Half a star for Lucius himself being pretty fucking cool but that's cancelled out instantly by the constant bigotry. The black guy gets the most brutal and detailed death. A maid is consistently referred to as "the latina maid". A fat woman is constantly demanding more food. You take photos of a maid getting fucked doggystyle. You peep on that same maid in the bath later on. Also, every single woman just has her panties sitting somewhere and you can pick them up. Why? No fucking reason! It genuinely reminded me of the Half-Life 2 Cinematic Mod and how Alyx just has a giant dildo on display in that. The cutscenes are just horrid too and the puzzles could be solved by a fetus that's still attached to the umbilical cord. Despite being as simple as it is, it manages to also be buggy as all hell. They decided to have some combat in this and yeah its about as dull as you'd expect. I wanted to check out the sequels because, again, I think Lucius himself is really fucking cool. Then I read about how the third game has KKK members lynching a black man and yeah, that's where I check the fuck out. Fuck this series.

I played both prior Dragon Age games in a binge that has stopped dead in its tracks due to this game.

smug 2009 atheists should be punched in the face before they're allowed to write narratives that centrally explore themes of faith, because they cannot fucking approach the topic with any empathy and it massively defangs their critique. DAI being from the perspective of a literal inquisition but having no coherent ideology behind it and not actually being founded in any religion is so craven, they deny themselves the ability to meaningfully critique these structures by never stepping inside them and this profound inability to even try to understand the religious mindset and its decisionmaking while simultaneously making it a large narrative component is continually the worst part of dragon age as a series. truly baffling that they play into it harder and harder with each successive game

if this first act was you being like an anti-rift militia and trying to manage the complexity of operating on both sides of a border that was hotly contested within most people's lifetimes, and as you pick up steam you eventually discover records of the ancient inquisition and take up its mantle that could be, like, a story! but no, instead the cool-down section after the obligatory stupid action setpiece tutorial has you immediately fucking start the inquisition, which is insane, that feels like an end of act 1 thing where the world opens up. as a result there's no weight to it, it doesn't make sense and doesn't fit any coherent expectation of what an inquisition is, and it muddles the shit out of everything from the start.

this is an agnostic-atheistic politics-free inquisition with no authorization by any political or religious athority performed in the style of a syncretized cult from a millennium ago, which makes about as much sense as disgruntled knights during the hundred years' war converting to zoroastrarianism because their lords aren't doing shit to help their countrymen. except zoroastrarianism still has a coherent ideology and set of strictures behind it.

there's no sense of place to Haven by the time you leave it behind for the hinterlands, the only way you'd know where it's at is by implication of the world map and if you recall loghain's descriptions of war with orlais back in origins. the town has no history, has no culture, has no attachment to the player past a bunch of MMO questgivers and menus. awakening does so much more with so much less of import within minutes of its opening action sequence and its aftermath.

cullen leads your troops and queen anora handpicked the quartermaster to help with the inquisition, despite the inquisition having been founded approx. 30 seconds before you visit, how the hell do the orlesian politicians not see the massive amount of fereldans who were teleported into the inquisition's ranks as they operate directly on the state border and perform extrajudicial killings of templars and not see that as an insanely partisan threat to their security? how are they STILL doing the "both sides bad" thing for their stupid fucking templar/mage conflict? how do they manage to have you fight both groups in the same encounter but not actually design encounters around these multiple enemy types, they just spawn in a wave of templars then a wave of mages? why did the time to decompress not give me any fucking time at all to meet the cast and get to know how they tick? i still have no reason to give a shit about solas other than his deeply unnerving design

bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and it makes me wish i'd never given these games a shot. no game in this series ever approaches its potential and they are all fundamentally compromised products. dragon age origins has constant bleeding chunks of its world be stitched back, gangrenous, via abhorrent 2009 DLC practices. dragon age 2 is completely unfinished, a vastly superior game when you skip all combat with the press of a button. and inquisition reeks of the same shit i see in every other frostbite-era bioware game: two years of prototyping and engine dev that led nowhere, followed by 18 months of crunch where nothing comes out in any sort of way that people are proud of. i fucking hate this company dude

Okay, hear me out on this, buuuuut... this game kind of fucking kicks ass? As the many upgrades make the game itself more complex, so too does the lore surrounding your empire. In the beginning, you've just got some cursors, some grandmas, some farms, maybe a few mines. By the end game, you have genetic fucking clones of yourself making cookies. God damn floating giant brains in space who are so intelligent that they conjure cookies into existence with a thought. You go to parallel universes, steal their shit, and use it to make cookies. It's complete and utter madness. And yet, its not just a funny "hehe haha isn't this so whacky?" game. There is some genuine criticism of capitalism here. See, there isn't actually any reason to bake the cookies. Seriously. You bake cookies to get cookies to get upgrades that helps you make even more cookies faster. There is no outstanding goal outside of just more, more, more, more, more, more. You're filling a cup that will never be full. You want to see the number go higher and higher but there isn't really any point in it doing so. And yet... it feels so good. It just feels good to see that number go up. And since we get to sit back in our chairs and pull the strings of this ridiculous little cookie obsessed universe, we are completely disconnected from the consequences of our number going up. Unless, of course, you choose to pay attention. The news will often give flavor text that is relevant to your actions. This can range from "everyone loves your cookies!" to "a cookie mine collapsed and killed 17 people". Even an apocalyptic event where your grandmas become eldritch abominations is simply a new mechanic for earning cookies. Its kind of spooky at first, but then it just becomes another normal part of the gameplay loop. Again, when you are disconnected from the consequences of your actions due to your position of priviledge and power, you have no reason to care about people. I'm not sure what else to say, but I'm going to quote one bit of flavor text for one of the many, many, MANY upgrades in the game:

"You started this whole cookie venture on the simple kitchen counters of your own home. Your industrial and research facilities, sadly, have long since outgrown the confines of the little house, but you always knew it was still in there, buried somewhere. With a targeted portal, you could, conceivably, pay it a little visit for old times' sake..."

Lil' Guardsman is a fun puzzle/adventure game that has wonderful and whimsical artwork which does a grand job at hiding the game's serious nature that it has sometimes!

Your guard shifts let you interact with a variety of characters who present different challenges with the tools given to you as a Guardsman. You can give them truth spray to get informed of their true intentions, a x-ray machine or metal detector to see if they have anything suspicious on them, or you can also use a whip if you'd like! Because why not! These all present different options of ways to achieve a 3 or 4-star rating for that specific guest, which is fun. Sometimes, the way you achieve those 3 or 4 stars is a bit confusing though.

Your character, Lil, is a 12-year old who does have some tough things going on, and some of that stuff gets discovered more as you go through the game which I am glad we got that type of character development as the game progressed.

Overall, Lil Guardsman is a jolly time and not too long! Not perfect in some ways, but still a fun time!

In late February, I left a review on this game. I didn't really get it. I wouldn't say I fully get it now either, but I have been thinking a lot about this game ever since then. That review kind of sucked, but I guess it's a snapshot of that moment in time, the immediate guttural reaction to a challenge like this game is. I acknowledged in that review that as a cis guy, this was a perspective that I was likely not going to fully understand. I do feel as though this game is somehow unreviewable. Maybe this review can be seen as more of a review of my now-deleted review. In that I described this work as "ineffectual". That feels strange to say. I think it being on a site like Backloggd where it's presented as the same sort of product that any other video game is, inclines one to view it as a product. It's art, but is it really fair for it to be judged in the same way that Baldur's Gate 3 is? That just feels off-base to me. For me to suggest that it is "ineffectual" is almost like saying that somebody is venting in an "ineffectual" way. You could say that I guess, but read the room man! Maybe that's fair game because it's released as a Twine game on itch.io, but that still doesn't quite sit well with me. I didn't even really know what Twine games were when I first played this! It looks like this is its own category of game, which is pretty cool. I think my unfamiliarity might have hampered my perception in some way. This is an earnest piece of writing. That's important.

The major takeaway that I got from this game upon first playing it is this acknowledgment that there aren't that many critically acclaimed girly/feminine games. That IS true. As a cis guy I think that's an important point that I hadn't really thought about before. I find this point to be even more poignant after seeing the release of Princess Peach Showtime, recently. Especially with how a lot of people seem to look at a game like that. An industry where everybody feels there are ample games made for people like them and by people like them is a better industry than where we are today.

I love mechanics in video games. I love how much there is going on in a game like Metal Gear Solid 2, that kind of nitty-gritty where there's detail pouring out of every button press, every possibility, every corner of whatever world you're in; in my mind that is some of the best of what video games have to offer as art. I think when first reading this, the frank style of writing made me feel as though I was somehow wrong for thinking that way, like I was being reprimanded as this silly guy gamer. But that's really a reactionary way of looking at it, I think. I don't think that's its purpose. In retrospect I think I was really thinking about it all wrong. I think my older review, and I suppose the divided reviews on this game on this site are a showcase in how a site like Backloggd can and does play a part in the way in which we perceive art. I honestly wonder, if I had found out about this game through a recommendation from a friend, or some other kind of website, would I have reacted to it the way that I had? In a place like this, a piece of writing can end up commodified, as just another product to review and rate, and because it has strong writing it must have some sort of finger-wagging point to say to any and all gamers that come across it. Though I often criticize reactionaries and their culture wars against art, this was a case where I found some other ways that somebody can get sucked into that. Even me. That's humbling, and it has profound meaning to how I engage with art going forward. I realize that it's something that was present with how I engaged with other perspectives in the past, too. I never really understood the whole "liminal space" thing that was popular online, and I don't think I engaged with those feelings in an empathetic way. This was meaningful, important reading for me to have had.

This writing is another perspective. The best thing you can hope for with something like this is that it'll make you think, or at least feel. If it's lucky, it may even change some minds, open up mental doors. Evidently, it's successful. Based on Princess' perspective shown here, I'd really like to check out her games.

Full review here: https://gameluster.com/botany-manor-review-a-garden-to-root-for/

There are times when I think Botany Manor asks too much of its players in terms of brainpower, and a few more hints and more easily manageable clues would have made a huge difference. However, I had an amazing time regardless learning about a litany of plants too fantastic to be real, and feeling the ultimate satisfaction of figuring out the solution and then executing it perfectly.

Botany Manor will be on Game Pass day one as well as for purchase, which is a huge get. Fans of escape room-like puzzles, gardening, and especially fans of both will no doubt fall in love with all the manor has to offer. The narrative is satisfying and paced extremely well, and I completed Botany Manor with a genuine smile on my face. And now, it is time to tend to my few real plants, and maybe try and replant those geraniums. After all, won’t it feel nice to help guide new life into this world?