I find a group of like-minded individuals who think I nailed it with this review and agree that FromSoft ought to return to the good old days where they made shitty, clunky games that launched blatantly unfinished, what does that accomplish? If a group of Sekiro fans come in and dunk on me for just not understanding the game, what does that accomplish? I put myself through the ringer beating a twenty hour-long game that I hated, and for what? So that I’d be more credible when I said it was a pile of shit? What does that accomplish, then, when someone comes in and says that beating the game doesn’t mean anything and I’m still bad and that’s the only reason I hated it? Without anyone involved actually being in a position to change anything, what use is discussing it at all?
A large part of what bothers me is that I don't feel I've really gotten anything I value from my time with Sekiro. It's not just because of the difficulty; I do plenty of difficult things, play plenty of difficult games, and it's all given me something I value. Every piece I write makes me feel like I'm a little bit better at writing, and it helps me appreciate the writing of others more. Every fighting game I play tends to have wildly differing mechanics between them, but the fundamentals of squaring off against another player are transferable. Every song I compose makes me feel like I've got a deeper understanding of music. What I get from playing Sekiro is that I'm now better at Sekiro, which is a game I have no desire to ever touch again. There's hardly anything that plays quite like this — which is a massive point of support for those who love it — so I may as well have gotten nothing for all my time spent. There's nothing wrong with what I'll affectionately call "junk media", where there's no value to the piece besides what you feel in the exact moments where you're actively experiencing it, but you'd hope that what you feel is a sense of fun or reward. I felt neither from Sekiro. I thought it was boring, and it didn't give me anything I value. I could have gone to work and felt equally bored and unfulfilled, but at least work pays me.
It’s telling that the parts that I thought were most interesting — the Divine Dragon, the Armored Knight — are the parts that either go completely overlooked or disparaged by the broader fanbase. There’s a clear disconnect between me, this game, and everyone else. People all over the place online said to keep playing until the combat clicks, and that’s when you start having fun. I felt the combat click, and I felt bored. People said to play until Genichiro before you say you don’t like it, and I beat Genichiro and was still bored. People said you can’t call the game bad if you haven’t beaten it, and I have, and I still think it’s bad. Do I have the right to dislike it yet, or is there still something that I’ve missed?
Seeing a monkey in a conical hat firing a rifle was almost enough for me to justify giving this five stars.
Sekiro is guilty of everything that its staunchest defenders attack other games for. An unforgivably bad camera, bosses with surprise second phases, dreadfully simple and overpowered parrying, a near-complete lack of depth both artistically and mechanically, and a thematic retread of what the studio has been doing for fifteen years now all culminates to create something that can peak at the heights of interesting but mostly just lingers in the trenches of bland.
I knew that I wasn’t going to like Sekiro about an hour into it, but I also knew that it would be incredibly easy for someone to point out that I'm a quitter and say that I just didn’t like it because I was bad at the game. You get that a lot, with FromSoft’s titles: the implication being that the difficulty is the sole reason why anyone could ever dislike it. Set aside the red-headed stepchildren that are titles like Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III, where the premier Soulsheads are often pretty harsh on them, and look instead to the darlings like Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, and Sekiro. There are a certain amount of criticisms that you’re allowed to make — farming for blood vials or spirit emblems is boring, certain builds or weapons are imbalanced compared to others — but start pointing out flaws in the underlying systems themselves, and watch the wagons get circled as you’re told that you just need to git gud to appreciate them. I’ll outline what I disliked about the game itself in a bit, but all of this preamble is required to explain why I felt so compelled to finish Sekiro, in the hopes that it’d allow me to speak with some degree of authority.
I have to wonder if Hidetaka Miyazaki ever feels like Victor Frankenstein looking at the monster he's created. The ethos of the earliest Souls games were largely about strangers coming together to overcome the challenges imposed by the brutal and uncaring world they inhabited. Miyazaki famously said that he was inspired by an icy road on a hill that he needed a stranger's help to get over, and that he himself also helped a stranger get over; it was "a connection of mutual assistance between transient people", he said, because he couldn't stick around to thank them or else he'd get stuck again. This laid the foundations not just for the jolly co-operation summons of the original Dark Souls, but certainly reflected players on a more meta level, as well. We're all transient people to one another online, and we'll talk about these games for tips and guides and then dip out to take on the challenges with new information, often to never hear from the other players again. We get what we can and give what we're able.
Yet there's been an inarguable change, I feel, in the way that fans of the newest games talk about them. The seeds were certainly first sown with the whole "PREPARE TO DIE" garbage from the western Dark Souls marketing campaign, but there's been a marked shift in the way that people discuss these games. Complain that it's too hard, and you'll now immediately be met with derision instead of advice: well, you're just bad, you need to git gud, you just don't get it. God help you if you decide to drop the game because you're not having fun. There's no faster way to prove that you're a casual who hasn't earned the right to talk about it. Sekiro discussion in particular is especially noxious, with the community that exists today largely believing that anyone who has any complaints whatsoever is just mad because bad. Even if you beat the game, complaining about it is unjustified because you're actually still bad. If you were good, you would have liked it. Your complaints are because you're bad, thus they're invalid; any praise must then be because you're good, and thus valid. I complained about the shitty camera to a friend and he immediately shot back that it was my fault for being near a wall, and that it's actually intended behavior for it to fuck up near terrain because it'll push clever players to the middle of rooms where they'll be safer. This is the level of discourse we're operating at here. A decade and a half of making these third-person action-adventure games and they still can't fix the fucking cameras, but it's actually because they're playing 4D chess against the player. Can you imagine anything else getting this much leniency?
The camera is really the thing I want to hammer home as the worst element here, because it alone has killed me more than any other enemy in the game. I don’t know how FromSoft still haven’t figured this out. I intentionally sped through most of the game, skipping a lot of the optional content primarily just because I wanted to roll credits, and even most of the mandatory bosses introduced new problems with the camera. Guardian Ape would throw me into a wall that the camera couldn’t phase through, which meant that it tried to go for a birds-eye view and got me killed because I couldn’t see what was happening in time to block the follow-up; Summoner Monk similarly backed me into a wall and brought us both so close to the camera that our models turned invisible and I had to guess what the pattern was, effectively with my eyes closed; Sword Saint Isshin’s Phase 2 jumping attack would break the lock-on whenever I dodged under it, because the camera couldn’t keep up with where he was going. Mini-bosses like the Lone Shadow Longswordsman and the Lone Shadow Vilehand would similarly eat the camera with some of their dashing moves, and bounding off the head of the latter after dodging his sweep caused the camera to get stuck in the ceiling so hard that it started flashing Electric Soldier Porygon at me for a few seconds until it freed itself. It’s so blatantly wrong that I’m astonished both that it made it to production in the state that it’s in and that it isn’t a complete dealbreaker for significantly more people than it is.
I mentioned to another friend that I was having some trouble with Owl and that I was going to call it quits for the night there, and he excitedly mentioned that Owl had his favorite boss theme in the game. It was at this exact moment that I realized that I couldn’t actually recall a single track from the entire ten or so hours I had played up to that point. Even after rolling credits, I still don’t remember anything aside from the fact that I thought Divine Dragon had a cool theme. Music is constantly playing over every sequence of the game, ambient tracks and combat tracks alike; if you aggro an enemy, kill them, and then immediately aggro another, the combat track will start, fade out, and then start from the beginning again. Moving through an area to quickly cut down enemies who don’t alert the others when they aggro can make the combat track start itself over what I managed to get about five times in a row. It’s kind of funny in how sloppy it is.
The narrative is dreck, of course, and I doubt anyone was expecting much different. It’s the same story FromSoft has been telling for years now — unnatural life and resurrection, it’s all cyclical, you can choose to either break the cycle or keep it going, blah blah blah — with the added twist of “honor culture is actually dishonorable”, which has been massively oversaturated for longer than anyone reading this has been alive, and Sekiro has absolutely nothing interesting to add to the conversation. It’s certainly present. Owl shows up after seemingly dying, decides to be evil, actually dies unceremoniously, and the game just kind of moves along without really being interested in how or why any of that happened. I’ve seen praise for the story, and I can’t honestly believe that anyone is cheering this on. This is the fourth time FromSoft has shown that time is a flat circle in class, and the irony of how they keep doing it over and over again is really kind of giving me a kick as I type it out. You certainly can’t say they don’t believe in it.
Souls combat was never mechanically deep, but made up for it predominately just by giving you a lot of options. Sekiro throws this out in favor of exclusively allowing the player to play as a squishy, dex-based katana-wielder who dies in two hits on a good day and has to perfect parry the world or be crushed beneath it. I respect, in a way, the sheer commitment to this singular playstyle, but I also don’t think there’s any depth here to actually make me want to play this over any other similar action game. You get a parry and you get some basic sword swings, and if you’re a really good boy, you get to do Ichimonji Double. The actual parrying itself is ridiculously forgiving, and you’ll just end up psyching yourself out if you read online that spamming it will reduce your parry window to about seven frames; it’s active for so long and you’re actionable again so quickly after you use it that you’re in no real danger so long as you just keep hammering away at L1 fast enough. The fact that this got a port for the Stadia — with its inherent input lag that you can count in geologic time — should indicate how core these so-called “strict reaction times” actually are. What you’re left with once you get past that mental barrier is a game where you hit R1 until orange sparks fly, hit L1 until orange sparks stop flying, and then repeat the process from the start. When the kanji for danger occasionally appears, you get to hit either the jump button or the dash button. It is fucking boring. I managed to no-hit all three phases of Isshin not because I had downloaded him and completely figured out a perfect counter for every single one of his combos, but because his AI broke and he kept spamming the thrust attack in Phase 2 and the lightning sweep in Phase 3. I was getting rolled before that, because he was actually using his entire arsenal. I didn’t outskill him, I just got lucky that he kept picking the exact same attack over and over again. It’s like I got double-perfected by a world-class Zangief player and then in game two he just sat in neutral and spammed SPD. Sure, I’ll take the win, but it’s not because I earned it. I didn’t win, he just lost. Sekiro occupies an incredibly awkward middle ground between something slow and simple like Dark Souls and something fast and complex like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. The game is instead fast and simple, and I can’t think of anything that is less for me.
Speaking of, I think FromSoft has indicated with their last few releases that they’re no longer interested in catering to players like me. That’s fine. I say this with my teeth gritted and steam coming out of my ears, but, really, it is fine. They’ve clearly found a new audience who loves them dearly, and every new game they put out sells millions of copies and sweeps the Game of the Year awards from every publication giving them out. This beat Death Stranding and Resident Evil 2 at The Game Awards! It’s the fifth highest-rated game on Backloggd of all time! It’s sold over ten million copies as of September of this year! Clearly I’m the odd man out, here. What use is it even to complain? What reason would they have to listen?
I’ve been getting this sort-of old man doom sense lately — not just for game discussion, mind, but for a lot of things — about how saying what you feel about something doesn’t actually accomplish anything if you’re not in a position of power to change it. It’s got a purpose to just let others know how you feel about any given topic, but what does it actually do? If I find a group of like-minded individuals who think I nailed it with this review and agree that FromSoft ought to return to the good old days where they made shitty, clunky games that launched blatantly unfinished, what does that accomplish? If a group of Sekiro fans come in and dunk on me for just not understanding the game, what does that accomplish? I put myself through the ringer beating a twenty hour-long game that I hated, and for what? So that I’d be more credible when I said it was a pile of shit? What does that accomplish, then, when someone comes in and says that beating the game doesn’t mean anything and I’m still bad and that’s the only reason I hated it? Without anyone involved actually being in a position to change anything, what use is discussing it at all?
A large part of what bothers me is that I don't feel I've really gotten anything I value from my time with Sekiro. It's not just because of the difficulty; I do plenty of difficult things, play plenty of difficult games, and it's all given me something I value. Every piece I write makes me feel like I'm a little bit better at writing, and it helps me appreciate the writing of others more. Every fighting game I play tends to have wildly differing mechanics between them, but the fundamentals of squaring off against another player are transferable. Every song I compose makes me feel like I've got a deeper understanding of music. What I get from playing Sekiro is that I'm now better at Sekiro, which is a game I have no desire to ever touch again. There's hardly anything that plays quite like this — which is a massive point of support for those who love it — so I may as well have gotten nothing for all my time spent. There's nothing wrong with what I'll affectionately call "junk media", where there's no value to the piece besides what you feel in the exact moments where you're actively experiencing it, but you'd hope that what you feel is a sense of fun or reward. I felt neither from Sekiro. I thought it was boring, and it didn't give me anything I value. I could have gone to work and felt equally bored and unfulfilled, but at least work pays me.
It’s telling that the parts that I thought were most interesting — the Divine Dragon, the Armored Knight — are the parts that either go completely overlooked or disparaged by the broader fanbase. There’s a clear disconnect between me, this game, and everyone else. People all over the place online said to keep playing until the combat clicks, and that’s when you start having fun. I felt the combat click, and I felt bored. People said to play until Genichiro before you say you don’t like it, and I beat Genichiro and was still bored. People said you can’t call the game bad if you haven’t beaten it, and I have, and I still think it’s bad. Do I have the right to dislike it yet, or is there still something that I’ve missed?
Seeing a monkey in a conical hat firing a rifle was almost enough for me to justify giving this five stars.
Dead dove, do not eat.
I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.
This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.
IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.
To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.
But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.
By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.
Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.
Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.
At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?
And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.
I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.
I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.
This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.
IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.
To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.
But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.
By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.
Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.
Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.
At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?
And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.
I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.
Somerville
2022
This is a stylish, beautiful, cinematic and (if you look closely) interesting project in its plot. But the gameplay here is not at all catchy. Rather, it is most often perplexing. Camera selection is sometimes fiddly, puzzles are often unintuitive (although there are some interesting ideas), and action sequences can fall apart in a less-than-polished state of the game. The hero has interesting abilities, but the game seems to lack moments for their disclosure and interaction. Many game design decisions raise questions too (one of the main problems I see is that often you don’t quite understand what the game wants from you or where to go).
The slightly tediously repetitive gameplay (especially in the ending) coupled with the minimalist storytelling keeps the player from being as involved as the game seems to want it to be. It’s really a good setting and story concept, but I’m sorry that I learn about this from a guide from a person who was much more interested in exploring this world. The mechanical and technical side of Somerville unfortunately doesn't let me dig that deep. And although this is undoubtedly a visually pleasing project, its fundamental parts are not executed at a level sufficient so that they do not interfere with absorbing and laying out the plot and concept in the head. And therefore Somerville is just a beautiful sketch, but, alas, not something more.
The slightly tediously repetitive gameplay (especially in the ending) coupled with the minimalist storytelling keeps the player from being as involved as the game seems to want it to be. It’s really a good setting and story concept, but I’m sorry that I learn about this from a guide from a person who was much more interested in exploring this world. The mechanical and technical side of Somerville unfortunately doesn't let me dig that deep. And although this is undoubtedly a visually pleasing project, its fundamental parts are not executed at a level sufficient so that they do not interfere with absorbing and laying out the plot and concept in the head. And therefore Somerville is just a beautiful sketch, but, alas, not something more.
A Short Hike
2019
The video game equivalent of getting a hug from a nice stranger. It's not too long, but it'd be weird for the both of you if it was.
