French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir argues in her 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity that 'existence precedes essence;' that the personality and the core beliefs of each human individual is defined through their environment and their actions, and that the challenges that allow those personality-shaping events are the ones that truly test the scope of the limits between their limitations and potential, their past against their future, the comfort of familiarity against the fear of the unknown.

"I Was a Teenage Exocolonist" is a quiet meditation on this and other questions asked by de Beauvoir and her fellow existentialists, packaged stealthily in the wrappings of a Solarpunk-themed dating game. Beneath the cotton candy colored environment of Vertumna and the egregiously tumblr-era character designs lies one of the best narrative experiences I've had in years, one that manages to succeed at the challenge of remaining both replayable and emotionally impactful. IWATE introduces the concepts of string theory, mortality, identity, collectivism, and on and on and on as each character you meet lives, grows, dies, lives again, and becomes a different person entirely.

When asked about the passing of her lover, the famed philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir simply said "His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.” Vertumna asks you to spend ten years with it before it lets you go, and readily welcomes you back again for the next loop of a cycle that continues on into infinity. But each of those cycles of ten years creates a unique you, and the life you live with its people is truly splendid.

ps: rex is best boy, even with the dumb tattoo, fight me

This game came very, very close to being my favorite game of all time, but in the end it didn't hit the mark the way that a lot of my favorites did. This isn't a bad thing; NieR expresses all of its ideas in as coherent and fluid a manner as it can and I think it really hammers home everything that it needs to with the tools that it has. It just didn't tell me anything I didn't already know - and that’s a good thing. I cherish NieR as much as I do for the exact reason that it reminds me so much of what I have, what I know and how I've grown.

NieR is a celebration of video games as a medium; it picks them apart, critiques them, and gets to know them inside-and-out for all their weird quirks and then pieces them back together, the relationship between creator and creation much stronger for all the bizarre intimacy and trust that can only come when you've exhausted every little detail of something you know and love so well. In many ways, NieR is the definitive game of the state of games in 2010: a look back at the achievements of games' past (with countless homages to games such as Resident Evil or the original Legend of Zelda with gameplay mix-ups and perspective changes), while taking a few brave first steps into the increasingly unique and experimental narrative language games had started to develop going into their fourth decade of mainstream prevalence.

There’s also something to be said about NieR’s LGBT themes and the manner in which it explores them and works them into its core narrative; every single member of the main party has some sort of LGBT experience related to their story. Rather than dedicating entire subplots to extrapolating upon these themes, it lets the player identify these characters as gay/intersex/bisexual and then places them in circumstances where one can identify strong parallels with LGBT experiences in a very real way without having to carve out room in the story just for those. It feels natural, and it’s the best way I’ve seen a game tackle LGBT themes - a scene where two “non-human” characters reassure one another over their “flaws” becomes a textual example of LGBT solidarity in the narrative, whereas one character’s discomfort and feeling unsafe being half-shade in a party of shade-hunters becomes a parallel to the fears that intersex and transgender feel in cisgender society. I’ve never seen another narrative handle it so subtly and yet so explicitly as Nier does, and I cherish it endlessly.

The fact that NieR has two protagonists is one of the best possible decisions that could have been made for this game. Perception, perspective and understanding is an important theme in this game, and a lot of the writing is written in a way that will resonate differently depending on whether or not the protagonist is a young man protecting his sister or a middle-aged man protecting his daughter. Brother Nier’s story is one of the best intentions and purest love slowly rotting into the most volatile hate, whereas Papa Nier’s story is one of how even the most innocent and noble of love can draw you to do terrible, awful things. Both protagonists have unique and incredibly impactful effects on the world around them, and are impacted by it in different ways, and have equally meaningful and unique relationships with their party members.

I personally prefer Brother Nier - he resonates with me on a much greater level and I find his more dynamic character arc more compelling, and I’m a sucker for understated, subtle romances such as the one between Brother Nier and Kainé, which is amplified considering the backstory context (and resulting LGBT status) that Brother Nier has whereas Papa Nier does not have it. At the same time, I cannot imagine NieR without Papa Nier. I found myself missing him even when he was right there in the playthrough of NieR: Gestalt I watched while playing through Replicant.

Some criticize the new ending in the remake as unfitting or that it ruins the original game’s point. I understand where they’re coming from in saying so, but I disagree - I think to emphasize NieR as a purely cynical and centering its darkness above all else is to miss the point. NieR is a story about love, and what people are willing to do for the people that they love. Some loyalties are unbreakable and will lead people to do unthinkable things - such as “undo” a poignant and controversial ending that many people consider the highlight of the narrative in which they are held. (Personally, I find Ending D to be a bit overrated - the twist ending comes as a bit shoehorned in and doesn’t have much narrative weight or presence, without ever explaining how Nier can do what he does to achieve that ending).

The only true complaint I have is that I feel that it’s a touch too short and relies too heavily on padding through (ultimately meaningless, if not entertaining) sidequests, and that its truly emotionally impactful moments are more-or-less hastily crammed into a game whose routes you could beat in ten hours or less if you rushed through it (it took me about eighty hours to achieve all five endings, with this in mind). I understand the importance of the game’s replay value and that it’s what makes the game so special, but at the same time I feel like I would have definitely been willing to rack up 100 hours or more in exchange for longer playthroughs so that I could see the party interact more. The four-man ensemble of Nier, Kainé, Emil and Grimoire Weiss is my favorite in any video game, and it feels like we’re made to say goodbye to them just as we’ve truly gotten to know them.

But — and this is a key theme of NieR in and of itself — perhaps it is more important to appreciate the journey itself, for often it won't end the way you expect, or even in the manner that you want it to. Sometimes you're happier on the path to your goals than you are when you achieve them. Love your friends while you still can, cherish every step you take for what it is, and don’t look back.

an open-world exploration game that has both more "breath" and more "wild" than Breath of the Wild

Sable wears its BotW inspiration on its sleeve, but the game is much more than that. BotW's combat is servicable at best (the bows are okay), but Sable imagines an open-world experience without that. what if you focused less on conquering and looting a space and more on luxuriating in it and learning more about it. the world feels alive, skittering like the wind across the dunes. the people don't feel placed in random locations, they feel nestled into their own communities where it's you're job to figure out where you fit in with them.

for a coming-of-age narrative, Sable goes a lot more beyond that. it has its Lore Dumps, sure, but the story does a lot by piecing out the flavor of the world through incredible dialogue. i have a folder full of screenshots of my favorite lines, and i STILL missed a lot that i wish i would have captured at the time. the writing centers the player not as a Grand Important Hero that the land needs to survive, but instead as a friend to many. the different groups of "jobs" that you get badges for both asks you what Sable wants to do and what You like doing. for a game about deciding what you want to do with your life, it encourages you to taste all of its flavors.

i love the score by Japanese Breakfast. i got tears when the title theme first appeared in the story. so often i would warp to a specific area when night would fall just so i could hear the area's night theme while driving aimlessly across the desert or climbing to sit atop the dunes or a perch somewhere

it is with this that Sable's love is felt. not when you are running from place to place trying to burn through a game as fast as you can just so you can say you beat it, but when you sit and become part of the world around you. it's this ludonarrative synergy that kept me coming back. the game embodies the feeling of being on a road trip, stopping somewhere cool to get food and the locals there are really nice to you, continuing to drive in the dark, looking at the houses that pass by and wondering who lives there.

in this, Sable reminds us that the joy of games is not in the checking of boxes off of a list of activities, it is in the running and jumping, the exploring, the learning.

(the game has bugs but whatever lol. i'm always willing to look past jank/unintended things when the core experience is good enough)

What a joke! I cannot comprehend how the developers so clearly have a sincere passion for Half-Life while simultaneously not understanding in the slightest what makes Half-Life what it is.

My disillusionment with the game set in the instant that I got into my first encounter with the HECU, who are so unbelievably obnoxious and focused on trial-and-error that the game stops for 30 minutes at a time every time you encounter them. Of course, this wouldn't be such a bad thing if they weren't the overwhelming majority in terms of enemy placement; once you first encounter a Marine the (genuinely very good) alien-fighting gunplay is sidelined up until you reach the very depths of the Lambda complex.

The HECU (while also obnoxiously and artificially difficult) are representative of Black Mesa's biggest flaw, and the most dire manner in which it fails to recreate what Half-Life is all about: rather than encouraging exploration, innovation and improvisation like every Half-Life game does, you're regulated to kneeling behind cover and using some of the most boring weapons in the game (namely the MP5 and shotgun) as you attempt to pick them off from a distance. Even the flow of using these weapons is neutered when compared to the original game, due to the MP5's magazine capacity, ammunition reserves and grenade stock being reduced to mere fractions of what they were, meaning that you can't even truly indulge in bombast without having to stop and reload or scavenge for ammo every minute or so. This problem also impacts the revolver and crossbow, genuinely fun weapons that lend themselves well to the long-distance based combat of the HECU: you're reduced to a measly three-or-two magazines in reserve for both of them, meaning you can carry a maximum of twenty-four and fifteen rounds apiece for them. I don't know if they were going for realism here or what, but tell me, do you play Half-Life for realistic portrayals of combat?

The gunplay is not alone in being completely representative of Black Mesa's disdain for exploration and player creativity: there are invisible walls and cheap mapping practices everywhere, determined to stomp out Half-Life's signature feeling of "what's up there? I wonder if I can get up there" at every possible corner. Some of my favorite examples were long-jumping off a floating island in Xen to land on one situated below, only to find that the developers had registered all long falls in Xen as falling into a bottomless pit and would force a reload upon landing... and feeling quite clever when I used satchel charges to bypass an explosive maze only to find that the map was designed to blow you up if the explosives blew up regardless of where you were on the map, even if you were well behind cover.

Speaking of Xen...! I don't know, it's beautiful and impressive and perhaps a step up from the original's from a certain perspective, but it's also not really anything we haven't seen before in a million other alien worlds from a million other science fiction stories. The Xen of Half-Life felt genuinely strange, incomprehensible and uncanny in a manner that not only acted in favor of the game's horror elements but also reinforced the notion that you are not welcome here, that this world was never meant for and never intended to pay host to those of your kind. Sure, we're treated to beautiful forests, swamps and factories, but... they're just that, things that I recognize, things that I've seen before, things that are familiar. It takes the alien out of "alien invasion."

Another thing that bothered me was the music. None of it was bad, I'd say, but none of it really felt like Half-Life to me. Half-Life's OST was dominated more than anything by droning guitar feedback, dark ambient soundscapes and industrial rhythms, the prevalence of which makes the heavy synths and pounding drums that much more impactful when they do show up. Not only does the Black Mesa OST sound much more like something you'd hear in a standard fare sci-fi FPS of the 2010s, it was more or less one Epic Videogame Song With Heavy Drum And Guitar And Synth after another - sometimes it worked for the moment (such as We've Got Hostiles, whose almost desert rock-styled riffage fit perfectly for the adrenaline rush of seeing the surface for the first time only amid a massive firefight) but most of the time I mostly either found the loud music irritating when it played during something as innocuous as exploring a reactor facility, or when I had to listen to it again, and again, and again as I reloaded save after save after save in one of the game's million-and-a-half HECU skirmishes.

It's a shame, because as I said in my intro it's clear that these developers love Half-Life. There's a lot of thought put into capturing the idiosyncrasies of 1998's portrayal of Black Mesa while also making them feel more lively and lived-in from a modern point of view. The moment-to-moment combat and "gun feel" is excellent when you're just fighting aliens, and the flow of the levels themselves is quick, breezy and natural... but because it all goes to hell whenever you get to Xen (the only completely original section of Black Mesa) it's clear that we can give credit to the fact that these are painstaking bit-for-bit recreations of Valve's innovations as opposed to something that the team can truly take credit for. Xen literally milks the same puzzle over and over and over again for the entirety of its 8-10 hour playtime, and only really bothers to introduce its trump card (which in fairness is cool as hell) during the last quarter of Interloper.

The Nihilanth fight, though? That shit fuckin' rules. It's just a shame that the game only finally realizes its potential during the literal final moments of the game.

Played on "hard" (eventually got so fed up with the very first tank fight and the Gonarch fight that I set it to normal until I'd killed those), completed in about 28 hours.

After finishing this game with each of the protagonists, I can say confidently that I really did just find more and more to appreciate on each playthrough. I know it's been said to death, but this game is something special, even if it's a complete slog to get through sometimes. If you have way too much time on your hands and have a high level of tolerance for jank, I think the game is worth playing.

It's true that the vast majority of this game is walking from place to place, but I think what's often glossed over is just how many things you have to manage while doing that walking; having to plan out the ideal route through town to get from place to place most efficiently, weighing the risks of walking through an infected district to get somewhere quicker or taking the long route to avoid danger, checking what roads are safe to go down using the plaguefinder, and doing all this while soaking up the thick-as-fuck texture of this town, which is, I think, genuinely interesting to exist in. It's true that it's mostly varying shades of brown, yellow and green, but it never got boring to look at; infected districts are always sickening and genuinely uncomfortable to be in, burned districts feel less immediately alien while still immediately presenting themselves as dangerous, and safe areas are, in their own way, haunting beautiful, made even more so later on in the game where they become small, precious pockets of breatheability surrounded by disease and danger. The way the visual danger of hazardous areas is accompanied by notably more sickly versions of those areas themes does a lot to make the world easier to get lost in, and I will fucking fight the guy in the comments section for the YouTube upload of Utroba Night who said that this game's soundtrack "is nothing compared to Akira Yamaoka's work on the Silent Hill games" after someone (kind of bizarrely?) invited that comparison. How fucking dare you even suggest that Most Main and Stone Yard aren't god-tier mood-setters.

I also implore you to not make the mistake I made on my initial playthrough of loading a save after getting infected. This game is at its most engaging when it's a desperate balancing act, and having to find or make antibiotics to keep the sickness at bay another night made my second play-through all the more interesting. I will be the first to admit that I initially played this game in Coward Mode but speaking as someone who has renounced my ways: catch the plague if you can't avoid it! When in Rome/The Town On Gorkhon do as the locals do ya know (slowly and agonizingly rotting from the inside out)

If you've heard someone say that this game isn't worth playing for yourself and that you'd be better off just not bothering and looking up a summary, I implore you to at least give it a try if it goes on sale for cheap. Maybe you won't like it, and that's fine, it's understandable. But I think you owe it to yourself to at least try it out.

My sincerest apologies fellow Taro heads, but this is my favorite one. Nier Automata is the inevitable conclusion that the series has been working towards to, with the actors of the stage play set by its predecessors finally rebelling against the 4th wall and breaking past this ever beautiful aging artform we love. Videogame characters being aware that they are inside a videogame is nothing new, but Nier Automata masterfully utilizes ever interactive system, device, mechanic and language at its disposal to bring new life to this concept and create an incredible purposeful metanarrative that could only work within the limitations of the medium and nowhere else.

Utilizing videogame conventions and expectations to frame its story as one of existential crisis and nihilistic despair experienced by what could be the protagonists of any kind of shmup, a genre defined by its disregard for narrative context and its primordial struggle where the player throws themselves to death over and over again oblivious to such purpose, Automata pits its characters against the bleek reality devised for and enforced on them and instills a level of self awareness that brilliantly paints a baroque moving picture that paralels our own communial absurdity on this tiny rock floating in space. That same interactive narrative continues on outside of the 2D ships, where Drakengard 3's intertwining of violence with sexual drive is further expanded and improved upon in Automata through its combat design.

Just as the characters are built to derive pleasure from the killing, so too do we from the now immediate and highly satisfying stylish Platinum combat, and just as purpose and meaning starts to inevitably crumble in front of them, so too does the fighting quickly decline into Drakengard territory, as the non threatening and non hostile enemies fail to ilicit any desire for engagement. No better is this exemplified then by the shift from 2B's two weapon combo fare to 9S's stop and start combat that perfectly reflects his state of mind and increasing frustration that explodes at the tail end of the game. And at the peril of shooting myself in the foot and being sent to the internet gulags, even the much (deservedly so) maligned peek at 2B's undergarments ends up reinforcing through gameplay the protagonist's self awareness and rejection of player control.

Carrying on the post 9/11 sentiment of Nier, Automata from the outset presents "the Other" as the consequence and victim of an eternity of perpetual warfare born from a conflict that none of the current perpetrators remember or fight for, and through an engrossing narrative that constantly delivers devastating revelation after another that repeatedly shatter the character's sense of purpose and resolve, it takes the ethos of a greek tragedy and creates a fascinating dialogue between the player and the screen. Route B and C provide the best use of sequential playthroughs in the series that cleverly switch between numerous point of views and further hammers home the theatricality of the game's construct, with 9S especially being a standout case with his pechant for breaking the boundaries of the game with his 4th wall breaking quips and hacking mechanics that ultimately make him the most vulnerable to the reality of the fiction he lives in. A world screaming out of the edges of the monitor, trapped in a nightmare of their own making and restricted by our very own code.

And that finale. That fuckin finale. What a glorious and exuberant display of love and admiration for the power of videogames and its capability to unite the world with empathy and optimism through a beautiful message of perserverance and struggle that only this artform knows how to deliver. Constantly do I see Automata criticized for being filled with philosophy name drops and references, implying an "emperor has no clothes" sort of deal that aspires to a pretense at depth, an odd critique that I fail to understand when the game consistently mocks said name drops and references and doesn't treat that lack of subtlety in the same manner as something like MGSV did with Moby Dick or 1984. If after witnessing that ending, you still believe that the philosophy musings aren't just the coat of paint through which the world of Automata communicates its message and are instead the focal point of the game, you my friend, have missed the forest for the trees. And I love how Automata's callback to Nier's final sacrifice gains a new whole meaning by its more open optionality.

Could go on about the perfect use of dynamic soundtracking, the cohesive selection of side quests that explore the game's ideas from numerous angles and humorous vignettes, or the clever use of achievements, but I guess I just did so time to wrap it up. I'm sorry the normiecore took this franchise from you, I truly am. But you wanted a new MGS2, right? Well, you got it. This is it.