I know nothing about Lisa: the Painful. According to what people seem to tell me, it's like The Road but with fart jokes (?) Regardless, I come from the angle of wanting to check out every Yume Nikki fan game, there's a large wealth of them that fly underneath the radar, my favorite being Neftelia 1&2. I wasn't able to play this, as its an RPGM2003 game, which the sound doesn't work for Linux users. Watching someone else play it, I was compelled by the story of abuse. Before I could pull myself away, I was already in the middle of it.

Games that touch on this specific kind of trauma are never easy for me, and I always worry if it's a form of self harm to even let my mind recede back into that kind of place. With Lisa, it really isn't holding back with the disturbing imagery at all. It's not just a mediocre game; a real feeling pierced through me. It has all of the abstract and expressionistic treatments of the topic you'd expect. But also, its a mediocre game because it suffers from miserable level design, apparently.

To me the emotions the game made me feel just happen to strike so deep that I had to say something about how good it is in just that way. I don't really know if I'm going to play the sequel game, but I'm happy I didn't listen to all of the people who told me to skip this. On the other hand, this game will reopen wounds. It took me half a day to emotionally bounce back.

I really want to love this game. I don;'t know if it's because I'm playing it on Linux and using a dualshock controller but no matter if I'm doing mouse or doing controller, the controls for it just feel so wrong and hard to deal with. I'm fighting with the basic controls to get through a game with a massive amount of tilt sensitive movements and platforming. It's a shame because I love the colors, the theming, the singsongy dancy pacifist story. I guess I can just watch someone else play it, but it's very frustrating for me.

I've been a fan of Dear Esther ever since I first played the Half Life 2 mod, under-aged, disenfranchised, looking for something deep; more importantly, new free things to pad out my experience with PC gaming. Since that time, I've realized just how much of my sensibilities of what I want from not just games, not stories, but whole experiences in general is so heavily informed by things from this game. It helped drive a lot of my own interests in design, sitting at the recesses of my taste as I would figure out what kind of artist and designer I wanted to be. So now for the fourth time, I've decided to play the most recent iteration of it, with the newly included Director's Commentary mode. I really wanted to get a better idea of what was going on in their minds when they were making this, see if I can maybe come out with some strong takeaways.

The commentary was more or less divided into four parts, much like game itself. Scattered throughout the usual landmarks were clip bits you'd interact with to hear the audio tracks, much like other games directors commentaries, and delivered very reminiscent to System Shock 2, which the team directly cites as an inspiration for the design. Design being the principle and most important topic of discussion, but also the audio, visuals, and logistics of pulling the project off. Design, Art, and Music leads all sitting together, chiming in on the most meaningful parts as I nostalgically walk along the familiar derelict island that grew up along with me.

The general design and influence talk, what works for the story, what they had in mind and how they went about managing it was the most important for me to dig into.. They really had no point of reference for what they were doing and were trying to pull more from a great deal of different things and ideas rather than falling into any kind of convention, and I think it's one of the reasons why it stands out so strongly from similarly depressive island based games like your typical Dark Falls or Barrow Hills that float in a similar area of the adventure game world and came out around a roughly similar time as the initial mod.

They called it a ghost story in a sort of casual and half hearted manner before they really could put exactly what it was to words. They constantly talked about how important the subjectivity and dreamlike nature of the narrative was. They put a great deal of effort into randomizing certain sound cues and props that spawn in so that it would deliberately draw from more intensely loaded symbolism and personal experiences in the viewer so that it could give a truly unique kind of interaction. Not interaction as a cold mechanical set of systems and functions, but along the lines of how you feel about it, what these instances mean and how you'll look back at all of the moments in the game later.

Because of the unique nature and tone expressed through the writing, visual design, and way they decided to even structure the gameplay and level design, the game is an amalgamation of profound moments of silence to reflect on more serious topics.. There's a deep silence and sparseness all throughout the game, especially enhanced by the music. By the end of the game, the climb up the tower and soar down around the island ends up meaning something to me that other people ultimately can't understand, because my feelings are my own, and the game deliberately designed for me to interpret things the way I personally do. In spite of the fact the game was made by atheists, I always find myself likening the whole experience to a purging from the fields of asphodel.

The music and art leads both really just are a joy to listen to when they express their process. How they ended up making the caves work and how the music would shift away from a more sparse direction and more into a strongly vocalized and feminine kind of expression as you'd pass out of the threshold, in the worst of the memories the narrator carries you through. How the sound wasn't designed to be running on constantly to try and force you how to feel, but rather inform you about the character of the island and narrator, their emotional states, tying the audio motifs in with their concept designs.

There's really so much more to talk about in this game.. It's just a treat for people who can look past what they were instructed games are supposed to be.. But you may already have played games like this and think half of what I'm saying is elementary or shallow readings.. It is, but I'm more trying to celebrate these formative elements in a work that really gave me a lot of inspiration. And hopefully enough, convince an artist or a gamer struggling with some kind of burnout to find that same spark I did in my experiences playing this game.. Each stage of my life I went back to play it, I got something else out of it. Felt something different.. There's not much like it out there and I'm thankful they made a commentary version on this release.

With the expressive key art and character portraits, I was really hoping for a lot more with this game.. It really didn't provide anything I haven't seen before in the realm of east and southeast asian school horror, you're really better off trying anything else. And it provides this sameness in the limited scope of 2D. Its other huge problem is that it's simply just.. very buggy and hard to deal with. Nothing engaging enough to string me along far enough either. If you've done the school classroom hide/run puzzle of coming in one door and leaving out the other to confuse the AI in another game, then you've played basically what all of this game has to offer. That, backtracking. Tedium. Glitches.

I had played this game once and gotten frustrated with it when i was a young impressionable teenager with barely any taste in anything, so naturally I should come back to it as an adult and actually try to beat it, right? Only something went wrong. Before the game could even start, the it assaulted me with its aggressively unfunny south park humor. I had one of those moments where you question every other bit of media you consumed in those formative years. "What other dreck was I so easily ready to choke down in the name of content?" Not this time. Don't even bother to try to get through this cringe corporate take on the indie platformers of the time. You'd be better off playing Braid (derogatory)

Not exactly the BPD coping / recovery activity I thought it could be for several reasons; nonetheless, it's a very lovely game with a simple and effective design. You're listening to pleasant music in a cozy little room, reading random nice messages from people, writing and answering letters. People requesting help or.. kind words. The only reason I don't think it's the perfect coping / recovery game is because it lacks the immediate nature of someone listening and responding to your problems. This by no means makes the game bad. I do like sending nice thoughtful messages to people but I'd want to be playing this game to get reassurance, which in the case of this game, is far from immediate. Still, if you're feeling down in the dumps, I'd give this game a try.

Back in my days still going to art college, I would often cash out random stuff at the local trade shop called Bookman's, and find whatever curios I could get my hands on. This was a time period where I was especially obsessed with 'visionary art', a genre of psychedelic art meant to depict a kind of fantastical concept of reality through a spiritual or some kind of metaphysical connection. This was also a period where I was struggling with my identity and femininity, so the image of an ambiguously gendered jester angel immediately sucked me in like a vortex. For.. I think four dollars, I got this game, complete with a little art booklet, I have it next to me in a trunk still. It has the most strange 360 view point and click controls, vivid, strange, and horrible bit-crushed environments, and an aesthetic that completely doesn't match the cover artwork. (done by Gil Burvel) It's had a profound impact on my sensibilities, sense of aesthetics, and how i view myself. It's also literally low quality 90's shelf fodder. It's funny how you can be so impacted by such random things.

A testament to how I would play anything that labeled itself as cyberpunk in 2013. A period in which my intellectual curiosities were insatiable, but comprehensively poisoned by the desire to have it all filtered through video games. There is nothing of substance in this game. It has learned features from the cyberpunk games that inspired it but has not learned how or why to use them. Looking back on my longing for cyberpunk material to digest (which would become a quest to eventually learn of the much more intellectually healthy genre of solarpunk) I can only come to the conclusion that not much has changed in the world of cyberpunk video games. People into cyberpunk will literally play anything that presents itself as cyberpunk. With several exceptions, it's an intellectual wasteland, excavated of all value, with the sensitivity, depth, and thoughtfulness that supposedly defined the literary genre completely absent. It's empty symbols that vaguely allude to something better from a different time.

A game that nobody really could appreciate because it was a sequel to a hack and slash action RPG MMO while offering something completely different. This was my introduction to Phantasy Star so I was immune to being let down. PSOEPIII is a turn based, tiled based, card based strategy game. It's a tough sell even if it wasn't attached to the IP of an action game. Yet, I couldn't help but find the depth of the cards, customization and tactics of it all so fascinating. It also has an understated story that reveals itself pretty well unless you talk to every single NPC between every mission and listen to their requests, deploying the right characters in the right missions in order to get more context for the story. The story itself is actually incredibly profound, preoccupied with the struggle between terrorists trying to prevent the ecological damage of a colonized planet. They do this by hacking the technology of the colony and create nanomachine phantoms of the animals killed by their ecocide, using the very ghosts of the planet against them. The greatest part about the game is its grave sadness that bleeds out through the dialogue of the characters and overpowering music. The music of the game is nothing short of breathtaking. I would recommend this game to anyone who likes card games and the soundtracks of Sonic Team games.

At the time I really got into the game I was incredibly burned out on all of the aesthetics in its arsenal. Decayed and grimdark london, lovecraftian themes, steampunk curios, and a gameplay ethic more drawn from devil may cry than zelda, a change I didn't exactly get. The game still managed to completely pull me into its grasp and show me that these things I'd been so tired of were still able to have a deep resonance. The staggeringly gigantic, labyrinthine, and practically ramshackle layout of Yarnham completely captivated me. Claustrophobic, diseased, and most memorably, a deep feeling of loneliness with the full knowledge that there ARE people still in this town. The loneliness is for its own good. Absolutely stunning creature and character design, fine details in all of the environments that I can stare at for hours (I'm a 3D artist its a thing I literally do), it still all perplexes and inspires me. As I make my way through the game, many strong narratives emerge, gently expressed as to allow my imagination and interpretations run free, just how I like it.. A healing church administering a healing blood from an unknown and likely horrible and terrifying source, the slow decay of the minds of the people receiving the blood ministration, the constant inescapable explicit meditations of dreams, nightmares, insight, truth.. The game is a painful and mesmerizing little puzzle box for me to get lost in. If I could recommend the game to anyone, it would be to people who always felt burned by cosmic horror or victorian fiction.

One would think a spinoff to an industry juggernaut would give something far less thoughtful and engaging than the mainline games. Pulling you in with the cyber ninja aesthetic only lightly teased in the original games, now front and center, fully developed into a stylish and visceral spectacle. Eccentric and tormented cyborgs locked in both physical and ideological combat, waxing philosophical about social contagion one minute, and sliding down the side of a skyscraper the next. This time taking a more direct approach to critiquing the western war machine, the profiteering corporations that drive it, and the collective consciousness that enables it to continue. Raiden in this game is a character very driven by moral obligation, an indignation and wish to truly disrupt the military industrial complex and its exploitation of the global south.. The intensity of the soundtrack, the frenetic combat system, absolutely larger than life characters all are icing on the cake.

For better or for worse this game had unleashed a maelstrom and dramatically changed the landscape of games. Some may even say its success reduced the enjoyment and magic of playing the game as internet culture fixated on it so intensely. But please, if you haven't played this game yet, push through any weird impressions of it you got from the fandom and just give it a try, and not just watch someone else. It makes a profound difference and feels much more personal as you bring yourself into the world and really feel the weight of choice, of the history of the world, the feelings of its inhabitants. It also happens to have a very cute aesthetic, engaging bullet hell gameplay, and a mind blowing soundtrack. Every major character in it is unforgettable and widely popular online for a reason. I highly recommend the game to anyone unsatisfied by violence in games.

A game where the conversation around it has truly overshadowed its value as a game. A mirror reflecting out their feelings, understandings of games, and of course unwanted, unwarranted, and unchecked aggression against a vaguely defined "them." The game itself is a very blissful, bright and evocative depiction of nature. It gives me some of the same strong feelings I get when I go on my own nature walks. It's pleasant. I like it. And I figure anyone who likes nature walks could appreciate the unique experience the game provides.