A few screens into this you come across a hole in the floor. You drop through it by pressing down on the d-pad, and then the right shoulder button very slightly afterwards, not at the same time, slightly afterwards. It was only by overexposure to the AVGN's video on Batman games did I already know how to do this, otherwise I would fumble about with the controller until I would eventually get Brian Smyj to drop down, whom is playing the part of Val Kilmer, who plays the part of Batman who daylights as "Bruce Wayne". If you had played this back in 1995, you would probably have to consult the instruction manual that came with your copy of Batman Forever on Super Nintendo, assuming your parent didn't carelessly throw it out along with the box. The manual actually does detail your moves and how to pull them off adequately, it doesn't make it any less clunky or unintuitive, but it exists. However, this hidden move where you get Brian Smyj to drop through this conspicuous orifice is actually completely unmentioned in the manual, and I even made sure that it wasn't hidden in the warranty or in some character's profile. So in a pre-James Rolfe/GameFAQs era, you're pretty much guaranteed to be lumbering around trying to find out how you're supposed to get down in order to make progress.

That was the SNES game, I would like to talk about the Genesis/MD version now.

The AVGN did not do this version of the game, and there is only one guide on GameFAQs that specifically talks about this version, and it also fails to mention how to do this secret move that is needed very early to make progress. When I got to this part, I attempted to do a combination similar to the SNES version with pretty much every button on my six button controller, including the shoulders on my Retrobit pad despite them essentially just acting like extra C and Z buttons when plugged into an actual Genesis console. For the first time in what seemed like years, I felt obligated to bust out my phone and look up something that didn't have to do with cheat codes or passwords. Keep in mind once again that the manual fails to mention how to do this move, because it's easily the biggest riddle you'll need to solve in Batman Forever for the Sega Genesis/MD. It turns out that you have to HOLD C, and then press down on the d-pad. A very different input from the SNES version, and one that I find hard for anyone to figure out on their own back in 1995 without wasting an hour of boredom on it. Was this incompetence or nefarious design to get kids to waste money calling Acclaim's help hotline? Who knows, maybe Jim Carrey was running the company.

I went two paragraphs talking about the world's greatest detective getting utterly bamboozled by a hole in the floor, but that's honestly the biggest thing I can talk about other than this possibly being the most 1995 game that could ever exist, because you're not gonna find another time in human history where a Batman movie license tie-in is bone grafted with Mortal Kombat moves and inputs. It might be the biggest sellout game to ever exist, combining two of the most overpushed things at the time, all while not being able to have blood, because McDonalds would possibly withdraw on their agreement to sell Batman Forever licensed glassware mugs.

I briefly booted this up for a Geoff Follin tribute stream with some friends of mine for shits and giggles, before I closed it and went to Wolverine on NES. My weekend was full of morbid curiosity of a potential funny-bad game, only to be met with mindlessly boring gameplay where you smack wet noodles with enemies, carelessly shoot your bat dick out at the ceiling to try to find hidden rooms, and jump around trying to see if you can hit any background objects to make explode and drop health items. A hard game that is only hard, because it's an endurance round of buffoonery with no continues or passwords. The NyQuil-laced bank stage ending with a fight against waves of henchmen on top of a small platform where they could easily throw you off to your doom was the final nail in the bat coffin for me, despite me actually clearing that stage and stepping foot into a circus that had the gonads to force a time limit on me. The most fun you would get out of this is dragging a friend along in co-op, and gaslighting them on how easy the controls are and never explaining them, which is something you can already do in Cyborg Justice, an infinitely superior experience. Fuck Goof Troop man, it's all about ruining friendships with Batman Forever.

I would end this with the Nerd's closing line on his review of the game, but I've been beaten to that at least twice on this page, so I'm gonna use a little bit of one from another review he did of a game I actually kinda like.

It sucking fucks, it fucking sucks, it fucking blows, it's a piece of shit....and I don't like it.

"Would a mentally ill person do THIS?"
[plays all the way through Fallout: New Vegas four times in two weeks]
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"Every time you play this I feel like you're doing something completely different. I've never seen that Casino mission [Dead Money]. How much stuff is in this game?"
-Conwife

Joke's on her because I'm not doing different stuff. For 14 years I've been making Primm Slim the sheriff of Primm. Good karma, bad karma, how about a yee-haw for law and order in the fine town of ERROR: TOKEN NOT FOUND.

Obviously there's no shortage of Fallout: New Vegas glazers, but you're in luck because I truly cannot express how much I love this game. I have been pulled back into its vortex many, many times; if nobody got me, New Vegas got me. One of the most important games in my life, and one that I look forward to replaying in the future despite claiming to my loved ones that I'm done.
_________________________________________________________

"I sort of tasted human flesh once. Mmm mmm good. Tell me all your secrets."
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MESSAGE FOR PHIL SPENCER, TODD HOWARD, AND ANYONE ELSE IN CHARGE OF FALLOUT:
Why does Fallout 3 have a 4K update but not New Vegas? Both got the FPS Boost. What gives? Also if you wanted to license the Fallout IP to other studios again that would be cool. Plus who needs Spider-Man games when you have gamebryo Y-spam climbing? More Fallout! Get on it!

i loved this so MUCH. soooo so so so so so much. agh. so delightful. perfect first game of pride month :)

definitely a game i will come back to. soooo much replayability. early on you make a choice and it kinda seems like that splits you into at least 3, maybe even 6 or more completely different stories.

it'll be hard to pull me away from dj roadkill though hehe. that's my BOYFRIEND right there :')

i had such a great time with this. the banter between roadkill, the most eccentric hypersexual furry you'll ever meet, and noel, the no-bullshit, cold asexual fallen angel, was SO fun i couldn't stop giggling

i read there's a poly romance in this!?!? absolutely NEED to see that. i don't know of a single game with a poly romance. and believe me i've been SEARCHING :p

can't hype this game up enough. so so so inclusive. at the beginning of the game they ask both for your pronouns and if you're trans. and this isn't just a case where they just switch up the pronouns and nothing else changes. it's actually brought up in conversation! rosita called me valid! :p

and this isn't even mentioning the EXTREMELY diverse cast!! we got several trans folks! pansexuals! a bigender omnisexual! a hyper-femme lesbian! an intersex person! an asexual panromantic person! an agender person! a bisexual! a single token straight woman LOL. the whole spectrum's here babey!

highly HIGHLY recommend this if you are cool!!!! is defi gonna be a game i surprise gift to my queer friends when it goes on sale hehehe.

SO good. sooo good :)

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes feels like an anachronism. I don’t just mean this from how the game haphazardly scatters documents from 1847 and 2014 throughout the hotel set in 1962, or how it references multiple past eras of gaming with PS1 survival-horror fixed camera angles or DOS-inspired 1-bit adventure game segments hidden away on floppy disks, though these elements certainly play their part in creating what developer Simogo refers to as “collage of styles, ideas, and disparate inspirations.” No, what instantly caught my attention was how uncompromising yet thoughtful the game felt. In an era where most developers seem content to simply pay lip service to the great mystery/adventure games of old while over-simplifying their gameplay mechanics, Simogo seems to have figured out the formula of creating a final product that feels intricately designed, yet ultimately accessible.

I’ll admit that I’m not too familiar with Simogo’s previous work; the only other game I’ve played by them is Sayonara Wild Hearts. That said, I would not have immediately guessed that Lorelei was by the same developers from my first hour alone. In some ways, Lorelei presents an interesting foil to Sayonara. Sayonara’s persisting strength is its grasp on harmony: the epitome of what is essentially a playable music video, it’s pure and immediate gratification racking up points to the beat in this flashy and lush arcade game. On the other hand, Lorelei feels deliberately constructed to emphasize its dissonance. From the uncomfortably quiet manor clashing with the occasional audible off-screen disruption to the vibrating monochrome textures interspersed with low poly environment, nothing seems right in its place. It’s a much slower burn than Sayonara as well, with most players taking fifteen hours or more (in comparison to Sayonara’s two hour runtime) to navigate the sprawling hotel with no hand-holding provided whatsoever.

As different as these two titles appear however, they do have one thing in common: minimalism. For example, both games require just a d-pad/joystick and a single button to be played. Sayonara gets away with this because the available actions on input feel clearly telegraphed by the visuals and generally boil down to moving and timed dodges with the music. Lorelei similarly gets away with this because it deemphasizes more complex/technical interactions (i.e. the usage suite of adventure game verbs in look, touch, obtain, etc) with sheer puzzle intuition. Simogo describes this as forcing the player to “get a deeper understanding… and connection to [the world]” and just like Sayonara, “wanted the complexity of the game to revolve around this, and not dexterity.”

What makes this particularly impressive is how Simogo was able to strike a fair balance between simplicity and variety. According to the game’s development page, the game became “a very iterative toy box” where many different systems conceptualized over the game’s development cycle could interact and interplay with one another in different ways. Interestingly, I found that most of the solutions to these different puzzles were not that difficult or complex to determine. Even so, despite Lorelei’s simple controls and straightforward objective (figuring out passwords/key phrases to unlock new areas and information), the game is able to successfully obfuscate the means to achieve said objective by drastically changing the means in which information is presented to the player, for instance by using different camera angles and systems that allowed them to “change a lot of rendering parameters on the fly” from the aforementioned iterative toy box. Additionally, Simogo highlights key details from clues to ensure that players don’t get too confused, but leave enough ambiguity by never outright leading the players onto specific logic trains and refusing to provide any specific assistance (no in-game hint system and no specific feedback aside from telling players if they’re right/wrong). The result is a confident final product that understands the persisting strength of a good puzzle adventure game: a game that gives the player all the information they need to succeed while giving them the room to work out the connections themselves, and a game that constantly surprises the player with new opportunities to intuitively understand the world around them without ever feeling too frustrated by unfamiliar mechanics.

I do have to admit however, that there are a few instances where Lorelei’s minimalism and uncompromising nature can backfire. For instance, the lack of detailed player feedback aside from a right/wrong sound effect usually isn’t a significant deterrent, given that players can fine-tune most of the game’s one-variable solutions and are encouraged to tackle the hotel’s many branching paths and puzzles at their own pace, since they may not even have the pertinent information required and might have to work out other puzzles to obtain said information. However, certain late-game puzzles require multiple sets of answers (ex: a computer that requires three different types of phrases in a password), and it can be frustrating getting barricaded by such puzzles and not knowing which part of the answer requires more investigation. I’ll also echo some of the previous complaints regarding the controls, because while I appreciate that Simogo has crafted a base system where more complex controls aren’t required, I also don’t think that it’s a huge ask to add a “cancel/back” input for a second button. As a result, it takes significantly more scrolling to get out of menus or spamming random inputs to erroneously enter passwords if I want to back out of a puzzle, and the amount of wasted time per menu/puzzle really builds up over a playthrough.

While I did find the somewhat telegraphed ending slightly underwhelming given how elaborately the game wove its lore into its many clues, I nevertheless really savored my time with Lorelei. I might not have laser eyes, but I can certainly see this game’s approach upon system cohesion influencing many puzzle adventure games to come. As it stands, it’s another solid entry for Simogo’s innovative yet familiar library, and I’ll be thinking about its many secrets for quite some time. Perhaps it's finally time to delve into Device 6.

One of the rooms in this game has the shape of a heart and is full of capybaras, and if that doesn’t prove to you that this is the clear GOTY of the year of the decade of forever so far then I don’t know what will.

Despite being a highly anticipated game for me, probably one of this year’s releases that excited me the most this year… I had no fucking clue what Animal Well really was. By that I don’t mean that ‘’I didn’t know what to expect’’, there have been a ton of games I didn’t have expectations of what they would be prior to playing them, but at least I had a small idea what they were about, their mechanics, and overall ideas. But with Animal Well, I had no clue about how it could even play like.

It was supposed to be a Metroidvania? Is it Puzzle-Platformer? Or perhaps an immersive-atmospheric experience? Maybe a highly experimental take on open spaces and secret finding? I didn’t really know before I hit ‘’start game’’ to be honest, and yet, even before that point there was something that called me, that fascinated me. This world of blues and greens seen through the lenses of an old CRTV is an aesthetic I didn’t know I missed this much, or maybe is that it’s done so effectively here; the surround sound and flickering lights that accompany such abandoned yet beautiful looking structures and the nature that melds perfectly with it… I don’t know, it reminisces of feelings and memories I don’t think I can properly put into words, but still filled me with a desire to explore this rabbit hole.

Well, I finally played it, and I have finally found the answer to all of those questions that once plagued me:…

…Yes.

Animal Wells is an experience that feels like it takes inspiration from a million different places and ideas, and yet it molds them together to create something unlike any other game I can think of; is the idea that surrounds the ‘’Metroidvania’’ genre distilled in its purest form, yet it’s far from being simple.

The well is a place of few words; none of the areas have a proper name, there are no NPCs to chat with, and it’s not like the small slime-like creature we play as has a mouth to begin with. The only text present is one found in menus, small one-word prompts, and the name of the items, and that’s more than enough… because the rest speaks for itself. Each area and the animals that live in them chant a different song, each room a part of a puzzle of their own; I didn’t know for them to have a name for places to stand out vividly in my mind, like the Lake of the Cranes, or the Giant Bat’s Cave, or even smaller locations like the Peacock’s Palace or the Disc’s Shrine. The world of Animal Well may be quiet, but everything speaks volumes, like visting an abandoned virtual zoo: every encounter with a new-found critter, whether friendly or aggressive, every new interaction like distracting dogs using the disc, or every major tense moment like running away from the Ghost… Cat? Dog? I actually don’t know which of the two is supposed to be, nor do I need to know that the entire sequence and puzzle is an amazing highlight and super satisfying to overcome completely on your own… No wait, that’s also the rest of the game!

Managing to create a world that feels so well thought-out and designed so every puzzle feels intuitive, while at the same time offering such fun to use and multi-purpose items that can break open the game completely and taking ALL THAT into account is honestly worth getting up and applauding. The Bubble Wand is the clear star of the show for me; being able to create temporary platforms is already a game changer, especially when pairing it with fans and wind currents, but then you realize you can ‘bubble hop’, as I like to call it, by pressing the action and jump button both at the same time and completely bypassing many parts and sections that otherwise would have required other actions, and best thing is that even if it seems that it breaks the game at times, the dev clearly accounted for it since some rooms have passages too thin for you to maneuver or create bubbles or even animals like hummingbirds that immediately pop them once you make one. I normally wouldn’t like when a game makes a tool completely useless for the sake of a puzzle, but in here it makes total sense and balances out the moments were you make out your own path with pre-designed puzzles this amazing, and it’s not like that’s the only tool that lets you get creative anyway.

The moment you get any item, about two seconds is all you need to realize the possibilities it can offer, yet, as in the rest of the caverns, nothing is ever spelled out; you yourself and your own imagination and problem-solving are the ones that need to overcome the challenges this wildlife imposes; I’ve never felt so rewarded in such a long time than when using the Yo-Yo effectively, learning the code to fast travel to the main hub with the animal faces —which remind me of a certain game, I think it starter with ‘’Super’’ and ended with ‘’2’’… can’t put a finger on it tho—, or skipping completely the Ostrich escape sequence and its puzzles, near the bowels of the map, by using the Spring, Yo-Yo and myself. It honestly comes really close to feeling like the levels in Mosa Lina, now that I think about: you have incredibly useful tools that serve a clear purpose, but ones you can also use whichever way you like to, only with the difference that Animal Well is an already built, profoundly engaging and interesting world, and using all this arsenal while interacting with the animal and the curse that seems to affect the well is amazing, and little things like fall or water damage aren’t taken into account to incentivize and reward experimentation even more than it would have otherwise.

If I had to point out a flaw, and one that may honestly be a ‘’only me’’ thing, is the inconsistency with how it handles some switches and shortcuts. While I get and really enjoy some gauntlets of puzzles, he fact some of them reset, like the ‘’On and Off’’ switches, reset every time you teleport or get out of a room, just makes things a tad more annoying, in contrast to how the yellow door switches stay activated even if you don’t press them all or die, which makes other rooms kind of a joke and strips them from the tension found in the boss encounters, for example. I understand that this won’t be that big of a deal for many people, but when the rest of the game is so impeccably designed and each room amounts to so much, these little annoyances are noticeable.

A game that otherwise… I still don’t think I can say I've come close to experiencing all of it. In a way, it’s kinda interesting to have played this so close after beating Fez for the first time, because while both of those games have a similar sense of wonder and are brimming with secrets, that game created its mysteries through the tools you can find within a same room and code-finding through a fragmented world , while Animal Well is an ecosystem on its own, with the complete freedom that entails. Even after finding out what dwelled at the bottom of the well, it's insane how much there’s for me to find, not only the Eggs, but I’m convinced there are things that I haven’t even seen yet, and I know for sure that there are far more items than it seemed at first.

At this point, it shouldn’t be a secret that one of the things I love the most in games, or in any form of art for that matter, is when they give so much food for thought, letting the imagination run wild and feel so massive and grand even if their locations are small; Animal Well is only a 30 MB game, and it’s the perfect representation of all this, the wild desire to explore, to have fun, and to fear the unknown, even when it's scary as all hell.

I’m obsessed with Animal Well, and its ambience, roars, and silence speak to me in a way few games do, and I’m happy to see that’s a sentiment already being shared by so many people.

We were young, and we were still learning. Coming into our own, yet still not quite there.

The second generation was much like some of us who had experienced the series from the beginning as bright eyed and optimistic children. Maturing, finding our footing in life, and trying to figure things out for what we really wanted out of our future. Do we continue onward with our current path and continue developing our skill? Are we seeking to make a career of said skill? Those drawings bearing a similar crudeness to generation one sprites that we etched on the back of our tests, those little characters that you made from your own two hands and the ocean of your imagination. They would need to be refined, perhaps to the point you would be sick of seeing them again through the months and months of practice. We struck gold on something we were good at, but were we ready to make this our life? How do we get ready for life? Would we even make it to that path we dreamed of?

For us, this was the sequel. A sequel to childhood, and the path to maturity.

If we were to get ready for life, we would need to learn how to maintain a schedule and utilize a form of communication to keep in touch with our contacts. Through our little battery-powered clock in our cartridges, we kept track of the time of day in order to search for different friends on different paths. We would remember what day it was, so we could participate in a bug catching contest and try to find that Scyther. If we couldn't get up in the morning early enough to catch a Ledyba, what good were we in participating in life? It was at this point we were starting to get into the thick of things, we weren't children anymore, but teenagers who aspired to be more like adults. We were excited of all that upcoming opportunity that would only be granted to us with age, and with that age in due time came responsibility and expectations to provide. Life would soon not be all about fun anymore.

It was soon time to grow up, and perhaps move away from home to master our craft elsewhere...

It's hard however to leave behind everything that you grew up with. We traveled to Johto to learn how to better ourselves, perhaps like the bike shop owner who got unlucky on their new shop placement in Goldenrod, but for us it wasn't truly home. We would long for our old pals, our old hangout spots, and our favorite order from our childhood fast food place. We desired a return trip home to Kanto, so we can say hello to everybody one last time before we begin our life's career. Home however, wasn't quite the same as we had remembered. Forests were chopped down, caves were cleared out, and Lavender Town's place of remembrance had been converted into a radio tower. Kanto has changed, or has it matured like us? Resources have been plundered for practical use over the thoughts of those who had lived there, and spirituality has been pushed to the side in the name of technological advancement. Have we lost our way, or is this what is to be expected of us in the future?

When I finally climb this mountain and end this visit home, what will await me at it's peak?

The last lingering strand of childhood I had left made manifest, the past me armed with the very first friends I had made on this adventure. If I must let go of the past, I must defeat the longing memories of what once was. Even if I were victorious, will the memories finally rest or will they continue pursuing me? With the destruction of the past, we make way for the future. This is the way. This is the way we grow up. We no longer have room for trifling matters such as our childhood friends, memories, or the places we once held dear. It's time to make way for adulthood and to only go forward without ever looking back. Home is no longer home, it's no longer even a memory for us, it was thrown back into the toybox where it belonged. With this we continue our adventure elsewhere, and we leave everything behind. It was a fad, and it's time to bury those McDonalds toys and trading cards in a box or sell them off in a yard sale.

It was never to be the same again, for we have both grown up. Us now simple mature adults, and them a fully-realized juggernaut of a franchise with no end in sight. We've defeated our childhood, there was no reason to keep going with this series obviously geared towards what we had grown out of. We could take a peek once in a while to check on them when they make the television, but we would do so with a look over our shoulder to try and maintain our mask of adulthood and maturity. It was time to only watch mature programming, and play mature games while doing other such mature things, like swearing while our parents weren't around. This is what is expected of us now, it's time to leave it behind to the next generation who will grow with the next set of games, whom may also leave once they have grown past it....with another generation to follow.....and the cycle repeats....

My time was over, much like Kanto and the Game Boy, but despite what life and middle school demanded of me, I would never be too far away.

I am home, I always have been.

Nothing says “Gameboy” quite like a kitchen sink aesthetic and slightly melancholic music. Ok and slowdown, flickering, ghosting, compromised platforming, short game length…

I’ve actually played through this on og hardware a few times in the last couple of years, but today I played the whole game while Conbaby was napping. Sweet Prince… u would have loved Mario Land. I think this is a remarkable and charming game even though it’s basically an early tech demo for Mario Land 2.

But don’t let the HATERS bury the REAL STORY: the koopa sprite in Mario Land 1 is the CREAM of the crop. Conbaby core. The itsy bitsy teenie weenie… sprites are WONDERFUL.

I am a frisbee god.
Seahorse with bubble bridge?
Sorry, but you're wrong, dog;
I'm using the frisbee.

I am a frisbee god.
Spike pit spanning the ledge?
Though I should walk the dog,
I'm using the frisbee.

Chinchilla's head goes thunk,
I dance to frisbee funk.
I am a frisbee god;
I'm using the frisbee.