I've played Star Wars: Dark Forces on two separate occasions over a year apart now, but each time I start this up, I get to the sewer level and give up after being lost for close to an hour. It was only after I dropped this for good today that I'm hearing that the sewer level is infamous for making players do that. Well, I understand your frustration now, my friends.

That said, the last time I dropped this game, I wanted to play games chronologically starting in 1995. This one released February 15 and was therefore the first on my list. As a retro newcomer of sorts, this game understandably looked very bad and getting to grips with its controls (Page up/down to look down or up respectively, 5 to reset view) and its level design had me uninterested pretty quickly.

This time however, I had already started my challenge well over a year ago in 1990, so I have over 100 retro games and even more time-appropriate expectations before going into this. So how does Dark Forces compare to its contemporaries? Actually pretty well.

Star Wars: Dark Forces takes the FPS / boomer-shooter genre, accepts its fate as being called a doom-clone in every single review made for it at the time, and adds adventure game elements to it, as well as the looking up and down mechanic I talked about in the last paragraph. The adventure game elements consists of actual cutscenes and mission briefings that actually give you story details as well, which is really nice.

In doing so, the game actually brought the genre forward in a meaningful way at the time. In addition, the maze-like levels known to players from Doom I and II at this point are 'mazified' even further by adding additional floors and overall complexity to them not found in boomer shooters before this point. For the most part, I appreciated this. The complexity also means that you can more easily get lost, and I think in that regard the devs misunderstood complex for stupidly obtuse in certain levels, like the aforementioned sewer level. Add to that that in that particular level there is lots of darkness and limited amount of battery power for your NVGs and it can get pretty frustrating unnecessarily. The very low resolution in this game and poor framerate doesn't help matters as you try to figure out where to go.

Everything you can make out despite the resolution does look pretty appealing though, especially if you're into Star Wars. It often actually looks like you're in an enemy base instead of room after room with same-textured wall after wall. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Doom plenty, but when talking about bringing something new and improved to the table, Star Wars: Dark Forces does that in the visual design of its levels as well. Enemy design is another part of this. The game obviously has the immediate unmistakeable Star Wars enemies in the Stormtroopers (and Darktroopers, which is a new enemy type introduced here) as well as all the officers and commanders of the Empire you will find waiting for. But that's not all, as there are probably 20 or so enemies in the game in total, from Droids to turrets to those disgusting Dianogas in the sewer level.

Star Wars: Dark Forces will be remastered in February 2024, which means I'll definitely revisit the game at some point next year. If you're into Star Wars and don't mind retro gameplay, this game is definitely going to be a blast to the past that is well worth experiencing with that updated package.

(This is the 106th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

How stupid am I? I played King's Field II instead of King's Field I because I didn't realize that King's Field II was called King's Field I in the US since King's Field I never released outside of Japan. You know? Either way, there is only a year that separates both of these games and apart from minor differences, they appear to be very similar in terms of gameplay. King's Field II is about twice as long though, which is worth pointing out.

Anyway, whether I played the game I wanted to or not, I got the King's Field experience alright, so I'd like to share my thoughts on the game for those of you curious about this game. As you probably know if you're looking to play (or have played) any King's Field game, they were some of the first games developed by From Software, who have built on the foundation here just a tiny bit to bring us games like Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and most recently, Elden Ring in an Action RPG subgenre that they've pretty much pioneered.

King's Field is not quite a soulslike than it is a dungeon crawler / Action RPG that doesn't change up the established genres all that much, but it's FromSoft finding their footing in the video game industry, so I wanted to see their first attempt (second attempt...) at developing a game by playing King's Field (II).

It's a game alright, and has some good ideas, but the experience is dragged down by sloooow combat and the obtuse nature of everything from dungeon design to itemization and overall progression.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 4/10

The game starts with the camera flying over the island of Melanat, where the game takes place. You find yourself washed up on the coast of Melanat, which is in control of either a god or a demon (the storyteller itself wasn't quite sure). The writing isn't so good in this one. Your purpose isn't explained much further, other than what you can make out yourself. Go into the depths of this place and kill whatever controls the island.

As you make your way through the labyrinthine island, you will stumble upon multiple NPCs, who either give you lore on the island, the enemies and important people, or they will ask you to find something or someone. They'll give you helpful tips as well, and in classic FromSoft manner, you gotta talk to them multiple times to get all the information out of them that they have to give. There was one character in particular who stopped eating his soup to tell me that he is too fat to go down into the underworld. What, there is only a tiny hole that leads there? I laughed quite hard at this line just because of how blunt and out of nowhere it was. If you're wondering whether characters have personality here, that's as much as you'll get out of the ones that you'll see within your first 5 or so hours of playing the game.

Still, there is an effort here to tell a story of a hostile place filled with hostile enemies and one that is bigger than 'em all. Even though it's a story that has been told 80000 times in games by now, effort counts, especially during the early 90s, though the bar is definitely about to be set much higher as more and more PS1 games come out.

GAMEPLAY | 7/20

I know every console has its stinkers and its diamonds, but I still find it fascinating that the only two PS1 games I've played for more than a few hours are THIS and Metal Gear Solid. Talk about two ends of a spectrum.

King's Field has its fans, and I never want to take anything away from them when I play and review these games myself, but if I'm addressing this review to not just obtuse and retro dungeon crawler / RPG fans, then I can only say that these people should stay far away from King's Field, or at least that they should expect to drop it after their initial curiosity as Soulslike fans runs off.

Controls can be optimized thanks to emulation these days, but the basic controls look like this. D-Pad buttons to walk in four directions, L1 and R1 to strafe left or right, L1 and R1 alongside a directional button to circle around an area and turn around, and L2 and R2 to look up and down respectively. You will kind of get used to it but I never got really comfortable.

The game runs at a solid (/s) 20 FPS for most of the game but has some spikes both up and down from time to time. Don't know if it's emulation that rescues some frames from time to time or whether it's simply the optimization of the game, but what you need to know is that frames correlate with speed of attacks. Not just your attacks, but enemy attacks. In a game where staggering your enemy is key, not attacking the second your stamina comes back means opening yourself up to being hit. Get hit a couple times against most enemies and you're dead. So if the game plays fluidly for a few seconds, it's not something to be happy about when you're in combat.

If the game runs at its normal FPS, combat is very slow. First, you need to position yourself. Facing an enemy head-on, especially when there are more than 1 enemies in a given room, is guaranteed death. When you swing towards an enemy from the front, the one who hits sooner wins. If you hit the enemy, you stagger it and avoid damage. If you are hit, you don't get staggered but a hefty sum is taken from your health pool and you might be poisoned or paralyzed to boot. And even if you do hit first, you know have to play a game of timing your next attacks. Each swing depletese your entire health pool, so you have to wait for 1% of it to come back in order to swing again. Time it right and you can stagger-lock the enemy for the duration of the battle. Click too early and you lose precious frames before your input is finally recognized, meaning the enemy can get a fatal attack in. And EVEN if you manage to time it correctly every time, killing an enemy takes an agonizingly long amount of time for the first few hours. Then you level up a couple times and instead of taking 30 seconds, it takes 20 or 25. I can live with a lot that this game has to offer but combat was at no point satisfying, and having to circle around enemies to cheaply hit them from the side or back to avoid damage very quickly felt repetitive and even less satisfying, as you never really are besting the enemy but the game.

As I mentioned, death comes quick, and unfortunately this means you usually lose a lot of progress as well. In fact, the game drops you back at the very beginning of the game, even if you reach the first save room that is likely 1-2 hours away at least when you first start playing. If you do save, you spawn at the start, have to go into the menu and load the save point, which takes 20 seconds longer than spawning at your save point immediately would. Emulation and save states will be your friends.

Talking about the menu, this is where you use and equip stuff. Being low on health means opening the menu, going into "Use Items" and using the item before exiting the menu and returning to gameplay. Being poisoned means the same thing. It's not a big deal though because you can rarely heal anyway (I could only bring one healing potion with me 5+ hours into the game), so you mostly open the menu to use items or equip stuff you find.

Stuff you find is another thing. Merchants usually give you items that you find in the game world anyway, and anything that you can't is really expensive, so they don't feel useful at all for the first half of the game at least. Finding stuff is kind of fun, but then you have items like the knight's helm which is in some random corner and not even visible on the spot it's supposed to be on.

Items also have no information on them, whether it's for their use or what kind of stats they have (for equipment), so you equip and then go back to the stats screen to figure out what changed. This is pretty archaic even for 1994.

This all creates a pretty unsatisfying gameplay loop for someone who is into retro games but not quite a hardcore retro RPG gamer. Combat can be fun in 1994, games don't have to be this obtuse in 1994 and games can perform better in 1994 ... well, maybe not quite for that last part, especially for the new 3D market. But still, more likely than not, King's Field will not be enjoyable for you, unless you are part of the more hardcore retro RPG fanbase I mentioned, in which case, go solve this island and hopefully, you'll have some fun along the way.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10

There are 10 or so large areas in the game and one track playing in each. One. Luckily the first few actually are nice to listen to and set the tone nicely, but it still gets very repetitive. The ending music is pretty nice.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10

The visuals look really bad. The only saving graces here are the villages, which have some retro charm to them thanks to the odd character design and the vibes the locations give off, as well as the enemy art design, which I found to be somewhat well done. Enemies repeat a lot, but they look disgusting, and I think that's a positive for a game like this.

Other than that though, the gray just tired me out after a while. Areas look way too similar, which in a game with no map is not great for getting your bearings. Textures look bland and I can't say that the visuals added much to the atmosphere as a result, other than telling me that I'm trapped in this ugly world, at least until I found the X to close the window.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 5/10

The game is not scary, and the island does not have this mysterious feeling to it that I got in some other dungeon crawlers I've played as part of this challenge I'm doing. Even games from 1990 like Elvira: Mistress of the Dark oozes a lot more atmosphere than King's Field (II). 3D will have helped with immersion a lot more at the time, but I felt more immersed in those point-and-click style dungeon crawlers from years earlier. That said, death is truly around every corner in this game and the soundtrack at least pulls off a certain adventure-like vibe.

CONTENT | 6/10

It's a shame that I disliked combat and dungeon design so much, because the game has some fun content otherwise. Lots of locked doors, secret paths and items that unlock cool stuff can be found in this game. Finding a dragon stone to put into a stone tablet to finally get a MP-healing source was pretty nice for example. The game is pretty long, so I'm sure there is a lot more where that came from. Unfortunately, you gotta be OK with the gameplay itself, which will probably decide whether you have the interest to play on.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

Not the worst. As mentioned, areas have lots of secret rooms and paths to discover, which will lead you to lots of enemies and treasure. Much of it felt optional, so if you want to experience more of what King's Field has to offer, it felt like more was always next door, you just gotta find a way to get there. That said, the poor visuals and repetitive design of the dungeons as well as poor economy design are some clear weak points here.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10

This Kings Field game wasn't the launch title, but it's still worth mentioning that that one was launched close to the release of the PS1, and games like these were not at all common at this time. Still, you can see the very short development time in the overall quality of the experience, which, no matter which way you put it, means that this sort of innovation was not for the best, at least not with the execution found here.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

You'll probably miss out on lots of secrets after your first playthrough. If you still want more after that, there will likely be plenty to find still.

PLAYABILITY | 4/5

Works well, but the low FPS is headache, and the odd spikes even more so. There is also head-bobbing enabled at the start, which I suggest you turn off asap through the options menu.

OVERALL | 49/100

There are many better dungeon crawlers and RPGs of all kinds available from 1994/5 or earlier. I'd suggest you play those. King's Field has very poor combat that is not only slow and hard to figure out at first, but once you do, you realize it's really not hard to cheese the game. The challenge for me was to stay awake as my character swung 25 times to kill a generic enemy. Maybe you'll feel differently, but I wouldn't personally recommend the game.

Doom II: Hell on Earth came out not too long after the original Doom. It took only 10 months, in fact. When you play the game, it's easy to see how the game was developed so quickly. It's basically the same game with larger levels, more enemy types and an additional weapon, among some other minor changes.

If you loved the original Doom, that's great. As someone who liked it, I didn't see that much reason to go through the entirety of Doom II though, since story is, understandably, irrelevant for the game (though not "not important" in general, John Carmack!).

From the couple hours I put into the game, what I realized was that the setting 'Earth' felt somewhat off-putting compared to the first game, that many of the tracks sounded way too tame for a game like Doom and that I've otherwise already played this game, as it plays exactly the same way, just with more levels now.

Don't get me wrong, if you enjoy boomer shooters and Doom in particular, you won't be looking for much else. Additionally, from what I was told, the modding scene is what makes the game so popular still, and having checked some of the user-made levels out, yeah, I can see why. Custom enemies, custom weapons, custom maps, custom music... You can probably spend the next few years solely playing this game and not run out of content.

I've got thousands of other games I would like to play, so I'm not gonna get into that rabbit hole, but you're invited to do so if that sounds interesting to you. Me personally, I'll gladly return to the series for the next game, but I'm hoping to see a little bit more innovation, if the story itself is irrelevant in these games.

(This is the 105th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

(This is the 104th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

Thanks to this challenge I finally played so many beloved Nintendo franchises for the first time in my life. Metroid, Zelda, Kirby and now, I finally played my first ever Donkey Kong game: Donkey Kong Country. I knew next to nothing about this game before playing it and I still know next to nothing about the rest of the games, but after playing Donkey Kong Country, I'm definitely excited to check out whichever games next for this character.

Donkey Kong Country released on November 18, 1994 and was developed by Rare. Rare developed 3 games before this that I actually played, namely Captain Skyhawk, Battletoads and The Amazing Spider-Man for the GameBoy. While I didn't necessarily enjoy all of these games (I'm looking at you Amazing Spider-Man), I saw even then that Rare are capable of developing good games, it's just gonna be a budgetary thing that'll decide the overall quality. So Rare developing a game for Nintendo sounded like a great combo before playing this, and turns out, it was.

Donkey Kong Country went on to sell over 9 million copies (3rd best-selling SNES game, best Donkey Kong game), which led to two sequels on the SNES that released in 95 and 96, which I'll check out for sure. But not before sharing my thoughts on this game. :)

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10

There is no actual storytelling in the game. You control Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong to rid Donkey Kong Island of the Kremlings and to reclaim your bananas that were stolen. This is all explained in the manual exclusively, which has a nice, longer-than-usual story explaining the setting for the game. In the game itself, there are a few characters you meet who will help you out. Funky Kong, the cool dudebro surfer gorilla, who flings you back to a previously finished level really fast if you want to, Candy Kong, Donkey Kong's love interest according to the manual who saves your game, and Cranky Kong, an elderly and wise gorilla who gives you tips. His bio is pretty hilarious because he is apparently the Donkey Kong who featured in the games from the 80s and wants nothing to do with the fancy visuals of (then-)modern day. Legend.

But you're not gonna be playing this for the story and characters, but for the gameplay, the levels and the music.

GAMEPLAY | 14/20

Donkey Kong Country is a 2D platformer like many others before it. It differentiates itself mainly due to its main character and his barrel-flinging escapades, as well as the amount of space he takes up in the otherwise rather small levels. This changes the dynamic of avoiding enemies and objects somewhat because you have to be more precise with your inputs in many of the levels, which is one of the main reasons why Donkey Kong Country is not as easy as it may seem. There is a save system in place, both in-game and in-emulator (if you want), as well as a generous number of extra lives you can get as you play, so beating the game is by no means impossible, but you'll die more often than you think.

Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong run alongside each other and you can swap them out whenever you want. That's worth it at specific points because Diddy Kong is smaller (good for water levels), runs faster and jumps higher, but Donkey Kong is stronger (kills enemies by jumping on them just once instead of twice), grabs vines automatically and can hold a barrel over his head instead of just in front of him, which matters depending on enemy positioning.

There are many obstacles to face in the game, and they continuously change up as you play. The game uses the same items and enemies throughout, but makes use of them pretty creatively. The main challenges include avoiding enemies or killing them by jumping on top of them / rolling into them, grabbing ropes/vines to jump across platforms, jumping into barrels which catapult you forward and chaining together some of these challenges to get to otherwise inaccessible areas, which unlock bonus rooms. There are also mine cart levels, underwater levels and rainy levels which make the floor slippery (always love those), so the challenge is constant and varied enough. The difficulty is mostly fair, but not perfect.

Each world ends with a boss fight. These are pretty simple, which is typical for Nintendo platformers I find. Find a good time to jump on top of the enemy, repeat this 5 times (with Donkey Kong) and the enemy is down. Apart from the final boss, I found these to all be easy.

Overall, it's a fun loop and it's one of the better platformers for its time. Donkey Kong's move set is more limited than I would have liked, so I hope the sequels improve upon that, but gameplay is enjoyable enough to carry you through as you listen to the music and take in the great visual style.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

There is actually voice acting here, though mainly for Donkey Kong yelling. If you're talking about audio in Donkey Kong Country though, you're mainly gonna talk about its soundtrack. Beloved by just about each of the 9+ million individuals who bought it and the many more millions who emulated the game through other means, Donkey Kong Country's soundtrack is just as much part of the experience as the gameplay.

Having listened to the soundtrack for hours while playing the game and a couple more hours in addition to that, I can both definitely say that it's a great soundtrack, but also that I wouldn't put it among my favorites on the SNES. The soundtrack has a distinctive quality, which is that pretty much all of the tracks are nice to listen to and there are no real stinkers included, but the soundtrack, for me, doesn't have that many tracks that make me stop and listen to them like I have a tendency to. Games like A Link to the Past, Super Castlevania, Super Metroid, Super Mario World etc. come to mind.

What makes Donkey Kong Country's soundtrack additionally to me though is that I did not at all expect it to be this vibey and play with different themes like it did. I expected cheerful and jolly music throughout while you run around carefree from level to level. As discussed, the game is much harder than I would have anticipated as well, so it's only fitting I guess that from time to time, the music can set an almost dangerous vibe. If you wouldn't agree on dangerous, I'm sure you can agree that some tracks set a mysterious, adventurous and even thoughtful tone from time to time. Then there is a track like Acquatic Ambience, which sounds incredibly soothing and chill instead of hyper and energetic like I would have expected.

In general, the water levels have some of the better tracks in this game, which I'm thankful for, because the levels themselves sucked. So if you do play Donkey Kong Country, I hope the levels themselves don't ruin the songs for you. Overall, a great soundtrack by David Wise, who is another composer I can add to the list of "one's to look out for".

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10

Wow. To call Donkey Kong Country's visuals unique would be an understatement. If you are looking for some of the best looking games of the early 90s, put Donkey Kong Country on your list asap. It's really worth reading up on the technology used to make these sprites come to life, but suffice it to say it's impressive how Rare pulled this off. I have no real working knowledge of this stuff, but if I understand it correctly, they managed to turn 3D geometry into 2D images to use in this game, and whatever way would be correct to explain it, all you need to know is that it looks great.

Environments from the jungles to the mines also look great to extend the vibes and emotions that are put forth by the soundtrack, as well as simply being pleasing to look at. Some locations are repeated here, which is worth pointing out, but thanks to obstacles/challenges constantly varying from level to level, the levels still feel much more distinct than different-looking levels in some other platformers were the challenge stays static.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10

I've gone over the vibes and emotions I got from playing the game and how it is way different from what I would have anticipated. Apart from the whimsical, quirky characters that aid Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong in their adventure, there is no storytelling or anything here, so it's important for the music and visuals to set the main tone for this game and if you're like me and have played so many of these cheerful platformers that give off "low stake, made for children" vibes (and I don't mean this negatively, I enjoy them myself to this day), you might feel some fatigue from it from time to time. So to have Donkey Kong Country switch up the tone here and there was a very welcome change and definitely will make the game stick with me longer than some of its contemporaries.

CONTENT | 7/10

The content in this game is very good, but it doesn't feel like it has the budget of a Mario game for example. This is understandable for a video game character that remained dormant for a while, but is noteworthy nonetheless. Donkey Kong has a lack of skills, enemies and objects repeat pretty early on (even though their placement creatively differs regularly) and levels provide lots of fun, but not a lot of depth to them. It has the feeling of the start to something bigger to it in many ways.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10

This game has a lot of levels. While I'd consider most to be good and some to be excellent, there were some levels I really didn't like. A lot of it has to do with the space given to your character and the timing of button presses. The windows to jump in order to reach a platform or barely just get past an enemy (like those damn zingers) felt too short many times. Two things come to mind especially. First, it's all the levels that include ropes. Half the time I'm struggling getting Donkey Kong to hold on, and the other half of the time where I succeed, I felt like I always would eventually hit my head or my legs on one of the zingers patrolling all the ropes in this world. The other situation where this issue arises is during water levels, where fish are seemingly everywhere and you don't have enough control nor space to maneuver past them reliably, at least as a new player. So if you find yourselves in these situations, best of luck to ya.

Apart from that though, there is more variety here than you'd expect based on the number of enemy types and the limited feature set for Donkey Kong. The barrel levels were fun, the mine cart levels, ditto. Finding secret areas is neat, riding one of the multiple types of animals a la Yoshi is cool too. I thought the mini games weren't as exciting as in Mario games for example, and the last boss was pretty annoying, so there is lots of good and bad here for me, though overall the good definitely wins.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

The innovation here definitely comes from the graphics. Apart from that, the level design and gameplay has similarities to many platformers of its time, and in many ways to Mario as well. It's just that Donkey Kong Country has passion oozing off of it from every direction and also controls well for the most part, which is more than I can say for most platformers in this era of gaming.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

After beating this, you can try and find more of the bonus levels to get closer to 101% completion, though as someone who has never done a speedrun or followed the scene, I still don't know what the additional percentages after 100 mean in these games.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 74/100

A must-play for platforming fans. Some of the most unique visuals for its time, a great soundtrack, fun levels (but also some frustrating ones) and overall just a charming game. I wouldn't call it my 3rd favorite SNES game like its sales would suggest, but I'm positive someone else out there will and I can definitely see their point.

Earthworm Jim is probably the best animated video game since Battletoads at the time of its release, and I think it's fair to say that those two games were just at their own level in that regard beyond any other game on the market. It's hard not to be amazed at how much work went into dozens of different animations, whether it's for shooting, whipping, getting bitten in the butt, pulled from side to side by a raven biting at your head and more.

Unfortunately, as a game, Earthworm Jim was probably one of the more frustrating experiences I've had during my 100+ game journey from 1990 to this game's October 30, 1994 release date. A poor control scheme that I not once really felt in control of, enemies popping up and attacking you less than a second after they become visible, environmental objects pulling, pushing and locking you up while you try to just get past them, and a slight delay in movement made this very, very annoying to play.

The visuals are great, the soundtrack was nice to listen to, sound effects are well done and funny, but unless I find a time machine that brings me back to the late 90s and early 00s with nothing but Earthworm Jim to play, I don't see how I would ever force myself to push through this game.

(This is the 103rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

Shin Megami Tensei if... (...it were Seinfeld. I mean seriously, listen to the songs) is the third and final SMT game on the SNES and considered to be the third mainline title in the series.

Unlike SMT 1 and SMT 2, the game features a smaller-scale story that takes place in a school setting and a place called The Expanse, where you go through several dungeons named after the seven deadly sins, like the World of Pride, Gluttony and Sloth, which is where I eventually abandoned this game. (There are additional areas you unlock through a NG+ route). Still, I have some thoughts here as someone who did manage to finish SMT 1 and SMT 2 (and enjoyed both), so here goes.

SMT if... is a game that I'm glad exists. It features a school setting for the first time, and it introduces the Guardian system, which are special demons given to aid you. You get your first when you die the first time and they change each additional time you perish. Both of these points are what became common in the now much more popular Persona series, a series that includes some of my favorite games of all time. That said, nothing else you will be familiar with is included in this game, apart from the combat and demon-fusing gameplay of course, meaning no in-depth character interactions, social bonds etc.

And that's OK. This is an SMT game after all. What I wanted from this game, just like the previous two, was an addictive gameplay loop, a depressing atmosphere in hostile environments, an interesting plot filled to the brim with symbolism and metaphors and overall, enjoyable enough dungeon crawling. If you really liked SMT 1 and/or 2, SMT if... has a lot of the same features that will appeal to you. That said, for the 8 or so hours I played this, it features less plot and, as mentioned, less high-stake plot, to pull you along. Worst yet, it features some horrific dungeons, namely the World of Sloth, which I quickly learned was something the community unanimously agreed on. The dungeon is a test of endurance in the worst way, a test I did not pass, and I'd imagine the majority of you will feel similarly. If you, however, are someone who loves to suffer, I invite you to take a shot at it yourself.

SMT if... is the precursor to the Persona series as I mentioned, so it did more than even the developers would have probably thought at the time, because other than that, it doesn't really bring the series forward in a meaningful way. It plays like a worse SMT 2 for the most part, and it even has a lot of the same tracks and of course the same mechanics and visuals. There is a route you can choose for a NG+ playthrough which actually introduces completely new dungeons and songs, which after reading up on it, sounds pretty interesting, but I'm not going to force myself through one normal run to experience it.

Finally, to those of you who still want to check it out, I recommend the Reiko route, which based on the story synopsis for the routes available at the start, seems to offer the most content.

(This is the 102nd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

Wild to think that it's been less than a year since I beat Yakuza 2 and since then, two more Yakuza games released and another comes out next month. Even more wild is how these games are just bangers after bangers. So to quickly answer the question whether Yakuza 3 deserves its negative reputation in the community? In my opinion, NO. Yakuza 3 has tons of redeeming qualities, a solid story with many moments that nearly brought me to tears and to put the icing on the cake, is so unintentionally hilarious that I'm not surprised to have seen like a dozen moments already memed to death in the community. So if you ask me, do not skip Yakuza 3, but for many valid reasons, it wouldn't be a bad idea at all to focus more on the story in this one.

Those reasons? For one, the combat is not good for a while until you get upgrades. The game starts you off with very few moves, and it takes quite some time to get enough upgrades to make combat more interesting. Even then, it's still not as good as the combat in the three games preceding it, though it gets more and more OK as you play. Using items to hit enemies is especially satisfying, while heat actions generally felt like they lacked the punch of heat actions in previous games, both because they don't always feel so hard-hitting and often do little damage.

Another reason to rush the game is that substories weren't as good here as in 0, 1 or 2. Most are pretty short and don't tell those unique, funny stories that you'll be used to coming from those three games. There are still funny ones here of course, but I didn't really feel after doing 30 of them that I wanted to do another 70 more.

Finally, the other issue with the game you might have is the very slow start. The first few chapters are spent in the orphanage Kiryu took over called "Morning Glory", and for multiple hours, all you do is spend time with the children and their problems. These little mini stories always had a satisfying ending and I liked that you're supposed to get to know the children yourself. There were many moments in the main story as well where I felt grateful to have spent so much time with the kids, so overall I wouldn't say it's a negative. It's just that the tasks before you get these mini story conclusions are usually very boring, which is a drag. At some point I thought the game was taking the piss with how many times I got interrupted before I could finally leave for Kamurocho for the first time but once you do, the story picks up the pace.

As is the case in many Yakuza games, Kamurocho shares time with another location, this time with Okinawa, where the orphanage is at. It's a nice little place, but I'll always remember it as the place where I would sprint after Ayako who's doing the griddy and is still faster than Kiryu.

The soundtrack has some very solid tracks that add to the vibe, especially the New Serena track was very chill and is something I can see myself listening to outside of the game, but there is one battle theme that is just the worst. It's called D2A, and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I laughed the first time I heard it, but I don't understand how it got a place in here. It's like if a Barbie song played in the Oppenheimer movie.

Overall though, Yakuza 3 feels like it gets more hate because I assume a lot of people come into this game after they played three remade / modern games in 0, 1 and 2 to play a game that was merely remastered, though the slow start and combat will also play a big role. If you can get past these things though, Yakuza 3 has some great characters, a story with many memorable moments and beautiful eyes to offer. Can't miss, if you ask me.

This game is free. If you're a fan of Sonic and the Sonic universe, that's all you need to know. It's a train murder mystery adventure including Sonic and the gang, and you (a new employee for Mirage Express) work alongside detective Tails to unravel the mystery of who murdered Sonic. It's a unique setting for all these characters to find themselves in, and for what it is, it provides a fun two to three hours for Sonic fans.

If you're not a Sonic fan, and especially someone who (almost) never plays Sonic games, there won't be a point to playing this, as you won't know the characters and most of the charm of this game will probably be lost on you. I myself have played the first few Sonic games ever released within the past 12 months, so I know many, but not all of the characters that feature here, and I did feel like I'd get more enjoyment out of it if I were a more avid Sonic gamer.

That said, I did enjoy the game. The game plays itself for the most part a la visual novel, but interrogations include mini games in which you control Sonic from an isometric perspective as he collects enough rings to beat a level, which allows you to formulate an argument. Simple, but challenging enough. Just don't expect more from this game than it is, since it is free like I mentioned. If a gaming franchise I really like made a similar project like this, I'd definitely be really excited about it, and I think it's really nice that this exists.

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did because I enjoy the immersive sim genre (though I'd say System Shock isn't the most accurate representation of the genre) and all of the well-known games that were inspired by the original System Shock to this day.

Unfortunately, System Shock has something that regularly makes me fall off of similar games, which is a big reliance on quick-saving and reloading. Enemies that kill you with a few shots, health items being very scarce compared to how easily and how much damage you take, multiple areas that you just aren't supposed to be at yet (keyword 'radiation') that will empty your health items before you eventually realize that you shouldn't have been here in the first place and more. It's something that makes me hesitant to say I'd recommend it to everyone, and I think that's more than acceptable among gamers. It's a niche game made for a certain audience who will love it, popularized and refined in games like Bioshock, Prey, Deus Ex, heck even Dead Space and more. And even beyond that, System Shock has done things that I have not previously seen in the 100 other games I had previously played as this retro challenge I'm doing (see bottom of the review), especially in terms of its storytelling, which has caught on in the years to come.

Yet, despite the fact that I can acknowledge and respect what this game has accomplished at its time, it unfortunately never managed to grab me. Both because of the first issue I mentioned, but also because of some other issues. For one thing, the progression in this game truly shows its age. That's a good thing for those who want the remake to be faithful to the original. But to start the game and have a general idea that you're meant to stop SHODAN, but other than that rather aimlessly walk through 9 or so separate areas to just progress further and further to the end, didn't feel all that engaging. It can't be helped that in each area, you look for keycards to unlock progression, a pretty common thing back in the day, and do the same few puzzles and shoot the same few enemies throughout. Enemies that either felt too weak or too overpowered to me. Another thing is the recycling system in the game. To get currency, you grab junk items and vaporize them in your inventory, which turns them into scrap to recycle for the currency. That becomes pretty tedious after a while, and it's not as optional as I anticipated it being because items will be very useful in this game (healing items in particular) and you get very little currency outside of recycling.

The storytelling is pretty good to this day, as it's told through voice recordings for the most part, which gives you an idea of how it was for the people working at the space station this game is set in while SHODAN went rogue. Some of the voice acting is less good than most of it, but I enjoy this style of storytelling and that's true for this game too. The atmosphere grabbed me as well, and the threat of SHODAN was portrayed really well throughout.

Unfortunately, as a package, the gameplay loop itself did not grab me as much as I would have hoped. There is a demo for the game on Steam, so I'd urge you to try it and decide based on that whether you want to buy the full game. It has its many fans, but it's worth mentioning that the game is definitely not for everyone. And I'd definitely say that has more to do with the taste of the player then with the quality of the game, though the game does have its flaws.

(This is the 101st game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is an isometric soulslike with a Lovecraftian Horror theme. If you enjoy the lovecraftian genre, there is plenty to like here visually and in terms of the game's lore. The setting, the characters and the items are described in great detail within dozens of entries for those interested in that. The soundtrack is also quite good.

Unfortunately, I didn't quite enjoy the gameplay in this one. It's pretty simple and repetitive but relatively enjoyable when you're fighting normal enemies, but falls apart whenever you are facing bosses. A big issue for bosses is that hitboxes (for both you and the bosses to be fair) are quite unfair. A boss might just slash to its side, but will still hit you even though you are below or above the boss, making it unpredictable at times whether you are within reach of the boss or not. In addition, bosses can have charge attacks, in that they just rush towards you. If you don't know that they will do this and don't preemptively run away far enough, there is nothing you can do and you will get hit. There is no way to dodge, parry or block, you can only be far away from the enemy before they charge up.

As a soulslike, Morbid: The Seven Acolytes unfortunately does lots of things wrong, or at least in ways that I wouldn't dare to do them in this genre. For example, the game has to separate its seven or so areas with loading screens. So if you accidentally walk to the edge of a map and enter a different world, getting back to the previous world will not only take 30+ seconds, but it will also reset all the enemies on the map. While doing so, your health and item charges DO NOT refill, which is quite unfair. It's not gonna happen a lot, but it happened multiple times to me, so worth a mention.

Worse offenses are that resting at "bonfires" triggers a loading screen, maps don't show you where you are exactly (which is an issue because so many areas look the same due to the game's low budget and some areas are pretty big) and bossfights always play the boss entrance cutscene, no matter how many times you attempt it, so you spend 10+ seconds on the first boss for every attempt for example. Some take less time, some probably longer, though I didn't finish the game.

I'd say it's worth checking it out, if you already own it, and perhaps worth it on sale, if the positives about this game sound appealing to you, but it's not a soulslike I would recommend.

A game in the "Endless Runner" genre with a hip hop aesthetic. Whether you want to pick it up or not is basically tied to how appealing you think that first sentence sounds.

To me, the appeal was to find something short that I could achievement hunt in. In that regard, Aerial_Knight's Never Yield was a solid option. Getting all achievements, which requires you to check out all three available game modes, took me about 3 hours overall. That includes finishing the story mode, doing a bonus level and spending 30 (!) minutes in the endless mode.

So what do you do in this game? Well, it's an endless runner game, meaning your character runs to the right of the screen and the challenge is to dodge obstacles whenever they appear within a short amount of time. There are only four different obstacle types that you either jump over, slide under, dash through or jump inbetween by pressing the correct buttons based on the color shown. It's very easy to pick up after completing the first level or two, and once you've seen these obstacles once, you've seen them all. For the rest of the game, they just repeat for a while without really mixing it up. You can turn off your brain and just play, which has its appeal from time to time. The hip hop aesthetic is pretty cool and the soundtrack has some pretty nice tracks to listen to, but everything in this game just gives the impression of "limited". That's not necessarily a bad thing, the game does only last a bit over an hour for a normal story playthrough after all, but that should be your expectation going in.

The endless mode is basically you running from corner to corner in a gym and dodging stuff two times in every lap. I think it took me 150 or so laps to get the achievement there, which, again, took half an hour, so go for 100% achievements at your own risk.

If you just found this game in your Steam library and are thinking off checking it off your backlog, there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon, but also plenty of better ways.

(This is the 100th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

I've played 100 games as part of this challenge now! Shame that the milestone was achieved with this game in particular, but also kind of fitting as one big theme of the challenge so far has been me finding out that Spider-Man games were shockingly bad for many, many years, so why not reach the 100 mark with another one of those?

Well, if there is another silver lining to that, it's that hey, you know what? Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is the best of the 8 (!) Spider-Man games I've played between 1990 and 1994. That says much more about the other seven than it does about this game, but it's worth acknowledging nonetheless.

This beat 'em up game released on September 16, 1994 to be exact, was developed by Software Creations (who developed the other, actually functional, Spider-Man game in 1992) and published by Acclaim Entertainment / LJN, who retro fans need no introducing to. It feels like yet another game where the publisher went "fuck it, do what you want with the license, here are 8 bucks", and the developers went "Ok, we'll actually try".

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10

The plot is apparently the first ever for a Spider-Man game to be picked straight out of an actual comic book story. It's told in a comic book style as well, which is a cost-efficient and fitting way to do things for a Spider-Man game. Finally a Spider-Man game that picks the easy and better path in that sense.

While there is more emphasis on the plot here than for most non-RPGs of the time, the problem here is that the storytelling is a jumbled mess at times because there are so many characters involved and just appear seemingly out of nowhere, so it is very easy to get confused by what is going on. The simple version of it is that Eddie Brock is released out of jail, and the Venom symbiote bonds to his former cellmate Cletus Kasady, who turns into supervillain Carnage. Venom and Spider-Man begrudgingly work together to defeat him whilst Carnage builds a team of villains.

For gameplay, this translates to fighting the same 5 or 6 types of enemies through well over a dozen stages and fighting the villains themselves about a dozen times overall as well. The pacing is pretty weird and clearly a lack of budget and/or time limited enemy variety so much that the devs just re-used the same events many times to make each encounter feel less and less special.

Overall, I think comic book fans who are more aware of all the characters will easier understand what's going on and get a little more enjoyment out of this, and I'm glad that comic book storytelling was used here, but it's not going to be the driving force to keep you playing, if gameplay doesn't do it for you.

GAMEPLAY | 8/20

If you play this and think "man, controls are not great", than boy do I have something to show you with all the other Spider-Man games that preceded this one. Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage's gameplay controls OK actually, but the issue is that enemy attack patterns are hard to discern in many ways, which will lead to you getting hit a ton, even though you are in the midst of attacking an enemy that for most of the time staggers enemies (meaning they don't attack back), until it somehow doesn't.

To explain it a bit further, this is a beat 'em up game in the same vein of Streets of Rage, Double Dragon and Final Fight. You walk down alleyways and can progress as you beat up enemies that show up continuously, until you reach the end of a stage and face a boss. You control Spider-Man, but the game lets you pick between him and Venom from time to time as well, which is pointless since their moveset is pretty much identical.

You hit enemies with punches for the most part, but you can also tie them up with your webs, use your webs to jump up and kick them in the air, jump & kick and pull them towards you with your webs to punch and throw them. If you time it right, you can sit inbetween two enemies and pull them towards each other and make their hands bang together, which is the highlight of this combat system.

There are stages where you have to dodge bombs and projectiles from above by swinging from one building to another and then back, but mainly it's the classic beat 'em up gameplay here.

Enemies are more or less aggressive depending on the color of their clothes, which indicates toughness, and enemy types do have their own attacks, but as mentioned, there are just very few of them in this game. It's so limited that they actually use a specific enemy type as a boss upon first introduction, before throwing them into the normal enemy pool in the next stages.

Then you have the fights against the main villain group, where you face up to 4 of them in one boss rush-type sequence. This is where the gameplay falls apart, as you can't reliable hit and dodge them, and their health pools make the fight last for way too long. The idea is to hit Carnage once or twice and move away, because he will not be staggered and just rush towards you. Then you gotta watch out to not dodge into Shriek's path, because she will just horizontally shoot her sonic energy blasts, which covers way more space than it appears she would. Then you punch her a couple times, at which point she teleports to another area on the screen, but not before leaving a vertical energy blast in her stead, which is going to hit you 100% of the time unless you punch just enough times to tread backwards before she teleports. Punching one too few times however will open you up to her horizontal blast, so it's a tediously tight game of do enough but not too much until she is disposed of, at which point you can focus on the others. You do this, as I said, 10+ times, which is not very creative nor fun.

To help you out a little bit, you can pick up power ups that let you spawn your allies, who will do a special attack that knocks out all bosses on screen and takes just a little bit of their health, or that kills all normal enemies on screen. It's OK but not too useful.

Overall, the gameplay works but is too unfair and repetitive to be considered fun.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10

No voice acting besides grunts. Sound design is a pretty basic SNES soundboard affair, while the rock soundtrack itself is actually pretty good. Not too many tracks in it, and I can't say it's all that unique, but you'll be OK with listening to it at minimum.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10

The graphical quality is average for an SNES title. It stands out though for the fact that many locations look and are identical/repeated, enemy variety is low and overall, visual diversity is just too little. Unlike all other Spider-Man games from its time, Spider-Man doesn't have horrendous posture though, which is at least something.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 5/10

Feels like a Spider-Man game thanks to the comic book storytelling and the multitude of characters appearing, but doesn't feel like a Spider-Man game because all the normal enemies are just random dudes and gals hitting you with frying pans and ... their hair.

CONTENT | 3/10

You will play this game for 3-8 hours depending on your skill level, if you want to beat it. For that run time, the game offers you fairly little. The moveset is very limited, enemies are always the same, levels look similar, there are no surprises the game really ever has in store for you in its gameplay, and the frustration levels here are very high anyway. With all these points combined, you'll see everything the game has to offer in an hour and probably not want to spend more than that anyway.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10

Alleyway, rooftops, the insides of bland looking buildings. That's what you'll get in terms of locations for the majority of this game. In almost all of them, you will be doing the same thing as well. Move from side to side (sometimes even back the way you came???), punch a bunch of bad guys, fight bosses that are the normal enemies, just tougher and move on with the story. Very bland.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 3/10

The game doesn't do anything do differentiate itself from prior beat 'em up games. It just uses that formula to make a functional, not terrible video game. The most (read: only) inspired part about this game is the comic book storytelling, but that loses its novelty after a while once you realize the story is not particularly well told despite the method they chose fitting the titular main character very well.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

You can choose Spider-Man or Venom as part of an illusion of choice for some levels. In reality, the only replayable part about the game is the high score system, in that you can try to beat your previous one.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 43/100

So yeah, the best Spider-Man game of the early 90s by far, but only because the other ones are so much worse. This game doesn't do so much wrong, it just does very little right. If you want to play a Spider-Man game, play the modern ones or those from the early 2000s, and if you want to play a beat 'em up, play Streets of Rage or Final Fight. The devs clearly had some passion for this game, which is nice, but an LJN-led (Spider-Man) game being only pretty bad is probably the best we got.

(This is the 99th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

I'm constantly hearing great things about Earthbound or "Mother 2", a 1994 JRPG developed by Ape Inc. and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo. Admittedly, when hearing of the game's Japanese and Western titles, I had a totally different type of JRPG in mind. One with a much more sad tone than I was met with.

It doesn't take long for Earthbound to show you what kind of game it is, and it won't take you long to figure out whether you like said tone or not. As a child, I would have absolutely adored it. As an adult? I absolutely adore it. The humor hits a lot but it misses quite often as well, at least for me. Depending on how that balances out for you, you might be more or less inclined to play on Earthbound once you start.

However, there are other reasons to continue or stop playing this game, which I want to go over in my review of this game.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10

You're playing the character that you can give your own name, but is canonically called "Ness". It takes place after the events of the first Mother game, which I haven't played, but I didn't ever get the impression that you need to play that. (That one got first localized in 2015 under the name "Earthbound Beginnings")

The game is set in the fictional country "Eagleland", which is a parody of the USA. The word "parody" should already give you an idea about the tone of this game. This is not a medieval / fantasy JRPG. The game's setting is themed around a parody of Western culture, which is why you can enter burger and pizza joints, go to ATM machines to withdraw cash, rest in hotels, heal in hospitals, are able to go to police stations and much more. There is a humorous tone to nearly everything in Earthbound, and it's what drives the game's charm.

The story has you investigate a meteorite crash in your home town. You figure out that an evil creature has engulfed the world with his evil nature and turned lots of creatures hostile. A bee from the future tells Ness that he is prophecized to save the world and that he has to collect melodies in a Sound Stone to put a stop to the evil.

On your journey forward, you visit several other towns, forests, a desert, swamp and more. I spent 12 hours with this game, so I didn't see everything, but expect quirky characters, odd obstacles to overcome and eccentric bosses to fight.

Characters that have stuck with me are apple and orange kid (one who is deemed smart and capable, and who isn't, among which you can choose to help one), a man who interrupts your gameplay to take a photo of you (which I hope is then shown at the end of the game), a boss who wants to turn everything blue and created a cult over it and several more. Lots of NPCs have funny one-liners you can read through alongside the usual lore dump they are used for in RPGs.

I've read up on how the story ends, and it seems to take things into a very interesting direction. So if you see it through, I believe you will be satisfied with it. For me, the reason why I didn't stick with it can be read through just below.

GAMEPLAY | 11/20

Earthbound does a lot of cool things that are pretty unique for its time and have stuck with the genre until today. Most of these things are related to the game's setting and quirkiness, but I found some interesting things to highlight in its gameplay as well.

Just recently, it was announced that Like a Dragon 8 would introduce a feature that lets you win battles automatically, if enemies are a lot weaker than you are. I don't know if Earthbound was the first game to do it, but that feature is in here.

Additionally, the game does not use an overworld. You seamlessly move from town to town in this game world. For random encounters, you can see enemies placed on the map, which I've last seen in 1992's Romancing SaGa. When these enemies run towards you, additional enemies can run up to you before the encounter starts.

The game does cool things with its times as well. Buying salt packets or ketchup and eating food with these items in your inventory leads to boosts to the food items, like additional health recovery. Not all "enhancers" work well with all foods, which impacts the boost you get.

Finally, each time you win in battle, you don't just get money from it, but rather a money deposit from your father to your bank account. Since money on your person is halfed whenever you die, you can choose to keep money on your account until you want it to buy stuff. I can't say that I think this is a good unique feature, but it is certainly unique.

So Earthbound does a lot of interesting things and many of these are pretty neat ideas. In its basic form though, the game employs similar gameplay mechanics to other RPGs of its time. The game uses a turn-based battle system in which battle order is chosen randomly each turn. This means you can use a healing item, but die if the enemy is chosen to attack first. That part in particular was really frustrating to me during my playthrough. With the help of an emulator, you can easily rewind and get different outcomes, but I've noticed just how RNG dependent the gameplay is during tough fights.

For example, say you are on low health. You can choose to heal, but if the enemy does an attack, you will lose all or most of that health again anyway. Or you can use a powerful PSI attack, but if the enemy activates a PSI shield right before that, you just waste a turn and PP points (yes, PP points). If you attack and the enemy attacks, you may die, if you haven't healed. Healing items and PP points are limited, so you can easily run out before killing a tough enemy. Or, alternatively, the enemy uses buffs or PSI shields while you are attacking, which lets you kill them before they get a chance to get enough hits in.

I got the impression that RNG dependency is too high on the one hand and/or grinding requirements are on a level that I'm not interested in engaging with.

Inventory management is also not the best and much more tedious than it needs to be. You can carry few items until you get additional party members, at which point you can carry twice as much and the issue is not nearly as bad. But for the first 10 hours or so, with all the key items you have, I found myself hard-pressed to be able to carry more than one food item, which made battles unnecessarily harder.

I've seen some people say that the game gets much easier as you go, so sticking with it may be rewarding in that sense. To me, the games 30+ hour runtime meant that I wasn't really too motivated to grind through the gameplay for that much longer.

Outside of combat, progression is also achieved by doing some light puzzles here and there or finding proper items to progress, such as figuring out a way to get past pencils that block your way forward. How could that be done?

Overall, your tolerance for the combat will decide how far you will take it with this game, and as is evident by this game's cult following to this day, the journey has been worth it to many.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10

When I played a few hours, I couldn't believe how recognizable and nostalgic the music sounds in this game. I have never played the game before, and only after a couple hours did I realize that I actually have heard one track in this game in particular many, many times over the years without knowing that it's from Earthbound. "Sanctuary Guardian" or the What Meme is what I'm referring to, and if you give it a listen, I can guarantee that anyone spending more time online than the average person will have heard of it (listen to at least 20-25 seconds in).

This track's weird, quirky, confusing and oddball vibes are exactly what the whole game sounds like though, and not only does it make the game's sound immediately recognizable no matter how many years later you think back on it, but I also found it to add to the wackiness of the game's moment to moment gameplay, and in a positive way for sure.

Sound design overall is very good in this game, with unique sounds at a time where a lot of games use very similar sounds for most actions, so overall, I had a pleasant time listening to the game.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10

The grounded, albeit parodied, real life setting is always very pleasant to me. Yes, there are humans and animals in control of evil who come after you like zombies, but seeing the setting and the design of the various towns be grounded like this is getting more and more rare these days where fantasy and sci-fi is included in nearly every single AAA game, so I appreciate the visual treat Earthbound ended up being in that regard.

In general, the look of the game is very distinct. You control kids who look like kids, in a world filled with your average modern-day adults (with quirky personalities), and run around from burger joint to flea market on your quest to save humanity. It's a pretty funny combination and works really well. So the art design I find to really be fantastic in this. Lots of stuff feels like it was drawn or written by children and then added into the game, so they really embraced this vibe and went for it.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10

Few games have the same vibe as Earthbound. I've read that Undertale is one inspired by Earthbound. Even there, I can't say I ever got the same vibe from it, and I don't think that was intended either. The closest modern games to me that have this vibe are the South Park RPGs, and according to the South Park creators Earthbound apparently was a game they took inspriation from for those ones too. Considering the South Park RPGs, especially the first one, are some of my favorite games ever, you could see how I dug Earthbound so much, though I'd say there is one big difference between those two in terms of the vulgarity of course.

I've described it a few times in this review already, but quirky, whacky and weird will be common adjectives that will be used to describe the game. For example, early on, a bee of all things comes to you to tell you that you are to save this world and that it will follow you until you finish your journey. Minutes later, you get to your neighbor's house and the bee unceremoniously is swatted down and dies. Can't say I've played a big budget game during this time where things like that ever happened. It's unexpected, it's funny and even today, I was caught off guard by it.

CONTENT | 8/10

The game takes roughly 30 hours to beat if you mainly focus on the main path. There is plenty of distractions on top of that, and lots of those hours are spent talking to people and finding your way forward that way. There are lots of items to find, buy and get to use on key things, lots of unique characters to meet and many different enemy types to fight. It being an RPG however, it also means that many of those hours will be spent in combat, which, as described above, has not aged very well.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10

The unique world map (no overworld) is a nice change from other RPGs for its time. Seeing enemies and being able to dodge random encounters at times is a good approach to them in my opinion.

In terms of the mission design, for the most part, it's your typical RPG affair. You go from town to town, dungeon to dungeon and beat boss after boss as you get stronger and stronger. While the dungeons I've seen all looked pretty much the same, towns are where a lot of work has gone in. Sure, you get the same main areas in all of them, but in layout and non-key buildings (hospital, burger joint, hotel..), there is enough variety there to give towns a distinct feeling.

In terms of the dungeons, as mentioned, they have all looked the same in the first third of the game. You enter caves and either come out the other end in a mountaineous arae or something similar, or you find yourself in the bigger part of the cave and have to move upwards to find the boss. Gets the job done, but not much creativity here.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10

The tone and setting of this game are both very unique components of it, and there are plenty of QoL improvements the game brings to the fold. Unfortunately, the combat system is too RNG-dependent for me to really say that all changes from your typical RPG work well here, and overall, Earthbound still is a 90s RPG in its core, and uses a similar formula for the most part.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

Early on, there is a choice to go with one of two kinds of kids to help them. Maybe there are more of those later on, but other than that, the game is not gonna offer you branching paths in key areas.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 79/100

Earthbound is among those dozen or so games from the 99 games I've played as part of this challenge so far that I can recommend everyone to at least check out. There is a reason it remains this popular, and it's one of the most unique games in terms of atmosphere that you will be able to play from the early 90s. The SNES is a console that keeps (kept) on giving and Earthbound is one of its many highlights, though the combat might be unendurable for some at this point in time.

I've had Papers, Please on my wishlist for many years. Finally picked it up for very cheap recently as part of the game's 10 year anniversary. Playing it taught me that I've been 10 years late to the party.

In this game, you are an "Inspector" at the border to Aristotzka, and your job is to check entry documents of everyone trying to enter. At first, you grant entry to Aristotzkians and deny it to every foreigner, but with every passing day, new rules are added and present ones change. By Day 20+, passports can be forged, both natives and foreigners need multiple different entry forms, you check for fingerprints to confirm identities, search bodies to check for contraband, detain criminals and also take part in shady activities as part of the main story if you want. The main story takes a lot longer than I imagined based on the premise, but the game keeps presenting new challenges to keep things interesting.

Whether you will enjoy the game yourself depends on how you feel about the core gameplay loop. As someone who does enjoy doing "mundane" tasks like looking over passports for discrepancies, I've enjoyed Papers, Please's gameplay a lot. It also sounds a lot easier than it is in practice. The number of times I made mistakes in this game is staggering. The game does a great job of making you feel and look dumb as hell. And it will happen to you often, simply because in the latter half of the story, there just is way too much to look out for that something small is tiny to slip by you. The only things I found a bit unfair were single letters being different in certain words (Citu instead of City is very hard to discern) and invalid height being a criteria too, since heights don't seem consistent enough.

There is also the part of the game being a low budget indie game. Not a bad thing, the game is a creative beauty, but the visual look is very simplistic and repetitive, there are very few sounds and tracks in the game, there are only a couple dozen faces in the game so they get repetitive too and all this combined adds to the repetitive feeling that comes up herre and there overall. This is one of those games though where a bigger budget wouldn't necessarily have done a whole lot for the overall experience relative to the potential income for the developer. As it stands, this is a very fun experience for the right player, a very unique experience no matter who you are (unless you're a border patrol agent irl) and one of the more creative games I've ever played. Check it out!

These "charming Indie(-style) platforming-adventure games" (like Rime, Gris, Aer, or even Journey) are not usually quite for me. The feeling the devs would like you to feel whilst playing these games don't usually bubble up inside me when I play these, even though I certainly can and do become emotional when I play video games. If you're like me and are still curious about Jusant, here is what I thought. If you're the opposite, I'd just disregard this review and read some of the other ones you find.

I booted up Jusant because I had a few days of Xbox Game Pass left and read multiple positive reviews (both by critics and players) about it. It's quite short at 3-4 hours (though it took me 5, maybe because I read every letter), so why not just play through it in an afternoon or two.

Ultimately, my experience with Jusant was pretty much the same as with the games I've described above, though closer to Journey and Gris than Aer and Rime (which is to say I thought it was above average in its category of games). Gameplay was enjoyable, I like the visuals and the soundtrack has some good songs in it, but the payoff to both the main story and the side story told in letters were both 'meh' because despite heavy lore dumps in letters at times, a lot of questions remain unanswered about this world. So much so that I find it hard to come to my own conclusion as to what happens after the ending, which is something many games ask you to do and usually feel satisfactory in doing so.

To go into it a bit more in-depth, gameplay consists of two things. The main part, which is climbing. You are an unnamed wanderer who starts close to the Sand Plains, which, to my understanding, is the bottom part of this so called "Tower" that you are about to ascend. You reach the "Low Tide" area, where you find some letters that clue you in on the story. From there, you start climbing upwards, finding some of the different areas that the letters previously described to you.

Each of these areas present you with additional climbing challenges, some of which remain for the rest of your playthrough and some of which are region-specific. For example, in the heat your stamina drains faster and roots of a plant wilt and disappear after a short while.

Climbing was fun enough for the duration of the game. It was not challenging but also not just a matter of pressing RT and LT all the time until the end. I've seen some call it meditative and, for the most part, I'd agree with that.

The other part of the gameplay is the collectibles. There are four or five things you can collect in this game: Letters, cairns which you can complete by adding a stone on top, frescos which you can light up, shells which you can listen to and altars which you can turn. The frescos look different, the shells give you different sounds each time and the letters obviously have differing contents, but as you can perhaps tell, these tasks are repetitive and don't serve a lot of purpose other than being busy work for achievement hunters.

The frescos look differently and have poems attached, which might impress you if you're into poems. I'm not a poems person myself. The shell sounds are OK but I didn't feel like there being 0 people in this tower besides you was a particularly good idea, so the shell sounds to replace them wasn't something I thought was sufficient to add to the game's atmosphere.

Finally, the letters consist of two types. There are Bianca's letters, which tell the story of a girl who leaves her home at a young age to join an expedition to the clouds and logs her progress. The second type consists of letters by past inhabitants of the homes you find these attached to and their worries, as well as newspaper articles to clue you in on the lore. While it helped in that final aspect, I didn't find most of these letters interesting and Bianca's story to not be worth the 15 minutes or so I've spent reading it.

The fate of the people in the tower is a sad thing for sure, but without really knowing much about the circumstances of them nor your character, I can't really say I knew enough to be able to care much about it all.

Despite that, the visuals, the climbing gameplay and the calm nature of it were enough to make this an enjoyable couple hours for me. You can (and should) avoid the non-letter and perhaps even shell and fresco side activities though, because they don't add much to the experience other than making it take longer.