Signalis has lived rent free in my head since the moment I started it. It is both a game I want to go on about endlessly, dissecting it's thousand details and it's lineage of inspiration - and a game that I think everyone should just straight up play for themselves. Brilliant in worldbuilding and aesthetics, strong puzzle-boxy game design ripped straight from Resi 1/2, Surrealism that both comes in spades and is perfectly balanced to keep you on your toes, and a story that slowly forces its way under your skin, unravelling in a manner that is currently living rent free in my head.

I would concede that Signalis appeals particularly to my sensibilities - theres a bit of the thing, bit of lynch, bit of alien, and a whole lot more. But it's reference and reverance is never out of line and never takes away from what's an insanely compelling experience. It is a game that uses the best of the past to set a baseline for a good horror game and set up the game language, only to twist the knife.

Its not flawless, but to even broach the flaws feels like doing a disservice. Like, there's little niggles with the difficulty, enemies, and one or two puzzles in retrospect. But Signalis is such a ridiculously compelling game that it never really matters, it was never something I was thinking about actually at the time. Only progressing onward, unpicking it's puzzle box levels and slowly unravelling it's story.

Easily game of the year, and one of the best horror games in a long, long time. This game made me buy a damn book, play it.

While exploring 2000s era titles to further build up my knowledge base, I stumbled upon Fragile Dreams, and something in my mind just clicked then. Normally I wouldn't have bothered, given the labeling of Fragile Dreams as a horror title, but I've dealt with and enjoyed my fair share of survival horror titles this year and it felt like a great opportunity to chase down this season. It's an interesting case because when I look back upon those comparisons, Fragile Dreams certainly has its resemblances, and yet presented itself as a great antithesis to the often stressful and terrifying survival horror titles I've played this year, like Silent Hill 3 and Condemned: Criminal Origins. For better or for worse, Fragile Dreams is less focused on being scary, and more focused on being haunting; after all, what could be more affecting than the nature of human drama itself?

In Fragile Dreams, you play as a 15 year old boy named Seto, set loose in a post apocalyptic landscape after his grandfather passes away in the prologue. After stumbling upon a letter written prior to his death urging Seto to set course for a "tall red tower" alongside a mysterious blue stone in an old locket, Seto fends off an ominous masked ghost, warning him that the end is nigh and resistance is futile. Regardless, he forges on and begins his journey across the ruined metropolis of Tokyo to scour for any remaining survivors through scores of angry and disturbed spirits, and begin to find his place amongst the remnants of civilization.

Putting things bluntly, I do think that there is a lot to be desired from the gameplay mechanically. The combat more or less boils down to quickly tapping the A button, and while there's supposed to be a specific rhythm to tap the A button to in order to execute the most powerful three swing combo for light melee attacks (blue -> yellow -> red), tapping too rapidly just executes a standard triple blue combo and tapping too slowly causes the 2nd attack to never come out and leave your character in a long vulnerability state. For what it's worth, I could never figure out the exact consistent timing to always get the powered up swing combo, though I never needed to; the quick triple blue swing was good enough at dispatching enemies, and sometimes the delay from the powered up triple swing would give enemies too much time to recover and they would simply disappear and reappear behind me, restarting the whole process. The movement's not the greatest either (there isn't even a run option), so dodging attacks usually consists of awkwardly stepping back and waiting for enemies to attack, or more hurriedly circling around your opponent with the Wii Remote pointed at the screen (otherwise, you slow to a tiptoe), and this does make combat a bit more tedious, especially when later enemies have poses that will outright block attacks, forcing you to wait around and dodge before they show their weakness. Adding onto that, the limited inventory further slows down the pace, because you'll constantly be collecting mystery pickups (in the form of valuables sold for currency, health pickups, weapons, or relics) and you can't dispose of mystery packages or shove them into your suitcase until you sit down at a campfire. You'll need to go to back to campfires quite often anyways, since weapons have pretty limited durability and again, you can't switch out weapons from the suitcase on the field. Since sitting down at a campfire has a pretty long animation and will respawn enemies, let's just say that you'll fighting a lot of enemies and spending a lot of time at the campfire, and as a result, become pretty overleveled to where most combat isn't too complicated, though rather rote. You get the idea; it's a somewhat drawn out gameplay loop that ultimately makes the game a bit too easy in my opinion.

Of particular mention are two moments in the late-game that are emblematic of excessively sluggish gameplay and unfortunately feel a bit out of place. Near the very end of the game, there's a forced stealth segment where you have to sneak past a room filled with motion sensors, and activating any of them will spawn a horde of androids that must be dispatched in order to reset the sequence again from the start of the room (leaving the room is not an option because setting off the sensors locks the door). It's further complicated because swinging your flashlight (aka the Wii Remote) counts as an action, most likely due to turning your character around slightly, and will set off the motion sensors; there's also a collectible in the motion sensor room that upon collection, will set off the motion sensors even if your character is not within their current cone(s) of detection. This unnecessary and singular stealth section is then followed by two boss battles against the final boss that are more or less the same ordeal; the boss is normally invincible to attacks and randomly switches between shooting globs of goo at you and deciding to become temporarily vulnerable, either from sudden electricity overload or after shooting three globs at a time that must be destroyed. It's a shame that the finale of the game is marred by these somewhat uninteractive sections that consist of a lot of waiting around more than anything.

Having said all that, Fragile Dreams' strengths lie not in the flawed and somewhat slow gameplay, but rather in the quality of its ideas that are presented. I'm a big fan of games that understand the system of which they're working with, and this fits neatly in that scope. Using the Wii Remote's emulated motion controls to handle the flashlight in tight, dimly lit corridors or quiescent and abandoned landscapes is phenomenal at building immersion. You can also hold up your Wiimote to your ear whenever you need a hint, and your companion will chat to you through the Wiimote speaker to offer some words of encouragement. In a similar vein, Fragile Dreams' utilization of the Wii Remote's speaker to hint at looming hostile spirits or provide echoes of distant characters to guide the player towards objectives is also a great implementation of sound design, forcing players to at least absorb every detail of the urban decay and reclaimed nature of the sprawling ruins. Honestly, wandering the abandoned vestiges of humanity has never felt quite so much like a mood.

More importantly, I think Fragile Dreams is a game that is not so much about answering, but asking questions. What does it mean to breathe? To feel? To live, to even exist? What does it mean to be human, and what brings us together as a species? And if you had one final day on this planet knowing you will be gone by tomorrow, what would you do in your fading hours? Scattered throughout the ends of the earth are the final proofs of those final moments in the form of their last possessions, and bringing them to the campfire will give you a slice of life of what happened and what they went through before they no longer were to be. Some are moments of levity and others are more melancholic moments of reflection, but nevertheless, they're moments that prove that they contributed something to this world. Silently sauntering through this forsaken world with your flashlight, taking note of every memory from a lost object or every scribbled message or graffiti-ed chalk drawing, I was constantly reminded that while even in the stillness of the earth, the echoes of the past kept breathing new life into a world where its prior inhabitants could never truly be forgotten; even in the depths of despair, there was still hope to be found and connections to be made.

So here I am again, at a bit of a standstill, yet not at all regretful in the slightest for my time spent. It'd be easy to write this off as another "style over substance" ambitious title that didn't quite make the spotlight, forever relegated as a hidden gem of the Wii. Yet, just like the communication that the game itself comments upon, Fragile Dreams is unmistakably human. It's imperfect in many ways and perhaps it'll never reach its full realized potential, but that's what makes it so compelling. Despite its often tedious gameplay, the whole is far greater than the sum of its design elements, and propel the game into something that seeks to be heard, to be known, and to be us. It's 100% not everyone's cup of tea due to its many faults, but if you're willing to put in the time, perhaps it'll move you beyond words... and ultimately, isn't that what makes us who we are?

In the spirit of the season, I've been dabbling with a few horror or horror inspired titles here and there, though it dawned on me that I'm not too familiar with Halloween themed games that aren't terrifying. Off the top of my head, there are the two Costume Quests, some cartoon franchises I've seen on Cartoon Network like Courage the Cowardly Dog, Scooby Doo, and the Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, and then I Spy Spooky Mansion? That said, my friend Bubbles and I were talking about the Gamecube library and how there were still a ton of obscure titles that we needed to dabble with, and Spirits & Spells (better known as Castleween in Europe) came up. So since I've been a bit crunched for time lately finishing up obligations and it's from my favorite era of gaming, I thought... why not?

I won't go too much into detail about the story, as it's mostly inconsequential; the gist of it is that you play as these two kids entering the world of the dead after their idiot friends got punked and had their souls taken away by the Boogeyman for visiting a haunted house in the woods. I really thought kids should know better by now, but I suppose there's some degree of plausible deniability involved. Anyways, the game stresses that you can only play as one kid at a time due to arbitrary entry limits, and you'll have to swap between the two as you go along. The girl, Alicia, is dressed as a witch and can throw her hat as an attack; she can also skate on ice and activate ice pumpkins to change the environment, and later on can charge to duck under obstacles and do a spinny hat attack around her. On the other hand, the boy, Greg, is dressed like a little devil, and has a pitchfork slash as an attack; he can jump through fire and later gains access to a super jump after charging and a ground slam.

What's more important is that this game is actually pretty challenging. I originally imagined that the game was going to be an open-world 3D platformer, but instead it's actually a very linear 3D platformer obstacle course in the vein of Crash Bandicoot, and there are tons of pits, traps, enemies, beams, all out to get your ass. Anything hostile that touches you will instantly end your life and send you back to the nearest checkpoint, as will using the wrong character for the wrong type of terrain (Greg will die from touching ice and Alicia will die from touching fire), which is not always obvious for reasons explained later. There's a lot of precision platforming as well, and there's little leeway in jumping and landing; you have to be very clearly above the platform when landing (i.e. no ledge grabbing or sliding above the lip), otherwise you will bump into the side and fall to your doom. Some enemies can be taken out, but a few (like the falling birds) cannot and have to be avoided entirely. This isn't an easy task either, because the limitations on the attacks & hitboxes become very obvious; Alicia cannot throw her hat while in midair while Greg's pitchfork slash appears to hit all around him but in fact does not cover behind him (so good luck fighting ghosts that chase you). And finally, there are fairies that you can collect as a "shield" to take a single hit for you, though many will require you to venture slightly out of the way into potentially more danger just to get them, and fairies will not prevent you from instantly dying when falling into pits or death water.

I'll quickly talk about the lives system and swapping system too as a minor gripe. The only collectibles in the game are hearts (extra lives), coins, and fairies. You can gain extra lives from collecting 100 coins or hearts that can either be hidden a little bit away from the path or directly in the obstacle course as a sort of reward, but you absolutely need coins nonetheless to gain extra swaps. That's because the amount of times you can swap per level is actually limited (something the game doesn't tell you) and you can only regain swaps from each additional checkpoint (+1 swap) and collecting enough coins (this figure I don't know unfortunately). So there is a chance that you can essentially get softlocked if you swap too much prematurely and get stuck on the wrong character when needing to traverse certain obstacles, and be forced to lose a life to teleport back to an old checkpoint and get your swaps back. Additionally, the "game over" state is kinda strange, because instead of resetting you from the beginning of the level with three lives like that of what you had when starting the game, it resets you from the beginning of the level with only one life. You actually have to exit out of the game, reload the save file, and then you'll be spawned back into the level you exited from with three lives to start. Not doing so means that you'll risk dying again from another obstacle; if you don't end up collecting any spare lives from there, you'll forfeit any checkpoint progress and still be locked into one life at the beginning of the level. I'm guessing this is just a developer oversight, but since this game can get quite tough, it's more likely to occur than you'd think.

Now, most of the above difficulty isn't too bad strictly speaking, but I do take particular issue with a couple of elements that bring the difficulty to levels of unfair in many instances: specifically, the camera. One of the classic rules of thumb for figuring out if something is a good 3D platformer or not is checking the efficacy of the camera and well, Castleween fails this test in every possible regard. I don't know how they did it, but in almost every instance of 3D platforming, they chose the worst fixed camera angle imaginable. When you need to move forward (i.e. into the screen), the camera is pointed straight at the ground, so the character is uncomfortably close to the top of the screen and you can't see what you're walking or jumping into. When you need to backtrack and move towards the screen, the camera is pointed upwards towards the sky, and so you can't see what's below you while jumping towards the foreground. And when you're moving from side to side (the 2.5D perspective), the camera will be pointed away from the intended direction of movement so you'll be constantly blind jumping across gaps. You often can't take your time with these jumps either, because this game sure loves its falling platforms that force you to react on the fly despite the horrid camera angles and narrow FOV lest you fall into the pit of doom. And as if that weren't bad enough, the game loves to drop frames whenever more than 3 moving elements on screen are present (that's actually both an exaggeration and not an exaggeration, this game has horrible performance) and it is very noticeable since the game is normally capped at 30 FPS. Oh, and the camera perspective will bob up and down when jumping across platforms going into/out of the screen or up/down cliffs, and it's very easy to get some degree of motion sickness when combined with the frame drops. Finally, the awkward camera angles make it quite difficult to perceive depth when jumping forward in the direction of into the screen, and I lost count of how many times I died from falling into pits due to unperceived platform ledges and misjudging the distance. All I'm saying is, I feel a bit bad complaining about Rayman 2's often horrible camera angles after this experience and I think I'll be a lot more forgiving of shaky and stiff camera handling going forward compared to the new rock bottom I think I've hit from playing this.

What else... the game's presentation is pretty typical for its time and has the usual blocky textures and jagged shadows, though it definitely hasn't aged as well graphically as many of its GC and PS2 peers. I do like the kitschy cartoony enemies and the exaggerated fantasy obstacle course hazards, though if I'm being real nitpicky, I could have used a few more swinging axes and lasers beams. The soundtrack is generally pleasant and hits the right tone of playful "spooky" tunes, though the actual loops are a bit short (maybe a few minutes long at most) and it's very noticeable when the loops end and begins anew abruptly throughout a level. It also doesn't help that some of the themes are reused, just as almost all of the levels appear twice, just with different and often tougher obstacles the second time. The exception to this is near the end, where a factory level is played in reverse while running away from a demon robot as a nice wrinkle to the formula. There are some mini-bosses but they're mostly just simple variations of dodging a close attack and then striking back until they die or activating pumpkins, and a couple of them appear twice (or more) as well with little variation. And finally, the 2nd to last level and the boss have no checkpoints, and take quite some time to complete with tons of hazards thrown in the way, so it's a bit of a grind memorizing all of the patterns and obstacles to get the "perfect" run to finish them cleanly.

I'd love to tell everyone that this is a great and unfairly maligned hidden gem perfect for this time of year, but unfortunately, I can't really think of any convincing reasons why anyone would want to play through this nowadays; if the intended audience was for kids, then why is the game so difficult? It took me a couple of days to get through this title that's really only just above two hours in a longplay, and I definitely can't see any kid wanting to spend hours grinding through the final two levels. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that the developer, Kalisto Entertainment, declared bankruptcy in 2002, shortly after releasing Spirits & Spells. Regardless, it was still an interesting product of its time and I'm always down to try wacky and more niche titles of this era, especially ones that Bubbles has played through. Hope you're doing well buddy, happy Halloween!

It's been a few days since I've finished my playthrough of Beyond Eyes, and I still don't exactly know how to put it into words. In a way, this is a good thing: an old tutor of mine once defined art as "something that you cannot properly describe with words," and I'd say this game absolutely fits the bill. Recontextualizing this in the scope of a lot of the games I've played and reviewed recently, here's my interpretation of that definition: a compelling artistic video game tells a story or evokes emotions that cannot be as effectively accomplished in any other medium, and once again, I'm forced to conclude that Beyond Eyes also matches up to scale here. Yet at the same time, I'm not sure if I found this game particularly fun or gripping to the point where I would recommend this without reservations to others, and it's this inner struggle that I've been dealing with that I will attempt to reconcile as I go along.

The story unfolds as one day, a girl named Rae is blinded from a fireworks accident and must now adapt to a much different way of life. Some time after this accident, she befriends a cat that she names Nani, and a winter later, Nani is nowhere to be found. Thus, she must now venture into the unknown (in many respects) to figure out what happened to her newest friend, focusing on not what she has lost, but what she can still gain.

Beyond Eyes could be described as an attempt to translate her experiences into a playable form, turning her necessity of relying upon her other senses (mainly through hearing, touching, and smelling) into what is essentially a walking simulator with some sparse interactions. As you slowly make your way through this blank canvas of a world, more and more details are "painted in" through the interactions of Rae's other senses, with obstacles often appearing quite suddenly as you walk around due to not having the ability of sight to spot the landscape from afar. By no means is this a 1 to 1 reproduction; you obviously can't reproduce smells and touching surfaces on a video game console or a PC, though it's nevertheless been transcribed in the form of colored lines (ex: a flowing yellow line for smell) for the player to imagine. At times, you'll need to use those context clues provided by those colored lines to interact with objects in the environment in a very careful and gentle way, such as when Rae must feel around to climb over shorter sections of a wooden fence or carefully dips her toe forward to avoid falling into a river when crossing on a series of stones.

I'm most likely not doing the gameplay description justice, because ultimately, I think this is a case where words fail to accurately describe the experience. Is it actually fun to plod around slowly while walls appear out of nowhere as if the game's got a draw distance of a foot? Perhaps not. Yet, it's the attention to detail that keeps me captivated here and from totally dismissing this as yet another unrealized art project. The creator of the game, Sharida Halatoe, once stated that the game's distinct watercolor-like artstyle is due to the visuals serving as a projection of Rae's imagination; she "sees" the world in this way because of what she's seen prior to blindness, like that of what she remembers from picture books. Because she doesn't have that ability anymore, her reliance upon sound means that she can perceive noisier objects, such as a bird chirping or a river flowing, from farther away until she can rely on smell or touch to pick out closer objects. It's why she "sees" the river from across the landscape, but the bridge isn't spawned until she's physically walking across it. This idea of challenging her perception is prevalent throughout the game's runtime as well, as the vision of what she hears and initially perceives some objects as are overwritten when she approaches closely enough; one instance of this occurs when Rae approaches what she thinks is a clothesline fluttering in the wind, but when she gets close enough, she realizes that it is in fact a scarecrow without a head with a crow perched on top. Certain elements of the unknown such as these also create fear in Rae's mind and takes a "true identity" of its own through thick inky lines and eerie, discordant tones, draining the coloring book of its vibrancy; it'd be easy to write this off as adding elements of atmospheric tension to the gameplay, but I see it as another illustration of how the blind perceive the world around them. There's a lot of attention to detail in attempting to communicate this different way of life, and I would be a fool to disregard that.

Perhaps the game's artistic merit is best highlighted in Chapter 5, where Rae must make her way through an intensifying storm across a pier towards cat noises that she heard at the very start. It's easily the most challenging part of the game, as you must slowly navigate across a gradually spawning wooden platform across the perceived ocean with few landmarks recognized, with even these few landmarks and previous ground covered "erased" by the sound of the pouring rain washing away any scents beside the sea. Again, is it particularly fun getting lost in a seemingly endless white room with only your immediate surroundings and memory to go off of? No... and in fact, it's quite frustrating and often scary. And perhaps this is the exact point of the whole exercise: trying to translate the experiences of a blind individual through an interactive medium that couldn't otherwise be expressed as strongly as a simple observer. I think it would be a fool's errand to try and judge this by the same standards that we use to consider mechanically and technically whether or not we find something "fun," for these kinds of experiences turn the whole idea of what we consider an effective video game on its head, and instead beg us to consider looking through the lens of a different individual and walking a mile in their shoes as a way to invite us into another world while savoring that of our own world.

Now, I did say that this write-up would also entail some degree of reconciliation, because I do have a few laments where I think the game could be improved. I was originally playing this on my Steam Deck, as a more intimate way to interact with the objects on screen, but later switched to playing this on desktop with a connected controller in hopes that there would be rumble interactions on a controller. Unfortunately, I don't believe that any rumble interactions were built in to the game, and I feel that this is a genuine missed opportunity; I understand budget constraints and that the sense of touch cannot be replicated perfectly even in an interaction medium such as video games, but I think adding vibrations where Rae would have felt vibrations under her feet (such as the ground quaking from a jackhammer, or a dog shivering from her touch) would have elevated the sensory experience even further. There are a few optional interactions with the environment that aren't very obvious, and I unfortunately can't recall any green ribbons serving as indicators for those cases; again, I understand that this might go against artistic vision in that it shouldn't be realistically obvious to interact with those elements from the perspective of a blind individual, but I do think it's a shame that I never got to see those interactions unfold and I'm not particularly interested in slowly backtracking through levels and using an achievement guide to track down and proc those interactions after finishing. And finally, I do think the relationship between Rae and others around her (mainly the friend she makes, Lily, as well as Nani) could have been further developed, as I found the ending quite abrupt, though the game's short runtime at least justifies this lack of scope towards that narrative development.

Ultimately, I've decided to not mark a score on Beyond Eyes, because this is a very strange case for me; it's one of those games where I don't think I actually enjoyed playing it very much, but at the same time, I can't help but appreciate what's been created here. Recommending it feels strange too, because it's a very niche title that's not easily accessible to others looking for more traditional games with clearly defined objectives and fail-states; this is instead the tale of a blind girl struggling to make sense of what is left, but finding much meaning in what she is able to make sense of. It is unfortunate that the game was met with such a degree of mixed reception and that a dispute between the game's publisher and creator has led to Beyond Eyes being delisted on Steam, though keys of the game are at least still being sold on external key stores even if Halatoe is no longer making any pennies off of it. Having said that, if you're looking for another ambitious "game for change" that may not be particularly enjoyable to actually play but nonetheless pushes the envelope of video game communication and exploration of the medium, perhaps you'll find that experience in Beyond Eyes.

Scorn has been met with a mixed reception thanks to a solid handful of faults. The hyper-grim tone stays static throughout, missing out on the dynamics of tension and peace that make the best horror experiences shine. The story, such as it is, coasts largely on vibes and might not amount to a satisfying punch for some players. And of course… there's that unfortunate combat.

However, I want to let those problems lie where they may and spend a little time talking about what I liked about Scorn. I want to speak briefly about something Scorn did that interested me as a designer, and hopefully you'll find that thing at least a bit interesting too. First, though, I've got to mention the most obvious aspect of the game that impressed me: The way it looks!

Without a doubt, the visuals are gorgeous. Dense fog and dust blanket the bulbous alien architecture with eye-popping beauty. The quality of texture and material, and of the light passing through the cracked ceilings and obscured skies of Scorn come together to create a genuinely credible nightmare world that's a morbid pleasure to inhabit. It could definitely be said that Ebb Software gets no points for originality, lifting Giger and Beksiński wholesale and dropping them into a videogame landscape, though I want to give them their due for realizing those artists' aesthetics so confidently. It takes more than just having big tube-shaped things push themselves into holes to properly nail that vibe, and Scorn goes all out to really give it the detail it deserves. Besides, I've always wanted more games with precisely this aesthetic anyway so why get too hung up on originality?

The gameplay itself is, at least at first blush, nearly bog-standard. You walk around and solve various puzzles, pressing buttons and flipping switches.

Beneath that first layer of tissue though, I think Scorn is doing something at least interesting from a design perspective. It exploits the arbitrary nature of adventure game puzzle design to make the game world feel all the more alien. Playing the first level of Scorn, I was introduced to half a dozen technological devices whose purpose I truly couldn't even imagine. The odd glove-shaped holes and big mechanical arms with some sort of melon baller or ice cream scooper at the end, they didn't read as puzzle elements to me, they barely read as game elements at all. Am I being shown a lock, or a key? They were just pieces of this world with a function as unfathomable as the rest of my environment.

Usually when an adventure game has me climb up a rope of neckties and use a piece of corral to fashion a makeshift grappling hook so I can then use a balloon animal and some bread all to steal some pigeon eggs which are good for… something, it feels like an annoying, synthetic solution to an annoying, synthetic problem. But in Scorn these things feel all too natural, just of a sort of nature very, very far removed from me. Scorn uses its puzzle elements to heighten its sense of alienation through the gameplay, and in doing so it takes one of the largest traditional weaknesses of adventure games and makes it into its own greatest strength. Something resembling a real alien logic only unspools itself gradually as you interact with the game's various semi-organic mechanisms. It wasn't until later into my trip through that introductory level, when the game placed into my care a miserable looking man-creature nested inside some sort of half shell, that those melon baller machines began to make sense…

The level design is operating on the same wavelength, as the circular architecture of the environments seem bent on purposefully disorienting the player and denying them mastery of the space. Repeated trips through previous locales begin to grant some familiarity, but I never felt fully confident in my mental mapping of the levels, which I'd say is a success on the part of the game.

Scorn has its share of issues, but I find myself thinking more about the grisly delights of its art direction and the way it puts a little twist on traditional game design elements in order to better sell its vibes. Yes, the combat is bad. But when a game is such a mixed bag as Scorn, sometimes I just want to look at the positives I can take from the experience.

What a timeless game. Real Higher-Mid ass combat, carried by an iconic soundtrack, some adrenaline pumpin vibes, and some unforgettable scenes.

What a real shame that this studio just dropped off the face of the Earth after this game.

#RIPBozo