I first got this game in the Halloween 2012 or 2013 GOG sale on a bit of a whim, I think you had to buy 5 games from the selection of 15 or so horror games and there was 4 others I wanted and I had one left so I picked this one having seen its name on this old PC Gamer list of horror games that described it as being really unique if not the best looking (I disagree but whatever).

I managed to get through the Bachelor scenario with the help of a walkthrough and was absolutely blown away by it and it quickly became my favourite game and I wouldn't shut up about it for people. Struggled with the Haruspex and Changeling (or Devotress as it was known in the original translation) scenarios though.

Then when this re-translation came out it blew the other 2 playthroughs wide open for me too, have played through all 3 scenarios at least twice now. (I think Haruspex x2, Changeling x4 and Bachelor x3 from memory though not 100% sure of that?) and it still remains my favourite game overall. Even though Pathologic 2 has improved some parts and is likely more accessible for the newer player, this is still a bigger beast, at least while P2 only has 1 of its 3 scenarios complete (and it looks less and less like we'll ever see Bachelor and Changeling scenarios on P2) and I do miss the soundtrack and some of the wilder story parts that were cut out of the original.

Anyway, this is one of those games that was originally quite obscure at least outside of its home country of Russia, but seems to grow more and more in popularity as every year goes by. Back in 2012 its wikipedia page was a stub and there was one famous article on it from RockPaperShotgun, but that was about it. All the 2 hour long video essays on this game were still years away

A lot has been written about this game, a lot of it is misleading though and I do think there's a bit of gatekeeping going on sometimes when it comes to this game, like people almost want to say how good the game is but similtanously talk other people out of playing it so it feels more like "their" game (maybe I was even guilty of that in the past too), and it's a shame that some of it is actually quite off putting (I'm not at all a fan of HBomberguy's video of this game for example as it really tries to make the game look quite unplayable when it really isn't for the cred points).

Truth is, this is actually not a particularly difficult game once you know what you're doing and neither is it really that buggy or janky, oh and it's plenty fun too despite the moniker being "it's not fun but still great", I feel like people saying this are using a very strict definition of fun that would mean that virtually all games aren't fun. This is fun in exactly the same way Dungeons and Dragons is fun or how Dark Souls, Silent Hill, Thief, Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld are fun i.e. it's not a game you "play to win" but it's a game which has an incredibly engaging world which draws you in and the mechanics really add to the sense of wonder in this game.

The game does have a slow build though, there's a much quoted stat showing how hard the game supposedly is about how few steam players get past the achievement for beating day 2, but this is not about difficulty, it's about the game's slow opening reveal. The plague doesn't even properly break out in the town until day 3 and so you don't have to deal with the plague mechanics until day 3, the first 2 days do have a bit of slow burn, which personally for me really add weight to the town and make you feel like you've been on a huge changing journey within the town by the end, but I say this as someone very au faix with the game and knows what they're getting, not someone who is playing for the first time.

Anyway, this still remains my favourite game, it has a narrative that I've only found Planescape Torment has ever been on the same level as in terms of ambition at least from the games I've played (and Pathologic is still the more ambitious of the 2 over the 3 scenarios) and the mechanics really tie in into it in an incredibly engaging way.

Just ignore the people saying this game is incredibly hard and punishing and unfun and ones who say "I love this game but can't recommend playing it", it's none of these things once you know what you're doing and in fact it's incredibly playable and fun and you should absolutely play it and not just watch a lets play of it, just appreciate the game can be slow for the first couple of days (but once you finish it if you're like me, you'll appreciate that in the end) and just enjoy the ride. There's still no other game like before or since.

Since i’m not very inspired to do some proper writing, and considering there’s hardly anything that haven’t been said already about HL2, this review will be mostly a list of random incoherent thoughts

- Half-life 2 is even more linear than HL1. HL1 was more puzzle oriented, therefore involving lots of backtracking.
- All in all HL1 was a more cerebral game, while HL2 is a lot more focused on action, even with the incorporation of the new physics
- HL2 has almost no flaws
- HL2 shows how to properly design levels around a gimmick: Whether it’s based on a vehicle, a particular weapon, or a special use of NPCs, HL2 proves that there is nothing wrong in gimmicks as a design choice (Take that you Barrel O’Fun haters), specially when they add more variety to the gameplay. In a very reductionist way, you could even describe HL2 as a succesion of gimmicks.
- Gameplay in HL2 is absolutely perfect
- Despite sharing a common story, showing similar design and aesthetical choices, HL1 and HL2 seems to me like completely different beasts. It would be like comparing Doom to CoD: MW2, which would be a pretty silly thing to do. I do have to recognize that i had more fun playing HL2, even if, up until this day, HL1 was one of my all time favourite games ever. I feel like i could replay HL2 next week already, while replaying HL1, instead, feels like a harder thing to do.
- One point where i think HL1 does slightly better is in it’s storytelling. While both stick to this idea of leaving many things unexplained and relying on the environment (which i really enjoy, it’s basically deviating from the Netflix norm of explaining everything way too much), i think they somehow handled things differently. In HL1, things unfold at a very slow pace, there aren’t many characters, and all in all little really happened, like the whole narrative was a lot more minimalistic. HL2 instead introduces many characters, the whole Combine vs Rebels conflict, and actually there’s tones of action going on all the time. HL1 felt like Ridley Scott’s first Alien movie, while HL2 is more like a Michael Bay movie. And don’t get me wrong, HL2 is great at doing that. But probably, if i ever had to write a script for a videogame, i would probably do something more in the vein of HL1 than HL2.
- A little nitpicK: The latter NPC’s. Alyx, Barney, Dog, the Priest, and specially the Antlions (they fucking rock), every NPC here is just fantastic. But the Citizens in the latter levels were just too clumsy, at times they felt more like an obstacle and even kinda ruined those episodes for me, specially in the tighter areas. Of course, those episodes were a lot better in the wide open areas, specially those were you were fighting gunships and sentries.

In conclusion, this is simply one of the games of all time. I think the only questionable thing about HL2 is it’s influence on the FPS genre, which is, of course, not really HL2’s fault, but mostly a problem of how the industry misinterpreted it. Thank god for the boomer shooter revival.

On September 11th, 2001, the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed, the aftermath of which would change American culture in ways we can still pinpoint decades after the fact. The greater minutia of the War on Terror or the Bush Administration is not something I'll be delving into here, but what's important here is that specific period of time, where the tragedy was still warm on American minds and the War on Terror was just beginning, because it's that specific cultural maelstrom that gives birth to something like Postal 2.

The reason 9/11 is so important to Postal 2 is due to the fact that the transgressive nature of the game lies in its nihilistic social and political commentary about America: From offensive Muslim stereotypes modeled after Bin-Laden who violently ransack churches and yell about Allah, to a 1:1 recreation of the botched Waco Siege operation by the ATF, to a whole in-game task about getting signatures for a petition dedicated to making whiny congressmen play video games, Postal 2 is a game that could have only been made in the transitional post-9/11 period between 1997 and 2003. Yet, despite Postal 2's attempts to be an apolitical parody piece that spares no demographic or political party, there are some aspects to the parody that belie a reflection of post-9/11 American society. The Postal Dude, despite being a violent lunatic who has no qualms about violence, is a model American: He votes on Voting Day, he loves the Second Amendment, and he makes time to go to Church. The fact that the Muslim stereotypes are all part of a terrorist organization, yet reside in the heart of small-town Americana, running the grocery store and hosting their base of operations right in The Postal Dude's backyard, reflect the Islamophobia that was rampant in American culture at the time due to the 9/11 Attacks, the paranoid ignorance that led to wide-spread discrimination against Muslim-Americans. Compound this with critiques of the U.S. Government, from rampant police brutality, to a recreation of the infamous Waco Siege, to the bombing of a Muslim terrorist camp in Apocalypse Weekend by a gung-ho, hyper-violent military force in a way that reflects the worst of the War in Iraq, the post-9/11 nature of the game is prominent in it's bloodstream. It's a perfect time capsule of the era, sensibilities and all.

Following in it's predecessor's footsteps, Postal 2 aims to be transgressive, in a much more aggressive sense than the original Postal, in a way that feels like a direct, personal response to the controversy courted by Postal upon its release. One of the first missions The Postal Dude embarks on is picking up his paycheck from an in-game replica of the Running With Scissors studio, where he works and interacts with real-life staff members in-game, before the studio is besieged by moral guardians protesting against violent video games, who hypocritically, launch a violent assault the studio and its staff. The Running With Scissors office in-game is crafted with love, with photos of staff on the wall, real-world photos of documents, meticulously crafted office spaces, and a whole faction of RWS NPCs that will always support The Postal Dude and whom you are allowed to kill with zero consequence. All of this paints a meta-context for the game going forth: A direct response to RWS' critics and cultural legacy, at a time where Joe Lieberman was still in the headlines and Mortal Kombat was being presented in court hearings on violent content in video games. Where Postal was a statement, Postal 2 is a response.

The most interesting part of Postal 2 as a response piece to the criticism of Postal is the fact that it's entirely possible to complete the game without a single kill. While the original Postal was a mass-shooting simulator that required you to kill in a commentary on the casualness with which we treat violence as entertainment, Postal 2 amped up it's transgression to the surface-level with the political commentary on America, but reworked the core gameplay loop in order to put the impetus for violence on the player. While there are systems in place for all manner of violence and crass actions from a myriad of murder implements to a functioning arson and urination mechanic, there are also mechanics for the mundane: waiting in line, paying for your goals, getting arrested peacefully and non-lethal takedown methods for every enemy you encounter. The meta nature of the game is pushed further than the interaction between Postal Dude and his creators at Running With Scissors, with a complete lack of a 4th wall as the Postal Dude comments on and interacts with the player in a mostly jeering way. The game itself taunts you with tedium and annoyance in an attempt to make you go postal, holding a finger an inch from your cheek while claiming to not touch you. The violence is shifted from a requirement to complete the game to an optional way of approaching a situation, and the casualness with which the average gamer will resort to violence ties into the main underlying theme of the series: the prevalence of violence in the media.

In our entertainment, violence is the most common language with which we communicate. Even in something as innocent as Mario, you still engage in violence to reach your goals, stomping on enemies and bosses, even if the violence is abstracted enough to not feel weird over it. This is not a condemnation of violence in our media, but simply an observation. Postal was so controversial because of the fact it stripped away the layer of dissonance we create by contextualizing the violence in real-world terms: a lone gunman engaging in meaningless violence to fulfill his goals. Postal 2's commentary on violence is much less upfront than the original Postal's, but it's still interesting in the detached way in which it lets the player engage in it. If you kill or if you don't, Postal 2 passes no judgement on your actions. It knows you'll resort to violence just because it's what you're conditioned to do as someone who plays video games, but the only thing goading you into engaging in said violence is the tedium in place in our own reality. It's a horrifically offensive, ultra-violent jankfest. It's cathartic form of virtual rebellion against the mundanity of everyday life.

"POSTAL 2 is only as violent as you are."

If you're as disillusioned with the state of video game comedic writing as I am, then I can't recommend Moon enough. The Undertale inspiration is beyond apparent, but, thankfully, Toby Fox-esque dialogue isn't. Instead, it's written more like a golden age point-and-click, in which every character subscribes to the same sort of backwards logic that you have to make sense of in order to progress. This degree of committal, to me, is what separates retro quirk from modern indie quirk, which typically means presenting the player with a series of jokey, half-sarcastic statements that more often than not clash with the setting rather than characterizing it. And the setting's really everything in Moon, which tasks some kid (who I named "Sirloin," for some reason) with collecting love from the citizens of Love-de-Gard through various means. The more love you get, the further you can venture outside without having to sleep, which gives you more leeway into tracking the villagers' day/night and weekly schedules and allows you to reach new locations on your own accord. The same giddy feeling of planning out how to be in the right place at the right time that would later make Majora's Mask great is present here, but it's also amplified by the fact that you have to earn the ability to even be there. You're not guaranteed three full days, you have to work your way up to that point first. Moon's other stroke of genius comes with it being solely composed of sidequests that all reward you the same thing. Hit a wall in a typical point-and-click and you're done progressing until you eventually flail towards the correct answer, but getting stuck in Moon simply means you get to pursue a different avenue to obtain love. Your character's slow movement speed also gives you plenty of opportunity to consider possible solutions, more or less diffusing the feeling of wasting your time that usually comes packaged with any contextual puzzle game. The cherry here is the game's story, which you really have to stumble upon all by yourself. It's all about collecting love, until it isn't, of course, and it's easy to see how railroading could defeat the entire purpose.

Where Moon succeeds on a mechanical front, however, it often disappoints in the satiric sense... or, at least, that's what the first few hours led me to believe. It starts off as a surface-level subversion of JRPG tropes, positing a protagonist that's really a bully and monsters that are misunderstood animals, but, eventually, the hero fades away from the story, allowing Sirloin to create one of his own. Moon isn't simply a base parody or some milquetoast statement on love being the most important power of all, but a past tense coming-of-age story, a portrait of a very specific type of innocence loss using the framework of video games. We've all been there. Believing that L was real, that the truck in Vermillion City was blocking something important, that Sephiroth could be recruited into your party, or that Sonic was an unlockable character in Melee. The idea that games extended beyond the walls of your TV, housing unexplainable worlds where anything and everything could happen. Judging by Minecraft's Herobrine, this is a phenomenon that transcends both generations and philosophies of game design. But, at some point, we lost the ability, or perhaps the willingness, to reenter this state of mind. Play enough games and you realize there's a limit to what they're capable of, that there are certain rules that all developers more or less follow. This is what the fake/real dichotomy on the cover art refers to, and it's also something that's baked into how Moon works at its core. Learn enough about this world and you begin to find out that there's more to it than meets the eye, doing this also gives you the ability (or, the desire) to spend more time here. Spend too much time here and the seams start to show. Routines become too predictable, dialogue repeats itself, and the solipsistic nature of video games fully sets in. What adds to this is how consistently it subtly hints towards the boundary between fake and real. Take, for instance, this line. One on side of the spectrum, it serves to characterize Minister's anality (think "always watching, Wazowski") but on the other, it's a nod towards his ultrasimple AI. After all, any game trying to create the illusion of real characters would certainly avoid directly stating that doing X will always cause someone to do Y. Moon's puzzles also frequently point towards this separation. In gamespeak, someone telling you to look at a painting means that the player is supposed to physically study its graphical asset for clues, but in Moon, you actually have to literally position your character in front of it and wait for a few moments. This one briefly stumped me- I had to come back to it after awhile to figure it out, in other words, I was effectively punished for being on the "fake" end of the spectrum. I could harp on how Moon could've given you a few more reasons to hang out in town, or how the clock stops feeling like it matters too soon, or how it contains the most banal fishing minigame yet conceived by man, but it's hard to argue against how elegantly it ties its themes into how it plays. There's a reason why the tone's so somber, and why so many of the characters are trying to reignite some long lost spark. The Sirloin that your Gramby knew and loved is gone, replaced by a ghost wearing his clothes, while she lies in bed, Claire de Lune softly playing in the background. Once that dragon's slain, there's no going back.

Stop browsing Backloggd, and go to bed!

It's rather telling that this ur-Tetris operates with the same mechanical elegance as its progeny. I find the consideration of Tetris - and indeed, any game - as a 'perfect game' to be trite, but from the outset Alexey Pajitnov demonstrated with aplomb that Tetris is a perfect idea. The reiteration of gameplay systems necessarily precludes Tetris from an actualised perfection -- who can judge which of its 322+ official releases is 'definitive'?

Yet, with hundreds of versions each expanding on that which came before, one would expect the very first title to be lacking most of what allowed Tetris to be a success. The Electronika 60 release is a monochrome textscape without even the barest flourishes of the Game Boy version. The shrill piezoelectric beeper's pathetic tones are an auditory agony; the ubiquitous whine of the cathode ray tube a tinnital torment. There is no bag randomiser. There is no hold. Rotation is clockwise-only. No T-spins, no back-to-backs, no combos, no garbage, no ghost. One next piece is shown. Surprisingly the hard drop is present, despite its omission from subsequent versions until 2001's Tetris Worlds.

It all matters not. In a cacophony of noise befitting a Ryoji Ikeda installation, I am dealt five Z-pieces in a row. The inconsistent speed increments befuddle me, catching me off-guard. How characters are rendered makes it difficult to consider my board's layout. I am in love. This scant realisation feels pure. I am entranced by it. It is all I have ever needed and wanted.

Abstracting and replicating patterns in harmonizing ways are some of humanity's greatest strengths as a species. Everyone knows nothing is created and that it’s all transformed, but the way in which we apply this logic in creating media is what determines whether our names shall be salvaged by history books or left to rot alongside us. When a groundbreaking title, such as a videogame, is released, everyone wants to have a piece of their own, inevitably trying to subtract what was essential for its success and applying it in different areas, in the hopes of either improving the new established norm or trying to find some success with different audiences drawn out by its newly attained fame. We always fail to take into consideration however, that even the most revolutionary discoveries like gravity, needed some sort of apple like object from somewhere else, to be fully remodeled into a genuine theory.

Dodonpachi, the cult bullet hell from ‘97 didn’t invent the shmup wheel by any means, but it improved on it massively, to the point that the symbol of the game, a quirked up bee, slowly became a cult icon for gaming as a whole. Taking direct inspiration from what it worked previously from games beloved by the recently formed STG fans, it abstracted what worked from games made by Toaplan and Raizing, to produce what some consider to be one of the most important titles to the genre of all time. One of the areas in which Dodonpachi is really memorable, is the story which it tells, mostly because you are treated with no explanations ingame for what's happening until shit hits the fan. The style in which Cave would later adopt regarding exposition would improve in their subsequent titles, however the lack of questions answered in obtuse narratives was not only kept as an already established genre tradition, but was also utterly solidified as one, as the question "Why copy this part too, sir?" wasn't asked enough times.

A lot of classic 90's and 00’s shoot ‘em ups have stories that pass flashing by as remnants of a proper one, due to the nature of how arcade titles were consumed, and how expensive it was to produce cutscenes, usually being reserved for openings made solely to attract new players. What is happening to the characters during the screen flashes of ESP Ra.De? Who are they fighting for in Progear? What do Ikaruga passages between levels tell me about the world? Even games that try to be more in your face, without the previously established archaic arcade limitations, that uphold proper dialogue such as Zero Ranger, Radiant Silvergun and the Touhou series, still give a sensation that something you can’t quite point out is missing whenever you think about the grand scheme of things, almost as if you joined a movie in the second half. The narrative of a classic shmup game are most of the time just the aesthetics, and that's not necessarily bad.

By being exposed to small glimpses of the situation your character finds themselves in, only the pastiche of war stories such as Aces High or Secret Invasion, and other heroic warfare tales being told by shonen anime lenses, remain. In the end it wouldn’t make much of a difference, would it? Your very nature as a player of just assuming the position of an underwhelmingly small war machine, bravely dismantling a whole army just by yourself, requires no explanations, instead just being relegated to something similar as the climax of a mindless yet amazingly produced power fantasy movie. Of course, not all games need to have complex stories (or stories at all), but it makes me wonder if this was a deliberate artistic choice or one made to maximize profit. I believe this unpronounceable title to be the first legitimate subversive shmup story, but to properly explain that let’s talk first about this genre's conventions.

Both in game and in the menus, your eyes will be assaulted by 28 different symbols that substitute not only our usual aramaic alphabet, but our precious arabic numbers as well. Trying to understand what’s happening in the game might seem like an easy task at first if you ignore the dialogue, however eventually you’ll notice that the alien appearance of the game also extends to the way your trusty weapon works. You only have 2 buttons besides the one that pauses, one for shooting and one for switching weapons, which I’ll be calling the cross arrangement since it has no official name and because I think it sounds cool (also because until you master it, you better pray for it).

The way the cross arrangement works is that you’ll spend approximately half a second without shooting and the last input in which you pressed (moving, shooting or even doing nothing at all) will change your shooting pattern, from wide, to more focused, aimed backwards, X shaped, auto guiding… and so on. Early on you have 4 patterns to which you can transition easily, however you can find up to 24 more by shooting on the screen in some specific areas to unlock way more, expanding in your options. Ranging from a curse and a blessing, you might panic sometimes not knowing to which pattern you can transition from. It’s a very unique sensation that I felt during a desperate struggle to maintain control of my own weapons, in an increasingly difficult double edged overly complicated system.

There is a menu dedicated to leveling up, however because you can’t interpret what’s on screen, it’s a question of trying to decipher how far off from getting an upgrade you are. Even worse, if you gather points by playing solely the last levels, the algorithm doesn’t bend back to upgrade your early necessities, in an incredibly bizarre way that feels like you can only buy such upgrades if you have enough money, but not too much in your wallet. Applying and understanding how each and everyone works (except the obligatory life upgrade), is another challenge in itself, even after beating the game 2 times to make this review, I still don’t properly understand what they do. Googling for help the day before was hilarious, because not only I was trying to understand a really cryptic and specific tool in the game, but also I couldn’t find a way to look for the title’s name itself, as just searching ‘_____’ showed me results similar to the peculiar I’m Feeling Lucky button.

The way in which the story is told is not exactly what you think it is from such an offbeat shoot ‘em up. Riding through different planets with small transitions only to fight against seemingly similar enemies from the ones before, just to encounter a rival that fights using your own moves while speaking complete gibberish, is something that feels oddly familiar, even if you can’t point out a specific title that does it. The alienation to which we have been exposed to STG narratives existed even in its infancy in the 80’s, when it was filled to the brim with nonspecific all-encompassing space odysseys, striking back once again with added relatively modern shmup anime lenses from the 90’s and 00’s laid back game design choices of continuing in a multitude of ways, to the mix. The proper ending of the game made it all worth it, explaining not only the stylistic choices found in this peculiar galaxy adventure, but also the very nature of this game release, which I won’t spoil because I think it is particularly genius. Consider this a challenge to beat the game, for everyone who’s reading.

For a title to have such a unique and hard way to find, it sure was made by a studio that covers itself with unusual stylistic choices aimed directly at those who end up stumbling on the title, like someone who just found out a secret pile of gold. Just to give some small context about Platine Dispositif, they had a game vanish from Steam, in which you had to unlock the ability to walk. Obscurity by choice in a game that plays itself as being an abstracted version of repeating the genre’s usual staples while still carrying purposefully unfamiliar visuals and mechanics that forces you to abstract the genre’s conventions on your own, is what some may call ‘art’. Being inventive even in the way in which it was released, as to having such a name that the only video I could find about it attached a "?" to the game’s title, is a very unfamiliar sensation in the medium of video games. From a regurgitating genre full of familiar sameness, this unpronounceable title shines, in the bottom of everyone’s obscure radar, as a certified shmup ultra obscure classic.

Now, pray and tell me oh local Backloggd user.

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