i know this is a game about social themes because it told me so, very directly, about sixty different times.
towards the end i stopped fighting the writing and found a little bit of peace with it but it took me a while to stop skipping through the oceans of text to describe a single room.
i'm a little snippy about the idea this game is "learning from tabletop games" because it is still a very constrained game where you can see almost everything in a single playthrough. in no sense are you playing against a DM or making hard choices between compelling scenarios where it feels like anything can happen. there's just some resource management.
dragging dice around was kind of a chore - i left resources on the table several times because the process of collecting them was so unintuitive, towards the end i was spinning my wheels looking for something to do, navigating the whole station was a little clunky and exhausting.
it's not, like, a problem? but neither was it a revelation. corporations are bad, robots are people, people are good. is that really all cyberpunk has to say to us as a genre? or is this "hopepunk" where there are only vibes?

it didn't really ..... capture ..... me

oops, i thought this was a vibes-based horror game, and not a "things chasing you" horror game. not my thing.

i love the feel of a ps1 adventure game with horror vibes but i don't love the game-breaking bug i encountered. i like the art and story but i don't think it is very complex or even necessarily well-told. i think this is good and interesting and something people should consider picking up and playing, and also a flawed and amateur work that needs to be approached as such. no rating because it's a beautiful contradiction that deserves more consideration than getting boiled down into a simple score.

All the people who say “this game is too easy” make me feel a little self conscious. I found later levels and bosses get kind of tough!

2022

Gorgeous art, great sound, interesting story, fun plotting, beaaautiful prose. Gotta say, though, the ending…. Kind of lost me.

for a second the narration said "I breathed in" and a wind gusted through the forest and I thought "well at least they did the bare minimum to attach the narration to the scene around me" but then it continued "I breathed out", and it was clear the gust of wind was randomly timed. and i stopped playing after the second section because walking through a randomly generated forest listening to an apparently unrelated tall tale just didn't really seem worth it to me.

liked the vibes, genuinely weird, but got stuck on a puzzle and couldn't finish it. oh well!

excruciatingly slow. i tapped out after like 5 minutes.

spleunky meets Evo. neat to play with for a few minutes, but i got stuck in an area because the procgen needs a bit of work

2022

Fez (conlang puzzles) meets dark souls (precise and demanding fights that start you back at a bonfire), but a handy "no fail" mode makes this the first soulslike i have finished.
there's.... some stuff to like. the existence of the manual as both extra-game artifact (notes scribbled in it from a fellow player, coffee rings, etc) that shows the game in a low-res blurry mess in the background, but also an in-game Thing (an important collectible that reveals key information to you at gated points and has Implications). and for the most part, barring a few cliches, i liked the way the plot was revealed. the music is fantastic.

but also there's stuff i don't like about Souls and a cute face and an accessibility option don't take away the pain of enemies and hazards that drain your max health, or boss fights with precise and unending patterns, or opaque next steps.

this is a hard balancing act. i don't want the camera to swing towards my next objective every time the state of the world changes, and i don't want my character to mutter "need to get to the armory" every 30 seconds. but also i don't want paths blocked by geometry or to be stuck for an hour because i made a wrong turn and i don't know what to do next and none of the online guides have caught up yet. that's a hard balance. does this game achieve that balance? who am i to say!

i don't like videogames i like atmospheric 2d platformers with puzzle elements

edit: actually i don't like either

i didn't really expect the slapstick comedy (which works beautifully!) or the occasionally tensely poetic line delivery. i kind of expected good music but was blown away by some of the best musical sequences i've played in a game - a shame they came so late! other than that, this is an adventure game. it has puzzles. it has a story. what's unusual is the style, but you can tell from the screenshots that style is like top 5. also, i am not totally sure i tracked the story aside from the deeply metaphorical asides to, uh, astrophysics. does that mean the story was bull, or does it mean i'm just not properly attuned to vague cosmic spiritualism? idk! it only mildly interfered with my ability to enjoy the game though.
some minor problems playing with a controller, switching between controller and mouse worked best.

awful, debilitatingly bad combat

i liked the mechanics of it, but the plot hit so many of my yuck buttons that it made me question every ounce of enjoyment i got out of it, and then made me retroactively question how much i actually enjoyed Her Story.