dreki
13 reviews liked by dreki
Pikmin 4
2023
Quietly Nintendo’s most consistent franchise, every Pikmin game is terrific, and this one may be the best and most cohesively designed of all.
As you dig further into the enhanced mechanical expression, from the excellent Dandori battles, night missions, to the retained loveliness of the Pikmin formula, this is a treat on par with anything on the Switch.
Pikmin 4 is a beautiful iteration. All new features are magnificent quality of life ideas and the expansion of what Pikmin can be, and how it functions in a game design way, feels rich and expansive.
The worlds are more interesting than ever and the cave systems are the most fun I’ve had in any new game this year. Even when a setting is just playing directly into the tried-and-true Pikmin-specific abilities, it feels so great and refined at a systems-level, that everything you do in the game simply sparks a contented kind of joy.
Savor the beautiful simplicity of the strategy systems, because this series remains the most uniquely conceived strategy game of the last couple decades.
The Dandori segments truly leverage everything good about the Pikmin mechanics and represent the functional and multi-layered progression of these mechanics over time.
Pikmin just keeps getting better. And there seems to be an open invitation for even greater iteration in Pikmin 5. There’s a perfect game to make that simply refines and totally expands all the great ideas at the heart of this game.
Pikmin is back and you’ve gotta play it. Copy that.
As you dig further into the enhanced mechanical expression, from the excellent Dandori battles, night missions, to the retained loveliness of the Pikmin formula, this is a treat on par with anything on the Switch.
Pikmin 4 is a beautiful iteration. All new features are magnificent quality of life ideas and the expansion of what Pikmin can be, and how it functions in a game design way, feels rich and expansive.
The worlds are more interesting than ever and the cave systems are the most fun I’ve had in any new game this year. Even when a setting is just playing directly into the tried-and-true Pikmin-specific abilities, it feels so great and refined at a systems-level, that everything you do in the game simply sparks a contented kind of joy.
Savor the beautiful simplicity of the strategy systems, because this series remains the most uniquely conceived strategy game of the last couple decades.
The Dandori segments truly leverage everything good about the Pikmin mechanics and represent the functional and multi-layered progression of these mechanics over time.
Pikmin just keeps getting better. And there seems to be an open invitation for even greater iteration in Pikmin 5. There’s a perfect game to make that simply refines and totally expands all the great ideas at the heart of this game.
Pikmin is back and you’ve gotta play it. Copy that.
My House
2023
This review contains spoilers
Scrapped my first draft of this review. I’ve struggled to write about this game, so I’m not going to talk much about the game itself here.
I didn’t finish MyHouse.wad. I played up until the Poolrooms and I couldn’t figure out much else by myself afterwards (I finished the Nursery as well). I watched a playthrough that showed me what I’d missed: the gas station and, eventually, the beach.
It is technically impressive, as anyone familiar with Doom is quick to remind players, for its clever workarounds and wizardry; although it appears simple for someone unaccustomed to playing Doom .wads, there’s a lot happening underneath the surface which is undeniably interesting and very cool. Watch this video if you’re at all interested in the technological sorcery afoot.
The community reaction to MyHouse.wad was spectacular. Huge name streamers were quick to hop aboard the hype train. When John Romero himself streams your .wad, that’s how you know you’ve created something truly special.
For my two cents, I think MyHouse.wad is nothing if not creative, transformative, and complex. I also think that some pieces of the puzzle are cryptic to a fault. I don’t think all games are beholden to communicating everything to its players, and obviously the community-driven aspect of the game fueled weeks of fervent discussions surrounding it; still, solving a puzzle is one thing, unraveling the narrative another.
It is shocking, then, that the journal takes so much more from the narrative than it adds. Although it’s a handy clue book containing some hints as to progression, it essentially amounts to a creepypasta, and a generic one at that. I can’t really imagine anyone championing the MyHouse.wad journal as a triumph in video game storytelling, or even regular storytelling for that matter. The original post sows more intrigue and reads as much more compelling in just a few paragraphs than the journal does in ten full pages.
To recap: MyHouse.wad is a tribute map to the creator’s friend who’d recently passed away, based on the map his late friend had originally started.
That hook is compelling enough on its own. The journal then removes any kind of ambiguity, veering into nightmares, dissociation, and an obsessive, unreliable narrator which casts doubt on this narrative anyways. Most egregious, however, is the insistence upon the blue text, which is lifted wholesale from House of Leaves. Stuff like this normally wouldn’t bother me, but here it takes an element of the work which was already implicit throughout and puts a blindingly bright spotlight on it (even the Navidson Realty sign in the bad ending was a little too on-the-nose).
Major spoilers for House of Leaves incoming – I’d turn back if you haven’t read.
It took me out of it. I’ve read House of Leaves, man. I have a deeply personal attachment to House of Leaves. It was a gift from an ex-partner. I read it exclusively in my parents' bedroom around sunset. I finished it during the pandemic and it hurt me profoundly. I also don’t think it’s an untouchable work of art above criticism. The amount of gratuitous sex scenes during Johnny’s sections are way too much (even if it has thematic relevance, which I know it does!! I read the book and I know it has thematic relevance!!) There is a part in House of Leaves that discusses Will Navidson winning a Pulitzer prize for a photo of a starving child. Observant readers may draw the connection between Navidson’s photo and the real-life Kevin Carter, who took an identical photo. However, most readers will probably not draw this connection right away, or at least not before the book itself makes the Kevin Carter connection explicit in a footnote – because Will Navidson isn’t real. He’s a character that exists only in the fiction of the Navidson Record, an account of a film that doesn’t exist, written by the late Zampanò, who is dead before the story even begins.
It’s easy to draw connections between House of Leaves and MyHouse.wad. The author, Veddge (or Steven Nelson) is an easy Johnny Truant analog. The creator’s late friend, Thomas Allord, is a dead ringer for Zampanò. Johnny aims to finish Zampanò's story as Veddge attempts to finish Thomas’ level, meanwhile the readers (or players) grow conspicuously wary of the author and their creative liberties – where exactly does the original incomplete work end, and where does the author’s influence begin?
This conundrum gets exacerbated tenfold by the end of House of Leaves, where Johnny’s story becomes an incomprehensible mess. Maybe none of it was real at all. On a metanarrative level, the entire book is fiction anyways, so of course none of it is actually real. The same paradox occurs in MyHouse.wad if you happen to find a certain QR code on a hidden tombstone. Steven Nelson didn’t survive a week without Thomas. That, of course, begs the question: who is Veddge actually?
If you dig, you’ll know that Veddge isn’t a greenhorn. He’s been on the Doomworld forums for a while. In the months leading up to MyHouse.wad, he’d been active on multiple off-topic forum discussions: “I haven’t logged into the forums in over a decade, but a close childhood friend of mine passed away recently and I decided to go through some of the Doom stuff we were making when we were kids.” So, the seeds are sown.
Reading a few of the later forum posts, Veddge also explores his malaise: “I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. For most of my life I could just put my head on my pillow and fall asleep, but lately I find myself lying in bed staring into the darkness. What’s the opposite of claustrophobia? I can’t explain it, but when the lights are out, I’m paralyzed by thoughts of emptiness while seemingly trapped in a void from which I will never escape.”
These forum posts are nothing if not an interesting extension of the narrative… that is, if they’re meant to be an extension of the narrative in the first place. I’d like to say that everything Veddge posted up to and including MyHouse.wad was a clever use of storytelling through forum posts – but what I haven’t mentioned was that, before he resurfaced in late 2022, the last time Veddge had used his account was in October 2006.
There’s no reason to think that Veddge wasn’t just revisiting his 15-year old account and having fun with a little roleplaying. But then the other day, while I was searching MyHouse.wad on Twitter (I refuse to call it X), I found something that actually shook me. A video taken inside of the actual house. Although this video was originally posted on Tiktok in May of this year, it seems to have been recorded around Christmas. There was something very unsettling about watching it. I certainly believed the house was based on somebody’s actual home, I just never expected to see it - even the painting was there.
What was even more unexpected was the additional context. This Tiktok user wasn’t the creator – rather, this was the creator’s previous partner. A throwaway question asked by one user read, “So does the house change like in the mod,” to which she replies, “No, but our marriage did. As our marriage fell apart, so did the house in the game”.
I realize now I dug too deep. I felt nauseous reading this. I felt nauseous typing this.
House of Leaves is full of mysteries, although I suppose the central question lies far beyond Johnny Truant or Zampanò – who themselves might be characters in a story, or… maybe not. I believe the real question is: what can even be considered real in House of Leaves? In a story that is consumed by another story, about someone that doesn’t even exist – did Zampanò see himself in Navidson? Or was Zampanò even real? Or was Johnny even real?
That maddening death spiral is at the center of House of Leaves, turning inwards, eating itself alive.
MyHouse.wad is not only an extension of these ideas, but an inversion. How much of this is actually fiction? Is this Tiktok user actually the creator’s ex-wife? Is this just another extension of the narrative? Did Veddge actually lose somebody close to him?
I can’t help but wonder (and the idea is morbid enough) if this game was the real product of profound sadness and grief for a loved one lost. If the creator had actually been recently bereaved, or that maybe the house itself was always a metaphor as the ex-wife had explained it – the same as in House of Leaves. Maybe Thomas was a stand-in for his wife, and the narrative that idea – losing a loved one, symbolically.
I don’t know. But I’ve felt that grief before. Sometimes all you can do is pour it into something. I am again reminded of when I read House of Leaves in my parents' bedroom. I am again reminded of that orange sunset pouring in through the curtains as daylight slowly slipped away. I am again reminded of people I will likely never see again.
I’ve given up on this critique because I’ve been here before, man. It hurts.
I am again reminded that happiness has to be fought for.
I didn’t finish MyHouse.wad. I played up until the Poolrooms and I couldn’t figure out much else by myself afterwards (I finished the Nursery as well). I watched a playthrough that showed me what I’d missed: the gas station and, eventually, the beach.
It is technically impressive, as anyone familiar with Doom is quick to remind players, for its clever workarounds and wizardry; although it appears simple for someone unaccustomed to playing Doom .wads, there’s a lot happening underneath the surface which is undeniably interesting and very cool. Watch this video if you’re at all interested in the technological sorcery afoot.
The community reaction to MyHouse.wad was spectacular. Huge name streamers were quick to hop aboard the hype train. When John Romero himself streams your .wad, that’s how you know you’ve created something truly special.
For my two cents, I think MyHouse.wad is nothing if not creative, transformative, and complex. I also think that some pieces of the puzzle are cryptic to a fault. I don’t think all games are beholden to communicating everything to its players, and obviously the community-driven aspect of the game fueled weeks of fervent discussions surrounding it; still, solving a puzzle is one thing, unraveling the narrative another.
It is shocking, then, that the journal takes so much more from the narrative than it adds. Although it’s a handy clue book containing some hints as to progression, it essentially amounts to a creepypasta, and a generic one at that. I can’t really imagine anyone championing the MyHouse.wad journal as a triumph in video game storytelling, or even regular storytelling for that matter. The original post sows more intrigue and reads as much more compelling in just a few paragraphs than the journal does in ten full pages.
To recap: MyHouse.wad is a tribute map to the creator’s friend who’d recently passed away, based on the map his late friend had originally started.
That hook is compelling enough on its own. The journal then removes any kind of ambiguity, veering into nightmares, dissociation, and an obsessive, unreliable narrator which casts doubt on this narrative anyways. Most egregious, however, is the insistence upon the blue text, which is lifted wholesale from House of Leaves. Stuff like this normally wouldn’t bother me, but here it takes an element of the work which was already implicit throughout and puts a blindingly bright spotlight on it (even the Navidson Realty sign in the bad ending was a little too on-the-nose).
Major spoilers for House of Leaves incoming – I’d turn back if you haven’t read.
It took me out of it. I’ve read House of Leaves, man. I have a deeply personal attachment to House of Leaves. It was a gift from an ex-partner. I read it exclusively in my parents' bedroom around sunset. I finished it during the pandemic and it hurt me profoundly. I also don’t think it’s an untouchable work of art above criticism. The amount of gratuitous sex scenes during Johnny’s sections are way too much (even if it has thematic relevance, which I know it does!! I read the book and I know it has thematic relevance!!) There is a part in House of Leaves that discusses Will Navidson winning a Pulitzer prize for a photo of a starving child. Observant readers may draw the connection between Navidson’s photo and the real-life Kevin Carter, who took an identical photo. However, most readers will probably not draw this connection right away, or at least not before the book itself makes the Kevin Carter connection explicit in a footnote – because Will Navidson isn’t real. He’s a character that exists only in the fiction of the Navidson Record, an account of a film that doesn’t exist, written by the late Zampanò, who is dead before the story even begins.
It’s easy to draw connections between House of Leaves and MyHouse.wad. The author, Veddge (or Steven Nelson) is an easy Johnny Truant analog. The creator’s late friend, Thomas Allord, is a dead ringer for Zampanò. Johnny aims to finish Zampanò's story as Veddge attempts to finish Thomas’ level, meanwhile the readers (or players) grow conspicuously wary of the author and their creative liberties – where exactly does the original incomplete work end, and where does the author’s influence begin?
This conundrum gets exacerbated tenfold by the end of House of Leaves, where Johnny’s story becomes an incomprehensible mess. Maybe none of it was real at all. On a metanarrative level, the entire book is fiction anyways, so of course none of it is actually real. The same paradox occurs in MyHouse.wad if you happen to find a certain QR code on a hidden tombstone. Steven Nelson didn’t survive a week without Thomas. That, of course, begs the question: who is Veddge actually?
If you dig, you’ll know that Veddge isn’t a greenhorn. He’s been on the Doomworld forums for a while. In the months leading up to MyHouse.wad, he’d been active on multiple off-topic forum discussions: “I haven’t logged into the forums in over a decade, but a close childhood friend of mine passed away recently and I decided to go through some of the Doom stuff we were making when we were kids.” So, the seeds are sown.
Reading a few of the later forum posts, Veddge also explores his malaise: “I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. For most of my life I could just put my head on my pillow and fall asleep, but lately I find myself lying in bed staring into the darkness. What’s the opposite of claustrophobia? I can’t explain it, but when the lights are out, I’m paralyzed by thoughts of emptiness while seemingly trapped in a void from which I will never escape.”
These forum posts are nothing if not an interesting extension of the narrative… that is, if they’re meant to be an extension of the narrative in the first place. I’d like to say that everything Veddge posted up to and including MyHouse.wad was a clever use of storytelling through forum posts – but what I haven’t mentioned was that, before he resurfaced in late 2022, the last time Veddge had used his account was in October 2006.
There’s no reason to think that Veddge wasn’t just revisiting his 15-year old account and having fun with a little roleplaying. But then the other day, while I was searching MyHouse.wad on Twitter (I refuse to call it X), I found something that actually shook me. A video taken inside of the actual house. Although this video was originally posted on Tiktok in May of this year, it seems to have been recorded around Christmas. There was something very unsettling about watching it. I certainly believed the house was based on somebody’s actual home, I just never expected to see it - even the painting was there.
What was even more unexpected was the additional context. This Tiktok user wasn’t the creator – rather, this was the creator’s previous partner. A throwaway question asked by one user read, “So does the house change like in the mod,” to which she replies, “No, but our marriage did. As our marriage fell apart, so did the house in the game”.
I realize now I dug too deep. I felt nauseous reading this. I felt nauseous typing this.
House of Leaves is full of mysteries, although I suppose the central question lies far beyond Johnny Truant or Zampanò – who themselves might be characters in a story, or… maybe not. I believe the real question is: what can even be considered real in House of Leaves? In a story that is consumed by another story, about someone that doesn’t even exist – did Zampanò see himself in Navidson? Or was Zampanò even real? Or was Johnny even real?
That maddening death spiral is at the center of House of Leaves, turning inwards, eating itself alive.
MyHouse.wad is not only an extension of these ideas, but an inversion. How much of this is actually fiction? Is this Tiktok user actually the creator’s ex-wife? Is this just another extension of the narrative? Did Veddge actually lose somebody close to him?
I can’t help but wonder (and the idea is morbid enough) if this game was the real product of profound sadness and grief for a loved one lost. If the creator had actually been recently bereaved, or that maybe the house itself was always a metaphor as the ex-wife had explained it – the same as in House of Leaves. Maybe Thomas was a stand-in for his wife, and the narrative that idea – losing a loved one, symbolically.
I don’t know. But I’ve felt that grief before. Sometimes all you can do is pour it into something. I am again reminded of when I read House of Leaves in my parents' bedroom. I am again reminded of that orange sunset pouring in through the curtains as daylight slowly slipped away. I am again reminded of people I will likely never see again.
I’ve given up on this critique because I’ve been here before, man. It hurts.
I am again reminded that happiness has to be fought for.
Every choice in designing Dark Souls is philosophical. The design choices are not typical game design choices. From Software worked like there was no roadmap to make a new game, like their history, bolstered by new ideas and depth of lore, were the only possible considerations in releasing a game against the stream of the market, that broke off and became its own tributary, sourced from a fountain of Original Influence that flowed back into games and changed everything they can be.
The first rule of Dark Souls is to unwrite these rules of games. It takes a bit of unlearning. Disengage from the systems-based, accessibility-focused ‘Quality of Life’ changes that have defined contemporary games, and discover a true link to a golden age of videogames that is more true to the medium and its possibilities than what anyone else is making.
There were so many times I gave in. When I finally embraced the game — not on my own terms and definitions of a successful play session, but on an ongoing experience of learning and meditation on the process of death — everything slid right into place.
I’m not a lore person. It does not interest me because I don’t care about the plots of modern fan service media. But Dark Souls is an exception and exceptional because it carves a lore out of so many things both inherently receivable in the design and through contextual osmosis and living in the world.
Because the game functions through constant repetition, we are then forced to consider the space. And the spaces, to my mind, are the most interesting in their linked level theory and interconnected worldbuilding, as any I’ve seen in a game.
It’s a masterclass in everything From can do. That there are so many imitations is both obvious and unfathomable. This is one of the greatest designs. Everyone should want to borrow it. This design is so specific From, nobody else will really get it right.
Any other outcome gets it wrong or tries too hard to get it right. Any process of streamlining ruins it. Any further obfuscation is… well, it would have to be intentional, because the game obtuse in such a directed way, that you cannot just do it again. You have to have the philosophy and then make the game around it.
Dark Souls raises a lot of conversations about difficulty. I can think of several moments where it goes too far. The demands of Ornstein & Smough are too rigid for the openness of the player story we tell ourselves when we play games, and especially this game. Likewise, the curses you can incur, as punishments in addition to death, feel artificial, much like a series of design choices where the prime option is really to run it through and disengage from the mechanics in an intentional way.
Likewise, the way we explore and navigate an environment is built out of intentionality. When we go on a run, if we’ve banked our points, reinforced our loadout, and settled our debts, does not always have to come with an expectation of winning. When you let go and let the game guide your sense of interest and discovery — something radically unique develops around it, led by player choice and expression of level design principles in that no one person will do every one thing in the same order.
Every run of one individual’s game, in fact, ought to have subtle differences. The great repetitions in these spaces of design are what convey the game’s meaning, because as we explore and iterate, we are so close to how games are made and their functional pieces, and yet every piece feels alien to game design standards, which have flattened out meaning and process in an effort to find audiences that play a game forever.
If you play and think about Dark Souls forever, and you will have to do one of those, then you have engaged beyond the interactivity of the text, which is straightforward, but deeper than many other games go.
Through extraordinary design decisions — bosses and themes out of the darkest fables — there is an altogether sense of cohesion. Even the parts that falter, stick to the philosophy of the design.
Most games would be sunk by the kind of ending spaces Dark Souls has. But it is such an odd thing, when these spaces are overfull of enemies and platforms like the Switch and those of the original releases just buckle under the weight of the code, that it produces another kind of joy. The weirder the choices the greater the squeeze, and the more compelling the player-base’s radical reinvention of the story, is.
And here we reach the final and most important point of Dark Souls’ success, it is a game where we tell our own stories that demands that we also tell them to others. If you play Dark Souls and do not talk to anyone about it, you have not completed the design for the player. It’s in implicit in the options: both to leave soapstones for messages and co-op, and the many hidden features and deep buried lore that rewards endless hours of investment.
Finally a game captures something like what the original Zelda did, where you just have to talk about it to understand how others approached it, and better understand yourself, but also that preliminary world of videogames to which this is the truest successor.
This is a classic to hold in the same regard as anything that has shaped the history of games. From the heights of the game and the terrific world designs of both the anti-game spaces and the very gamey ones, to the highly polished and included DLC spaces, all of it stays with you. And all of it has to be discussed.
When you fully invest in Dark Souls, you are being completely intentional about your relationship to how you play games. It can tell you so much more about yourself and what you think of it, also speaks to what you value and how you think about games.
All this makes it one of the greatest games I’ve played.
The first rule of Dark Souls is to unwrite these rules of games. It takes a bit of unlearning. Disengage from the systems-based, accessibility-focused ‘Quality of Life’ changes that have defined contemporary games, and discover a true link to a golden age of videogames that is more true to the medium and its possibilities than what anyone else is making.
There were so many times I gave in. When I finally embraced the game — not on my own terms and definitions of a successful play session, but on an ongoing experience of learning and meditation on the process of death — everything slid right into place.
I’m not a lore person. It does not interest me because I don’t care about the plots of modern fan service media. But Dark Souls is an exception and exceptional because it carves a lore out of so many things both inherently receivable in the design and through contextual osmosis and living in the world.
Because the game functions through constant repetition, we are then forced to consider the space. And the spaces, to my mind, are the most interesting in their linked level theory and interconnected worldbuilding, as any I’ve seen in a game.
It’s a masterclass in everything From can do. That there are so many imitations is both obvious and unfathomable. This is one of the greatest designs. Everyone should want to borrow it. This design is so specific From, nobody else will really get it right.
Any other outcome gets it wrong or tries too hard to get it right. Any process of streamlining ruins it. Any further obfuscation is… well, it would have to be intentional, because the game obtuse in such a directed way, that you cannot just do it again. You have to have the philosophy and then make the game around it.
Dark Souls raises a lot of conversations about difficulty. I can think of several moments where it goes too far. The demands of Ornstein & Smough are too rigid for the openness of the player story we tell ourselves when we play games, and especially this game. Likewise, the curses you can incur, as punishments in addition to death, feel artificial, much like a series of design choices where the prime option is really to run it through and disengage from the mechanics in an intentional way.
Likewise, the way we explore and navigate an environment is built out of intentionality. When we go on a run, if we’ve banked our points, reinforced our loadout, and settled our debts, does not always have to come with an expectation of winning. When you let go and let the game guide your sense of interest and discovery — something radically unique develops around it, led by player choice and expression of level design principles in that no one person will do every one thing in the same order.
Every run of one individual’s game, in fact, ought to have subtle differences. The great repetitions in these spaces of design are what convey the game’s meaning, because as we explore and iterate, we are so close to how games are made and their functional pieces, and yet every piece feels alien to game design standards, which have flattened out meaning and process in an effort to find audiences that play a game forever.
If you play and think about Dark Souls forever, and you will have to do one of those, then you have engaged beyond the interactivity of the text, which is straightforward, but deeper than many other games go.
Through extraordinary design decisions — bosses and themes out of the darkest fables — there is an altogether sense of cohesion. Even the parts that falter, stick to the philosophy of the design.
Most games would be sunk by the kind of ending spaces Dark Souls has. But it is such an odd thing, when these spaces are overfull of enemies and platforms like the Switch and those of the original releases just buckle under the weight of the code, that it produces another kind of joy. The weirder the choices the greater the squeeze, and the more compelling the player-base’s radical reinvention of the story, is.
And here we reach the final and most important point of Dark Souls’ success, it is a game where we tell our own stories that demands that we also tell them to others. If you play Dark Souls and do not talk to anyone about it, you have not completed the design for the player. It’s in implicit in the options: both to leave soapstones for messages and co-op, and the many hidden features and deep buried lore that rewards endless hours of investment.
Finally a game captures something like what the original Zelda did, where you just have to talk about it to understand how others approached it, and better understand yourself, but also that preliminary world of videogames to which this is the truest successor.
This is a classic to hold in the same regard as anything that has shaped the history of games. From the heights of the game and the terrific world designs of both the anti-game spaces and the very gamey ones, to the highly polished and included DLC spaces, all of it stays with you. And all of it has to be discussed.
When you fully invest in Dark Souls, you are being completely intentional about your relationship to how you play games. It can tell you so much more about yourself and what you think of it, also speaks to what you value and how you think about games.
All this makes it one of the greatest games I’ve played.
Resident Evil 2
2019
Capcom took a good game and made a great game. This goes beyond the call of an ordinary remake, reimagining the spaces and places of Resident Evil 2 into a slickened, very modern third-person shooter that keeps all of the working ideas about the game and makes the rest that much better.
This is a terrific reimagining, even tonally changing the story and delivery to create a more reasonable and consistent throughline for the character arcs. New rooms and items have also been expanded and the way the police station, underground, sewers, and labs have been created, it feels like a consistent wraparound space, truly interconnected, and not a series of static rooms and camera angles used to create impressions of dimensions and space.
The game runs like a dream now, taking an aging and archaic system of play and modernizing it so it would be agreeable to everyone. The key is that it is still very much about preservation but the game now feels well-balanced, whether or not you have stockpiled ammo and herbs.
It sells the big moments in the best way. The bits with Mr. X are tremendous and his path finding/warping logic through the level systems, is interesting. Likewise, the design feels more organic for the player, as the interaction with the spaces is squared off and the rough edges are sanded down, then brushed with a fine coat of polish to hold all the changes it.
The game feels great and makes an old design feel immediately relevant and new. It is with the same spark that REmake entered the conversation as the best-ever Resident Evil, that RE2make now levels up the original second game to be near the front of the pack.
Some old design decisions remain, both with charm and some repetition and necessary backtracking. You still need to switch your brain into a different mode to accomplish Resident Evil puzzles, which often require running between points of interest, juggling inventory management, and bringing key items back to the right spaces. That formula doesn’t always feel compelling but it’s also tremendous that they left it untouched. That was the right thing not to modernize, and so, they did literally everything else and left the mechanical framework in place. That’s a great compromise and the right one for the developers to make.
This is a terrific reimagining, even tonally changing the story and delivery to create a more reasonable and consistent throughline for the character arcs. New rooms and items have also been expanded and the way the police station, underground, sewers, and labs have been created, it feels like a consistent wraparound space, truly interconnected, and not a series of static rooms and camera angles used to create impressions of dimensions and space.
The game runs like a dream now, taking an aging and archaic system of play and modernizing it so it would be agreeable to everyone. The key is that it is still very much about preservation but the game now feels well-balanced, whether or not you have stockpiled ammo and herbs.
It sells the big moments in the best way. The bits with Mr. X are tremendous and his path finding/warping logic through the level systems, is interesting. Likewise, the design feels more organic for the player, as the interaction with the spaces is squared off and the rough edges are sanded down, then brushed with a fine coat of polish to hold all the changes it.
The game feels great and makes an old design feel immediately relevant and new. It is with the same spark that REmake entered the conversation as the best-ever Resident Evil, that RE2make now levels up the original second game to be near the front of the pack.
Some old design decisions remain, both with charm and some repetition and necessary backtracking. You still need to switch your brain into a different mode to accomplish Resident Evil puzzles, which often require running between points of interest, juggling inventory management, and bringing key items back to the right spaces. That formula doesn’t always feel compelling but it’s also tremendous that they left it untouched. That was the right thing not to modernize, and so, they did literally everything else and left the mechanical framework in place. That’s a great compromise and the right one for the developers to make.
Surpasses the original Kingdom Battle by the tacit assertion that this scale and these mechanics make better bedfellows. It’s such a nice pairing, having learnt from the original and pared the components down, Donkey Kong Adventure meanwhile opens up the strategy and movement around fields, albeit overpowering its central characters, proving out through a new campaign and even harder challenges that less is most certainly more. There are more of the iffy puzzles, like the original, but the non skippable ones are joyous and painless, and the kind that always seemed to halt progress in the original, now feel like extra work for extra rewards, a suitable compromise. The game also just looks great — the Mario + Rabbids style even more at home in the Donkey Kong world than in the Mushroom Kingdom. Perhaps one of the finest DLCs for a Non-Nintendo developed game on a Nintendo system, this is an essential have on the Switch, ironically even more so than the original game. It ought to be sold separately.
Redfall
2023
It feels like there’s something in Redfall, but there isn’t. Every session gives a glimpse until you get a clear view of something and realise it’s bad. It is just an empty, repetitive and deeply uninteresting experience.
The repeatable content loops make it playable, but within this nothing really stands out. The designs of interiors are cool. Places evoke stories more interesting than anything in the game’s conventional arcs. The map is cool looking and I liked seeing new sights, it’s just that there’s nothing to do in any of them that legitimises them. No divergence or room for player expression.
To an extent, certain systems have promise. Nothing compelling is built out of them or around them, though. Characters are limited, best described by others as a complete character split into four deficient options.
The repeatable content loops make it playable, but within this nothing really stands out. The designs of interiors are cool. Places evoke stories more interesting than anything in the game’s conventional arcs. The map is cool looking and I liked seeing new sights, it’s just that there’s nothing to do in any of them that legitimises them. No divergence or room for player expression.
To an extent, certain systems have promise. Nothing compelling is built out of them or around them, though. Characters are limited, best described by others as a complete character split into four deficient options.
Doom
2016
Doom. The name alone conjures a deep well of feelings about experiences had and what a Doom game should be. After many years without a major hit, id came out firing on all cylinders in 2016 with a BFG (Big Fucking Game), that redefined a new era of Doomer shooter, and reintroduced their brand of badass attitude-forward shooters as worthy successors of the most respected games in the whole darn genre.
You feel it right away in the Robocop-like intro, as Doomguy is brought back into this world, with an immediate context for action. Levels start very wide and horizontal, with great avenues for exploration and, surprisingly, good platforming, then as we rack up a remarkable arsenal, the game begins to funnel us down narrower paths built only for combat patterns.
We can read this design as inconsistent or as one build around our increasing context for battle. What matters is that it feels tremendous to exist in these physical spaces.
Everything you do has a fast and heavy weight to it. The new melee kills are well incorporated and feel of a part with Doom.
At best, like in the Foundry, we’re channeling Doom all the way. It’s rewarding to explore and find secrets and codex lore that is written as funny and knowing notes about the world.
The most important thing is the constant dopamine drip, how you sometimes find yourself full of absolute glee as you’re mowing down whole fields of demons, feeling both like the ultimate marine and like every action carries forward a deep-felt sense of immediacy and gravity.
There are things you don’t need to test today, like an unpopulated multiplayer and the slightly more interesting map maker. Taken just as a campaign, Doom 2016 is an extraordinary step forward that points to a radically different future for the shooter than what others were doing at the time.
Rip and tear.
You feel it right away in the Robocop-like intro, as Doomguy is brought back into this world, with an immediate context for action. Levels start very wide and horizontal, with great avenues for exploration and, surprisingly, good platforming, then as we rack up a remarkable arsenal, the game begins to funnel us down narrower paths built only for combat patterns.
We can read this design as inconsistent or as one build around our increasing context for battle. What matters is that it feels tremendous to exist in these physical spaces.
Everything you do has a fast and heavy weight to it. The new melee kills are well incorporated and feel of a part with Doom.
At best, like in the Foundry, we’re channeling Doom all the way. It’s rewarding to explore and find secrets and codex lore that is written as funny and knowing notes about the world.
The most important thing is the constant dopamine drip, how you sometimes find yourself full of absolute glee as you’re mowing down whole fields of demons, feeling both like the ultimate marine and like every action carries forward a deep-felt sense of immediacy and gravity.
There are things you don’t need to test today, like an unpopulated multiplayer and the slightly more interesting map maker. Taken just as a campaign, Doom 2016 is an extraordinary step forward that points to a radically different future for the shooter than what others were doing at the time.
Rip and tear.
Redfall
2023
Can a broken game ever be good? Not in the technical way that a faultless piece of coding can be good. Not in the usual way where the mere function of running game is the lowest expectation.
What if you take a trusted studio like Arcane and have them make someone else’s game and it is broken beyond belief? That gets more interesting.
It begins to channel different things, looter shooters before their primary development and social hooks were added. Something like RAGE, from Bethesda’s own catalogue, a neat idea with advanced textures that does come together despite id coding to the metal (they are not alike in this last way). And most clearly, it’s like Duke Nukem Forever, this instantly outdated pastiche of ideas that used to work that is thankless of the teams who have worked on it and for the players who play it.
There’s the stuff that has gone right, evidence that more things can go right. There are slices of worldbuilding which suggest an environment and beautiful places, that if stacked together as levels, would have their maximum impact. Instead, they are connected in two open world between vast quantities of empty spaces.
All the technical errors you have heard about are true. Every time you’re having fun with Redfall, it crashes. There is some fun, because Arkane are / were a deeply talented team of programmers that have made some defining games where you can path through them how you want to. There is no point here: you can go in guns blazing or the stealthy way and the same things will happen. Just don’t think about anything.
Just don’t think about how good it could have been, when you trace the edge of the map and there’s this gorgeous mountain of water suspended high in the air, or when you find a really cool multiplex with a fun mission in it, or find some really crunchy horror-themed shotguns.
Don’t think about what it would be like to play the multiplayer. The single player can hardly bare the weight of the game’s performance. Whole sections are so badly optimized the game becomes a total slideshow. Don’t worry that they didn’t design whole swaths of the game that seem like they ought to be designed.
Don’t worry because you’re in good hands with Arkane who make good games you don’t have to worry about. I remember now, that first E3 with Dishonored and how bright and happy the team was then. I think of them when I play Redfall now and hope they are still bright and happy, somewhere.
What if you take a trusted studio like Arcane and have them make someone else’s game and it is broken beyond belief? That gets more interesting.
It begins to channel different things, looter shooters before their primary development and social hooks were added. Something like RAGE, from Bethesda’s own catalogue, a neat idea with advanced textures that does come together despite id coding to the metal (they are not alike in this last way). And most clearly, it’s like Duke Nukem Forever, this instantly outdated pastiche of ideas that used to work that is thankless of the teams who have worked on it and for the players who play it.
There’s the stuff that has gone right, evidence that more things can go right. There are slices of worldbuilding which suggest an environment and beautiful places, that if stacked together as levels, would have their maximum impact. Instead, they are connected in two open world between vast quantities of empty spaces.
All the technical errors you have heard about are true. Every time you’re having fun with Redfall, it crashes. There is some fun, because Arkane are / were a deeply talented team of programmers that have made some defining games where you can path through them how you want to. There is no point here: you can go in guns blazing or the stealthy way and the same things will happen. Just don’t think about anything.
Just don’t think about how good it could have been, when you trace the edge of the map and there’s this gorgeous mountain of water suspended high in the air, or when you find a really cool multiplex with a fun mission in it, or find some really crunchy horror-themed shotguns.
Don’t think about what it would be like to play the multiplayer. The single player can hardly bare the weight of the game’s performance. Whole sections are so badly optimized the game becomes a total slideshow. Don’t worry that they didn’t design whole swaths of the game that seem like they ought to be designed.
Don’t worry because you’re in good hands with Arkane who make good games you don’t have to worry about. I remember now, that first E3 with Dishonored and how bright and happy the team was then. I think of them when I play Redfall now and hope they are still bright and happy, somewhere.
Two of the best platform-signifying games of the Game Boy Advance, are still two of the best strategy games yet made, with Intelligent Systems’ charming sprite-work cartoonized by WayForward.
Several Quality of Life changes make this an essential try even for series veterans. That enough has been changed, points to everything that has not been changed, and even new changes which newly get in the way. Some of the new unit visuals, which change based on faction, are hard to tell from other units, now, and the overall refresh to the style, while initially pleasing, is not as form-fitting for the grid-based movement and precision of the first two Advance Wars.
There are other caveats which are regular Nintendo caveats: there is multiplayer if you connect directly with a friend, but no open online lobbies or public play. There is a map creator but the sharing is even more limited than Mario Maker, you can only send your creations to a friend who plays the game (for me, one person), so that’s a creative dead-end for what remains a pretty clean-cut mapmaker (but still limited to one size, odd).
There are baked in things, that feel more urgent to address now. The animations for CO Powers, in particular, are very long. Some in-game days you’ll see as many as three powers, meaning you’re watching long cutscene animations you’ve seen many times and when you progress with more troops, those times get longer, as it must touch every unit the power has influenced. There are filters for other game-specific animations like capturing and watching the battles, so it’s hard to imagine this did not especially occur to anyone while reimplementing those.
What the style does do is scale pretty well and allow a more readable format that can now be zoomed way out using the stick. Good. There are also changes to scoring, making S-ranks relatively easy, and even some formal changes to how certain battles progress, specifically changing many of the fastest routed strategies you may be able to look up for some levels.
While on the whole it felt significantly easier, whether by age and growing a big brain or because they’ve really made certain missions more accessible… There is one mission that took me about six of my 55 hours to complete, which is an absurdity, when everything else was cleared in a few tries. There is maybe some imbalance and someone else may get hooked up somewhere else. I do feel some of the instinctive changes are not considered whole cloth for how they change the course of a battle.
This is a terrific value and two of the best games. Given the extra year of development due to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, it’s a major downer every rough edge wasn’t smoothed out, all the options expanded, and online worked on. There could be the definitive Advance Wars here, but you cannot really say that for either version, and this far on, you still need to play those original games — and if you love them — only then do you need to play these games.
Several Quality of Life changes make this an essential try even for series veterans. That enough has been changed, points to everything that has not been changed, and even new changes which newly get in the way. Some of the new unit visuals, which change based on faction, are hard to tell from other units, now, and the overall refresh to the style, while initially pleasing, is not as form-fitting for the grid-based movement and precision of the first two Advance Wars.
There are other caveats which are regular Nintendo caveats: there is multiplayer if you connect directly with a friend, but no open online lobbies or public play. There is a map creator but the sharing is even more limited than Mario Maker, you can only send your creations to a friend who plays the game (for me, one person), so that’s a creative dead-end for what remains a pretty clean-cut mapmaker (but still limited to one size, odd).
There are baked in things, that feel more urgent to address now. The animations for CO Powers, in particular, are very long. Some in-game days you’ll see as many as three powers, meaning you’re watching long cutscene animations you’ve seen many times and when you progress with more troops, those times get longer, as it must touch every unit the power has influenced. There are filters for other game-specific animations like capturing and watching the battles, so it’s hard to imagine this did not especially occur to anyone while reimplementing those.
What the style does do is scale pretty well and allow a more readable format that can now be zoomed way out using the stick. Good. There are also changes to scoring, making S-ranks relatively easy, and even some formal changes to how certain battles progress, specifically changing many of the fastest routed strategies you may be able to look up for some levels.
While on the whole it felt significantly easier, whether by age and growing a big brain or because they’ve really made certain missions more accessible… There is one mission that took me about six of my 55 hours to complete, which is an absurdity, when everything else was cleared in a few tries. There is maybe some imbalance and someone else may get hooked up somewhere else. I do feel some of the instinctive changes are not considered whole cloth for how they change the course of a battle.
This is a terrific value and two of the best games. Given the extra year of development due to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, it’s a major downer every rough edge wasn’t smoothed out, all the options expanded, and online worked on. There could be the definitive Advance Wars here, but you cannot really say that for either version, and this far on, you still need to play those original games — and if you love them — only then do you need to play these games.
PowerWash Simulator
2021
More than a shared chore, PowerWash Simulator became a great bonding game between my wife and I. We shared the game as though it were a background to our best and most personal conversations of the last several months. While we played the single player mode, it was a great practice of marital cooperation and rivalry, as we’d often critique each other’s very different approaches and preferred methods. The game offered us so much space, unstressed by its demands of the user to just clean on their time, it suited our life better than most games have. And experientially, it sits so close to all our best talks as of late, a meditative piece of couple’s therapy in one way.