This game is unimaginably horrible and it's baffling it's the hill so many are willing to die on. There is no enemy variety, which is for sure a good idea for a modern open world game. There is no spell variety either (26), which again certainly was a great idea for a modern rpg based solely around it's magic set at a magic school, but hey Harry Potter has always had a terrible magic system so ¯\(ツ)/¯. For reference Final Fantasy (1987 NES) has triple as many spells (60), and Skyrim a more modern open world game for comparison has over 100 AND both those games have multiple combat classes besides magic. The game will let you use the "unforgivable curses" but it has no morality system to give any meaningful consequences to your actions because according to the devs it would be "too judgmental on the game maker's part". The world is empty, which is always a problem with open world games (not remotely a fan of the genre tbh) and every door is a loading screen. The game is also a buggy mess and anyone saying otherwise is just lying, the game literally has Denuvo lmao. But none of this is surprising, ignoring the original author for a moment, every trailer made it look lackluster and it's made by the developers infamous for Disney tie-in shovelware.

And now for the elephant in the room... The game doubles down on all the racism and antisemitism of its source material, anyone saying Terfling had nothing to do with this game is bending the truth. The official Q&A for the game on their site says they worked closely with her team so it perfectly fits her world, and that it does a little too perfectly. The main premise is squashing a goblin rebellion riddled with antisemitism. The goblin rebellions are not new to the franchise, they are a thing mentioned in the books and expanded material as something the students learn in history class. And what were all the rebellions about? The lack or basic rights like using wands, and checks notes wizards attempting to enslave them "as house elves" but we’re supposed to believe they’re still the villains throughout the franchise?
Which brings us to the next topic, the house elves... As in the source material Hogwarts is run by slave labor and the franchise doesn't want us to look deeper into what that means, waving it off with "well they like it". But if wizards can attempt to enslave goblins as “house elves” what does that actually mean, what exactly is a “house elf” and why doesn’t the series creator want us to examine it? The head house elf at Hogwarts becomes a companion, so you don't actually get to own a slave but you still get one by proxy. The game also lets you decorate the Room of Requirement with mounted house elf heads, with how controversial this aspect of the books has always been idk who on the dev team didn’t think “maybe we shouldn’t keep the mounted head of a sapient creature decoration item”. Again none of this is surprising given the source material where they decorate houses with elf heads and the kids put little hats on during christmas, oh isn’t it so cute and whimsical? And the fact that one of the lead devs was a gamer gate youtuber (them stepping down was never going to divorce the game from these elements). The game is also a prequel set in the 1800s so it can't actually effectively deconstruct the issues with the source material, the goblins are still the anti-semetic bankers, the house elves are still slaves, and the ("good") wizards are still the good guys that have every right to oppress them. Just like Terflings own politics and the politics of the source material the game's message is about preserving the status quo, nothing meaningful can change and it shouldn’t cause we have a continuity to uphold damnit!
The game also throws in the series "first trans character" who they named "Sirona Ryan", this is a name of a Celtic goddess (as many people will point out in an attempt to ignore criticism, despite the origin not being the issue with the name) but just like "Cho Chang", "Anthony Goldstein" and "Kingsley Shacklebolt" it's certainly a choice out of all the Irish names to deliberately use that one for your first trans women. Sirona was also very obviously thrown in last minute in an attempt to save face and say the game was divorced from Terflings and her raging transphobia, but as you can see the game is quite the opposite.
But you know despite all that 9/10 IGN-ostalgia am I right!

In conclusion this game is truly the “Legacy” of this franchise and I can see why fans say “this is everything I ever wanted in a Harry Potter game” because this is all the franchise really truly is. I certainly hope everyone who bought the deluxe edition for the sole reason to spite a minority the author is actively harming daily love their overpriced shovelware and fuck off. Remember yall were the same people in the 90s who hated and wanted to boycott the books for being “satanic” and "progressive". (spoiler alert they never were)

And for anyone who can’t let go of the franchise because of “childhood” and cause “it’s so magical”, let me recommend “Earthsea” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Discworld” by Terry Pratchett, and “Percy Jackson” by Rick Riordian. None of those series are perfect and have their fair share of problems, but they were written by authors who actually cared, who actually took criticism and grew from it. You can let go and grow too.

Well, we've found it. It's taken scientists and game developers decades and thousands of games of toil, but here it is. The exact middle of the road.

Arise is the perfect game for namco to release in the landscape of 2021. Extremely conventional, easy to digest storytelling which is just trope after trope, put together with a level of polish that other games haven't been able to achieve(COUGH deathloop COUGH), and has enough good elements and good enough marketing to catfish the local RPG fan into thinking they're getting next final fantasy or at least the next xenobalde.

Ok maybe that's a little rude. It's a competent game. Most notably, the combat is pretty good. It's well animated, has a great flow, and making long combos with various arts and boost break moves is good fun, though its very easy to fall into the same combo patterns (Especially since launchers are so ridiculously good on the MC), and any enemies that arent bosses are particularly unchallenging. But particularly with the different party members on offer it's pretty good. It's about on the same level as the modern Ys games albeit with less in the way of challenge and variety.

It's also a very pretty game. Character models in particular are fantastic and so are effects, and adapt an anime style into very high fidelity quite well. There's particularly nice details on little things, notably character eyes and clothing that just looks really nice.

And right there, i've ran out of remarkable things to say about Tales of Arise. The story and setting are so... bland and have nothing to them, particularly in the early hours that I just glaze over. Your amnesiac protagonist works with your pink-haired tsundere waifu who has a fancy fire sword to kill some lads, each of which resides in these tiny lands with no character or theme beyond "fire world, ice world".

The only real curveball Arise throws towards being the most boring thing ever is its slavery and racism (?) angle, which could have been and maybe does turn into a complete trainwreck down the line but by the time i was tuning out mostly boiled down to mistrust and some very tame stuff so its mostly just uninteresting and conventional. Count the times someone doesn't trust someone because they're renan of dahnan or whatever and then never proceed to poke the concept any further than that.

This is excepting the one thing, which is that the slaves in the first chapter, who are ostensibly mining for materials, are actually getting legitimately harvested for their will/life essence/magic by being beaten down... or something. It's some pretty damn charged imagery I feel they go with and I'm not sure if the devs recognise this. You eventually go and kill the bad dude and the sucked up will turns into a dragon or something and tattacks both of you and then you stop the dragon made from the power of the will of the oppressed by sucking up the energy into your waifu's fire sword.

Now that could be really fucking wild (though not neccessarily good or nuanced), but the emphasis in the game is never on it and it doesnt even seem to make those connections. So when i say "you suck up the manifestation of the life energy of an opressed people into your waifu sword,", whilst that's legitimately just connecting plot points, the game seems thorougly disinterested in it and you're immedietly onto the next bad dude woo!

And that's Arise in a nutshell. Making suggestions at being something more interesting every now and then but far more interested in being palatable, tropey, and digestible. It has absolutely no rough edges, nothing actually interesting to hook onto. And hey, I get that comfy, conventional JRPG plots like this can be nice to chill out to, but this game makes Atelier Ryza look daring.

The combat is good and it is pretty and it's consistently competent. But that's kind of all it is.

I have 63.5 hours in Vampire Survivors, 9.6 in Seraph's Last Stand, 4.1 in Soulstone Survivors, and 3.5 in 20 Minutes Till Dawn. I've played these Survivors-likes a lot, and I daresay I even like them. However, they represent one of the greatest issues of contemporary gaming and media consumption more broadly. With little exception, Survivors-likes are about pleasure rather than enjoyment.

That these games are pleasurable is hard to deny, they're perfectly tuned to tickle the brain through large damage numbers getting larger, (theoretically) overwhelming odds, the pseudo-random element of choices on level up, and pitch-perfect dings and chimes when getting XP. Vampire Survivors in particular adds on the pleasure of opening something with its treasure chests with resplendent animations and music. The first few hours of any Survivors-like are the best because of the sense of mystery, not knowing what's behind the curtain making it tick. You're left wondering how long you can last, what evolutions are possible, what maps you can unlock, what new systems lie in store. In that sense it's not entirely dissimilar to a 'regular' roguelite like The Binding of Isaac (1,031.9 hours), Slay the Spire (282.7 hours), or Enter the Gungeon (217.9 hours). Like those games, Survivors-likes have an overarching progression with gradual unlocks for doing tasks. Like those games, there's a feeling of becoming better at the game over time. The problem is that in nearly all Survivors-likes, you aren't actually improving at all, nor are you facing an actual challenge. You simply think you are.

The three roguelites I mentioned above have a lot of their enjoyment stemming from 'breaking' the game, finding out how to effectively use its mechanics and synergies in the most advantageous way. But figuring out how to break the game requires, at least in part, some knowledge of how the game works and how to manipulate play to increase the odds of breaking the game. In TBoI, a player has to know to avoid damage to get a Devil Room. As such, getting some of the best items in the game demands mechanically perfect play. You can fail forward into some synergies for sure, but to actually unlock access to potential advantages, you have to earn it. Even the items that would allow one to overcome the skill requirement are themselves tied to a skill requirement for their unlocking. StS, as an engine-building game, lets you demolish its challenges with a well-maintained deck, but you have to know how the mechanics work and how to deal with enemies that can render your engine moot.

Survivors-likes, on the surface, have that same game-breaking with their item evolutions/syngeries. You might feel clever for discovering an evolution, and like a badass for wiping out hordes with little to no resistance. But you didn't get that power through knowing how a fight works (unless knowing to move slightly away from an enemy is intricate knowledge), you got it by picking two items from a very, very limited pool. A limited pool that allows you, with progression, to remove items from it or skip the choices until you get what you want. It's similar to holding R in TBoI to get a good first item room, or waiting at a traffic light, trying to predict when it will turn green, and saying 'that didn't count' when you got it wrong. You're sinking up to thirty minutes per run into something solvable and solved. Without the ability to choose when you use what attacks, and with enemy attacks amounting to 'go where they are thinnest' and 'move up a little bit to avoid a slow projectile,' there's no skill ceiling or skill floor. There's no consequence for a poor (read: mathematically incorrect) decision outside of your numbers not being ideal; picking up Ipecac when you have Broken Mirror this is not.

To be abundantly clear, there isn't anything implicitly wrong with the Survivors-like formula, and there's nothing implicitly wrong with finding pleasure in them. They are purposely designed to elicit pleasure, after all. The issue is that players are largely uncritical of what they are consuming, why they find it pleasurable, and whether or not it is actually enjoyable. Pleasure and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive, but pleasure is something that happens to you, and enjoyment is something earned by you. To keep things in the realm of gaming, those broken runs in TBoI are pleasurable because of a sense of accomplishment, and enjoyable because that accomplishment was meaningfully earned. Survivors-likes are pleasurable because of a sense of becoming stronger and doing well, but not enjoyable because there is minimal effort put in and no actual skill. Playing a multiplayer shooter with your friends is pleasurable and enjoyable because you are exercising your skills and spending time with people whose company you enjoy. You are lost in the moment so actions like imperfect play do not hamper your pleasure, and since you are still being tested no matter how you perform, it remains enjoyable. Playing a multiplayer shooter alone has varying pleasure tied directly to performance of play, and enjoyment derived from trying your best.

Again, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with deriving pleasure from these games. You should, however, stop and ask yourself from time to time if you are getting any enjoyment from what you're doing. Maybe you're not, and that's alright, but a life lived in pursuit of pleasure above all else is probably not a very fulfilling one. And companies know that we love pleasure. It's why social media exists in the way it does to keep your attention indefinitely. It's why Marvel movies follow the same formula time and again. It's why reality TV was and is such a massive market. It's why viral marketing and the media tell you you have to watch the new Netflix original film, lest you suffer FOMO. It's why Survivors-likes demand a large investment of time so you feel more emotionally attached to the experience and will tell your friends they have to play it.

Take a step back and ask yourself, why?

Heaven will be mine:
dirty house
hoe
gold digger
stink pussy
5 kids
cheater
AGP

We know the devil:
pray
educated
a job
clean pussy
loyal
faithful
HSTS

I want it to be known that this review is mostly up for posterity. My refreshed views (mostly on worry of how it can hurt eyes) became more refined in a later post you can read here: https://backloggd.com/u/Erato_Heti/review/664032/

Please do not read this 40 minute review unless you have an obscene amount of time

CW: Gambling, Invoking Queer status to support an argument, quoting other users at length, terminally online debatelording, Russian Roulette, Exceedingly Dry, Lots of Hypotheticals

Est. Time to read: 40 minutes

Policy

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PART 1: THE GREAT VIP CASINO METAPHOR

Vampire Survivors is a relatively easy one stick shooter, with game design that consists of walking as the form of play and no actual ability to shoot. Instead you are tasked with moving around to avoid contact with the enemies as you pick up collectables. You can also pick up chests that reward the player with random amounts of loot with a long and exciting chest animation. As you play a half hour run, you continuously level up choosing between what to level up through a pool of 3 choices, however once you get to the end of a run you will have exhausted the majority of the options in that pool, meaning that keen players can force specific builds after playing for long enough.

There are performance issues with the game, the game produces 'number go up' gameplay through having the player automatically produce projectile spam, but the game starts to chug along and lag out at the end of a run due to the number of objects on screen careening the game to a halt. It is very odd that most people who play this game don't point this fact out at all because it makes it more nauseating and difficult to look at than it already is. However my impression is the reason this isn't focused on is that runs tend to play themselves out in the last 5 minutes so no amount of lag could prevent your character from winning. The game also looks like a visual skunks fart, with the halloween tier 'spooky' castlevania enemies sticking out like a sore thumb over the rest. That being said, while these issues are very grating aesthetically, my overall issue is with the design psychology, not just that it runs poorly or has a bad upgrade tree.

I think you could summarize my perspective on the design trappings of this game through the 2 following premises:

1. The game is a time waster with very little intervention or challenge against the player, since the only thing you can do besides walk around is choose from an incredibly limited upgrade pool that becomes samey and effectively fixed across runs.

2. The prior is an intentional design decision, along with flashy animations and reward jingles that are meant to mimic a sense of catharsis that you would get from being at a casino and to put you in a similar zen state.

Now that's perfectly fine, but I don't just think this is a bad game: I think it's a malicious psychic vampire of a game, and that calling it out from this perspective is seen as weird and histrionic. The question is why do I find this worthy of such an absurd condemnation? To illustrate properly it may be worth turning our attention to the design inspirations for the game: pachinko parlors and the mobile games market. The dev of Vampire Survivors mentions that his inspiration for the game was a mobile game called ‘Magic Survival,’ which I don't think anybody has played, but it's a carbon copy of that game with a new coat of paint. Same UI layout and everything.

You know what phone games I'm talking about: the maliciously designed pay-to-win grandma trap Candy Crush, the actually made by an Australian casino company Raid Shadow Legends, and infinite runner mobile ad junk like Subway Surfers. I don't think most people would come to the defense of these games, and many more would actively condemn them as seedy and gross. However, because Vampire Survivors is so deeply popular as a PC release, people are comparing it positively to games like The Binding of Issac instead and missing that particular connection point.

Anybody who has played any of the games previously mentioned knows what I mean when I use them as a point of reference, but people still find it uncomfortable to actively talk about why mobile games are like this in the first place. It's in part because the primary way you can get apps on your phone is through the monopolized app stores, which are not optimized with customer service in mind. Instead their store algorithm explicitly promotes free games with ads and microtransactions as much as possible. Following this is an issue of immersion through the lens of Natasha D. Schull’s ‘Addiction by Design’, as being in the 'machine zone' where experiencing play in a fugue zenlike fog is the only thing you care about. Phone games do actually have a bit of a problem in achieving this because of the fact that you usually mess with your phone while doing other things. That being said the most successful games are able to pull off a microcosm of this version, Candy Crush has a sordid history for actually addicting its player base, but instead of sitting in front of a large machine for a half hour and losing your money before finally peeling yourself away, you can play a few rounds of it and games like it whatever adware junk in your pocket at the bus, then in line for the restaurant, and then as you're falling asleep. Etc.

I'll concede something here: a large portion of the hangup on this argument, and how intense the discontent is, seems to be that most mobile games at least try to fuck you over with microtransactions and pay-to-play models, which are considered bad. But this game is 3 dollars you pay all at once and then never have to worry again, how bad can that really be? Surely that's not indicative of gambling or addiction and thus needs to be described via something else.

I want to defer to a rather brilliant analogy that Pangburn came up with during a fantastic discourse on the game’s addictive (or in his view, lack thereof) elements:

"I am strolling around a casino, perhaps nursing a drink, and a floor attendant notices me, beckoning me over to a new wing of the facility. it's a VIP room with a low price point of several dollars to get in filled with the same slot machines as out on the floor. the difference here is that once you have paid you have a lifetime of access to the suite, where you can continue to push the one button to your heart's content. the catch here is that there is no payout and you know for a fact that you'll never roll the jackpot for your first few hours, you must sit there and continue to press the button until your odds rise and rise, converging to a near perfect chance of the triple 7s after multiple dozen hours of play. at this point, you can return to this hall at will to watch the triple 7s appear again and again. this is how vsurv sounds to me. I think this sounds fucking stupid and I have no interest in playing it. " in the comments here

However, he contends that he doesn't have a 'moral issue' with it. He then goes on to say that
"the end state is fixed and you're always aware you will reach it at some point. it's not really ‘gambling’ when the odds are always in your favor, right? which is not to say it can't be addictive in its own right, but I hope this makes my thoughts on the matter clear. "

I don't want to deconstruct this too mercilessly but I do want to point out a few interesting things about the VS scenario and how it distinguishes it from this analogy. Mainly the idea that if you play for long enough you will hit the point of getting 7s and always will get 7s. Here's where I find this slightly misleading: the 'jackpot' of VS play is winning which means in order for the analogy to be accurate it would be something closer to guaranteeing you get 7s after waiting and intently interfacing with the screen for 30 full minutes. Although one could argue that the destruction of enemies is also a 'jackpot' reward system, I feel it's actually comparable more to just visual encouragement data like the bright candy explosions in Candy Crush, or the neon bright machines and loud sound effects of slot machines, rather those smaller moments are not the real 'jackpot' you are in pursuit of. Whereas people who play Binding of Isaac are playing to see a new unique run and how the tear effects synergize, its not just about finishing the game in itself.

At the same time there's the assumption that gambling is merely bad because of the house edge, but this risks over simplifying the process of gambling itself. Just yesterday, I played no money poker for the point of prestige and no money was involved, and as such I find that a genuine interest in playing poker as a game seems to distinguish it from a perception of gambling. However, the idea of risking increasing stakes is still there and can thus lead people to take up higher risk poker. Sports betters start off by watching the sport, then they start betting after warming up a while.

However, let me ask you a question: if I played real money poker and I was the best poker player in the world, is that not still gambling? If I was the best poker player, and I was playing with random people, my odds of winning are probably 90%, maybe even more, so is gambling identified by that 10% risk? Is it identified by the house edge? You can come ahead consistently in poker, people play this game for money after all.

Perhaps the nuance here then is that poker is a genuine game that can also still be described as a vehicle for gambling. If that's the case then honestly maybe any game could be a vehicle for gambling, and it's just about how well that engine is tailored to do so. To come back to the "slots'' example then, here's what GoufyGoggs has to say on it when musing about arcade games in comparison:

"No one wants to play a slot machine where you aren't forced to put your money on the line after all. The reliance on leaving outcomes up to chance fundamentally prevents a creative space from ever forming, they’re inherently destructive as Caillois put it. So what you're left with is just the addictive practices and negative impacts on mental health without any of the tangible benefits. " cited here

Now I feel like it's worth comparing this point to something like Blackjack. Blackjack is an insanely simple 'game' that has to a large degree been solved on what number and below you hit and what number you don't. it's automatic, with the only room for discretion being when you should split or double down. There's no room for a creative space of play to breathe, it's a totally static play experience. Poker is incredibly dynamic. They are both gambling. Even so, another question that might be worth bridging: can Candy Crush be called slot machine gambling? After all, the later levels absolutely have a 'house edge'. I'll leave that question for you, but hopefully you can see on some level it reveals a pedantry over word choice and the contexts we attach them to. That pedantry in part implies a moral disgust with gambling where there isn't with single player game experiences, in spite of the fact the boundary between both is very unstable.

PART 2: GAMBLING IS ACTUALLY AWESOME

This is where I start saying things that really just completely veer off the map from anybody else so far: I don't even dislike gambling, I dislike money, and I dislike people being coerced into situations where they feel they can't stop, and I dislike the games that encourage this. Money is not the sole reason Gambling is good or bad. The idea of playing something for stakes, even with a house edge, can be reapplied to other forms of stakes, like Prestige or an erotic form of stakes like strip poker. Gambling can exist in a world without money and sort of already does through shit like 'spin the bottle'. The reason I'm emphasizing this is that the only real concern is that the play needs to be dynamic enough not to mentally fatigue and lull the person interacting in it. Slots and Blackjack get washed out when you remove money, but not universally. Some people still like being in the zone with Blackjack and I can imagine people getting a compulsion to play on these slot machines without money once a habit has been built. It's not really about the money, it's about the habituation through automated play. On the contrary, what we currently consider gambling can be seen as a vector for genuine expressions of creative humor and identity. For example when playing a best of seven of different games, popular streamer personalities Ludwig and Jerma traded out the idea of playing for money for instead playing to see who else has to wear a silly shirt on stream. The games they all played as well were dynamic, in a way all competitive multiplayer games by design tend to be.

This is deeply funny and engaging version of stakes, and the explicit difference that Detchibe focuses on in their own post,
"The issue is that players are largely uncritical of what they are consuming, why they find it pleasurable, and whether or not it is actually enjoyable. Pleasure and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive, but pleasure is something that happens to you, and enjoyment is something earned by you." source

Being acted upon for pleasure under Detchibe's ruleset can only happen through games that don't pass a degree of dynamic threshold, for example playing at the roulette table, the results strictly only happen to you through random chance, a pleasure, rather than being joy seeking in themselves through a dynamic input that causes the results. In poker you have an incredibly wide array of options: bluffing, folding, playing a weak hand to the bridge, purposefully losing hands in order to win later for intel, etc. This is by design dynamic play. Earlier I mentioned the enjoyment a person can get with 'playing for stakes', but I didn't mention how doing this for an ego and without money involved can obviously be bad in both games and 'gambling'.

Some ways people perform self harm with a game is by playing it for far far longer than they should without taking a break. Meanwhile, gamblers often play without 'taking a break' and in the process losing more money or assets than they expected, this process may produce pleasure for them but not enjoyment. To get dark for a moment, there's nothing about Russian Roulette that makes it a non-game, the results just happen to you with minimal player agency and input. Clinically we could refer to russian roulette as technically a pre-established and static 'game' of chance with no input from the player whatsoever besides rolling the barrel until a certain random point, the results are by this metric technically 'pleasurable' for the living player as the operation of death was not done upon them, but not enjoyable. There's obviously the stakes themselves which are awful, but even if it was being done with a nerf dart the game itself is so static and unrewarding if played many times that the only way to have fun with it and produce more pleasure is by either getting in a tantric zone, or by raising the stakes. For people who play static non microtransaction single player games, those stakes are by time and reward catharsis "I will play today until I get 3 wins", which increases to 4, or 5, etc. Playing a static game like slots is the same. The results are static and not deeply determined by what the player does.

It is my belief that the most 'addictive' games in part can come from playing simply for the reward receptors of having something 'happen upon you' and not engaging in your own branching set of decisions and cognitive inputs, and where it no longer becomes about the dynamic play of the player. To tie this explanation to the Great VIP Casino: A team in WoW start learning how to do boss Raids and they are getting wiped, but in a dynamic and chaotic way where random players are rushing in and dying, its hilarious, but the way to win is actually almost perfectly solved and the results of a win or a loss become increasingly unconcerning and unchallenging. Eventually they get good enough at knowing how to build and prepare for the raid that the odds of success ever increase, yet being prevented from 100% by internet issues, physiological interventions, etc. Eventually the issues of pure success stop, that stops becoming the 'jackpot'. They now know exactly how to pull the enemies etc. Now they are redoing this raid for a .5% rare item drop which they are going to sell or use in arena fights, the new 'jackpot'. The only reason for playing the raid is in order to get this next level of jackpot which is inevitable, but takes much stress and many hours, after the point of vastly diminished dynamic returns, to get. The results are not enjoyable, they are pleasurable, they fulfill a compulsion. This is indistinguishable from the VIP Casino except for the fact that the real 'reward' jackpot for play is much more rare, this seems like a very important distinction except when you recognize that this is the exact type of person who would be compelled into a WoW Raid loop after having spent a week at the great VIP Casino.

Fuck WoW and fuck Blizzard (hot take I know) for doing this, this is how this system operates and it shouldn't need to, there's no reason to limit certain items to such a low drop rate, it should just be a test of basic ability and skill not pure compulsion and time gating. The issue with this version of the events is that it encourages compulsion and encourages a raising of the stakes in at least a few problem players. Some players will never stop playing in the Great VIP Casino or they will seek out a version of the casino now with lower odds and higher stakes, or they will play at the Great VIP Casino for a longer amount of time than last time for the same pleasurable results. For WoW raids, a new boss can come out that now has a .1% chance of dropping that item but maybe it takes quite a bit longer and a few more players with no change in the dynamic set to play, this means it takes more time and labor in order to achieve the same base pleasure. For Vampire Survivors then, this can be seen in 2 different ways, either receiving pleasure from trying to get higher win streaks in the original game. Or through playing Clones where the only change is how long a run takes, or if you need to spend real life money to get further. We are assuming that these 'Knock Offs' provide no enhanced player input and are still 1 stick shooters with small upgrade pools. In this case, either Vampire Survivors is an addicting gateway game for static increased stakes gambling (with time, money, or mental acuity) or its a boring game that sucks to play. The only difference being decided by when the player has the decent sense to 'cash their chips' and leave. There's no way to leave this situation untainted.

From this you could say that I hate this type of gaming more than the umbrella medium of 'gambling' itself as the static and hedonically unrewarding nature of a game would stress you to the point of going further and further in order to activate those same pleasure receptors, eventually to the point of either oblivion, self harm, or non-play. Most players will choose non-play, but because of the existence of the primary 2 potentialities, there needs to be various approaches to mitigate or be aware of the mental trappings of play.

Now to go back to Vampire Survivors for a moment. The issue and stakes purported by the game are obviously not money but time. Your reward for doing well enough in the game is that you get to learn and beat it slightly faster, which is an unengaging form of stakes. Compare this instead to the false equivalence examples I've seen brought up within the idle game genre. Cookie Clicker can obviously ask for large amounts of your passive time, months in fact, which by my time wasting critique may seem damning. That said, there's a significant distinction between those idle games where the goal is to find out more of the lore and world like Universal Paperclips or The Longing and games that are primarily interested in locking off content and completion behind time walls that you either have to pay through or play to compulsion to escape out of like Adventure Capitalist. These malicious design traps can exist in idle games but it's not core to the genre, and in fact Universal Paperclips is a great example of a short idle game that conveys its message and gameplay without taking advantage of the player's time needlessly. This is not a genre issue, this is not a gambling issue, and this is not an 'upgrades in games are bad' issue. This is uniquely a game design issue.

That being said it gets quite complicated talking about the nuances of where that difference can be identified so I'm going to outline some common rebuttals I've seen first:

1. All games, especially those you get good at, are about getting to win-states you have to wait out through increasingly minimal cognitive levels of interfacing.

2. Concerns over how the condemnation is described, ie. calling design malicious, evil, or predatory design practices feeling like loaded moral language.

3. The game can be completed 100% in 30 hours, and many other games like CS: GO, League, etc. eat much more player time and are thus more worthy of condemnation

4. Why refer to it as 'morally bankrupt' etc. rather than just unengaging design or simply just a bad game?

For points 1 and 3, I agree that within the premise of being concerned about the excessive waste of player time you could say that any arcade game being functionally endless is just as bad if not worse. However, I think that while the 'jackpot' of VS gameplay very much is connected to finishing a run, not all games are about the compulsion to finish. For score attack games the concern is just to get further, and for shmups the concern is about also completing the game on one credit, not just completing a run in general (though completing the game also is find). Thus, the implicit challenge of a game is its most salient point of consideration. Run completion should be one of many carrots for play, not the only one. VS has nothing implicit in its system that says you should stop playing when you hit 100% or if you should go for it at all but it has nothing of the opposite either. Instead it presents such catharsis through finishing a run and viewing shallow on-screen destruction that your mind will tune out quickly. The only desire for such completionism is in the player who might want to unlock new characters, but even after doing that getting 100% is not seen as a legitimate overarching nested goal in the way it is for Binding of Isaac, nor would it make the play better if it was.

Time and time again you read what people say and they refer to game as 'addictive' and that they 'dont want to stop playing'. This has to be thought of as an issue that is primarily compounded through static play, as what undynamic play can do is cause the player to treat the repetitive task as simply a way to make time goes by faster, and hibernate the mind in a tantric state. This is best expressed in Cakewalking's post on the game,
"I have 50 hours in Vampire Survivors. I treat it like a time machine. I use it to travel 30 minutes forward in time and feel nothing afterwards." source

The issue I have with this is that trying to time travel forward, considering everyone's time on the earth is limited, seems like quite literally a self-loathing gesture (which is why I refer to it as self-harm earlier). A primary argument for why people would want to do this is to quell anxiety or stress, but then this gets you back to those external stressors faster, whereas most games with a challenge tend to slow people's time down. A more reasonable explanation for it is that it's not a consciously-desired process and is instead being utilized for various other means, but I think the primary symptom that arises from this practice is at the very least low self-esteem. Focusing on only a select few games that speed up time means you have far less to dynamically socialize with others, which trends towards social atrophy. You could say that more dynamic gameplay like the Binding of Issac are equal in this regard, however I think the staticness of a game has a freezing effect on the mind such that if the few games you play are more static than dynamic it's much more likely to make you fall into that social atrophy. This may seem crazy or absurd to point out, but I think it's a valid reason to be upset with art that causes this. Less dynamic games register us as less dynamic people not in the sense of making us literally less interesting as a shallow judgment but in that it limits the scope of speech. Currently I've been obsessed with Undercards, and I recognize that's a game that nobody really knows or cares about. That being said, if given a moment to genuinely express and be excited about the game I could speak about it for hours upon end. But the repetitive and limited scenarios mean that you could probably only squeeze the lemon of discussion out of Vampire Survivors for a few drops if that. Similarly, a Candy Crush player has a lot less to say on their game of choice than a Tetris player. This may seem odd since Tetris is, on the surface, a far simpler game, but Tetris experts can talk about various stacking combinations, tricks, and speak about bonding over their hobby with others. Candy Crush players are isolated, and a lot of the purpose of the design, I feel, is to alienate people by crushing emergent gameplay into simple randomness generation checks that can be surpassed by playing over and over, but also increase your odds and thus lower the lack of pleasure from a loss through spending money. If you don't believe me that this actually happens to some Candy Crush players, don't take it from me, take it from the following study called
"Are you addicted to Candy Crush Saga? An exploratory study linking psychological factors to mobile social game addiction"

In the conclusion on the data, where they query the habits and preferences of play of 400 Candy Crush Saga players, they note that:

"According to DSM-IV’s classic definition of addiction, the present study found that 7.3% of the respondents were addicted to mobile social games. Given that there are 215 million mobile online game users in Mainland China (CNNIC, 2014), 7.3% does not represent a small number of addicts." And that, "With regard to the psychological variables, loneliness and self-control were found to be significant predictors of mobile social game addiction."

Vampire Survivors and Candy Crush play vastly differently of course. Vampire Survivors is a numbing experience with a time set that you are moving to complete and finish, whereas Candy Crush is a short series of individual time limited high stress levels. Candy Crush has you acting with swiftness and high cognitive and anxious response. These games on the surface could not contrast more, but both offer only the illusion of control and of outcome. Your results in Candy Crush are only found through how the next set of candies coming in are generated, it's easy to get to a point in Candy Crush where you fail a level by not being able to match the candies. In Vampire Survivors your results are decided by the random generation of the item pool upon level up, meaning that even if you can go for a specific build some amount of the result is left up to chance. The odds of the loss are of course vastly different, but neither provide the player enough agency to breach the upper limits that might come from bad luck nor are random elements forced to make them change and adapt their style of play to what is on screen. I will admit that this specific point may be perhaps the weakest in this whole post by far, but if I was wrong here and that Candy Crush did have a lot of control and variation in play, that would not be a defense of Vampire Survivors, it would be of Candy Crush. Perhaps the best way to quantify how they are both addicting is by highlighting the low amount of player agency and the endless appeasement of play.


PART 3: THE THOUGHT-TERMINATING DISTRACTION POINTS

With all of this settled, I now want to turn to the points of contention that I consider less relevant to the game in itself. Let's start with point 2. The idea that labeling this predatory or evil design is worth resisting. Woodaba put it best when they referred to this as 'tone policing,'

"No, I'm not terribly convinced by this tone policing, I think "predatory" is a perfectly reasonable word to describe a design philosophy cultivated from the ground up to create and reinforce gambling addictions, given that these mechanisms are literally designed to prey upon people. [...]

I think managing tone and tenor in conversations like this can be worthwhile, I just wasn't convinced by your statement that the tone was inappropriate in this instance." comments here

Ironically, even the value-neutral attempt to use the phrase tone policing is getting tone policed, because in our current political climate a lot of words feel polarizing and loaded. I'm not going to pretend I don't understand how these descriptors to a game of leisure would upset or distress people. The phrase 'predatory' is one that I try not to rely on as right now it's a phrase mainly invoked for the purposes of transphobic grooming accusations and thus is tinged with that moral weight. On the other hand, I actually enjoy words like 'evil' or 'amoral' which have been used as negative descriptors by friends in the past see for example Detchibe recently concluding their review by calling Moriyama Middle School "A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it." source , which makes me want to seek out and play the game more, not less. This is a struggle that is often core in my relationships with others. That said, even though my perspective on wording is very odd, I can still fully appreciate what they are actually trying to say and recognize that I'm bringing my own over-conscious linguistic baggage and identification with 'evil' to the table which can distract from the discussion. In a way you could say all moral language like this is distracting and meant to apply needless pathos, but these are speaking trends that are also really difficult to get away from in part because using more loaded language gives us a leg up in the attention economies. This is why all of the most outrageous social media posts are strange moral claims. Frankly nobody even tries half as hard to tone police over ableist remarks like 'stupid' or 'schizo' etc. and especially stuff like the r-slur was so common in gaming circles until about 2 years ago when everyone decided that its a no-no slur. I'm not saying increasing sensitivity to that is a bad thing, merely illustrating that there's far more hypocrisy on word choice than people let on. Nobody sits there and studies over each and every word they speak to make sure it's maximally accurate, because someone can just pick the one word you messed up on and highlight it for why it means you're wrong anyway. Doing so can only really be seen as a pedantic distraction. Language is messy and this is why the sentiment of 'good faith' online is so important.

On that note, Point 4 on moral claims, is one that I think is also a distraction point, as morality in general is a murky subject. However, I'm sympathetic as to why people find this worthy of contention. It feels like an attack, especially considering the fact that if you try to make an argument for or against a game or its developer, it can read like the same sort of political censorship that promotes book burning or banning mature video games. As Pangburn points out, "my first thought is that it affirms china's stringent limit on online gaming by minors, but I don't think me saying that here is going to be very popular on either side of the debate LOL"

However I don't think, taking the example of Candy Crush and the negative effects from its players that this is a defacto bad policy if certain games are regulated or restricted, to quote the paper utilized there that issues of self control and isolation were the largest factors of addiction to the game, following this they point out

"Society should be aware of the threats that mobile social game playing pose to players. Research on vulnerable groups has shown that children and adolescents are more susceptible to the influence of the media than others are (Gentile and Stone, 2005). Therefore, parents should pay close attention to their children, and teachers should monitor their students. "

Now I think that the specific restriction of all online games leaves a lot to be desired, and plays into my concerns I'll reference more in depth in a moment. However the actual doing so is based on objective policy data, but it's important not to conflate this meaning of objective and data with the 'my opinion is right because I said so' version. A good analogy might be how smoking regulations happened in response to the negative results of smoking being scientifically proven, it was first outlawed from kids and then warning labels were given to adults. I believe you can do pretty much the same thing and make a similar argument of regulation of a game like Candy Crush or Vampire Survivors.

For me, it's just about pointing out that it’s worthy of condemnation first, not endorsement. I don't want people endorsing games that create negative habits or, more strictly, waste my time. This is literally no different than, say, expressing that you think a story has damaging elements while not trying to actively ban the book. It's just that instead of a narrative, it is design, something people have less awareness of than they think they do.

As for the issue of policy implications in particular I'm just an internet dork, not a politician, and neither are you probably! This also has nothing to do with the point LOL. However, I'll try to address this best I can. Others have positioned arguments that the ESRB should have discretion in terms of highlighting gambling elements in a game, especially to minors, but that sort of regulatory framework leaves a lot to be desired. You could do that nudity popup disclaimer that steam has for games, but that's not a client capacity that can be universalized unless you get the government involved, which is a hefty conclusion. I don't put a lot of faith in the regulatory networks for making a clear distinction between a 'gambling aesthetic' like say Sonic Adventure's casino level, and 'addictive game design elements'', I feel like the core problem here is that we would need to rely on some sort of state policy procedure in which the government could specifically and objectively identify non dynamic and destructive play and properly regulate it. Aesthetics are always in flux even if they are alluring to the right demographic, but as I've pointed out earlier, what we consider truly to be the worst of gambling is only found through this undynamic play. Roguelites could be thrown into this bucket despite the fact that in my view they are the opposite. Take for example a game like Luck Be a Landlord, which has a constant 3 choice upgrade system similar to Vampire Survivors, but also requires a lot of decision making and forethought on what to choose, losing a run is almost entirely within player agency. How do you think a large government entity would perceive a game like that? Personally, I think that they would slap a 'promotes gambling' logo on it, but even if minors played the game (who are the most culpable) the reality is that extended play of it would probably make the less discretion-based system of an actual slot machine significantly less compelling because the play of a slot machine would be automated and have no genuine player input for winning a run.

One last point before we wrap things up. This negation of discoursivity does not just happen in the negative appraisals of our arguments. I want to close this post with what my good friend and critical eye Detchibe had to say about the initial, in actuality quite rushed, insight. I will make sure to leave the full quotation as such in the comments below as the first post, however for brevity there is one sentence in particular I want to harp on: "And as you and I and countless others have stressed time and again, there isn't anything implicitly wrong with a passive model of consumption when done responsibly and with an awareness that it is oblivious consumption." I think that while this might not be the intention of the post it speaks to a 'universalizing' diplomatic impulse that I don't think is entirely true. I think this game is actively mentally unhealthy in a specific way that even slightly more cognitively taxing games like 20 Minutes Til Dawn with its active shot aiming isn't. It's not an indictment of failure on your part, but you got there by a system that is actively taking advantage of you. I believe that this impulse while deeply well meaning and appreciated is actually sort of dangerous as it rushes to assuage conflict and disagreement through settlements of harmony. I highlight this not to shit on the absolutely wonderful words of my friend, but to instead expose that thought-terminating cliches are everywhere. One of the most annoying things about me is that I resist them constantly even when they are well meaning :p , but I'm sure I make mistakes on this too so feel free to call it out if you see me doing it.

I don't want the conversation to end, I don't want to 'let bygones be bygones'. This is perhaps the most important issue in terms of gaining a trust and understanding of each other's taste and improving them. You can still like Vampire Survivors after reading all of this, but the point is to be more mindful of recommending it to others. Again, some people like smoking but almost nobody recommends you become a smoker. So to conclude, Vampire Survivors is a mobile game in desktop's clothing, and has a lot of intentionally addictive design traps. So the console a game runs on should not be the sole point of contention for whether its good or not. It's important to be critical of cheap desktop addictive shovelware.

For now however I think I need to stop and digest the scene for a while before saying more, or using other games both positively or negatively for highlighting this, which is what I hope my newfound Court may help do. Fixating forever on one game can be boring and ironically in its own way a waste of time especially for a game with such polarized opinions. Imagine how much more productive this conversation would have been if it was over the mobile game market instead, a game like Candy Crush, which is more clearly delineated as pernicious. I want people to call games like these out of course, but mainly so I don't play them myself. The main reason Vampire Survivors was called out for this was not that it was just some '3 dollar game' but that its one of the most financially successful video games in recent years.

If you have thoughts feel free to leave them below, I'd love to read them

Note: My original post on the game was in reference to more off topic conversation surrounding the harassment by its fans and speculation about its place as a tool for streamers, which was happening to GoufyGoggs, who I was casually dating around the time this had happened as a result of a mutual crush held for a few months, and has recently become my girlfriend. Initially I was going to revamp this post to 'prove' the level of harassment and make people 'bear witness' to the attacks of character and disrespect leveled at her, however I realized that to a large extent such an operation is painful and excessive, and that it takes the bear minimum amount of research into the subreddits or youtube comments surrounding this topic to sympathize, this type of harassment needs not be immortalized in its particulars. I'm not going to quote people misgendering my own girlfriend for other people lol thats ridiculous.

That said, if you have not read the original version of the post, you can read it here (right now it's a google doc but it will be switched to a cohost post asap). The TL;DR of it is conveyed in the 1st link referenced in that post.

Special Thanks to Detchibe and Pangburn for the wonderful peer review and fine tuned grammatical editing on this, without their help I would not be able to write this half as well as I wanted to. To Franz for the well reasoned moral support and understanding. And to my new girlfriend Heather aka GoufyGoggs whose research on this game was a powerful catalyst to my own.

POST SCRIPT EDIT:

Reading this back I realize that I pretty much just dropped the policy proposal point, negating a policy potentiality out of suspicion rather than replacing it. I did that in part because I didn't want to let my heavy handed socialist ideals get too heavily in the way of the critique. I think one of the main reasons people engage in habitual behaviors like this is because of a desire to escape from labor insecurities, often not acknowledging that the therapeutic element is short term reward for long term set backs. This perception is tracked pretty heavily from Addiction by Design where the 'machine zone' is described as a space for escaping insecurities of life generally. I think that the only real policy proposal that would fix that underlying habitual response is by providing better labor security (slashing the 'gig economy' for example) and not promoting cultures of workaholism and burnout. By having a better safety net for people it would prevent anxious self destructive play. Not just for online gaming or gambling, but for other vices to like smoking and alcoholism. I'm probably playing way more of a game than I otherwise would because I don't want to think about my future: getting a job, a home, food, etc. In that sense I can totally understand uncritical play and can't condemn individuals for engaging in it really. The only way to really fix that quite reasonable anxiety is by eliminating it entirely via radical proposals like free housing, food, UBI, etc. The reason I never explicitly stated it in the original piece is because I didn't want to risk over complicating the network of critique there. Only to then simplify it with anti capitalist rhetoric forcing readers to either accept that as true or throw out the entire script. Hammering about labor rights over and over is not the most conducive to open dialogues I'm afraid. Regardless, even if you don't hold my perspective on that point I hope you can see why more general regulation would have to be done with consideration and care.

I think it's generally easy for cis people to write off stories that center around dysphoria due to a surface-level "I won't be able to relate to it" mentality. I am saying this as a generalization, but I'm really projecting my own trepidation regarding trying this particular game stemming from lingering transmisogyny on my part. which is to say that even though I consciously accept and support trans people in my words and deeds, I still was quick to other the transness within the game and write this off after first hearing about it as "this sounds interesting, but it probably won't really hit for me." this is of course blatantly untrue: no one will ever know features a rich level of detail for a game of its scope with surprisingly engaging exploration mechanics. I have to thank my current fascination with survival horror for pushing me to plunge into this one and take a detour from my usual gaming habits, as generally I have ignored smaller, more confessional games like these on some arbitrary "quality" metric. it feels easy sometimes to avoid games with subject matter I irrationally don't think I know how to engage with. I dunno, I've been revising this paragraph over and over again trying to make it less ugly, but I guess I also feel like the context is important for my interpretation of the game.

because really a lot of my experiences do rhyme with the protagonist. I went to a small high school in the south with a generally friendly student body, all the way down to jamming with my friends in the recording studio and frequently skipping class (I once got caught by a teacher having left in the middle of The Manchurian Candidate to play through a very decent chunk of SotN in our student commons). on a smaller scale I understand the general alienation demonstrated through flavor text as the player observes the idle behavior of other students in the building. through that I began a long web of synthesizing goufygoggs's experiences to my own, and especially to those of the people around me that I observed through all my years of high school and most of my undergrad before the pandemic hit.

goufygoggs's self-depiction reminds me a lot of people I knew in engineering school specifically; technically capable and driven by passion but ultimately overwhelmed by an consistent inability to perform and intense self-loathing. everyone has a certain ambient level of anger and hate and depression that they deal with, and dysphoria drenches this resting kindling like kerosene, able to potentially spark an intense fire at any moment. in-game intrusive dysphoric thoughts are represented as unavoidable encounters that the players must engage with a resident evil-style dichotomy of options: waste precious resources mowing the monster down or run along and take the hit. in theory we optimize towards the former, but in reality we end up reluctantly accepting the damage as we play, and the game runs with this concept to demonstrate the inability to mitigate each and every dysphoric thought one experiences throughout the day. in particular one person comes to mind that I connected to these musings: a rather talented trans girl I was acquaintances with thanks to our shared interest in 6502 assembly and TIS-100. I recalled two specific instances that tied well to this game:

1) she and I were in a digital logic class together, and she completely missed our second midterm for reasons that I do not know and never asked her about. shortly after, we had a final project where we had to build a working stopwatch from scratch on an FPGA board. I remember after nearly a month of being absent she showed up with easily the most impressive stopwatch of all of us; full hour:minute:second display, the ability to save times, et cetera. as a last desperate attempt to score much needed extra credit, she far exceeded the requirements and produced something truly excellent. she did not pass the class.

2) after returning from summer vacation, I went to a meeting for a club that she had a leading role in. in the intervening time since I had last seen her it was clear she was beginning her transition, as she had visibly grown breasts and had begun wearing makeup. despite this, the team captain took the opportunity to deadname another member of the team who happened to be this girl's best friend. she protested and the captain awkwardly mumbled an apology followed by "I don't really know a lot about that stuff." when the meeting was over I went ahead and asked her what her pronouns were; she responded that no one had asked her in our department before and she didn't really know what to say, though she eventually settled on she/her "for now." I remembered this moment specifically after the in-game line about resigning one's self to using he/him around the school.

in that sense my initial excuse of "this doesn't relate to me" is wrong. many moments in this game led me to flesh out my mental depiction of people that I hadn't seen in years and had always wondered about if I had maybe gotten to know them better, or what their mental state might have been. in essence, a story this raw and unyielding about the trans experience really did reframe the way I thought about prior experiences and gave me a better theory of mind. I think this phenomenon really only could have come out of this style of game given just how it truly bares the creator's soul in a way that a fully fictional story could not approach. much like how watching documentaries in my adulthood led me to recontextualize current events I had witnessed in my past, no one will ever know reorganized my mind palace in a way. there are a lot of memories there that are too painful to bring up, ones that remind me of how much pain I dealt to people in the past. I was that friend the protagonist mentions in passing who knew people were out but didn't know how to bring it up or talk about it. in some cases, I selfishly let the flames of their dysphoria rise even higher with my actions without proper apology or consideration for what I had done. much of this is tied in with goufygoggs's owns admission of physical harm to loved ones, a stark confession of wrongdoing that fuels her self-hate in a way I can understand. that's a good deal of what I relate to here.

this is before even getting into her poignant character study of her father, in many ways the reflection of the protagonist. caught up in his own cycle of self-loathing, he has an equally dysfunctional upbringing as his daughter did, and though never spoken to, demonstrates the end result of years of refusing to properly cope with both his trauma and his failings. his infidelity mirrors the protagonist's own physical outbursts as expressions of unmitigated psychic damage, all covered by socially-acceptable addictions: the father's prescription drugs and the daughter's video game obsession. yet through this shines a muddled but unconditional love between the two, not always visibly shown but conveyed with pitiful tenderness. it's heartbreaking but absolutely a necessary component to understanding the protagonist's pain and inner turmoil from the moment she wakes up in his apartment.

as mentioned prior, the game itself draws heavily from classic survival horror. it plays with the same basic resource management scheme while imploring the player to explore every room in a claustrophobic and purposefully opaque map. each class takes place at a specific time of day, for which the player must find a certain number of time-wasting activities strewn throughout the halls of the school while also contending with the aforementioned dysphoric thoughts and the dwindling phone battery (your ammo against said thoughts) that comes with it. once time has been spent and the correct start time for class has come, the player must navigate to said classroom (which hopefully they have already found) for another chapter of the story above. outlets are selectively placed in each wing of the school for the player to recharge their phone at a single time, forcing classic routing techniques in order to wasting too many resources running from place to place. the "puzzle" here becomes more clear as the game progresses, as the player must also keep track of when certain rooms open up later in the day for the player to waste more time in. these are unavoidable as there is strictly just enough activities to take part in between each chapter (especially as the game continues) and thus not a single one can be missed without being too early for the upcoming class. outside of the story I found this action well-paced and fascinating enough with the fantastic amount of character and stinging humor goufygoggs's brings to the writing here.

one final thing to mention before I go ahead and post this so I can go to bed: the ending is absolutely hideous and made my heart twists in knots. I'm not sure if it depicts a true event (another connection, this happened to my roommate and his girlfriend just nine months ago to my shock) but it preys upon all of my worst medical fears. this is all accentuated by some truly inspired soundtrack selection, perfectly timed to increase the looming dread and eventual shock the player experiences. true survival horror.

CW: Critical Waffling on Gaming as an Artform, Mental Health Discussion

Est. Read Time: 14 mins
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A twine game in which you as the unnamed player character have 10 seconds left to express all your love to nameless lover before everything ends. Refreshing in how absolutely information overload a romance in the face of desperation is.

Game is actually sort of simple and what you would expect here, there's no ending or bit of information in an ending hiding that 'reveals the whole story', instead you just scramble to love as fast as possible. Love turned into a warioware game with high replayability 'kiss me', 'love me', 'fuck me'', 'just look into my eyes'. It's all the same in the manic compression of the apocalypse, all action drowns into 1 and speed reading is the name of the game.

I wont say I have anything particularly novel or unique to add to this but I do want to hone in on 1 point. In particular, when you strip back the queer traumabonding innate to this there's one other factor the game here reveals upon play. On a mere ludomechanical level, the game is a meditation on how the size of a games possibility space is maybe one of if not the core aesthetic axis on which a game functions as an aesthetic argument to the player that they assess from.

In the gaming mind, games with a low amount of possibility space and games with high ones often seem to be deeply at odds. In a derogatory sense you have the perception against works with a low possibility space as being insulting. What I'm referencing here is not genre locked at all. It can be walking simulators, kinetic novels, 'waiting games', as long as its keeping the players input actions minimal thats all that matters. For a lot of gamers this lack of optionality, of having to wait out a story prepared for them, is deadly similar to a tutorialized hand holding. It's despicable in the sense that it robs the player of seemingly the only 'point' of the interactive simulation, the ability to interact.

In direct contrast games that are highly dynamic and have high possibility space require an actively information comparative effort on the behalf of the player. This can be anything from playing a game with a high number of multiple endings, or trying to make use of limited information on the fly in a rouguelite or an FPS game, at the end of the day it seems that a lot of games criticism is about assessing the relationship of possibility space in the form of immersion.

The conclusions drawn from this are not obviously 1 size fits all, and it would be easy to problematize the point I've made, after all a lot of people including me appreciate low possibility space games. However, on a base level the sentiment seems to be that a kinetic novel or a walking simulator is 'less of a game' (or at least quarentined as an 'art game') and that those high information vector prediction and/or comparative assessment points are 'more of a game'. Within the twine genre for example 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds (2016) which has you solving a problem with 16 outcomes is 'more of a game'. That on the other hand, another in the same engine, The Tower (2018) with its 1 button used to forward the momentum is perceived really more as a slightly interactive art piece than a game. Thus the way both are engaged with in terms of how much it speaks through the possibility space or lack thereof is what the mechanically focused critic takes note of.

At the end of the day it all seems to be assessed in terms of these possibility functions, does a game live up to the promise of its dynamicism or is there 1 player dominant strategy that kills the illusion? Is a walking simulator about to use its 1 interaction point to powerful effect and immersion is it just boring? Is the RNG in a game helping enhance the player possibility space or it is hindering it? In my view in the race to treat games as an artistic self contained medium this tends to be the reference point that most critics I come into contact with focus on.

I have actually no direct interest in challenging this relationship. Without treating game design in this way as a cornerstone for understanding the medium, there's a high risk of otherwise equating its abilities overall as synonymous with Film or Literature. As only ultimately a personal computer version of what those mediums can do, the interactivity here matters a lot, in fact its probably mission critical.

Instead, I want to make this claim: the 'artfulness' of a game in terms of a high possibility space and its cognitive effects (stress, anxiety, disorientation, etc.) is often mitigated or overlooked. A lack of knowledge about how high that possibility space really is usually not taken seriously as an effect for one simple reason, people talk about games comprehensively in the terms of a past experience. As such the fact that at one point a player didn't know all the options of the effects of play is part of the immersion regardless of how 'true' they all are. Maybe a game gives you 20 choices and 14 of them just change a single sentence if that, but the fact there's a direct sense of being overwhelmed by choices is a meaningful point of analysis. The fact of the matter is nothing novel in terms of a rich story is 'hiding' in any of the branch choices in this game, its all the same rush to love at the end of the day, but the illusion of the possibility spaces' effect is part of it. Finally, there is one last point here, whether or not your experience is being 'timed' or not effects your choices a lot to and your sensation. Being pushed to make options quickly enhances further that illusion of being pressed on possibilities, the inability to pause and totally assess whats in front of you is a rather important distinction to that cognitive mirage. Choices made under a stress of time are always going to feel more important than choices made with a lot of time, this is just a result of how thinking works. It probably also explains the variable relationship with games as art in some regard because if you have less real life time than another player for the same game you'll be assessing the impact of the choices more openly.

Maybe this thought means something to somebody, or maybe it's all just exhaust to people that already know but now allow me to say this. 'Gaming' in terms of possibility assessment incentivizes trying to screen as many options as possible for the 'right option'. I can't help but notice how this agitation to 'decide' can play out in mentally corrosive ways. By being unable to recognize the manifestly stressful cognitive elements of trying to assess a possibility space and glamorize them we can risk harming ourselves with feelings of regret or self loathing that we haven't made the "right decision" in real life situations to. True often we do make suboptimal plays, but there's nothing suboptimal about say expressing love here. If the other person feels loved and appreciated the company in those glimmering moments that's enough. If we are unable to assess that the world shouldn't be about trying to make the 'best choice' for some ideal 'win state' we risk causing mental health problems for ourselves. Similarly, games with high or low possibility spaces simply require certain cognitave relationships out of you, and you're not a better or worse person for not being in the right mood for them at every moment in life equally. That would be impossible.

We really do need to try better both as critics and as lovers to actually assess that. Nobody is a better or worse person for having choice paralysis in a game or in real life. The whole point of mental health awareness has been about how sometimes those affects are completely out of control so its ideal in my view to try and see a connection point between both worlds. There is a degree to which this rush to say everything to somebody or do everything with them is not really just a game, its a simulation of a genuine struggle within the possibility space of relationships as a whole.

To conclude here, if the 'best game' is one that is cognitively taxing me as much as possible at all times then I cant say with high confidence I'm much of a gamer at all. Every game has its utility, place, and preference but on some level I think this discussion of what it means to feel 'overwhelmed' by a simulation or the effects of trying to bring the aspects of 'gaming' to the interpersonal world are discarded without consideration. Sometimes, playing games/being in relationships that expect minimal input from you is actually more than anything else a genuine form of self care, and its worth keeping that in mind :3

I've seen a lot of talk, both positive and negative, about how the existence of this new Nier renders the old ones obsolete; some despise it because it represents the mainstreamification of a cult classic with little regard for the westernized protagonist they fell in love with, others adore it because it finally gives non-Japanese audiences the intended narrative while also providing a smoother gameplay experience. Admittedly, I fell hard into the former category during much of the early game, but after some introspection, I realized that the question is not if this updated remakaster replaces the original Replicant/Gestalt, or even what parts of it are better/worse than its predecessors, but rather how it complements them. Upon finishing this one, I believe all three can exist in harmony.

First off, this seems to be a literal update, built on top of the old version instead of remade from scratch, so most of Cavia's work still remains intact. The original game had a lot of idiosyncrasies that helped make it special in my eyes, and most of them are retained here by virtue of it being the exact same game at its core. I have a few nitpicks regarding the old goofy animations being replaced by ones lifted straight from Automata, though I suppose the developers felt that was a necessary alteration to make the combat feel snappier (I disagree, but whatever, it's fine). There are really just two major sticklers for me, which are the only reason I can't give this game a 5/5:

1) None of the original developers appear to be credited at the end unless they also returned to work on this remaster. I didn't even see Yoko Taro's long-time co-writers Sawako Natori and Hana Kikuchi mentioned, which is absolutely criminal considering they were responsible for penning much of the script. The one exception is D.K., who designed the characters for the 2010 release, and I'm glad they included him, but it's disrespectful as hell that Toylogic didn't think the original developers, the people who actually made the game we're playing here, were worthy of crediting. Yes, I am probably the only person in the world who cares about this, and no, I am not going to just accept it. To me, this isn't right. If games are art, then we need to treat the people who make them as artists. Even the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, an actual 1:1 remake using almost nothing directly taken from the PS1 games, saw fit to credit the original developers.

2) The new soundtrack is... I don't want to say "bad," but I don't like it much at all. Most of the rearrangements sound fine, and there's even one I might actually enjoy more than its original counterpart, but I find the majority of it either bland or overproduced by comparison. Obviously this is all subjective, but when I walked into the Northern Plains and heard the new Hills of Radiant Wind for the first time, I actually frowned. This was the moment that made me fall in love with Gestalt back on the PS3, and the new rendition with its muted instruments and subtler vocals couldn't be further from what I adored about it. The fact that there's no option to use the classic OST, but you CAN switch to the Automata OST, is maddening. Easily my biggest disappointment with this re-release, and probably the entire reason I felt so down on it at first.

The rest of my complaints are nitpicks that stem from having way too many brain cells devoted to Nier, so I'll spare you from them. In general, this is probably the version of the game I would recommend people to play nowadays. While I do think certain iconic moments had better voice acting in the original, the vast majority of the new vocal performances are a huge improvement, especially from the actors portraying Emil, Yonah, Devola/Popola, and Grimoire Noir. Everyone is at the top of their game here, and the remaster boasting full voice acting means we get 100% more Grimoire Weiss dubbing, a true delight that is not to be missed. As much as I prefer Papa Nier and a lot of his game's altered party banter, going back to a world where only half of Weiss' lines are voiced simply feels wrong.

The new content is also pretty damn good; maybe not worth paying full price for if you were satisfied by the original game, but I liked it a lot. The "Mermaid" sequence is unnecessary and threatens to harm the pacing, but it gives Seafront more of a purpose and I genuinely felt like something was missing when it wasn't there in my Gestalt playthrough. The last segment of it is very cool, cleverly integrating gameplay and story via Nier's otherwise entirely pointless RPG leveling system. Ending E is fascinating and handled in a really neat way, much better than I expected from reading the short story version years ago. I was always against its inclusion in a potential remake, but I think they made it work. Whereas Ending D was the perfect conclusion for the original release, with it mirroring Cavia's demise and the expectation that Nier would be forgotten in a few years, Ending E functions as a similar parallel in a post-Automata world where people love Yoko Taro's games and can't get enough of them. Some will scoff at its sappiness and appeals to new fans who started with the sequel, but I thought it was quite sweet and just all around exceptional.

In general, I think there's a lot to be gained by playing both OG Nier and Remastered Nier, Replicant Nier and Gestalt Nier. Most of the characterization is only subtly different between versions, but it can't be understated how different they feel from each other through a combination of script alterations, the disparity between animation quality, and the presence (or not) of Ending E. Classic Gestalt Nier is about a dumb old man who regularly falls on his ass bumbling around in a world he's outgrown, tunnel-visioning past harsh truths staring him in the face, and trying to rescue his daughter by thoughtlessly killing anyone who gets in his way. Modern Replicant Nier is about an acrobatic young man who has his innocence repeatedly shattered by events beyond his control, deliberately turns a blind eye to harsh truths, and uses rescuing his sister as an excuse for murder. Both versions of the protagonist are helpful to a fault and repeatedly put themselves in harm's way to ensure the safety of those around them (despite the things they're doing not necessarily being good at all), but while the Father and young Brother do this out of the kindness of their hearts, adult Brother does it more because it's the only life he's ever known. In the end, both characters make the same final decision, but the outcomes are completely different due to their interpersonal relationships causing the same action to be done for entirely different reasons.

Two protagonists, two tragedies, two development studios; this differentiation may not have been intentional, but it's brilliant, and somehow makes playing multiple versions of a game you already have to play three times to finish a rewarding experience.