Ico is the type of game I dread to play, critically acclaimed, landmark classic of the medium, influenced various games and designers I love. I dread playing those because of a fear I have, a fear that's come true : I don't like ICO, in fact, I think I might hate ICO. And now I will have to carry that like a millstone around my neck, "that asshole who doesn't like ICO". Its not even really that external disapproval I dread, its the very reputation that causes me to second guess my own sincerely held opinions. I thought I liked minimalism in game design, and cut-scene light storytelling and relationships explored through mechanics but I guess I don't. There's some kinda dissonance, cognitive or otherwise reading reviews by friends and writers I respect and wondering if there's something wrong with me or if I didnt get it or played it wrong or any other similar foolishness that gets bandied around in Internet discussions. "I wish we could have played the same game" I think, reading my mutuals' reviews of ICO. Not in a dismissive asshole way of accusing them of having a warped perception, but moreso in frustration that I didnt have the experience that has clearly touched them and countless others.

But enough feeling sorry for myself/being insecure, what is my problem with ICO exactly? I don't really know. Genuinely. I wasnt even planning on writing a review originally because all it would come down to as my original unfiltered reaction would be "Playing it made me miserable". Thankfully the upside of minimalism in game design is that its easier to identify which elements didnt work for me because there are few in the game. I think the people who got the most out of ICO developed some kind of emotional connection to Yorda, and thats one aspect which absolutely didn't work for me. As nakedly "gamey" and transparently artificial as Fallout New Vegas' NPCs (and Skyrim and F3 etc) locking the camera to have a dialogue tree, they read to me as infinitely more human than the more realistic Yorda; for a few reasons. Chief among them is that despite some hiccups and bugs the game is known for, you are not asked to manage them as a gameplay mechanic beyond your companions and well, my main interaction with Yorda was holding down R1 to repeatedly yell "ONG VA!" so she'd climb down the fucking ladder. She'd climb down, get halfway through and then decide this was a bad idea and ascend again.

ICO has been to me a game of all these little frustrations piling up. Due to the nature of the puzzles and platforming, failing them was aggravating and solving them first try was merely unremarkable. It makes me question again, what is the value of minimalism genuinely? There was a point at which I had to use a chain to jump across a gap and I couldnt quite make it, I thought "well, maybe theres a way to jump farther" and started pressing buttons randomly until the circle button achieved the result of letting me use momentum to swing accross. Now, if instead a non-diegetic diagram of the face buttons had shown up on the HUD instead what would have been lost? To me, very little. Sure, excessive direction can be annoying and take me out of the game, but pressing buttons randomly did the same, personally. Nor did "figuring it out for myself" feel particularly fulfilling. Thats again what I meant, victories are unremarkable and failures are frustrating. The same can be said for the combat which, honestly I liked at first. I liked how clumsy and childish the stick flailing fighting style was, but ultimately it involved hitting the enemies over and over and over and over again until they stopped spawning. Thankfully you can run away at times and rush to the exit to make the enemies blow up but the game's habit of spawning them when you're far from Yorda or maybe when she's on a different platform meant that I had to rely on her stupid pathfinding to quickly respond (which is just not going to happen, she needs like 3 business days to execute the same thing we've done 5k times already, I guess the language barrier applies to pattern recognition as well somehow) and when it inevitably failed I would have to jump down and mash square until they fucked off.

I can see the argument that this is meant to be disempowering somehow but I don't really buy it. Your strikes knock these fuckers down well enough, they just keep getting back up. Ico isnt strong, he shouldnt be able to smite these wizard of oz monkeys with a single swing, but then why can they do no damage to ICO and get knocked down flat with a couple swings? Either they are weak as hell but keep getting remotely CPRd by the antagonist or they're strong but have really poor balance. In the end, all I could really feel from ICO was being miserable. I finished the game in 5 hours but it felt twice that. All I can think of now is that Im glad its done and I can tick it off the bucket list. I am now dreading playing shadow of the colossus even harder, and I don't think I ever want to play The Last Guardian, it just looks like ICO but even more miserable. I'm sure I've outed myself as an uncultured swine who didnt get the genius of the experience and will lose all my followers but I'm too deflated to care. If there is one positive to this experience is that I kept procrastinating on finishing the game that I got back into reading. I read The Name of the Rose and Rumble Fish, pretty good reads. Im going to read Winesburg Ohio next I think.

"wait - you haven't played quake?"
~almost everyone who i've gushed about this to game in the past few days

a little about me: i'm partial to industrial grit, my favorite doom games favor grimly edgy atmosphere over 80s thrash worship, i'm a big NIN fan and the downward spiral is one of my top 5 favorite albums. so this should be a no brainer, right?

well - yeah, actually. that's exactly right. throughout my playthrough all i could continually ask myself was, "why the fuck didn't i play this sooner?" and rightfully so. i think the reason quake has eluded me for so long is because its holistic reputation is eclipsed at this point by a diehard multiplayer community that i frankly don't give a shit about. i'm not much of a multiplayer enthusiast for anything - let alone tech-y arena shooters - and honestly i probably would've continued ignoring this absolute fucking masterpiece if not for my pressing curiosity towards trent reznor's involvement

that'd have been a huge mistake; quake is easily the best boomer shooter i've ever played

this is where i could talk about how i adore the weapons and their balancing, the general focus on straightforward maps with powerups everywhere, the difficulty being largely driven by how easy it is to kill yourself in tight spaces - or even the god tier ambient score that has just the right amounts of otherworldly screams and metallic chords strewn about - i COULD go into those things and we could be here for a considerable amount of time - but instead of doing any of that, i'm just going to say that the shambler is one of the greatest enemy designs in any fps. in fact, my feeling towards quake 1 can be summarized roughly with my thoughts on the shambler; he's absolutely perfect. i love this giant, dopey, teethy foreskin man in all his fleshy (not furry - fuck you) glory. and i haven't even begun to MENTION his timbs yet

my mans butters be outright otherworldly

Beneath the surface of Resident Evil 4 Remake’s 4K high-definition models, textures, and overly-polished sterile gameplay lies the rotting reactionary corpse of modernity. Resident Evil 4 Remake represents the logical end-point for art under late-stage capitalism, where creators are in a petrified state of artistic stasis where everything old must be modernised, updated, and ‘fixed’. I cannot bring myself to care about this game or the two remakes that preceded it. It’s become a homogenous and trite blob of nothingness, void of any soul or integrity.

I still remember the exact moment that this game was revealed, I was ecstatic. Nintendo hadn't forgotten about Mario Strikers after all! They knew what we wanted and were gonna give it to us, and to make things better it was coming out in just a few months! I couldn't have been more clueless. Mario Strikers Battle League is to this day the most disappointing game that I have ever played and has little to no redeeming qualities.

Of all the aspects to dislike about this game that gameplay is the one that I hate the least, granted that means I still hate it quite a lot but it's not as bad as the rest of what makes this game bad. The general gameplay here feels like they completely forgot how to make a Mario Strikers game, because it just straight up doesn't have the balance or fun of those games at all. The captain and sidekick system are completely gone, now there's just a roster of like 16 or so Mario characters to choose from, none of which are all that surprising to see present or different in ways that makes them feel better. What's even stranger about this is that you can break all continuity and just choose four of the same character to fill your team, so if you want four Bowsers or four DKs you can have it, and nobody will say a thing. It's like if in real soccer four Messi's walked onto the field for a game, you'd think that would be bizarre and pretty unfair, but it's done completely straight faced here and it just shows that they really put no thought into this game at all. The way items are handled is really bad here as well, instead of the game giving them out to a team that fills the requirements to earn one in the situation, the game just drops random item blocks on the field from time to time. If the current match is at a neutral state an item block that anyone can grab will drop, if one team is at even a slight disadvantage though the game will drop team specific item blocks that only the disadvantaged team can get and will continue to do so extremely frequently until that team gets its shit together. Another feature done for the worse here is the Hyper Strikes, this game's equivalent of the captain specific special shots from the previous games. In this game you can no longer pop one of these whenever you want, you have to wait for a Strike Orb to appear on the field, grab it and then you'll have around 30 seconds to pull off a Hyper Strike. Pulling off a hyper strike is insanely easy, given that you get to a spot on the field with ample distance between you and your opponents all you have to do is press "A" twice on a meter that determines the shot's accuracy, if you press the button twice while on the smallest blue section your shot will go in no matter what and score you two points instead of one, the problem is that this timing is incredibly easy to hit leading to virtually no challenge when it comes to these other than finding a safe spot to use them. The fact that you can't use them whenever you want though and that any character on the field can use them, rather than just the captain, makes them quite useless in the long run. These kinds of shots were so useful in the other games because they were a risk and reward type scenario to use helpful for tying the game when you got desperately behind or pulling farther ahead, here they just show up to infrequently to strategize around and to be considered any kinds of useful.

Like I've already mentioned, I was extremely hyped for this game before it came out and bought it Day 1, I remember coming home and playing like 2 to 3 hours of the main tournament mode before inevitably getting bored and putting it down, hoping I'd never have to play it again. What's funny is if I had only played a like 2 more hours of the tournament mode I would have seen all that the game has and ever would have to offer in terms of content. Mario Strikers Battle League is easily the most barren and worthless Mario Sports game in terms of content and surprisingly enough it wears that on its sleeve unashamedly. I am not joking when I say that literally all there is to do in this game is the tournament mode, which consists of six tournament cups, each having a four-match bracket within it and that's all. Now there is of course also the online mode that Nintendo was clearly putting all their stock into when making this game but clearly after seeing how bad this game is everyone who bought it as a whole decided to forego the online and move on with their lives and I don't blame them. This is quite honestly one of the lightest games in terms of content that I've ever seen and it's absolutely shameful, then again perhaps I should thank it because if there were more content here I'd be forced to play this game longer.

Finally, we get to the most egregious aspect of Battle League, the presentation. I loved the style of the other two Strikers games and have already gone on in lengths about that in the reviews I've done for them, so you can imagine my distaste when I'm presented with a game that throws all that out the window. Battle League attempts to copy the former games' style visually and musically in some places but completely misses the point of it but toning things down and not allowing the characters to be unhinged like they were in the previous games. Instead of actually charming and funny win/lose animations like we got in the previous game we instead get the most homogenized cutscenes of Mario characters doing typical Mario character things that fit Nintendo's evergreen vision for them rather than one that makes them more fun and interesting because God forbid these characters be interesting. And it's not just the characters either, the stadiums are no longer fun or different instead just being basic stadiums with themed backsplashes that do nothing but change the color of the grass, the UI is abysmal and boring to look at, and the music tries so hard to be crowd-pleasing only to be the most forgettable few notes repeated that I've ever heard. It's because of this game that this series that I loved has lost its soul and Nintendo refuses to let it go and find it again.

I can say in confidence that Mario Strikers Battle League is the both the worst Mario Sports game and just one of the worst games I have ever played in general. It is a spit in the face to the legacy of Mario Sports games and those like me who grew up enjoying them and now that I have finished it, I am glad I will never have to play it again.

Something to be said about how the most sophisticated schools of design in any medium are the ones that encourage maximum consumption (see also: the blockbuster, serialized comics / soaps, and cultural/authorial anonymity through “pop”) but that doesn’t actually change that this is a brilliantly evil game about your most addictive impulses as a player. After ante 8 every Balatro run ends the same way, so it becomes a quest for numbers in themselves, joy through getting one over on The Man while always operating within the easy, intuitive iconography of poker (even though this game has nothing to do with asymmetrical information or even really card counting). It’s more about like.. being ready to change plans at the drop of a hat, to identify and exploit asymmetries between the two verbs of gameplay, all while on top of the runaway train that is your already-built deck. I would imagine a fuckton of players ran flush decks on their first run and were stopped dead by a boss blind that nulls whichever suit you have most of, for example, and early losses like these are what teach you how important it is to hedge bets. I personally really liked this aspect! - too many roguelikes become bound by the strength of their synergies, but in Balatro it’s less about having one goated hand you’re always hunting than maintaining a calculated redundancy while still keeping up with the power creep. It’s that aspect that separates it from the many other games I’ve played, and what I think makes it more worthwhile than a slot machine or whatever. Like there are situations you can get into that feel absolutely hopeless, where you know the run is lost with like three hands to be played, and that absolute commitment to letting you reap what you sow is so refreshing. Every time you start a run it’s very bluntly asking you, how do you want to wipe out this time? And every time you choose your deck and ante up and go, "nah i’d win", and lose.

After Fear & Hunger peaked my interest and watching videos and reading stuff about it , starting to play it full of confidence and thinking that I’d know how to play around its trickery a lil’ bit, only for a malformed Guard to cut my arm off and beat me up till I had no health left, waking up right after without either of my legs and bleeding, surrounded by bodies and gore from which I had to claw and crawl my way out off, trying desperately to find an exit and ending up yet another enemy who promptly took away the only health point I had left, and just when I thought I had finally died for real this time, I woke up once again, and was able to witness how said enemy did something I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t even lay on text on here, watched as the world faded away on those last moments of struggle… that was easily one of the most grotesque, vile yet humbling moments a game ever made me feel.

A feeling that is not mere terror and borders true helplessness, a fate brought by chance and my own hubris, the single best and worst fucking way the game could introduce itself. The Gods are too far away to hear your prayers asking for this madness to stop, but maybe that’s a good thing… maybe a worse fate would await you if they were able to hear them.

The dungeons of Fear and Hunger occupy a space that fascinate me, and it’s kinda funny how that’s a statement that serves well for both the context and lore of the game’s world and outside of it; at its more distilled, Fear & Hunger seems something that The Simpsons or Pen & Teller would have made to parody violence in videogames back in the 90s, it’s a collection of every possible vile or grotesque thing mashed together in a festival of cruelty and pain to such an extreme that should by any means be comical. I don’t blame anyone that hasn’t interacted with the game to only see it at that, when a game starts with a content warning such as this and it’s quite literally called Fear & Hunger, it’s easy to assume that this is gonna be some Itchy and Scratchy shit.

If Fear & Hunger was entirely about that, horrid stuff just for the sake of making people point at the screen in disgust or being cruel to ‘cause pain in the player just because, I do not think it would have garnered the following it has all these years later, it wouldn’t have grabbed me like a leech grabs to a host, that’s for sure. It still can seem a bit silly or ‘’too much’’ a few times, like when you encounter an amalgamation of human flesh and minds and it ends up speaking in the foulest yet most casual mouth you can think off, but I honestly could see those moments being done as such completely purpose, as a small acknowledgement of just how exaggerated this setting can feel at first, or maybe they are just a twisted way to have a little bit of a laugh, ‘cause believe me… there ain’t much to smile at otherwise.

The dungeon seems to have something that calls people —in this case something completely opposite to the game itself—, whether is just the impulse to try it out for yourself to wanting to explore every single part of the accursed catacombs, and when I first played the game back in October of last year… I really couldn’t see why. I could see quality, no doubt about it, but with every turn and step, I could almost feel the game physically rejecting me: being mauled by bogs, getting infected after stepping on a fucking nail and dying because of it, having and undesirable encounter with the Cavemother when arriving at the mines, losing a leg or both because I took a plunge I really shouldn’t have, or that series of, let’s just say, catastrophic events I mentioned at the beginning. Every time I loaded the save, every passing moment, every single hurdle I overcame only to always be met with another that felt even major, I always saw the intent behind it, but I never felt the satisfaction of learning it and gaining the knowledge that comes with it, it only felt like I was being kicked down a stair-case that only got deeper and deeper. I ultimately stopped playing, but I was not free of the dungeon, there was something here that, even tho I didn’t quite understand, kept me thinking about it.

And after months, I couldn’t take it anymore, I caved in, I returned to the dungeon of Fear and Hunger, and this time… well, I actually think it’d be better to say this if I use another example:

After what will be a incredibly high and grueling number of deaths and finally overcoming the upper levels of the dungeon with its Guard and flying Gnome infested halls and torture chambers, and unless you find the Thicket on your first go, you’ll most likely pull the lever you’ll encounter in one of the many rooms, which will grant you access to the elevator that will lead you to the next area… the mines. The mines are the break it or make it point for many players, and in my case, they completely broke me; not because of a certain Crow headed enemy which can break your bones and blind you or the ghost enemies you can’t even hit if you don’t have any cursed weapons or magic, those are bad, yes… But they are not the Yellow Mages. Before this point, the ways you could damaged without engaging into combat ranged from being shot with a bow or stepping on a nail, annoying and potentially mortal, but nothing too dangerous if you know what you are doing, the Yellow Mages then take this and the proceed to take it to fucko-levels. Being able to cast a spell in the overworld which, if you are close enough time or take you by surprise, will make you lose an entire limb, get hit 4 times? You lose all of them. No matter what I did, no matter what I tried, because I always arrived to them really hurt or without a companion, I either died on the overworld, or got killed by them while in combat. I felt powerless and defeated, it didn’t simply feel cruel or hard, it felt like it was a fight I didn’t even had a chance of winning ever. That was where I initially stopped playing, that was where my story with the dungeons first ended, and I look back upon it I only think of stress, fear, and frustration, a mixture of feelings I wanted anything but to experience again… who would have thought that I actually never would, even when coming back.

When I finally returned, something had… changed, not with the game itself of course, bit still, it felt different, I still picked Outlander as my starting class since I really like the survival options it gives and the amazing attack stat, I even picked the same options and the introduction since I wanted to start off with something familiar, but even tho it was the exact same, even tho the dungeon was still the same aside of some layout changes that can happen in certain areas every time you start a new run… it felt different. Maybe I went in with a different mind-set, or maybe it was the fact I already had experience from that past playthrough, but despite the fact I was still dying, despite the many errors and mistake I was making and the punishment the game was putting me through just like it did months ago… it all clicked. I was trying far more stuff, the game wasn’t just a puzlle that consisted on either fighter or evading enemies, it felt much more; the world of Fear and Hunger is as integral as the action in the battles, if not more, and gaining knowledge through books, setting traps for enemies, or even just learning how to get enemies’ souls and upgrading yourself with them, little steps that came with pain and challenges, but also with an enormous satisfaction. I’d die and have to repeat all the process over and over again, but each time faster, more efficient, even when something changed, it wasn’t mere trial and error, it was a continuous experimentation that made going from dark rooms to the deepest of chasms daunting yet worth it.

I learnt and discovered strategies to efficiently take care of the guards, how red and explosive vials can be tools for opening paths and locks but also amazing items to get out to sticky situations, I tried and experimented talking to enemies which even when it most cases didn’t led to much, in others meant basically winning the entire battle or getting an item, I even got an ability which turned the bow, a weapon that isn’t actually that great in direct conflict considering is a two-handed weapon, into something hat can one shot practically every single normal enemy outside of battle. Death at the hands of a boss or the Crowmawler never stopped feeling like a looming threat, but this time it was one that could be overcome, thanks to help of allies as well as the items you can get by defeating them, especially the boss souls. But no moment, no boss defeat, no Crowmawler kill, no item requirement felt as exciting and rewarding as going back to the Yellow Mages, saying ‘’fuck it, we ball’’, trying a new plan and it actually working, making them completely unable to cast spells in battle, and after talking to them in battle, getting an item that an help you recruit a character that not only is a strong spellcaster, but also immortal, AND THEN for him to help you through a certain part of a later area, helping you discover a laboratory that gives you a way to progress without sacrificing any party members, but also that holds one of the most powerful spears in the entire game. Fear & Hunger? More like Hopes & Dreams, because we ridin’ alive out of this one!

It's honestly fucking insane, I don’t think I could put it any other way; I really didn’t have to me an active change to the way I interacted with this experience, and yet through its punishing but constant learning curve, the never ending systems that flow into one another and give so much freedom I’m convinced 90 percent of stuff I did could have been accomplished through other means, everything about Fear & Hunger feels so impossible to describe, once you fully engage with it, not because everything in it is completely original or earth-shattering, but because how immense it feels in spite of how small the dungeon is in reality.

You never achieve a point where you are an unstoppable machine, you can be more of less comfortable with your build and party, but the menace of… you know, dying, never stops being there, your fate can always depend on a coin-toss, after all. I think that the best way to say It is that I’m glad the game is the way it is, a world where luck is a prominent factor, where you can never interact with all of it fully and where a single, tiny mistake result in permanent crippling, hell, even tho I overcame the Mages, I also lost a leg to one of them, making it so I couldn’t run for the rest of the run, one last parting reminder of what I managed to win against, but also of how another mistake like that would spell literal disaster. Yet another way for the game to punish me, yet another way to laugh at it when I triumph despite it all, if you could consider any of this ‘’triumph’’.
Fear & Hunger’s sheer madness and punishments wouldn’t be what they are if it wasn’t because of its world, a world I can’t call alive, not because it doesn’t feel like it, but because it reeks of everything foul thing imaginable. Hell, at times you can be the foul thing, I had to attack an entire village ‘cause I made an accident and fucked up! It fucking sucked and I felt so terrible about it to the point of contemplating trying to load a past save? You bet I did! You are told many times that the dungeon is a horrible place, but no words truly do it justice; it gets worse as you delve deeper, and deeper it delves, to the point of questioning what’s the logic behind this walls, if none. Wretched beings brough by desperation or corruption, fauna perverted by the darkness trying to survive, cults that serve different old gods but share the same madness, and a story of fellowships both in the past and present, all searching something in the dungeon, be it someone, something, desire, or godhood. Fear & Hunger doesn’t have much narrative, the one present being defined and individual to each of the characters, but the story behind and in it is so fascinating to learn about and so horrifying to truly understand that gives so much more force to said individual narratives and a killer fantasy setting.

There are so many reasons the dungeon calls to so many, but I think it all comes down to the experience itself, the idea of finding something you shouldn’t, of continuously experimenting and winning thanks to it, of trying to about starvation and madness by all means and only grabbing onto it by the tip of your fingers, and the idea that every run can go differently not so much because of the random items (tho thank All-Mer for the ones that always are on the same place no matter what) but by decisions you take, the path you decide to go down from, the enemies you face or ignore, the friends or enemies you make. When arriving at the city of M'habre, which has to be my favorite section in the whole game, you could theoretically skip all of it if you killed the other playable characters as Knight or used a ton of Empty Scrolls. You can basically skip three whole major boss fights if you really want to. The fact that’s even a possibility shatters my feeble mind more than spamming Black Orb.

If anything, Fear & Hunger biggest problem isn’t something related to the game itself… it’s how fucking broken it is. I swear the code must have been written on a scroll or something, ‘cause the amount of bugs and glitches is… not really immense, but they a constant and some can even break the game completely, getting you stuck in certain sections or one entire area before the final bosses of ending A and B being completely broken, and in one in particular made me receive that Yellow Mage attack constantly, which honestly may seem poetic, but it made me look an entire hour for solutions, and I ended up having to repeat the whole thing while praying it didn’t happen again. If by any chance what I’ve said about the game has caught your eye and want to give it a shot, by any means, do, but please, install one of the many bug fix patched made by fand (some also include censor mods which is also pretty cool), I should have done it and makes things much better, butt he fact the game still has some of these is infuriating. Getting soft locked isn’t the same type of cruel that the rest of the game goes for, it’s just fucking annoying.

The adventure that awaits everyone in Fear & Hunger is always terrifying, it’s always a race against time and insanity, always a test in resource management and decision making… but it’s also always different, maybe sometimes in the smallest of ways, but that makes an impact, nonetheless. The dungeon forces its players are forced to get creative through sheer cruelty, but it makes those moments of glimmering light the more valuable; even when there are no happy endings at the end of the line, most come down to a simple question; will you let the dungeon change you? Or will you be the one to change the dungeon? Fear & Hunger I can’t recommend like others, if you weren’t interested by it or its premise really irks you, then I don’t think most if the things I said will make you change your mind, and that’s totally fine! I just wanted to tell of my experience with it, what I learnt, what it made me feels, and how it’s much more than it seems, and despite the pain it can induce, travelling into the unknown comes with risks, so part of the course…

After getting endings A, B, D and E, I can say that I have learnt something for sure… Gods are REALLY weak to poison, which hey, kinda nice kowing I can stop an eldritch abomination with a lil’ bit of insecticide!

Look, I don't care if it's juvenile. Monster trucks are fuckin' cool. The sheer concept of a colossal vehicle built to literally crush other cars underneath it's gargantuan wheels fills me with delight, and not only can you play as one in this, but there's also a mechanic where if you run into another car from behind you'll drive over them and get a speed boost. This effectively makes the monster trucks in Off-Road Challenge the racing game equivalent of a grappler, and that's the sickest crap ever.

If that doesn't convince you, then how about watching an AI car drive into a passing by train and have the train be the loser in the exchange and explode into pieces? That sight left more of a mark on me than any racing sim this past decade I tells ya, and every time you set a record you're given a compliment and told "you're hot". Thank you Ms. Challenge! Midway arcade racers always got my back.

IGN: "oh oooh! the frame rate!"

gives IGN a swirly and steals their underpants

started to see the vision once I realized the grab (your only verb outside of jumping) gives you i-frames when you bounce off of whatever you're grabbing... pretty cool wrinkle on an otherwise plain set of mechanics. a lot of the game is carried by the dense mix of geometric terrain and organic outgrowths a la sonic; it's no surprise that much of this team got rolled into sonic team for NiGHTS into dreams the year after. said team really demonstrates their technical aptitude as well, with some stunning overlapping parallax on stages such as planet automaton and swirling line scrolling in the background of the itamor lunch fight. ristar emotes fluidly, with his walking scowl morphing into a grin and twirl upon defeating hard enemies. occasionally he'll even show a penchant for childlike play, such as in this snowball fight setpiece.

a first impression yields something a little dry on the gameplay front, with single-hit enemies and slow movement compounding into something more leisurely than interesting. thankfully around the halfway point the design veers into level-unique puzzles and setpieces. the one that stuck out to me the most was a series of areas in planet 4 involving babysitting this radio(?) item across various hazards in order to give to various birds who want them blocking your way. presages a klonoa style of puzzles built from manipulating objects in the environment rather than working with pre-defined aspects of the player's toolkit. near the end the game veers into some execution challenges as well, with mixed results. ristar's grab actually has a lot more going on to meets the eye: not only does he have the aforementioned i-frames, but he also gains a bit of height off his bounce, and he can hold onto some interactables indefinitely, swinging back and forth using his arms as a tether. the former gets used for a couple climbing challenges jumping between walls and swinging poles, which makes for some pleasant execution trials in the midst of the level-specific stuff. the latter never gets expanded on quite as much, probably because ristar maintains no momentum from his swinging when he releases due to bouncing back off of the fulcrum he's attached to, so actually manipulating the technique to achieve certain bounce angles is a bit unintuitive.

bosses are neat across the board; while somewhat cycle-based, the designers trickle a couple small points for attacking them before they're obviously wide-open. some of these (I'm thinking of specifically the bird boss on planet 4 and its array of non-linear projectiles) encourage the i-frame abuse in interesting ways. by the end of the game, however, it seems like they expect you to exploit it pretty openly to get anywhere, and by that point the bosses end up becoming grab spam. definitely makes the fights fly by quicker, but I find myself preferring the more cautious approach I took during the earlier bosses, although I would imagine upon a replay some of the same techniques apply.