Cult of the Lamb is very shallow and devoid of content, but the devs perfected the art of the streamerbait.

The game looks and sounds amazing, and presents the whole gameplay loop within the first hour, so if you catch a glimpse of the game on someone's stream, you will probably think "oh damn, this is really cool" and go to buy it.
If you haven't played any games in either the roguelite genre (The Binding of Isaac, Hades, Enter the Gungeon, etc) or the colony management sim genre (Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Oxygen not Included, etc) you might even have some fun playing it. Otherwise though you'll quickly notice there's nothing more to what you already saw on stream, and that the game doesn't live up to the level of an average game in either of those genres.

I've beaten the entirety of it in about 10 hours; the colony management is primitive and about 5-6 hours into the game my cult started playing itself with the only remaining duties being cooking and preaching, and after that I just rushed through the dungeons, of which there are only 4, all of them functionally identical. It's possible to repeat those dungeons after defeating the corresponding big boss, but outside of a tat one of the NPCs dispenses for completing the repeat dungeon for the first time, there is no point to it - they play exactly the same except you can loop 3 times through them to collect more rewards in one go (the rewards are completely meaningless by that point, because the cult will already be developed enough to maintain itself).
The combat itself is completely broken - rolling towards the enemy, striking once and rolling away by far outperforms any other tactic you can come up with, and there is pressure to avoid fooling around too much with suboptimal tactics because of the global timer which means that the cult's stats will diminish even during the dungeon time.
The enemies are copypasted from TBoI, and the bosses are just the same enemies, but bigger and with the ability to spawn smaller enemies. The only boss with the actual patterns is the final boss, and he's laughably easy, some bosses from the early floors of the aforementioned TBoI are more difficult to beat than the final boss in this game.
There are curses which act like the active items, but there's no interesting utility to them, just outputting a bit more damage.
There are tarot cards which act like the passive items, but they can be roughly divided into the two categories: minor buff to health/damage and an extremely circumstantional benefit you will never fulfill the conditions for.

I wrote a lot about the dungeon part of the game even though I think it's meant to be secondary for the colony management part.
This is because there's not much to say about the colony management part.
Followers have basic needs: hunger and hygiene, and they generate devotion. You build structures to satisfy those two needs, and structures to farm materials to build structures to satisfy those two needs. You use devotion to unlock more structures to... you get the idea. You can also preach once a day to make your followers generate cooler devotion which you use to unlock completely unsubstantial upgrades for the dungeon part. The followers level up which does pretty much nothing other than eventually allowing you to unlock perks for the cult none of which are particularly transformative.
It's all functional and completely boring, the only paradigm shift that happens in this part of the game is that eventually it loops onto itself and the cult generates enough materials which the followers use to satisfy their needs without any input on the part of the player (with the exception of cooking, and apparently the chef was on one of the promo screenshots, so I'm guessing they either removed this to put in a DLC later, it was too buggy to put in the game, or they realised that the player will literally have nothing to do at the cult anymore except preaching if the chef is present)

This shallowness, however, makes the game very approachable, and the target audience for the game, I think, is pretty clear. There is a lot of effort put into the visuals, the sound, and the Twitch integration, and seemingly a lot of money put into sponsoring the streamers to play it. The game allows you to pet a dog to tick off that meme "can you pet a dog in this game" twitter account box. The game has a fishing minigame to tick off that meme "does this game have a fishing minigame" twitter account box. When you finish the game, before the credits roll the game makes sure to plead you to recommend the game to the others.

At the end of this review I will instead recommend playing Oxygen not Included for the better colony management sim experience, and Hades for the better roguelite experience. They're just as polished as Cult of the Lamb visually and acoustically, but also are much better designed games.

people like to throw around the word "pretentious" when talking about things that they don't like, but i don't think that they Actually know what it means. when we, as people, describe something as pretentious, we mean that it is attempting to peacock as though it is more intelligent or significant than it actually is.

well, buddy, look no further than this game for that definition. a game whose gameplay is worse in nearly every way than its predecessors, one that makes grand gesticulations towards the ideas of "racism" and "american exceptionalism" only to fall flat on its face every step of the way, and possessive of a "twist" so meaningless in the context of the plot that acts merely as a smokescreen to quickly make its escape as it hopes players will walk away unable to remember anything else about the game.

if there were a poll online for "The Most Pretentious Game of All Time", i would bet money on the collective reddit-esque hive mind of "gamers" choosing something like Braid. well Bioshock Infinite, you've got my vote, friendo!

Stray is a game where you assume the role of a cat. This is the entire promise of its outward appearance. You control a сute furball navigating in a world proportionally large for your light presence. You can press B to meow and Y to cuddle with other cats. You can take a nap in allotted by game designer places. The cat mannerisms are meticulously animated and instantly gifable for twitter. An instant crowd pleaser of a concept, as Twitch and Steam numbers immediately suggest.

One of the first big puzzles you solve involves power outlets. You have to scout a room to find 4 cube-shaped batteries. You have to grab them with a floating button prompt and bring them to a computer. You have to MANUALLY (with paws?) plug them in power sockets. Surely, you already see a problem.

Stray takes place in a society of robots mimicking the images and idiosyncrasies of humans. Robots wear clothes, robots eat food, robots live in a police state – not because they need to, that’s just what we tend to do. The greatest irony of Stray is how it’s no different from the robots it portrays. It’s caught up in appearances, stupefied by feline oddness – and completely misses the essence of dubious little being.

Do you want to be a small rascal bumbling the way through, guided only by the most primal of instincts? Wrong game! And it’s mind-boggling to me how attentively every unique keynote of the whole premise is impaired here to create the most nothing hodgepodge of a modern action-adventure. You are pulled through a cat-sized theme park with the main attractions made up of the lightest of puzzles, dullest stealth sections and unlosable chase sequences. Traversal, which must pop with cats’ preciseness and unlimited agility, suddenly turns into a chore, because you can’t have a cat failing a jump, right? Even the animal inaudibility which opens the door for interesting environmental storytelling and silent interactions is undercut by the introduction of a companion drone acting as a translation layer between the feline friend and basically everything else in the world.

There are absolutely glints of creativity and good vibes here, and I decently enjoyed exploring the little hub levels where the game matches its title the best by letting the cat go a little astray. These bright moments though are far and between in this hugely underwhelming affair. Rain World: Downpour can’t honestly come soon enough.

One of the more notable changes that Bluepoint made with this remake was adding a suite of new contextual animations. When you trigger a riposte or backstab, your character will initiate a lengthy, bespoke animation based on the weapon class, remaining invincible throughout, so the additional length has ostensibly little effect on the flow of gameplay. However, damage is applied at the start of the attack, and additional follow up attacks in the animations lack the satisfying display of numbers and health bar drain, making it obvious how superfluous the new animations are. It's a small problem but it's indicative of a creative direction of Bluepoint that misunderstands why From Software games work and emphasizes the 'could' over the 'should.'

Before the release of the game, I watched a video from the developers where they repeatedly emphasized how much they wanted to show off the power of the PS5 and I think that video may have broken my brain. Demon's Souls is such a weird, idiosyncratic game even today, after it has birthed a subgenre which has transformed the gaming landscape in ways big and small. I am immensely glad that such a magnificent title could be shared with a wider audience but I think there's something almost perverse about desecrating such an unique creative vision for the sake of selling a console. While the original's visual aesthetic was pretty definitively born from technological limitations, it still conveyed mood, tone, and meaning in a way that Bluepoint simply couldn't give less of a fuck about, at least judging from the final product. Fire is now accompanied with a flurry of particles. Magic bears a heavy audio thwomp with spell cast. Armor shines brightly and shimmers. Architecture once spartan and stark is now ornate and regal. Green light filters through the center of the Nexus. Monsters are rendered with grotesque hyper-realism, robbing them of the quiet dignity that Miyazaki and his team envision in the decaying worlds they create. Despite besting even Elden Ring in some important areas like character creation and facial animations, the sum of these changes comes across as just so trite and unnecessary. I'll give Demon's Souls Remake at least one thing; it's made me believe that as a community and an audience, we need to put more effort and enthusiasm into appreciating games in their original historical context.

"This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game."

man. this was so bad that it made me start getting really annoying about gaming remakes on twitter which I'm continually embarrassed by, but it's hard for me to not be cynical about this thing on a level greater than 'i don't like what they did to a game that i think is good' bc to me it speaks to almost everything I find frustrating about the games industry at the moment

and like, I don't like to be miserable about media that isn't actively harmful! so what a shame that this remake feels actively miserable about the original game itself. it feels like the gaming zeitgeist at large sometimes have to be told when they're allowed to like old games instead of giving them the sweeping dismissal we generally give to anything older than a decade. if a game hasn't had a popular youtube essay about why it's good, actually, then it needs a remake to be playable in the modern age, right? jim ryan got absolutely demolished for asking why anyone would want to play a ps2 game nowadays, but we'll still eat this up because it has pretty lighting or w/e?

anyway to actually speak about the game itself, I think a lot of really questionable details in its presentation were largely overlooked when it came out. most people agreed that the new UI kinda sucks, but I've seen much less focus given to the janky facial animations (which will look worse in a few years than the original's lack of animation does now btw, there's a reason fromsoft straight up didn't bother) and questionable cutscene lighting and direction. a lot of scenes that from's team evidently gave a lot of care to in the original, like the dragon cutscene in 1-1 and king allant's entrance, look flat and lifeless in comparison - perhaps lit more realistically but cinematographically botched and much less effective. NPCs emote too much when they don't need to, and too little when they do, and every edge on most of the character designs has been sanded down to an unreasonable degree. the voice acting is a huge step down, the animation is all more weightless, etc, etc

fromsoftware are such an unlikely success story, and demon's souls has a weird place in their catalogue where it often gets dismissed as a kind of janky dark souls prototype instead of being taken on its own merits, so it kinda sucks to see it finally given mainstream attention only when its original paint job is stripped away in favour of something that exists primarily to show off the ps5's ability to push polygons. fromsoft's name isn't even attached to this in public, the vast majority of their original work taken out and replaced with presentation that's completely detached from the original's quiet, subversive style, despite bluepoint insisting that it's the same because they kept the gameplay intact or w/e

anyway this review is way too long and idk if i'm even allowed to post this here when it's so irrelevant to the game itself but I think this thing's mixed reception should prompt a lot of us to reconsider how we think about criticising games. is it an example of obnoxious purism when someone criticises the sweeping change in architectural style here, or the brighter colour palette? personally I think we should appreciate those details a lot more even before a new studio arrives to replace them wholesale, I have a lot more fun getting nerdy about the little things in games than I do trying to not be pretentious about them, and I think the push for better game preservation is allowed to point this stuff out without being shot down for nitpicking or w/e

(mask off, I think bluepoint are artistic terrorists and sotc ps4 was just as bad as this! give me my atmospheric haze or give me death, cowards)

cannot say i am particularly enamored with the idea that we should frame this discussion in any way that pretends it is not ultimately a willful net loss for games preservation. the idea that in order to aggressively push hardware a development team was enlisted to resurrect a long forsaken ip, in the process fundamentally misunderstanding the majority of its artistic sensibilities (sometimes aggressively so) to showcase a console’s power rubs me the wrong way for several reasons. and there’s potent irony here because we must also remember that in essence sony is banking on from softwares death cult to launch a console cycle for the second time in a row now. recall the invective words of shuhei yoshida, 2009: 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.' surely what is now a valuable ace in the sleeve for sonys financial strategy in the 9th generation of consoles onwards deserves more respect than this?

as an immediate contrast in the field of remakes, i’ll put forward that at the very least, ff7 is one of the most ubiquitous games of all time - to such a degree that altering its content and expanding on its themes in a rebuild-esque scenario is not only sensible, but appreciated. the same case is difficult to make for demon’s in my opinion.

perhaps bluepoints alterations, seldom rooted in any reverence for aesthetics but instead prioritizing largely perfunctory gameplay, are to your tastes. but they are not to mine. the original demon’s souls is an intensely difficult work to assess, litigate, and reconcile with, to be sure, but whatever your stance on it, it’s difficult to deny how exquisitely it worked with its limitations to fashion something that was entirely inspired and bold, yet quintessentially from software. none of that same evocative ethos is reflected here, and for these reasons i find bluepoint’s iteration extremely difficult to respect - doubly so because im in a position now of having twice been told to give bluepoint a chance on a remake, both times to personally and deeply unsatisfactory results. i only wish more folks had a convenient way of experiencing the original so they were free to pass their own judgments

Deus Ex: Special Edition

This mod is so bizarre, it's pretty much some guy with next to no mapping experience going "hey I'm gonna remake every map from Deus Ex lol" and after 8 years he actually did that. Add a bunch of gameplay and graphic mods from the internet and some new music and you get Deus Ex: Revision.

The entire thing feels so directionless, just a glimpse at the achievements page will tell you enough. And then you turn on the game and you see there's a goddamn horde mode. Who asked for that?

The new maps are obviously the main appeal, so when you start to play it you'll notice that most of them are barely any different, outside of some single new rooms, a TON of props that slow down the game (it's Unreal Engine 1 after all), slightly rearranged rooms or other completely arbitrary choices, like in the first map, Liberty Island, the very first moment you leave the port there is this place with a huge pillar in the middle of it and two possible roads to choose from. In the original game, it was supposed to be a safe zone (you can even find a secret medbot there!), where the enemies won't spot you that easily, and where you can really start to think about your approach and slowly adjust to the game. Meanwhile in Revision, they said fuck it let's add a bench and an enemy, and while we're at it a coffee cup, why not. He's placed in such a way there's no way you'll spot him before he spots you first, unless you knew about him beforehand. I have no idea what they were going for with this. It looks goofy and assualting the player at the start makes the game more unapproachable than it already is.

A few of the maps were greatly overhauled, most noticeably Hell's Kitchen, Hong Kong, and Paris, and they all suck. They're way too big, not fun to navigate, lag as hell, some have new NPCs that really stand out because unlike other characters, they don't speak at all (outside of one guy but you can tell it was recorded 15 years after the game came out), and for some reason if you touch any window with your body, they just break. These maps just have so many little problems with them, it all adds up to a very unpleasant experience.

You may think "don't be so hard on it, it's a passion project made for free" and you may be right, but it's also regarded as "the way to get Deus Ex to work on modern hardware", and I hate the idea of some clueless players playing it thinking this is how the original game was like. GMDX also shares this problem with its "vanilla with some tweaks :)" fanbase, but that's another topic.

At least the custom code stuff is good, which is mostly bug fixes and small improvements, like being able to see damage threshold for doors and cameras, or passive augs. They ported these to the original game as Deus Ex: Transcended, which is what you should be playing instead of Revision.

Absolutely an insane game and is rhythm game perfection. I think this game really pushes the meaning of what a rhythm game should be, and that's why I absolutely adore it.

Where most rhythm games are basically clicking a button to play a note, or strumming/pounding/drawing along on your plastic controller, Thumper says, "eff that." Thumper says, "why don't we have a game soundtrack that's industrial and grating, only sounding the best when you fully complete a track with an S rank?"

Thumper throws out all the preconceived notions you should have about a rhythm game and turns it into an aggressive assault on your eyes. You speed down a track at thousands of miles per hour, flicking your controller up and around just to time it right as your beetle grinds off a wall, screeching just the right frequency to send your dopamine sensors reeling.

Thumper is everything a rhythm game is not, and yet? It's amazing. Probably not for everyone, and difficult to 100%, but a game unlike any other, and a game that really makes anyone who does play it think about it a whole fucking lot.

The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.

The top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren - the secret name. This corresponds to the director, who directs the game of your life from conception to death. The secret name is the title of your game. When you died, that's where Ren came in.

The second soul off the sinking ship is Sekem - energy, power, and light. The director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the guardian angel, depicted as flying away across a full moon. A bird with luminous wings and head of light. The sort of thing you might see on a screen in a video game from your Xbox. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defence - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.

Number four is Ba, the heart - often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down like Samson by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka - the double. Most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Sands.

Number six is Khaibit, the shadow memory. Your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

𓂀

In the autumn of 2011, I got my first ‘real’ job, leaving behind the hell of zero-hour retail and office temp work to become an IT repairman at a big library. Finally, I could provide myself with food, clothing, shelter and, most importantly, video games. I loved problem-solving, working with tools and being on the computer so much already, and now had a professional outlet for all of those things that I enjoyed. It was the best job I’d ever had, but there was one weird snag - the librarians really didn’t like the cleaning and repair staff.

I’m not sure what makes librarians think that alphabetising Anne Rice novels is a more noble profession than networking 500 computers together or replacing tungsten filaments in industrial lighting systems, but nonetheless, they felt justified in keeping the workies out of every kitchen and staff lounge in the building. Mugs, coffee grounds, tea bags, milk, plates and microwaves were all kept in locked cupboards that only “academic” staff could access. Fresh out of retail hell, I just accepted this as a natural law of the universe (of course I was unworthy of a plastic cup for some water!), but in retrospect, it was a little fucked up. My “non-academic” colleagues responded to this in kind by hiding kettles, instant coffee and tin cups in electrical cupboards and storerooms, an essential act of survival misconstrued as spiteful by the microwave-havers. Without anywhere to store fridges in a stock cupboard, there was no milk to be had. Black tea or black coffee were our only options at break-time in the library.

This is how I learned to love black coffee. I had been a white-and-sugars type guy until this point in my personal hot-drink history, treating coffee more as a vehicle for warm milk then an experience in and about itself. Thirsty as hell from running around physically installing Microsoft Excel patches on computers still running Windows 98 in 2011, I had no choice but to forgo my preference for milk and just get used to gulping hot acidic bean water day in, day out when I needed to restore my hit-points. At first I didn’t enjoy it all, but like everything else in life, cultivating patience of habit can allow you to accept and adapt to almost any situation you find yourself in. 11 years later, I now drink nothing but black coffee. I could, probably, somehow - like those wine wankers you see in movies - even tell you the difference between different blends of the hot acid gloop that is burning my insides. Such is my passion for #coffee.

In the autumn of 2011, something else happened. A video game called Dark Souls launched on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, to some degree of fanfare that is still up for debate to this day. Video game historians like to mythologise the rise of the Souls series, and often claim Dark Souls launched to very little acclaim - but from my own historical perspective, I contest this claim. My memory leads me to believe the contrary - that Dark Souls had an exciting buzz about it right out of the gate - for game-fans and game-readers, at least. I was mostly a Halo and Street Fighter IV player at the time, and even I’d felt the urge to buy it on opening week. For some reason... I can’t remember why... That was over a decade ago. An age past. I don’t remember my motivation for every video game I’ve ever bought.

Friends of mine who’d foolishly bought PlayStation 3s to play Metal Gear Solid 4 derisively informed me that Dark Souls was the sequel to Demon’s Souls: their painful memories told mine that Demon’s Souls was a “stupid” and “unfair” game that treated its players with contempt and that I should consider getting Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 instead because this one was gonna have all-new ways for 12-year-olds to militarily abuse me through the internet. I wasn’t the type of person to listen to my friends, though - I preferred to listen to anonymous message board posters and professional video game journalists. With one of my first paycheques as a fully-fledged computer janitor, I purchased a Cafe AeroPress coffee maker and a copy of Dark Souls.

... And I hated it. As my friends had prophesied, Dark Souls was relentlessly unfair. Enemies came back to life and stabbed me in the back; pathways crumbled and sent me tumbling to my doom; evil knights shrugged off my attacks and responded in kind with bigger and badder swords of their own. The infamous curse status - an affliction that permanently halves your health and prevents you from becoming human - was my final straw. I recognised the gauntlet that was being laid before me in the Undead Depths and chose to reject the challenge. I found solace in the darkness of my coffee maker and put the game away forever.

A few months later, while trying to avoid studying for the most important exams of my life, I picked the game up again. I had decided that wading around damp dark sewers as a cursed little half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit was less daunting than preparing for my final exams before my adulthood-proper. I persevered, #coffee in one hand and a Wiki in the other, learning the ins and outs of the game’s mechanics in far greater depth than any of the Relational Database Management Systems textbooks on my study desk. I would rather prepare to die than prepare to pass.

Like many rookie Dark Souls players, parrying was my Everest - though perhaps over-emphasised by the playerbase as an essential skill for completing the game, it was certainly a far more important mechanic back then than that it is today. I spent many hours in the Undead Parish practicing my defence; learning the intricacies and timings of the mechanic and its follow-ups with my undead knight partners until the synapses solidified and I could pull a parry out of my reflexes without much mental effort. It was the key I needed to unlock my progress through the game, and I proudly rode my parrying prowess to the Kiln of the First Flame, linking the fire in ignorance of an unintended side-effect this new reflex had developed in me in the new ages to come.

Years later, I got the chance to play the now-infamous Dark Souls 2 demo at a video game expo and felt compelled to put my parry skills to the test once more. Despite the fact a coked-out Bandai Namco Games employee was offering free t-shirts to anyone who could beat the Mirror Knight in their allotted 15-minute slot, I persevered in the starting area until I could get my timings down once more. After a few whiffs and some off-colour comments from our jaw-clicking host, I finally managed to bat back a shadowy blade. It was at that moment that I discovered that Dark Souls 2 had a brand new feature - the parries smelt and tasted of black coffee. Despite all the gamer sweat and farts and poorly-ventilated electronics in my environment, I could sense coffee inside my brain. Hours of parry practice while sipping black coffee in my bedroom had built a permanent association between parrying and coffee in my mind. A soul memory.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of soul memory, even if you know it by another name (Mikhail Bakhtin calls it the chronotope, for instance). The taste of spaghetti bolognese reminds you of a good day at your friend’s house in 2002. The fresh scent of factory plastic that emanates from a new video game takes you back to the summer holiday when your mum finally bought you Timesplitters 2 despite it being rated a 15+. Perhaps a particularly bad hangover from a night of drinking rum and coke has forever ruined the taste of Pepsi for you. Petrol makes you think about the forest, for some reason you don’t remember. And so on. You’ve all seen Ratatouille, I guess. I don’t need to labour at this point.

Soul memory is the currency of the sequel and the franchise, and in our current era, soul memory is undergoing hyperinflation - Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Spider-Man: No Way Home; Ghostbusters: Afterlife - filmmakers are eagerly trying to collect soul memories so they can take them to the bureau de change and cash out in dollars. You might baulk at this suggestion that the scent of your grandmother’s baked potatoes can be commodified, but I think there’s ample evidence to suggest that no link in your mind is safe from capital’s claws.

Video games are perhaps the most egregious traders of soul memory. Video games, even the best ones, are standing tall on the shoulders upon shoulders of prior moments in space-time - real and imagined - all the way back down to Donkey Kong. Re-releases and remakes and remasters and retro collections are nostalgia-primers for experiences you might not even have been alive for - we all love Pac-Man, even though we may not have met him in an 80s arcade hall; you and I replicated those experiences instead with a movie) or a PlayStation 3 Arcade Archive or a Pac-Man music video on MTV; phenomena best exemplified by the teenagers I saw on Twitter who are collecting Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles promotional Happy Meal toys from 1993 to bring their souls closer to their blue-haired messiah. By letting you collect and play your figurative Rainbow Roads again and again and again in generation after generation after generation of product, video games explore the loss of a childhood place, and our attempts to recreate it.

And so what if the place that we are in the midst of is different from the physical space that we currently inhabit? What if the things we yearn for are located elsewhere, in another place or a falsely-remembered past, and all we now carry within us is an image of this place. We may remember only elements or impressions of it: there may be certain objects, sounds, a level, a character, special moves, cutscenes, or online battles; all of which come out in a manner that we cannot control or understand. Yet any of these elements or impressions make us feel at home in a way that we cannot find in the physical space where we are now stuck. Being displaced and yet capable of remembering the particularity of place: it is the state of being dislocated yet able to discern what it is that locates us. We have a great yearning, but we often cannot fulfil it with anything but memories from our soul.

In my review of Halo Infinite at the end of last year, I suggested the possibility that game developers are attempting to harness soul memory in new and exciting ways, the limits between your imagination and theirs almost fully removed in this gilded age of RTX and NGX and Speed Tree and shader-caching and other computer stuff I don’t understand; the world expanding ever-wider as we slot in more and more chips, spreading the channels between CPU and memory (both silicon and cerebellum) ever-wider. The end-state, no doubt, is a game that never ends, expanding outwards like our universe, all contained in the heart of an eternally-burning electric star on the platter of your hard drive. But how do you fuel a world-game of such approaching-infinite size? With the dependable financial and artistic mainstays of gaming, of course - the memory of/reverie in/nostalgia for/ known experiences, known systems, known self. Which makes Halo - a DirectX-based comfort food of the 18-35 crowd - an ideal candidate for colonisation via constant computer creation.

With Halo Infinite, it’s hard to gauge the intentionality of the author (and the multi-billion dollar corporation employing the author). By all accounts, Infinite was a scrap-piece, a million shattered pieces of contractor work and discarded concepts fused into a Holiday Product - something that, at least initially, presents itself as a never-ending ring-world: Zeta Halo could not be more apt as a setting for the beyond-open world template that’s come into vogue this generation (see also: Microsoft’s other tentpole, Forza Horizon). But was this product forged with any purpose greater than a shareholder deadline, a gilded-gold ring that can’t sustain itself beyond a financial quarter (never mind an eternal age!)? Fields upon fields of the same retrofuturistic alien base and knowing remarks about crunch and copy-pasted environments from your maiden, Cortana Weapon, imply that Halo Infinite was an illusion produced by profit - a defective ring-world, nothing more; but there are, at the very least, implications that game developers know what they create. In this new Halo instalment, Master Chief, regretting his transition out of cryostasis, is the only character in the game who opposes the rebuilding of the Halo installations. Too bad, John - you’re going for another last-minute warthog ride to the sounds of early-2000s progressive hard rock.

Does Halo Infinite sound familiar? Well, you might have played Dark Souls 3 and its downloadable follow-up: The Ringed City. Hidetaka Miyazaki's Souls series homecoming may have been hailed as a "return to form" for the franchise after the polarising reception to Dark Souls 2, but this oft-quoted games-journalist soundbite has a double-edge to it - namely, that it quite literally returned Dark Souls to its original form, repurposing locations, bosses, and emotional beats from the games that came before it. Lothric isn't a million lightyears away from Zeta Halo - it forges a similarly flimsy ring of questionable geography and architecture, a Dark Souls Disneyland built from item and character references that no longer mean anything beyond commercialised self-sabotage, names and item descriptions appearing only for the purposes of cynical, cyclical continuity with its predecessors. The game knew what it was creating with itself in its Bandai-Namco-hued orange-yellow wasteland - an idea perhaps best exemplified in the Abyss Watchers, a gang of frenzied Artorias fanboys from the Firelink Shrine who serve no literary purpose beyond infighting among themselves about the ways Artorias of the Abyss was like, really, really cool. (For some reason, I am now recalling the fact my PlayStation 4 copy of Dark Souls 3 came with a mail-order slip for a £344.99 statue of Artorias from the Bandai-Namco Official European Store...) These references without continuity, these connections without purpose... all they do is ring a Pavlovian spirit bell of soul memory in your brain for a fleeting moment. Nothing more. And Dark Souls 3 didn't just know this - it made it a central tenet of its thematics, even building its last-ever DLC around the concept of painting a forever-world made of the Dark Soul itself. Known experiences, known systems, known self, known forever. Consuming the Gods without question, like Gael, until the coming Age of Dark.

[[LAUNCH DEADLINE REACHED - BACKLOGGD SHAREHOLDERS ARE DEMANDING A Q2 LAUNCH OF THIS REVIEW ]]
// TODO: placeholder for another 9 paragraphs discussing the cyclical ages of fire depicted in the Dark Souls trilogy here and how the idea can be metatextually applied to the development cycles of each Souls game and their growing commercial impact vs. receding artistic impact. This part will be included in a post-launch patch to this review at an undetermined date. Hopefully never.

In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths are the truths of the “Noble Ones”: those who are deemed “spiritually worthy". These truths are:

- Dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara, the world-cycle of death and rebirth we all live through. Existence is pain, to some degree.

- Samudaya (origin, arising, combination; 'cause'): together with dukkha arises taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment, lit. "thirst”). While tanha is traditionally interpreted in western languages as the 'cause' of dukkha, tanha can also be seen as the factor tying us to dukkha, or as a response to dukkha, trying to escape it; a suffering often understood to be a combination of a consumptive desire for fleeting things, destructive hatefulness, and ignorance of the world as it truly is.

- Nirodha (cessation, ending, confinement) dukkha can be ended or contained by the renouncement or letting go of this taṇhā; the confinement of tanha releases the excessive bind of dukkha; the end of suffering. We are finite flawed creatures with only two ways out: either cyclical death, or transcendence through enlightenment.

- Magga (the path, the Noble Eightfold Path) is the path leading to the confinement of tanha and dukkha. The next path in the teachings; Buddhism’s sequel, post-launch DLC or content update.

☸

Elden Ring is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki and made in collaboration with fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin, who provided material for the game's setting. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on February 25, 2022.

Elden Ring is presented through a third-person perspective, with players freely roaming its interactive open world. Gameplay elements include combat featuring several types of weapons and magic spells, horseback riding, summons, and crafting. Elden Ring received critical acclaim, with praise for its open-world gameplay, fantasy setting, and evolution of the Souls formula. The game sold 12 million copies within three weeks of its release.

Elden Ring is From Software's first game of a new decade that follows an Age of Dark.

The exciting thing about a long voyage like Elden Ring is that it can inhabit so many spaces and times within your life, entwining its soul memories with your own in so many more ways than just an association between coffee and parrying. Due to its epic scale, brutal difficulty and my desire to travel through it as un-aided as possible, it took me four months to beat the game. Looking back from the now, the distance from February until May feels, as it often does in modern times, like a lifetime and a moment. Nothing and everything happened within the standard cycles of my life. I got up and went to work every day, playing through Elden Ring in spare moments and evenings. A war broke out while I was playing Elden Ring. I finished all six seasons of The Sopranos and four seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the time period I existed within while attempting to beat Elden Ring for the first time, and I noted that Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleed for the PlayStation 2 plays surprisingly similarly to Elden Ring. I went abroad for the first time in over two years, often thinking about Elden Ring while looking at the cathedrals and sweeping vistas of Barcelona. I saw a bunch of my friends in person for the first time in years while playing Elden Ring, and we discussed what builds were cool and which characters were cool. When I started Elden Ring, social distancing and facemasks were still mandatory in many places; when I finished Elden Ring, they were not.

So how do these new memories of mine intermingle with those presented in Elden Ring? Does Hoarfrost Stomp taste like marzipan? Is the Altus Plateau a portal to the golden fields of childhood freedom? Have I come to understand Godfrey as a Tony Soprano-like patriarchal figure in relation to Godrick's AJ? Perhaps nothing as crass or immediately interdependent as that. Has playing Elden Ring while existing in 2022 caused me to draw personal and societal parallels between my different lives? I'm tempted to say yes. I'm tempted to take apart Elden Ring's Elden Ring piece-by-piece and point at its golden roots and talk about the scarlet rot and the human ashes that drown the golden skyscrapers of Leyendell and all the ways in which this tale of souls and swords can be applied to someone who travels in the world of our present. But I'd be here even longer than I already am, hanging onto the dying embers of a rambling essay that has gone on too long. In a sense, choosing what aspect of Elden Ring to unpack and explore is exactly how the game makes you feel when you're contemplating which path to take at a crossroads in the Lands Between - whether to explore a cave, a castle, a peninsula, a continent, a realm, a galaxy, an age, a concept of the afterlife turned into a video game level. Naturally, you have to let go of possibility and walk down a single path in order to move forward.

This painful push and pull between potential possibility and your (perhaps pre-determined) path is what makes Elden Ring so compelling. Of course games like Breath of the Wild have already explored this concept of 'go-anywhere', but not in an artistic sense that exists beyond the controller and the things that are happening literally on the screen. In Breath of the Wild, going up a hill will get you into a fight with a bird and you will do a puzzle and you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun - but experiences begin to entwine and overlap, memories becoming overwritten and jumbled in endless plains of rolling green and goblin. Memories require delineation if they are to be stored within containers of consciousness, and in Elden Ring, going up a hill can turn into a 20-hour odyssey through the ashes of time to explore an all-out conquest that was once fought over the very nature of Godhood, where you will meet and contemplate primordial, psychological and philosophical concepts in the form of a dude with a wolf head who reads Berserk. Or maybe you will explore the entirety of a lost kingdom on the edge of the afterlife's cosmos and wonder why it exists or even existed at all, all while the ghost of a forgotten world-serpent caves your skull in. And you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun and those unique, memorable moments will bond with a greater space and time in your head.

Exploration of space beyond the time is a fundamental element of Elden Ring and the Elden Ring. From Software understand that space-time extends with video games, through video games, in video games - that old cliche of a gamer living a thousand lives. In much the same way that it can be confusing to refer to Elden Ring as both a video game product and a concept within the world of Elden Ring itself (it is amusing to note how difficult it is to get the wiki page for the Elden Ring on the Elden Ring Wiki), so too can it be confusing to separate memory and space-time as they exist within and outwith ourselves, our Golden Orders of subjective fact and fiction; moments and how we place ourselves inside them, the near-infinite subjectivity of experience that so often causes people to argue with each other over matters that are ultimately our inner order of perception and recollection. Was Radahn right? Was Malenia right? Sound off in the comments below.

For a long time, one of my most-visited YouTube videos was this performance of Dragon Quest V’s music by the NHK Symphony Orchestra. The music is a fantastic soundtrack to a comments section full of positive nostalgia in a foreign language. Google Translate doesn’t get the full meaning across, but you can feel all that’s being said despite the barriers between people on opposite sides of the internet's round table. This is the comment that always stands out to me when I scroll down:

“This was a game of my dad’s era, but it makes me nostalgic for that time all the same.”

I only beat Dragon Quest V in 2019, but I feel this same nostalgia, these same memories, this same realisation of a video game world as a portal through soul memory. I beat the iOS port of the DS port of the original Super Famicom version while sitting on the toilet at work, but my shared DQV reality with that kid, and his father before him, who played the game on different hardware in a different space in a different time, allows me to understand them. We saved the world and that adventure will stay with us all for a lifetime. Bur this feeling isn't anything unique - throw a dart at the board of YouTube's video game soundtracks and you'll find this phenomenon replicated for pretty much every video game ever made. Queen Rennala stands in a Grand Library and offers you endless rebirth.

The beauty of Elden Ring's length, scale and scope is that it's also capable of playing with this concept of chronotope from within. Whereas Dark Souls 3 relied on imagery and ideology from previous entries to invoke soul memory with (intentionally) cheap referentiality, Elden Ring instead chooses to loop over itself many times over in order to play new games with your mind. There are many ways in which the game achieves this, and if you've ever griped about "reused content", you probably know the kind of thing I mean - fortresses reappearing in different states of decay and ruin; enemies returning again and again as if pursuing you through the Lands Between; the souls of wolves and trees and tree-avatars haunt the earth; the same dungeons and dragons in different locations, sometimes appearing as battlefields of the present, sometimes appearing as sites of historical importance - Great War memorials on a school field trip. The game even deigns to reference the wider From Software cosmology (I am using every word in my vocabulary to avoid typing the term "Soulsborne"), but interestingly chooses to place a lot of these capricious callbacks in dank, dirty, decaying swamps - they are deemed to be hollow, undead references. In a sense, it's a game so vast that it's able to create nostalgia for itself.

For me, the most interesting way the game exemplifies soul memory is in its boss battles. In our realm, the bosses of Elden Ring are something of a contentious topic - out of some 150+ battles that put grand old names above life-bars, only five in the whole game are wholly unique. "How could the developers be so lazy as to do this?!" is the rallying cry of the passionate masses who are seemingly unwilling to afford From Software any artistic agency or intentionality of design. In a series/franchise/whateverthisis like the Souls games, isn't the whole point that you're prepared to die, over and over again, in the same battles, just like the demigods that you seek to surpass? You're in battle against spiritual and physical elements of the universe itself! The Fallingstar Beast appears twice in the game, but you didn't fight him twice, did you? I'm willing to wager you fought him five times, ten times, twenty times, maybe many times more. Why delineate by encounters in space when you can just as easily use time? Was each death and rebirth just "reused content", or was it an intentional part of an experience that the game's developers wanted you to live through? The game's named after a big old circle, for crying out loud!

This isn't an attempt by me to reframe the reuse of content as a purely artistic choice - of course it was done to gild the game's vast size and ensure every crevice of the world map had some experience of some form for the player, but practical compromises made within the constraints of development can be moulded, with appropriate care, into art. We can challenge From's tendency to rework frameworks, but aren't they trapped in their own never-ending cycle by capital, working to the drumbeat of 100 million sales? You may rankle when yet another boss pulls off the iconic Scarlet Aeonia (itself a reference/homage/repetition of a Magic the Gathering card ), but it's all in aid of your personal character development and the development of the game's characters and their relationships in the Lands Between. While I certainly wouldn't call any of my many, many, many battles with Malenia and her acolytes art in and of themselves, my memories of these multi-faceted repetitions tie back to an essential theme of the Souls series - overcoming the greatest boss of all: yourself.

It would be trite of me to spend a ton of time telling everyone about a universal human experience and how it applies to a series of video games that have sold enough copies to make them almost universal gamer experiences, so instead I'll just share a soul memory of Elden Ring that I think embodies this value of repetition and self-mastery. The Subterranean Shunning-Grounds (the names in this game rock lol) is essentially the final dungeon of the game, a terrible theme park of sewer content that long-time fans of these games will immediately recognise - pipes, poison, basilisks, curses, rats, little fucked up gargoyle dudes. It's essentially all the most annoying things about playing a Souls game in a single package, ramped up to 11 by twisted virtue of the fact this is the final area in a 100-hour game that stands at the end of a path of six other 100-hour games with similarly wicked ideas. 11 years after giving up on Dark Souls, I was once again a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit. Indeed, it is a punishingly difficult experience to be a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit - even with a high-defense build, certain enemies can take you out in a hit or two. And if they aren't capable of taking you out in a hit or two, they have almost certainly been carefully positioned next to a giant pit that can take you out in a single hit. It's an infuriating area, yet entirely optional. You don't have to do it to yourself, but at this point, it just feels right that you should pursue whatever nebulous reward that the Shunning-Grounds harbour. And what is the final test at the end of this dungeon? A dragon? An army of the undead? Another cosmic deity? No! It's a jumping puzzle in a tomb of skeletons and corpses piled to the ceiling - an incredibly tricky test of wits that combines your physical dexterity with an eye for problem-solving. It took me dozens of tries to master, and memories of the hallways leading from the bonfire to the puzzle chamber have now been seared into my mind. A video game challenge that made me scream out in pain for the first time in years... Fuck that bullshit!!! And at the end of it all, what is your reward for completing this task? No runes or swords or armor. Just a spell called Inescapable Frenzy, an incantation that sends the minds of humans towards madness. Let it never be said that From Software do not have a sense of humour! No wonder some players choose to enter into a covenant with Chaos a few moments later...

"try jumping" is a message you see a lot in Elden Ring. One of the oldest pranks in the Souls fan playbook, it's a nasty little trick that encourages the freshly chosen undead to leap from high places with promise of some unknowable reward. Inevitably, it always leads to one thing - a painful, costly death. Why do players take the time to encourage people they'll never meet to commit suicide, and why do so many people mark these messages as helpful to others? Probably for the same unknowable reason that people tell each other to kill themselves via other mediums of the internet. Ugly as "try jumping" may be, it has always fit comfortably with the artistic notions of Dark Souls as an analog for the neverending battle against depression and misery, the difficulty that comes with suppressing one's urge to die, to give up, to leave it all behind. One of Elden Ring's first concessions to new players is to finally explain this meta-mechanic - if you fall for the very first "try jumping" message that the game places before you, you end up in a tutorial area. Hopefully you won't make the same mistake twice now. From Software know that the Internet-at-large is one of the most lethal enemies their games have to offer, and I fought against that wicked foe by making a point of putting down some "no jumping ahead" messages while on my journey.

The online component of these games has always existed, but has never really been explicitly acknowledged within the game-world beyond a few experimental instances like The Ringed City's Spear of the Church. As the ostensible herald of a new age Elden Ring takes the first steps toward acknowledging ours, supplementing a mechanism with a metaphor. To avoid beating around the bush - I think the Roundtable Hold is the Internet. A realm inaccessible by horse nor foot, where the people of the world meet up to sell shit, trade stories, gossip and fuck around, all under an oath of no physical contact. Per Varre's comment, the Roundtable is "a place for has-beens trying to look important but unable or unwilling to actually take any action". Sound familiar? There is a place in Leyndell Royal Capital that looks exactly like the Roundtable Hold, but no one is there - the Hold is, in effect, a virtual, imagined space; a simulation in parallel existence to reality. It's a trick that From has pulled before, but characters and their occupation of parallel space-times with differing persona spells out that this is, in some classic weird-ass cosmic FromSoft way, a digiverse within a digiverse.

Ensha, Dung Eater and D are the most vivid exemplars of this idea. Three masked edge, lords who spend their time in the Roundtable acting aloof and cool and above it all; their corporeal forms lashing out with hatred against women in the meatspace of the Lands Between, giving away their Inner Order to pursue violence against Malenia, Fia and - in the Loathsome Dung Eater's case - every woman and child in the known universe. (See also: Gideon/Seluvis and their relationship to the class-conscious Nepheli Loux: Gideon as a gatekeeper who encourages you to overcome your Maidenless status and venerate yourself in the eyes of the Roundtable's men ("the road of champions"); Seluvis as a PUA who tries to involve you in a date-rape scheme.) In the case of D, the game implies the existence of a "twin brother" - an alternate persona - who behaves differently depending on the space-time he inhabits. We see him in reality, unreality and Nokron's post-reality afterlife, behaving more aggressively in each plane until he loses bravado when faced with with the bare-faced truth of inescapable Death itself. The player has the option of giving him back his mask and suit of armour, which ultimately leads to a violent death for "that bitch" Fia, a woman who recognises men possessing a warmth that has nowhere to go. In the case of the Dung Eater, whose mortal form is trapped within the aforementioned ur-Souls palace of the Shunning-Grounds, the connection to our ugly internet personalities is a little more explicit, a seeming admission by From Software of all the ugliness that arises from building one's personality around a nexus of digital souls and swords. If From are shackled on some level to this medium of expression, the least they have done here is develop some self-awareness and critique. At the game's climax, the Roundtable burns out, telling us more or less everything we need to know about the developer's feelings on the Web Between Worlds that we inhabit and the paths we choose to walk in each realm of spirit. Will this Roundtable fall to the mortal ashes of Leydendell too, or is there potential for All to achieve Magga, the enlightened transcendence of Buddhist teaching?

The natural follow-on from this topic is an exploration of the golden Grace, the "maidenless" concept and its real-world implications, but I feel the paragraph above demonstrates why it's unwise to provoke red phantoms in the hold through discussion of certain topics and experiences. Elden Ring is a game where not every path should be taken, and, as I already said like three times before (lol), the same holds true of a review; I'm not sure I have the experience or incantations necessary to step into that toxic swamp, lest I provoke an invasion. Instead, I choose to focus on the light that casts this darkness: Friendship. The golden light of the summon sign is the natural enemy of the blood-red invader, and Elden Ring makes this relationship more explicit than its predecessors by mandating that human invaders can only go after parties of two or more players - the eternal war between the "git gud" and the "git help" is now more aggressive than ever before. By changing the mechanics of the franchise's online component, From Software have peppered their latest instalment with challenges to the sensibilities of try-hard players that remind me most of Sakurai's implementation of the anti-competitive tripping mechanic in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While I think the omnipotent anger and cultural overpowerment of the "git gud" crowd is perhaps overstated by the fans at large, it's an unfortunate signifier of their ever-presence that after seven of these games I still get second thoughts about asking for help when I need it.

The kindness of strangers is an enduring motif of Elden Ring, a natural tonic to the toxic anger that permeates every environment you journey across. Melina, the thematic emodiment of this kindness, turns your experience and soul memory into strength, a companion who appears to those at risk of stoking personal flames of frenzy as a guide who leads you towards the Erdtree and the Elden Ring. I don't think it's a coincidence that the game gets inordinately tougher to handle by yourself in the wake of her ultimate sacrifice; investments in endgame Rune Levels feel less substantial, less meaningful, than those conversions of experience made while travelling with Melina at RL100 and below. (The Ranni questline, with its literal idolation of a young girl as a peculiar doll the player can contemplate in silence by the fire, dovetails nicely with Melina's death and serves as an interesting pair of endgame decisions the player can take, further compounded by the Roundtable stuff discussed above) The final stretch of the game demands, almost explicitly, that the player look beyond themselves and extend a hand of need to those around them in much the same way one should following a deeply personal loss.

If you did not touch a summon sign or ring a spirit bell or read a fan-wiki after Leyendell, know that I know you are a liar and a punk and you will be judged far more harshly by my council than the guys who spent six hours outside Maliketh trying to bring in a sorcerer called Pigf#cker or whatever other desperate means they chose to undertake in order to realise their ambitions. Everyone needed help to finish Elden Ring; everyone needed help to stave off the Frenzied Flame that the Elden Ring's Golden Order was trying to stoke from within you on your personal path to enlightenment. Fought the Godskin Duo by yourself, did you bro? Well, the Godskin Apostle didn't. He brought in someone to help him. Are you really that stupid? The legend of Let Me Solo Her didn't develop from the tremendous feat of beating Malenia solo - was this noble pothead the first person to ever beat her by himself? Of course not. The legend developed as a veneration of kindness, a manifestation of will and memory and dreams of ambitions, a symbol of those Tarnished who offer their help to those who need it most: Let Me Solo Her is our idealised savior, a breakup bro for the maidenless, a hero who will help you fight your hardest battles and overcome your most painful soul memories. Stay isolated and lost in your past, or find your friends on the path and start living your life.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.

How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.

And yet it all seems limitless.

So what of soul memory, the idea I spent so long talking about at the start of this review? Well, that's another thing that's beautiful about Elden Ring - I'm not done playing it yet. Much in the same way I wasn't done playing Dark Souls after I'd put down the pad, Elden Ring has manifested itself in my everyday life and my relationships with the souls and space-time and coffee granules around me. It's difficult to write a conclusive conclusion for an Elden Ring review because it doesn't feel like the game is over yet. I fought the Elden Beast, I saw an ending, I saw the credits, but evidently I can't stop thinking about the game and the ideas and memories and experience it imbued me with. I'm walking on an invisible path in a consecrated snowfield of boundless white, trying to find my noble truth and inner order and greater will by constantly making sense of everything I've seen, heard and felt through, with and in my lives lived, tilting at windmills in the gardens of madness within this life and beyond. You are too. Let's face it together.

𓂀

The seventh soul is Sekhu. The remains.

𝓬𝓻𝓾𝓮𝓵𝓽𝔂 𝓼𝓺𝓾𝓪𝓭 𝓻𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀


𝓒𝓡𝓤𝓔𝓛𝓣𝓨 𝓢𝓠𝓤𝓐𝓓 by 𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖘𝖚𝖒𝖊𝖗 𝖘𝖔𝖋𝖙𝖕𝖗𝖔𝖉𝖚𝖈𝖙𝖘 🄶🄴🅃🅂 🄰🅆🄰🅈 with 🄰 🅆🄷🄾🄻🄴 🄻🄾🅃 🄾🄵 ˢʰⁱᵗ 🄹🅄🅂🅃 🄱🅈 🅅🄸🅁🅃🅄🄴 🄾🄵 🄸🅃🅂 คєรՇђєՇเς รєภรเ๒เɭเՇเєร. ₛᵢₘₚₗy ₜₕᵣₒwᵢₙg ₒᵤₜ wₒᵣdₛ ₗᵢₖₑ 🅲🆁🆈🅿🆃🅾🅲🆄🆁🆁🅴🅽🅲🆈 and l̶̦͍̖̪̂̄a̸̧͖͍̠̤̜͇̮̯̅̈́̈́̔ͅt̷̳͈̔̀̑̓̌͝ȅ̵̛̥̠̯̖̯̮̹̃̅͛̓̂ͅͅ ̵̪̜̹̏̆̃̂s̸̭̙̱̰̓̎̋̇͋̿́́͝t̷̥͔̤̰̻̥̱̪̝̄̊̇̉̓̌͜a̴̡̨͔̙̦͓̮̠̦̮̾̉̎̈́̕͝g̵̰̻̥̊̎͗̂̈́ẹ̷͉̼͉̠̲̪̰͑̈́͆̉̀̔̄͜ ̷̼̩̣̪̺̎̏͋͊ͅç̴̭͕̹̼̓̎̽͛̆̈̚͝a̶̡̟͖̫̫͙͙̤͖̾͂̉̄͒͛̌̓͘p̸͚̖̰̓̓̓̈́͛͋̎̏͠͠i̵̧̮͓̎͛̕ͅͅt̷̠͇͊́̒̃̽̃͌͗̊͒ą̷̝̹̥͇͖̫͖̭̉́̀̄͋́̌̏̕͜͠l̴̺̈́͐͒͋̾͑͊̈́͊̿i̷̧̞̹͗͆̓̆s̵̡͙̝̖̳̳̭͕͚̣͊̌̀̓̕m̷̧̉ seems to be enough to ֆǟȶɨֆʄʏ (っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ online video game critics ♥ 【ｔｈｅｓｅ　ｄａｙｓ．．．】! "𝙀𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙪𝙣𝙧𝙚𝙫𝙞𝙚𝙬𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚" is the 𝓒𝓞𝓦𝓐𝓡𝓓'𝓢 𝓒𝓛𝓘𝓒𝓗𝓔 𝓒𝓡𝓘𝓣𝓘𝓠𝓤𝓔 𝕨𝕙𝕖𝕟 𝕚𝕥 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕤 𝕥𝕠 V⃣ I⃣ D⃣ E⃣ O⃣ G⃣ A⃣ M⃣ E⃣ R⃣ E⃣ V⃣ I⃣ E⃣ W⃣ S⃣, but I think ｃｒｕｅｌｔｙ░ｓｑｕａｄ（ゅヮ桜）, by [̲̅v][̲̅i][̲̅r][̲̅t][̲̅u][̲̅e] of its ιⓝşίˢᵗ乇ᑎς𝐄 on 𝓃𝑜𝓃-𝒸𝑜𝓂𝓂𝒾𝓉𝒶𝓁 𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓂𝑜𝒹𝑒𝓇𝓃 𝟤𝟢𝟤𝟢𝓈 𝒾𝓇𝑜𝓃𝓎. truly đỖ𝕖Ⓢ ʏᎸɘb ᴎɘƚᎸo 𝘵𝘺𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦-𝘫𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘦. . . . . . . . ᶜᴬᴺ ʸᴼᵁ ᴵᴹᴬᴳᴵᴺᴱ ᴼᴾᴱᴺᴵᴺᴳ ⒺⓁⒺⒸⓉⓇⓄⓃⒾⒸ ⒼⒶⓂⒾⓃⒼ ⓂⓄⓃⓉⒽⓁⓎ OR 🅶🅰🅼🅴🆂🅼🅰🆂🆃🅴🆁 🅼🅰🅶🅰🆉🅸🅽🅴 αɳԃ ｒｅａｄｉｎｇ 𝕤𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝓁𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 about c̴̢̹͔̦͍̯̮͙̜̓̕r̸̦̭̮̼͉̲̒̈́u̴̫͉̞̓̅͌̓̾̚͠e̵̡̠̹̩̱̓̄͂͆́̾͜ļ̷͉͇̱̈́͝ť̵̨̺̗̹̪̑̚ỵ̷̰̥̥̼̈́ ̶̪̙̘͇́̉̉͗̑̇͊̄͌̕ş̶̠͕̭̈́̄͌q̸̧̤͋̎̈̑̈́̆̐̈́͌̿u̸̼̞̟̬̪̻̰̖̇͝a̴̢̞̻̹̩͌̍̅̅d̵̨̨̳̖͔̈̓͠?


🄶🅁🄰🄿🄷🄸🄲🅂0/10
🄶🄰🄼🄴🄿🄻🄰🅈6/10
🅂🄾🅄🄽🄳4/10
🅁🄴🄿🄻🄰🅈🄰🄱🄸🄻🄸🅃🅈7/10
🄾🅅🄴🅁🄰🄻🄻8/10

Perhaps more importantly than making a good game, Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya has assured the world that, provided you have *a* computer (any computer still running can play this, I imagine) and an internet connection, you will always have free access to something universally cherished, something intelligent and forthcoming with ideas of simple design, and something (in its original form) untouched by the inherent evil that coats large-scale game development.

I love this game, but let's be real: it's a public service first, great game second. Give Pixel a key to a city or something.

Part of a very specific genre of game I quite literally cannot fathom "working" outside of a 90's club chill-out room. You're on your comedown double fisting lucozades and you're hypnotised by the light reflecting off the dolphin's scalp as it explores homebrew Windows Media Player visualisers. There's some very loose gameplay here where you collect samples and edit songs but it's all very unconvincing, you're here to nurse your friend back to health as he's has too many Es and is chewing his lips off. Honestly, I'm easily swayed by any soundtrack that is predominately jungle techno or downtempo, and the headline act bein a dolphin. Played for 5 mins.