Jugando a esta versión tras la edición original sirve, fundamentalmente, para apreciar un poco mejor lo que años de progreso técnico pueden haber hecho más difícil de percibir, o para acabar con la ofuscación tirando de los comentarios del equipo original. Una parte mía lamenta la pérdida de esa ofuscación y no puede evitar tener sentimientos negativos hacia esta obra, a pesar de que, a todos los efectos, se trata de la misma. Pero otra se alegra de haber podido conocer de cerca los pensamientos y formas que hubieron antes, aunque sea a coste de esa pérdida.

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Playing this version after the original one fundamentally serves to appreciate a little better what years of technical progress have made more difficult to perceive, or to dissipate ambiguity by pulling the original team's commentary. Part of me regrets the loss of that obfuscation and can't help to harbor negative feelings at this edition for that despite being basically the same game. But another is glad to have been able to get a closer look at the thoughts and ideas that went before the final text, even if it meant losing that ambiguity.

Nothing Squeenix ever does will make me think Zack Fair is good and/or cool. In fact, the more I learn about him the more I start to actively dislike him.

There is a part of me that feels fundamentally opposed to all the "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII" stuff because FF7 on its own is such an exquisitely self-contained thing. Like, they did a great job with it! We don't need every little detail explained and expanded upon! It frequently makes things worse! Sometimes you do still end up with something that is Cool and Fun (Advent Children) but mostly you end up with stuff that is Bad and Sucks (Crisis Core).

I didn't realize just how much this game pushes Zack and Aerith together. I had always assuming the fandom shipping them was based on some crumbs but they are pretty clearly Together in this, huh. I am choosing to ship Zack with Tseng out of pure spite because both Aerith and Cloud deserve better than this dumpster boy.

Genesis constantly dropping in to quote a play is very stupid and funny. Genesis walked so V Devilmaycryfive could run.

weird prank from squeenix to name the trans woman "Cissnei" but okay

Knees buckle before the great expanse
The threshold of ruin overtaken
Thoughts locked into hypnagogic trance

The foundations of reality thoroughly shaken
World screams out a final anguished cry
Searing pain on a land forsaken

A corpse whimpers a final lie
Phantasmagorical tears in space time abound
Clouds frozen in the blackened sky

Trembling ceases within the ground
Destruction slows into the still then
Atmosphere pierced by the soundless sound

A people denied their sundering end
Void spaces of slumber again and again

"House of Leaves inspired Doom mod" is one of the most esoteric concepts you could probably ever cook up, but man, it sure is an esoteric concept aimed specifically at me.

There's a lot to process and unpack, but I don't think the constant comparisons to Yume Nikki are off the mark here: Myhouse is one of those things best experienced rather than actively discussed, even if the (adorably obvious in its adoration for Danielewski's writing) actual "plot" and imagery around the house has a plenty to delve into, analyze and chew on.

On the technical side of things Myhouse is probably the single most impressive feat in the Zdoom engine to date, which is all the more impressive considering the community around that source port (and Doom as a whole) has become more and more defined by getting as much mileage as (im)possible out of a thirty-year-old engine. I don't have as many positive things to say about the actual Doom aspects of it - there's enemy spam at work here that would put Plutonia to shame - but that's not really what you're playing Myhouse for.

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

probably my favourite system mechanics in any fighting game, battle hub perfectly encapsulates the arcade setting as cordial yet caustic, netcode is excellent, this is the best starting roster any of these games has ever had, world tour gets dry after a little bit but finally manages to capture these characters essences in a personable and human way which has been a rarity in SF up to this point, endless quality of life features officially make this the new standard to aspire to for all pending releases, dhalsim sounds like he’s telling opponents to kill themselves whenever i land drive impact. five stars

El último título oficial de la saga de Nathan Drake y el último juego de Naughty Dog antes de que entrara en la Era de Druckman y se volviera aún más pretencioso, inseguro de sí mismo y explotador, es también el título de Uncharted que se me ha hecho menos cuesta arriba. Claro que eso tampoco quiere decir que tenga muchas cosas buenas que decir sobre él. Desde el principio ha sido obvio que los juegos de esta saga aspiraban a recrear, en clave estética que no jugable, los altos vuelos de una película de aventuras y la grandiosidad del cine épico de Hollywood. Por el camino, seguramente, se esperaba que esta aproximación artística también crearía la misma profundidad filosófica o espiritual que una obra como En Busca del Arca Perdida o La Última Cruzada lograron alcanzar. Pero como siempre, lo que esta manera de imitar de forma tan servil ha demostrado una y otra vez desde principios de siglo es que, si te posiciones desde el principio como une artista endeuade a las tradiciones de otros medios, los resultados nunca traerán nada mejor que En Busca del Templo Maldito o La Calavera de Cristal.

El equipo guionista hace esfuerzos titánicos para que la fórmula funcione, y tal vez por eso esta historia me resulte la menos cargante de las tres (aunque me descubro echando de menos la simpleza del primer Uncharted, mucho más cercano a los Tomb Raider que mira tan por encima del hombro). Pero por el camino, el diseño de niveles se ha rendido por completo al formato de pasillos emperifollados a los que la franquicia siempre iba apuntando desde el principio. La relativa variedad que ofrecen los encuentros-arena queda siempre subordinada a la secuencia de acción más óptima: destruye siempre a los tanques, luego a los francotiradores, luego a los tipos con armadura y si acaso ya te vas encargando del resto a tu ritmo. El modo sigilo que aportará tanto dinamismo a The Last of Us aún es un proyecto a medio hacer. Y las secuencias de salto, como viene siendo habitual, son poco más que un ejercicio de saber a dónde apunta la cámara y saltar hacia allí. Lo único que nos queda por juzgar (más allá del extremadamente simple sistema de combate cuerpo a cuerpo) son las largas secuencias andando en las que el juego nos invita a adoptar un ritmo más lento, o pensar la solución a un puzzle, o dejarnos llevarnos por la historia. Y como ya he dado a entender antes, el esfuerzo es admirable en más de un aspecto, pero el impacto de estos caminos de baldosas amarillas queda en entredicho cuando cualquier actuación de carne y hueso aporta más energía que estas agotadas voces de doblaje y estos risibles conjuntos de polígonos animados.

Escribiré sobre esto de forma más fría, pero creo que mi principal observación de estos juegos, por lo menos ahora, es que son extremadamente anti-jugadore. En ningún momento dejé de sentirme como si estuviera interfiriendo el drama de instituto de une profesore de teatro, y aunque participar está bien, siempre acabé con un agujero en el estómago y, por qué no admitirlo, con un poquito de rencor por no haberme dejado improvisar.

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The last title of the Nathan Drake trilogy, and the last Naughty Dog game before it entered the Druckman Era and became more pretentious, self-conscious and exploitative than ever, it's also the Uncharted title that I've found to be the least tedious to finish. Of course, that's doesn't mean I have many good things to say about it. It's been always obvious that these games have aspired from the beginning to reach the same highs, at least aesthetically, of adventure movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and epic movies like Lawrence of Arabia. It does feel like they hoped that by copying the surface elements of these movies they would be able, somehow, to reach the philosophical or spiritual depth that a work like The Last Crusade managed to achieve. But as always, what this slavishly imitative approach has proven time and again since the turn of the century is that, if you deliberately put yourself below the artistic heights of other media, you'll be only be able to achieve medioucre results that won't be that much better from Temple of Doom or The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

The writers here have made a herculean effort trying to make this work, though, and perhaps that's why I find this game to have the least annoying story of them all- though more and more I'm finding myself longing for the simplicity and Tomb Raider-esque approach that the first Uncharted took, despite obviously trying to distance from them. But along the way, however, the level design of the game has completely surrendered to the stripped down corridors format that they seemingly wanted to fall into. The variety offered by arena encounters is always resolved through the same sequence: always begin with the tanks, then the snipers, then the armored guys, and eventually you'll take care of the rest. The stealth mode that will bring so much dynamism to The Last of Us is still half-baked here. And the jump sequences, as usual, are little more than an exercise in knowing where the camera is pointing at and jumping there. The only thing left for us to judge (beyond the extremely simple melee combat system) are the long walking sequences in which the game invites us to slower our pace, or solving a puzzle, or ponder about the story. And as I've implied before, the effort is admirable on its own, but the impact of these yellow-bricked roads is undermined when any flesh-and-blood performance brings more energy than these exhausted voice-overs and laughable polygons.

I'll write about this more coldly, but I think my main contention with these games now is that they are extremely anti-player. At no point did I ever stop feeling like I was inside a teacher's high school theater project, and while participating was fine, I ended up confused and a little bit upset that they didn't let me improvise a little along the performance.

CW: Videogame Difficulty Discourse

My Policy Guidelines

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Considering the thoughtfully effusive praise from Maradonna focusing on why its probably one of the best game titles to come out of Brazilian culture. Along with the more reflective post on the game by Archagent focusing on the mechanics of grief and passing away. I would be remiss to write off the game and dismiss it entirely, and following that I'm quite surprised how many people I follow (and I follow a LOT) haven't touched this title yet at all. Lesbian overtones, rewarding top down action combat, post apocalyptic storytelling, and anti human sentiments seem like taken together the sort of interests that would apply to most of the people who read what I have to say. Anybody who enjoyed Hyper Light Drifter for example would likely find great company here. However, I must stay true to my roots here as someone who writes about games mainly to vent a bit so let me get into my caveats.

I think actually the most simple way to put my frustrations are not actually with the game itself per se, but with how videogame difficulty is conveyed to the player. When you start the game you have an option between "Explorer", "Action Girl (Recommended)", and "Robot Apocalypse" difficulty. Most players in actuality on their first play through are going to be choosing between the easy and medium modes, and leave hard mode for when they are actually familiar enough with the game mechanics. I don't think I've ever seen somebody actively choose a hard mode in a game on purpose for their first playthrough as anything other than a joke.

Recently I read a fantastic analysis of the importance difficulty framing by Duranda called How Can Game Options Help Casual Players See The Core Appeal Of A Game?. The stellar takeaway is that difficulty framing is a mechanic that is important to the overall package

"Rather than your average difficulty settings which are often framed as 'the same gameplay, but stricter', difficulty settings that radically alter core game behavior are more likely to spark the imagination and in turn inspire deeper understanding of the game’s core appeal."

In theory this sounds like a huge ask for a 2 person indie title, but the curse I'm speaking of then is not so much specific to the game itself as it is to maybe the weakest point in both games critique and development that exists: Difficulty transparency. Writers often don't mention at all the difficulty they played on or the fluctuation in difficulties midgame. Whether they used assists and what they thought of them. Similarly designers tend to not give a clarity to the distinctions in difficulty. The reason why is because there's often a homogeneity in approach, that if you did not play the game at least on the recommended settings or above then you didn't really experience the game, instead you are just a passive object through it, no better than a journalist. This sentiment that 'casual' play should not be utilized is often undermined by the fact that it usually only applies to a specific type of game experience: The action genre. Compare for example most people's relationship nowadays with point and click adventure games, often dismissing their puzzles as 'nonsensical' and relying liberally on walkthroughs when needed and you get a general understanding that lateral puzzle games need not apply to this rule of thumb. What this rule of thumb fails to keep in mind though is that when it comes to more reflex based games different people have vastly different reflex times depending on various life factors and desires from gaming. Generally human reaction time to visual stimulus rests somewhere between 150 to 300 milliseconds, which doesn't sound like a huge distinction, but seeing as there is 30-60 frames in a second thats the difference between 4 and 8 frames which is the difference between seeing a wind up and responding or not.

In actuality this 'test' of player skill is usually already great for people with already fast reaction times. They get first breakfast to jokes of other players being 'filtered' by godhand etc. the rest have to rely on 2 factors to keep up with swift reaction times:

1. Learning the attack patterns through trial and error

and

2. Exploiting the systems in your favor, consciously or not

Let's actualize this through a game mechanic. In Unsighted there is a parry mechanic where upon seeing a red indicator on screen you hit a button to parry an enemy and then close in with a reply attack. What I noticed is that I was generally following attack patterns and audio cues for parrying instead because due to my slow visual reaction time (somewhere at a resting level between 250-300 for whatever reason) the ability to respond in time was simply not fast enough within that visual parry window. I would be calling the parry unreliable and thus getting annoyed with it, the reality is it was probably completely reliable to the 'average' and 'recommended' player and I fell just far enough out of that range to find that hard to rely on. Thus I had to exploit the Cog mechanic (which give you temporary buffs) and learn attack patterns through trial and error instead. Eventually I would run out of materials for using Cogs so I was floudering more slowly against bosses instead.

The problem is that for Unsighted, the combat itself becomes punishing based on whether or not you can parry in time. Parries are the way to output the most amount of damage so it becomes vital, especially versus boss fights, in order to not die several times in a row. But unfortunately, there's no time to spare here. Each time you die that much more time you lose to being able to help and save NPCs. You're letting everybody down when you die, not just yourself. It no longer becomes an at best tedious process of learning boss attack patterns and instead transforms into something actually stressful.

Far be it from me to make it out like this is just a reflex based issue though, this game in particular is mainly focused on puzzling into action combat. Outside of boss fights, action combat trends towards easy enough that it can be discarded as a general concern. So if you have issues with puzzling things out you will also be stressed by the doomsday clock. I don't for the most part. I can solve problems generally quite quickly. However if that does apply to you then you will want the time to be slower than the suggested amount as well.

This is compounded by the fact that in an environment where games like Majora's Mask and Undertale have already established a general player motivation to not let everyone down, there's often a huge stress to reset and start all over to do right by NPC's better and not have them die. At some point I looked at the amount of time I had left and said 'I can do this better if I restart' but of course that robs the 'authenticity' of the experience. Since I'm a 'memory vessel' of the original player character who knows a bunch of extra tricks I shouldn't this is why impressing difficulty to the player on the outset is incredibly important. Postmodernism aside, game immersion often relies on this feeling of the first time playing being imbued with 'authentic' experience. So if you walk into Unsighted and lose half the NPCs because you're simply bad at puzzle mechanics, that's not good. Sure the game is supposed to be stressful and give you a reason to persevere, but if its a matter of unknown limitations from the outset then you're fumbling around and not persevering much at all. This is the difference I can categorize between a feeling of actual stress and simulated stress. Simulated stress is the yearning to achieve, actual stress is recognizing that in spite of yourself, you just cant.

I can't stand most boss fights in games because they become pattern recognition checks with large health sponges attached to them. Due to my generally slower reaction speed this makes a great deal of sense. Most people with a better reaction time than me feel like they can learn and respond to attacks from a boss even the first time dynamically and quickly whereas I tend to have issues even keeping up.

This is all to say that I think the reccomended difficulty for Unsighted, at least for single player experience, is a bit too hard for what it's trying to push out of a player. You have 5 different dungeons to explore and map out plus a final boss and roughly about 8 hours to functionally do it before almost all the NPCs die. You can get dust that gives some of the NPCs an extra 24 hours of life, these tend to be somewhat rare. Each second a minute of in game time passes on the recommended mode so you're looking at an 24 extra minutes. That sounds like a lot but for example Iris, your 'Navi' character who actively helps you throughout starts with only 194 hours before they terminate and turn into an Unsighted (basically a zombie). That comes out to around 3 and a half hours give or take, and that means you have to shove dust in their maw for the whole game in order for them to be alive and help you progress for as much of the experience as possible. I think the time per minute should probably be closer to around 2.5 to 3 seconds considering the amount of content the game is pushing you to move through.

I may be wrong here, as it seems that most people who played through the game didn't mind and thought positively of it. But I think the fact is when we read Archagent's testimony for example we read the story of somebody for whom almost everyone died and while forlorn reflected that 'I did the best I could.' A completely valid experience, but not one that maps onto my own desires to save at almost all costs virtual NPC and their desolate society. I was pumping dust into everyones mouths to stave off death which meant that for me, death was not going to be slow and induvidual but instead a massacre over the course of 2 days. It wasn't staving off 1 NPC's death I really liked, but pretty much the entire town.

I think one of the other reasons I feel this extra pressure to the degree of either wanting to give up, start over, or get cynical is because the game's narrative pushes a 'chosen one' sentiment. You are the strongest robot of your type, out to save your wife and help anybody along the way, the rest of the town has all but given up on actively fighting and instead imbue all their hope for survival solely into you. In spite of that though, they still have to run shops apparently. I don't know about you but if I was in a dire last ditch effort post apocalypse scenario the last issue that would be on my mind is currency. Currency is usually the result of having to simplify larger logistical networks and trade so that bartering no longer becomes a nessecity. However often in scenarios of war and famine, food for example is doled out on a by person basis of basic need until the situation improves again. In dramatic scenarios merchants and shops fall by the wayside for a moment, so I find it interesting the degree to which games have trouble seperating from this currency process. Usually games more aware of this incompatibility justify it through saying the currency is some other life force, Dark Souls has 'souls' for example with the merchants saying 'I dont need money, I'd rather your souls'. Currency itself also becomes a gesture of the absurd and desperate. That's why it's justifiable that Hollow Knight has the shell currency system, so few people even use it now, and they are all incredibly delusional about the degree to which their way of life can still be maintained. Unsighted unfortunately doesn't have that excuse, all the characters know exactly that they will die next week. It feels like I'm being distanced from the actual help the people left want of me, they want me to help them as an old friend, and I do. But they also want me to be an obedient customer for them, which I don't.

Instead I would have preferred the checks for say, upgrading a sword, to be based on having the raw materials and maybe making me wait like a few hours. That would be much more realistic to what the game is trying to convey mechanically but of course it would be a difficult system to get right.

The only other negative thing I'll say about Unsighted is that it has a similar issue Elden Ring does, you have all these gorgeous iconic and in many cases sexy characters to speak to in the hubworld (a town). In total you have about 20 lines of dialogue for each of them outside of dramatic cutscenes which is not nearly enough to feel close to the characters and their plights. The focus was generally put on engaging combat, exploration, and puzzle design. All to well effect sure. However for me a game about grief and trauma should tend to have much more dialogue. I want to have 10k words from characters, I want to see some of them tear up about their own potential deaths and talk to me about the specific anime we watched together. I don't want to give an NPC 4 dust and get a cool effect from it, that's not the point for me at all.

In spite of all those misgivings I do think the feedback during attacks, variety of weapons, and visual design is quite good. The world is gorgeous and the puzzles are decently engaging although not replayable enough that I'd want to start over. The upgrade system of being based on 'chip' loadouts is novel even though it's hard not to justify running as much defense and stamina in the loadout as possible. The time mechanic itself is well established and I like it a lot, but the game is overall too difficult to actually sit through. It's not that I'm uncomfortable with failure, its that failure feels more like having to clear a giant roadblock rather than being gummed up for a few minutes. But it has to be emphasized here that this is probably some of the best character designs I've seen in a game like this. The sapphic energy of having a pony tailed muscle girl like Ariel and a pink haired pixie cut frown like Vana, with their distinct body types feels great. It's an awareness of the diversity of body types and hair styles that trans-women seem especially good at picking up on. Not to mention that the fact most of the cast is women and the character you play as is a woman just warms up my gay heart, but it's just not enough to pull it all quite together.

I would probably have felt a lot better about it had I played on easy mode from the start. I've set the mode now to explorer mode allowing me to actually fail with much more ease against the bosses, and also switched the combat to an easier difficulty too, but that doesn't avoid the fact that the simplicity in the choices and slow emergence of combat information in the early game didn't assist me well in knowing what I should have preferred. Not to mention that the disctinction between setting the game midgame to an easier mode and starting over does still have those mild knock on effects to immersion. In my subconcious I'll still know that the enemies are easier and the game is slower for a 'magic' reason that has no actual narrative justification. This game should have been trying to convince a player like me at all costs that playing on the easy mode is best suited, but instead dropped me into a pool that I wasn't ready to swim in. It's important to mention here that this has nothing to do with how familiar you are with videogames, as much as these games often try to make it out. This is why I feel like difficulty and its framing should be critiqued more, it's a generic issue for this game to have but one that does disrupt and trouble a player like me to the point of not wanting to play anymore considering the actual intensity of its theming by comparison. I refuse to believe that just due to my slowness in response time and quickness to actual stress that I 'shouldnt' talk about games or play them.

If only for any other reason, I realized today that when it comes to action games I really do start out as a 'casual' player. I think I've finally done my due diligence in recognizing that fact and that will probably reflect more clearly in future write ups. Along with that I'll be sure to make what difficulty I played on more clear in the future to where it matters.

It's possible I'm just wrong in this case particularly, that I need to grow a spine and watch some NPCs die. But I feel like if I'm going to have games based around fail mechanics leading to divergent outcomes, I would rather not be fitted with the 'chosen one' narrative of saving a town on top. It's the exact same reason why I've found Fallout 1 almost impossible to play. This is why my next game I plan to try and play and complete is Lucah: Born of a Dream, a game I played a little of before putting it down due to being distracted by something else. I'll be sure to do a write up on it as well fairly soon.

Some thoughts that I had stuck in my head:
Explore the world looking for a solution, a connection. Together. Maybe not physically, not by the same routes, maybe not delivering the same

It is difficult for Death Stranding to reach you playing it alone. Its nature emerges more easily online, and it's a great gesture and a statement of intent that you don't need a subscription to ps plus.

Kojima presents a digital world that is difficult to interpret and unite in words, a fiction that shoots directly into our reality.
Cursed, heartfelt, but also emotional. embrace the connections between things, but question them. a celebration of human duality
More prophetic than MGS2 and with better observation, generalizing and at the same time specifying the difficulties of our day to day, articulating them in the total art of videogames.
From the most abstract to the most literal, collective fears, traumas and very recognizable memories materialized. Visible, audible, and even palpable in an alien America full of dualities, of people who only intuit and show themselves through holograms and numbers.
But we are here. Maybe not next door, but in the same world. And the proof is the ladder that I have used to create an improvised bridge, I have left it here, for you, for me, for everyone. And that rope on the cliff, that capsule, that package on the ground. We are here.

Where the rejection of what forces us to leave this world is manifested in a kind of allergy for those who are more akin to these fears or have experienced them to the limit.
Where people are baptized for their present, for their office and condemned for their past. Where the heroes deliver packages and letters. They come to our futuristic shacks and install an esoteric Internet.
Everything is Sam Porter Bridges, whose name makes it STRONGLY EVIDENT what Death Stranding is about, and at the same time no, you cannot perfectly encompass anything as complex as earthly and afterlife connections, the natural and the mechanical, the Software and the Hardware, the "Ka" and "ha". reality and dreams. Much of Death Stranding's recontextualized iconography seems to suggest that.

It is a work that calls for thinking in an unprecedented way about it, because it offers an unprecedented reinterpretation of the transition and relationship with our environment, especially for gaming standards, obsessed with the mechanical-narrative relationship or the challenge, the suggestion and the satisfaction as a criterion to generate interpretations that are autopsies or descriptions. That in the best case.
At worst you have Far Cry 3.
Every species has the game in different facets and areas as a form of intellectual and emotional connection.
Children play and learn/relate, animals play to understand each other. We play to replace war.

Even before having sex we played.

Homo ludens. And Kojima welcomes a lot of this.

We need to be playful without losing focus.
There is no need for subtlety, just answer honestly to human questions. Use the forms of play as a response to the bitter obstacles of reality.
The example is the "Social Strand System", a mechanical reinterpretation of social networks where the game of deliveries and recovery of packages, manufactures and constructions has an impact on likes and statistics, but also on turning the environment into something more livable and peaceful, at the same time, shows that a more altruistic and ethical form of social interaction is possible.
It sounds naive to say that the reconstruction of the collective environment in an online video game is a lesson in altruism and community, even more so when there are likes involved, but the exercise of life begins somewhere, and now that we are waking up from this techno delirium -competitive utopian in which social networks had us flooded, now that we know how important they are to connect with each other more than to raise our ego, this "Social Strand System" shines more than in 2019.
Through the textures of slow gaming, an experiment of self-knowledge and updating is proposed, there is the unprecedented, in how the game confronts us with situations without necessarily connecting their thoughts or ideas and still achieving a certain cohesion. As in life, no one knows "what it is about" and yet we walk through it with what we own and what others leave for us.
And for a game that wants to embrace these themes without giving up the nature of its medium, its foundation, it's something really admirable.
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Not a single day goes by that I don't think about Death Stranding. Perhaps because of what has been happening in the world since 2020.
On arrival at Port Knot City.
How the corpses of people who have left explode, leaving an emotional and physical void in the form of a crater. Cities with people locked up, invisible. In the networks. In their inverted rainbows. How work becomes playing with its dozens of tools to transport, how enemies are my reflection, silence, likes, photos, stories... In life, how life can be everywhere.
And I can't even put into words practically anything that this game is for me. I plan to return to it in 2023 now that a sequel has been announced that begs the question: Should we have Connected?

Fuck it, I don't care, I don't have reasons, nor do I want them. I am capable of emotion, believe it or not, despite my scrawls of pontification. And I get feelings from these games. The first came out in 2017 (age of political awakening and steady decline) and this came out in 2022 (deep in the age of "it") and I needed it both times. Romance is dangerous for me; I avoid it because I get all up in my lonely feelings. This is my rare chance to curl up in it. There's no logical reason why this works for me so much and other things like it simply don't. I can dissect it or make a nuanced pitch, but it's a waste of words. This is not a recommendation or a review. I'm just saying things. I'm not going to compare one entry to the other; I don't much remember the first one other than adoring it deeply. Sure, maybe some of it is hamfisted this time around, and sure, there are anachronistic memes, but I literally don't care. I just like it. It makes me smile and I get warm fuzzies and I like it. It is so rare that I can just smile authentically and earnestly at art. Vulnerability can be embarrassing but it's liberating. Earnestness will set me free. And if you think it's cringe to find joy in something so vulnerable, then you can leave me the fuck alone