“EST. TIME TO READ: 2.5 TO 9 YEARS”

Before I moved to Portland – maybe 2016 – my friend Collin told me about this game he was playing, “The Beginner’s Guide,” over a Skype call.

“It’s by the guy who made the Stanley Parable,” he told me. And I was like, whoa, cool, that game owns. I love the Stanley Parable, I told him. Anyways he described the game to me briefly, said it was about a guy going through another guy’s games without his permission, which… now that I’ve finally played it, yeah, that’s basically what’s happening, but for the longest time I had this idea of the Beginner’s Guide in my head. I thought the game was about a thief, digging through games on somebody else’s computer. He wasn’t lying though.

Why I played the Beginner’s Guide now, nearly a decade after it was released, is because Jacob Geller posted a video where he briefly discussed the Beginner’s Guide, and I figured I might as well set aside an hour, play the game, and then watch the video in full.

Also, to whom it may concern, I think you owe it to yourself to play the Beginner’s Guide and watch Jacob Geller’s videos on Modern Art, and then his latest video (at the time of writing), “Art for No One”.

Although I make it a habit to mark spoiler-filled reviews, I’m leaving this review unmarked in the event you might read these opening paragraphs, and hope you might indulge yourself in this recommendation.

That said, I’ll put a bunch of big, bold-faced spoiler tags right here:

! SPOILERS AHEAD !

! SPOILERS AHEAD !

! SPOILERS AHEAD !

(Disclaimer: When I refer to Davey Wreden in this review, I am specifically referring to the character, not the person)

It’s also funny because my first thought as I started playing this, and during my playthrough, was “Hey, this guy sounds like Jacob Geller!” Funny enough, Jacob Geller wouldn’t post his first video essay until late 2018. So actually Wreden exists here as more of a proto-Geller, and Jacob his progeny.

A surface level reading of the Beginner’s Guide is that it’s a cautionary tale, one of alienation, of art vs. product, and how want of external validation can inadvertently poison one’s intentions, actions, etc.

Even without much heavy lifting I think a lot of people will enjoy the Beginner’s Guide for being a genuinely interesting and inspired story. I also think that some people will either fail to grasp (or deliberately misrepresent) this game’s ideas and write it off as pretentious, overly-philosophical, or whatever.

To me, games exist as multidimensional art. When people get onto Backloggd.com and write forty paragraphs about why Dark Souls is good because its friction challenges conventional action RPG mechanics, you’ll also end up with people that dislike Dark Souls because of that same friction. Such disparity between players exists because the experience can vary so significantly.

In that Dark Souls example, for instance, there’s like a hundred Fuck You moments in the Souls games that exist purely to spite the player. I think this is an undisputed truth. There are certain areas, levels, enemies, mechanics that players can’t and won’t fully grasp until they’ve been experienced firsthand – in layman’s terms, because they’re killed.

Dark Souls is a remarkable series of games because it was able to find any kind of audience at all. It’s a real chicken and the egg-type scenario. Was the collective gamer subconscious secretly vying for the masochistic dark fantasy kingdoms of Boletaria and Lordran? Or were the Souls games truly unique, steadfast arguments in and of themselves – independent of the then-zeitgeist – as games that sought to cultivate an audience instead of merely “finding” one? I tend towards the latter option, but I can’t deny that there must’ve been some real freaks out there waiting for a game like Dark Souls with bated breath.

Regardless, Dark Souls has an audience now. And that’s great! But it’s also kinda sad. On one hand, it’s awesome that such a striking, contentious game is able to receive universal acclaim and connect with so many people; on the other hand, this experience influences the mainstream, inspires imitators, and loses its individuality to the myriad clones it inadvertently spurred.

Now, I’ll save my unabridged thoughts on Dark Souls for another review, but that’s where I’d like to begin with the Beginner’s Guide.

It should go without saying that (like any game) Dark Souls is multidimensional art. The experience of playing Dark Souls is a game of unending struggle. The world is bleak, hostile, dying. Dark Souls has rudimentary, heavy combat. Enemies have long windups and telegraphs. Dark Souls is a labyrinth of puzzles and traps. I quit Dark Souls three times before I defeated the Taurus Demon, the game’s second boss.

Dark Souls is predicated on struggle and perseverance. I think that underlying “struggle” is what most people (myself included) will focus on when discussing Dark Souls. The struggle is – in so many words – “the point” of Dark Souls. You’re supposed to struggle. You’re supposed to die. You’re supposed to learn from your mistakes, strategize, reorient yourself, and triumph by any means necessary. That’s Dark Souls.

James Davenport’s PC Gamer article, “I beat Sekiro’s final boss with cheats and I feel fine” stands in harsh contrast to these romantic ideals. I remember reading the headline for the first time and just going, “Oh, no”. I was mortified. It was like watching somebody jump into a shark tank. A virtual suicide via angry mob.

Indeed, the response to this article was swift and brutal. Many users decried Davenport’s victory as illegitimate. Others scrutinized Davenport’s profession. These replies would spiral into juvenile insults, batshit insane post-Gamergate takes, and a new wave of aversion towards games journalism.

“You cheated not only the game, but yourself. You didn’t grow. You didn’t improve. You took a shortcut and gained nothing. You experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained. It’s sad you don’t know the difference.”

If you’ve played any of the Fromsoft Souls titles, I know it’s easy to get swept away by the game’s lofty ambitions and demanding difficulty, but dude, talking like this to people is weird as hell.

Maybe it’s partially because I’ve been in this guy’s situation before. I used cheats at the end of my first playthrough of FFVII to defeat the final boss. I only used cheats at the end of my first playthrough of FFVII to defeat the final boss. Yeah, I felt bad about it, but you know what else feels bad? Being stuck on the final boss of a 50+ hour game and putting your one and only save crystal at the very start of the final dungeon instead of the Point of No Return. I’d played and thoroughly enjoyed 99% of the game until then. I wasn’t going to let one mistake sour the end of my playthrough.

That’s the thing, too, because Davenport’s article mainly concerns the final boss, most people overlook that he’d already made it to the end without cheats. In fact, he spends a good amount of that article talking about all the bosses he’d enjoyed fighting up until that point.

It’s genuinely baffling. Like, in the context of a “game,” we’re not discussing football or chess, we’re talking about a single player action-adventure video game. This dude’s not hurting anybody. He cheated himself, and he knows it, but that’s not why he cheated – he cheated because was stuck on the final boss of a 30+ hour game and he was ready to be finished. He’s obviously not in it for the clout. He’s not under penalty of perjury or anything. He’s invested time and effort into a game, enjoyed himself, and the final boss – a notoriously difficult final boss – was a bridge too far. I get it.

The alternative would be a white flag. When a game’s difficulty exceeds any one player’s capabilities, we have to throw in the towel. This happened with me and the original Mega Man. Even with save states, I could not put a dent in the final level’s boss rush for the life of me.

Anyways, the Beginner’s Guide is not by any means a condemnation of players that use cheats and therefore bypass the intended meaning/experience of a game, but more of a meditation on art as personal expression (more than anything imo) versus art as a product.

It would also be very easy (and frankly, dismissive) to summarize the Beginner’s Guide as a criticism of players that overanalyze media. This is a very surface level reading of the story. I mean Wreden is about as subtle in his writing as a sledgehammer to the face. His friend’s name is literally Coda – as in “coder”. Like come on. If your only takeaway is that the Beginner’s Guide is “pretentious” or “postmodern” (may or may not be directly quoting another review I read here… who’s to say?) then I fear you’ve lost the plot.

Players take a literal machine gun to an engine that is representative of, in the game’s own words, Coda’s motivation to make games. It’s his inspiration, his drive. When Coda loses his motivation, when the engine “breaks,” Coda doesn’t attempt to repair it – he interrogates it. Treats the engine as an evildoer. A criminal.

Coda’s fixation on prisons is an especially noteworthy motif. In his series of “prison games,” as Wreden calls them, Coda creates a prison out of a house. The player begins in a comfortable, pleasant-looking room with furniture and amenities. The opposite wall reveals a well on a hillside, which is barred off. When the player proceeds, they eventually find themselves at the bottom of the well – on the other side of the bars, but still trapped.

This idea is explored in many of Coda’s games. In “The Great and Lovely Descent,” Coda traps players in a prison cell for a full, real-world hour (although Wreden allows players to bypass this hour-long waiting period). In “Nonsense in nearly every direction” (the Stairs level), the player climbs a set of stairs – but at the halfway point, their speed is reduced to almost zero. Wreden modifies the game to return the player’s speed to normal. In both instances, Coda expects players to wait an inordinate amount of time to progress. In both instances, however, there appears to be a continuation (or a “payoff”) to this waiting period. In the “prison games,” there’s no means to continue. Players remain trapped without escape.

Now, for all of the armchair analysis Wreden attempts (in regards to the “prison” aspect of Coda’s games), he only ever sees Coda as the one that’s trapped. Trapped in his own head. Trapped in his ways of thinking. Wreden says as much during the prison games level, affectionately titled “Pornstars Die Too”:

“There's nothing that's particularly interesting about it,” Wreden says, “it's kinda just weird for weirdness sake… Personally I think it's awful to watch this, to see a person basically unraveling through their work, and for what! At what point do you just go ‘Eh, maybe there are game ideas other than this prison that I could be working on’? But Coda doesn't have that voice telling you to stop, that particular mechanism of defense against yourself. Without it you just spiral.”

A few things I find interesting about what Wreden says here: firstly, the way he uses pronouns in this instance – instead of saying, “Coda doesn’t have that voice telling him to stop,” he says “Coda doesn’t have that voice telling you to stop,” switching between third and second-person. Although I know Wreden’s delivery here is informal, and oftentimes people (myself included) use “you” when illustrating examples in conversation and writing, I think it’s interesting because it implies Wreden is having a kind of “conversation” with the player and is not necessarily reading from a script, and also because he’s convinced that this is what’s happening to Coda as he’s making these games.

The way Wreden talks about Coda here also seems demeaning. Both because he is actively critiquing his friend’s work – work that the player understands was meant to be private, and originally not meant for Wreden – and also because he characterizes Coda as this meek, self-destructive character that frequently needs outside guidance. Players will notice this pattern in Wreden. He frequently breaks Coda’s games wide open to allow players to progress, calling attention to these sections and posturing his alterations to Coda’s games as improvements.

There’s also that title, “Pornstars Die Too”. What’s up with that? The title doesn’t seem to have any relation to the level itself. My interpretation is that it’s comparing porn to video games; alternatively, it’s comparing artists to pornstars; alternatively, neither, or both.

I think it’s specifically “pornstars” and not something like “rockstars” or “movie stars” because porn is comparatively understood as a product instead of “art”. Nobody’s making 40 minute video essays on why Deep Anal Abyss 4 is an underrated masterpiece. Porn exists very much as a product to be consumed unlike film or music. Especially now, in an internet age where an unfathomable volume of porn is widely available and redistributed (even against the wishes of its producers), how people consume porn has become a point of conversation. I know people who’ve never paid for porn in their life, actual filter feeders whose porn collections fit neatly into a bookmarks folder.

My friend Collin, who I mentioned at the start of this review, will sometimes open conversations with, “Hey man, you watch any good porn lately?” Which is like, bar none the funniest opener to a conversation imaginable. It’s always funny. And I never answer him. I laugh it off, or I ask him the same thing, or I pretend like I’m going to tell him about some porn I’d watched recently, but I never do. But honestly, what is there to discuss?

Well, uh, pornstars, for one. I’ll avoid talking about pornographic images, or drawn pornography, or 3D-rendered pornography; mainly because if we’re talking about actual porn with actual people in it, we’d mainly be discussing the actual people in it. People only ever talk about pornstars.

It’s weird though, because unlike rockstars or movie stars who oftentimes (inadvertently) inspire a cult of personality outside of their work, pornstars are often only viewed in relation to their work. You’ll see this happen with people who no longer work in the industry: their prior work is often denigrated, framed as a source of embarrassment, and subsequently this “invalidates” all future preoccupations or career paths. You’ll often hear something to the effect of, “If you wanted ________, you wouldn’t have done porn in the first place.”

It’s weird because there’s still a negative association with being an adult performer. It’s also weird because people can watch porn in private, keep a library of stolen porn on their computer, and not pay for any of it; but God forbid you’re a performer, because otherwise the people that’ve watched you, seen you naked, seen you contort into somebody else, will never let you forget it.

Pornstars die too.

Objectified in life and after death. Performers that give their bodies to be used as objects. Is that not – in a sense – some kind of art? Forgive me if that perspective is unbecoming. Maybe I’m thinking too much into this.

My point is that it’s a mostly thankless job. But I know that people produce porn for reasons besides the money. Some of my close friends are sex workers, even some that no longer produce content. I know that sex work can be pleasurable and cathartic, but it can also be awkward and messy… that comes with the territory.

Beyond the obvious heteronormative vanilla pornography, each individual’s predisposition towards certain kinks/fetish content will also determine a pornstar’s “niche”. Such content is comparable to “genres” of films, television shows, or even video games. For example, it’s understandable that a pornstar who makes the most money from BDSM content is likely to continue producing BDSM content; likewise, if a developer is known for releasing FPS games, they’d likely continue to release FPS games. There are plenty of exceptions to be made here – I’m sure you could even think of a few counterexamples. Your favorite developers have probably dipped their toes into more than one genre. What I’m saying is that if we’re speaking in pure economic terms, once you’ve found a niche, it’s safest to stick to it.

Relate this to how we perceive Coda through his work in this level. Every variation upon this prison of modern furniture. The second variation of this level, where players are given options as to how they desire to decorate the room, also does not account for the myriad options presented. For the last choice, one dialogue option reads “I’m pretty sure none of my choices are making any difference.” There’s a maze at the end that Wreden skips over.

So, much like Wreden, I’d like to bypass some of the game’s later levels – figuratively skipping over them – so that I can talk about the last few levels and their significance.

“Mobius Trip” aka the Game You Need to Play With Your Eyes Closed aka The One With the Giant Door is a farce. Obviously you can’t finish the game with your eyes closed. This is the first game where Coda explicitly admits that he doesn’t want to keep making games anymore.

“Island” is more of a conversation. Almost like listening to a prerecorded therapy session. The irony is that the conversation becomes explicitly one-sided towards the end, the disembodied voice that seemed to want to help the player instead has the player lie to themselves.

“When I make games I feel completely energized.”

“I am constantly excited and enthusiastic about my work.”

“It is easy, it never stops being easy.”

Whereas Mobius Trip feels like it’s about Coda coming to grips with his work and finally being honest with himself, “Island” feels like a response to that game. Even if Wreden believes this is Coda talking to himself, I think most players understand that the anxieties Coda expresses within “Island” are not unfounded. Although Werden interprets this game (and others) as a cry for help, I think this game’s purpose is to underline the disembodied voice’s instructions and intentions. The player is disempowered – as they are in all of Coda’s games – and are unable to speak their truth. They are forced to lie to themselves to satiate the voice’s demands, and so that the game will reach its conclusion.

Although it’s unclear if the game ends once the player finds the woman behind bars. The voice says “I’m free,” but the last thing we see is a prison.

And finally, of course, “Machine”. The one where you take a machine gun to an engine that is representative of Coda’s motivation to make games.

I think that “Machine” is a remarkable level. Certainly one of the more striking moments in the game. It’s also beating players over the head with its messages, so much so that Wreden’s line that “[he] really felt like [he’d] done something good, like [he] was a good person” as he explicitly outlines how he’d originally gone behind Coda’s and given his games to the public is really hammy in a way that’s a bit too unbelievable.

Can you believe that people were unsure if Coda was a real person when this game was first released in 2015? Like buddy, if you can’t tell if this game’s real or not by the end, I think you need to take a media literacy course at your local college or something.

The “Tower” is the real sendoff, a noticeably harsher, darker, more hostile level that seems to actively ward away potential players. Each puzzle is designed to be deliberately unfair, requiring outside knowledge of Coda’s previous games, or hidden messages between games, concluding with a section that is actually – literally – impossible to progress without cheating.

It’s in this level that we find Coda’s last message to Wreden, presented plainly, and in no uncertain terms:

“Dear Davey, thank you for your interest in my games. I need to ask you not to speak to me anymore.”

It’s honestly a little shocking. I’m not going to quote or paraphrase the whole thing because honestly that would kinda ruin the potency of it all. And I mean I’m assuming you’ve played the game anyways. Which if you haven’t, again, it’s literally an hour long game. You’ve got nothing to lose.

The game really says all it needs to say here. Everything afterwards including Wreden’s ensuing breakdown and the seventeenth level feel inconsequential. The story runs its natural course. We’re painted a full picture.

I think the game really needs to break its narrative logic to get across its point, that being that the reason Coda stopped talking to Wreden is because he was using and publicizing Coda’s work for his sake, and not for Coda’s sake. Coda didn’t want his work being publicized and made this boundary known, and Wreden going behind Coda’s back and altering his work and publicizing is a major breach of trust.

I’ve seen a lot of differing opinions and interpretations about the Beginner’s Guide, but a really weird perspective I’ve seen (citation needed) is that Coda is equally culpable for continuing to make games and sending them to Wreden knowing that he would misinterpret and/or alter and/or publicize them, which is (pardon my French) a very fucking stupid interpretation and I’m not even sure how you’d come up with that idea to begin with. As if any work needs to broadly encompass every possible outcome and interpretation of the work within itself so as to not be misinterpreted. Which is, uh, the point of the Beginner’s Guide, isn’t it? Like somehow people are reading too much into the story that is explicitly telling them that reading too much into work and assuming the artist’s intent/message is a bad idea.

News flash: not only is the game explicitly telling you it’s a bad idea, it’s also (somewhat paradoxically) inviting you to analyze Coda’s games alongside Wreden, because it wants you to sympathize with Wreden and it also wants you to understand that what he’s doing is wrong.

I also think that the final “puzzle,” that is the door puzzle at the end of “Tower,” which ends with the player needing to lock themselves in the dark – where Wreden has his breakdown – reads like a visual metaphor to me. This is Wreden’s point of no return. I feel like this scene reframes the Beginner’s Guide as Wreden’s journey overall. Although yes, the Beginner’s Guide exists as a game that we can play and experience, I do think that the epilogue retroactively calls the prior levels into question. As if this is Wreden’s final pass as he’s about to put his intentions into words, and once he finally locks himself in the final door puzzle, he realizes that he’s completely lost the plot. Coda’s gone and he won’t be forgiven.

Trying to generalize Coda and Wreden’s story misses the point. Anyone who pokes holes in a story and says “people don’t act like this/people don’t do this” are missing the point. In a vacuum, the Beginner’s Guide is a fable told through a series of Gmod maps. And I’d argue it works really well.

Although one aspect many people seem to get hung up on is Wreden’s need for external validation. It is indeed one of Wreden’s many character flaws, and arguably the most prominent.

Davey Wreden (the person and not the character this time!) posted an article shortly after the Stanley Parable’s standalone release about his depressive episode at the end of that year, when gaming news sites and content creators were busy putting together “Game of the Year” lists.

“The reality is that being given an award for your art is like being given the sun.” Wreden writes, “No matter how you dress it up, the gift is ultimately intangible, distant, trying to hold onto it will kill you.

And like, I know all of this, but for some reason I continue to viciously crave the validation I imagine each new GotY list might shower me in.

Like a drunk wandering from bar to bar looking for a fight, I am compelled by each new venue, each new possibility that THIS time a victory will temper the anxiety forever.

I am drinking to solve the problem of being an alcoholic.”

If you had no idea what the concept of “validation” even was, you might even assume it was some kind of addictive substance the way it’s described here. Nothing’s wrong with validation. But it’s the kind of validation Wreden describes, when his first major release became a runaway success, where I assume that validation becomes a deterrent against one’s own fears and anxieties.

And you could likely draw the same parallels from Wreden’s words here and the character he’s playing in the Beginner’s Guide. He tells us that he wants Coda’s games to succeed because A) he sees himself in Coda’s work, B) he feels good about himself when he sees himself in Coda’s work, and C) it makes him feel good when other people acknowledge that Coda’s work is good.

So, Wreden’s character makes sense. He goes against Coda’s wishes because he needs external validation and it costs him Coda’s friendship. That’s the entire game.

After watching Jacob Geller’s "Art for No One," however, I also think that Wreden’s most egregious crime in the Beginner’s Guide is his halfhearted eulogizing and pathologizing of Coda in general. Deliberately turning his games into a narrative of an artist losing himself to depression when that was never the case to begin with. I think Coda puts it best when he writes, “The fact that you think I am frustrated or broken says more about you than about me.”

The epilogue, to me, feels like Wreden deciding to make his own game – taking everything he’d loved from Coda’s games and creating something truly transformative.

To actually critique the game here, I believe there could’ve been a more fulfilling, concrete ending. It’s very much open-ended on purpose. But maybe there could’ve been a section where Wreden shows his own levels and explains his process, or maybe Coda could’ve appeared as a voiced character to give his side of the story. I don’t know. Totally spitballing here.

The Beginner’s Guide is a starkly minimalist game by design. Like Wreden’s previous game, the Stanley Parable, the narrator is basically the only voiced character. Stanley doesn’t have a voice because he’s the player analogue, arguably the perfect vessel for player expression. The narrator’s “goal” is to tell a complete story, and Stanley (the player) and their actions will often create friction if they contradict the narrator’s directions. This creates some fun interplay and seeing all of the endings of the Stanley Parable is a real treat. In the Beginner’s Guide, however, there are no alternate endings. If the Stanley Parable is a game about choices with numerous outcomes, the Beginner’s Guide is a game about being trapped, where the choices don’t matter because everything meaningful has already happened.

The Beginner’s Guide is a museum of one man’s mistakes, and as players we find ourselves complicit as Wreden invites us to theorize and pathologize Coda and his work. It is profoundly uncomfortable, by design.

And honestly at this point, there’s like ten different things I could touch upon, how this game interrogates us and how we interrogate art, how external validation becomes addicting, how Coda’s games can still be interpreted but without pathologizing its creator… however, instead, I think I want to return to Mega Man.

Mega Man was the last game I completely gave up on. And I was absolutely abusing the save state function before I quit. I’m not built for it.

When I was younger, I hated the idea of cheating. When I was a teenager I subsisted on an unhealthy diet of Call of Duty and Halo until Dark Souls rocked me out of my comfort zone. Dark Souls and its community imbued in me a sense of smug superiority over other players. After I’d finished Dark Souls, I felt like a champion. The mere achievement I wore like a badge of honor.

But it also drilled this idea into me that games always gave players the tools they needed to succeed. And I suppose that’s partially true, but not entirely. I think if I locked myself in a dark room in front of a 1980s CRT with a Nintendo Entertainment System and a copy of Mega Man, I could probably beat it (assuming I had reliable access to food, water, and a bathroom I guess). But it would take me a very, very long time. And at the end of it, I don’t think I’d like Mega Man very much.

I’ve started playing Super Mario Bros. 2 recently. I’m using save states frequently, usually after certain levels so that if I lose all my lives I don’t have to start over from the very beginning of the game.

In general, I think I’m just not a fan of older games’ tendency to punish players by sending them back to square one. Mega Man and Castlevania were at least lenient, giving you infinite retries and never resetting your progress to zero, but they’re still balls-to-the-wall difficult. And I’ve been playing a lot of older games and every time I use a save state I feel like I’m cheating myself.

I want to be a purist. I want to experience the game as it’s intended. But I’m also becoming exceedingly aware that my time on this earth is limited. There’s so many things I want to do. During Mega Man’s final level, I realized I didn’t want to keep playing it. So I didn’t.

When Wreden says that Coda originally had players stay in the prison cell for an hour before moving on, then adding, “If you don’t mind, I think we’re gonna skip that”. Players understand. We know why Wreden doesn’t want us to sit in a prison cell for an hour. It’s boring.

I don’t think the Beginner’s Guide is a condemnation of players going against the wishes of developers. I do, however, think it’s meant to have players examine their own preconceptions and biases in regards to games as multidimensional art, presented in-game as experiences that are purposefully unsatisfying, confining, and/or boring. Is the game better when you don’t have to wait in a prison cell for an hour? If this were a more traditional, straightforward narrative or action-driven game, maybe. But removing this section diminishes the experience as was intended by the developer. Wreden curates these games to be enjoyed as experiences, as part of a larger, interconnected story. In reality, Coda’s games aren’t comparable to similar games, not like Mega Man, or Castlevania, or Dark Souls, or Sekiro, or even the Stanley Parable, really. Coda’s games aren’t really games at all. They’re hardly cohesive experiences, let alone playable, oftentimes completely breaking down or confining players to inescapable prisons. It’s for this reason I don’t believe the game is providing commentary on how games ought to be experienced, because Coda’s games weren’t meant to be experienced by other people in the first place.

At the same time, I do think we’re meant to interpret Wreden’s modifications to Coda’s work as inherently transgressive. Not only because it distorts Coda’s original intentions, but because these games were never meant for the public. Wreden’s betrayal is so complete that it calls his entire character into question. In attempting to eulogize Coda, he slowly, unknowingly unravels. Wreden is laid bare. His praise was never in earnest. He only ever wanted to sell Coda’s story to an audience.

It was never his story to tell. It was never a story.

In summary, the Beginner’s Guide is metafictional reverse-revenge porn.

This is another game I won’t bother trying to assign an arbitrary score. Thank you for understanding.

Instead of attempting to review each individual update as they’re coming out, I’ve decided to just lump all subsequent updates from Tides of the Foscari onwards into main DLC releases. Thus, although this will be a review for Emergency Meeting, I’ll also be covering several updates released before and after this DLC as well.

WHITEOUT

Not much to say about this one. Pretty uninspiring, plain snow map. It’s always cool to have more content added for free but this one feels pretty barebones. I only played on it once I think.

Notably, adds an evolution for the character O’Sole Meeo, which is something I’ve noticed the last few updates have focused on. Mortaccio can transform into a big skeleton, Syuuto transforms when his main weapon is upgraded, etc.

Also adds the Glass Fandango weapon, which is good, and Defang, a powerup which renders some enemies unable to deal damage when spawned – which is useful in the late game.

SPACE 54

Decent update, fun map. New characters are whatever. New weapons are whatever. Phaser SFX is fun.

EMERGENCY MEETING

The main course, obviously.

Like anyone/everyone else I was curious to see how this DLC would even work. There’s only so much creative liberty you can take with a game like Among Us. Now that I’ve played it, uh… I guess this is probably the best we’d get.

The Among Us characters are hilariously out-of-place, but the map itself – Polus Replica – is actually pretty good. Incorporating time sensitive objectives to avoid penalties was a good idea and makes the stage marginally less brainless than levels prior.

The weapons on offer range from pretty good to pretty bad. I think the main thing is that with Mt. Moonspell and Tides of the Foscari, although some weapons weren’t incredible, they at least evolved with passive items which were already part of the item pool. Like sure, the Mirage Robe or Silver Wind aren’t my first picks, but because they evolve with the Attactorb and Pummarola respectively, they can also pair with Santa Water and Garlic. In Emergency Meeting, every new weapon requires a new passive item – each a miniature crewmate.

At first, I thought dedicating an entire passive item slot to each new weapon was a bad decision, until I realized that the mini crewmates are “consumed” after their respective weapon is evolved, freeing up their passive slot. It’s actually a good tradeoff, and because the miniature crewmates’ offensive abilities persist after being consumed, it’s like earning another weapon/passive slot after both are fully upgraded. It’s at least interesting.

Some of the new weapons aren’t super useful until they’re evolved, and in one instance – in the case of Science Rocks – I think the evolution is definitively worse, Rocket Science requiring players to participate in a timed Leapfrog-ass minigame to get a screen nuke that completely blinds you for 5-10 seconds at a time. What were they thinking?

Anyways I think this DLC is okay! Just kinda doesn’t have much item/build synergy outside of the included map which makes most of it feel a little superfluous. Doesn’t mesh super well with anything. Which is also…

ADVENTURES

…kinda where Adventures comes in.

I was interested to see what Adventures would even be. On the tin, it’s a more streamlined, straightforwardly stage-to-stage approach to Vampire Survivors’ gameplay loop. And at first, I was pleasantly surprised!

It’s strange how scaling back all of the extra, bitrate-killing, seizure-inducing nonsense actually makes for a much better experience overall. Adventures capitalizes on the self-containedness of itself, requiring players to start from scratch, unlock every weapon, item, and upgrade all over again, and even limits each adventure to a handful of playable characters.

This gives each “adventure” some personality. Some stages even have reduced time limits so moving from one level to the next is pretty breezy. The unlock requirements for each stage also require side objectives instead of simply focusing on survival. It’s a good change of pace.

Unfortunately, it highlights a lot of the game’s shortcomings as well. Because the game resets your upgrades, players will usually spend a lot of their first stages without skip, banish, or reroll unlocked. If you focus solely on unlocking all weapons/items, your item pool will quickly be oversaturated, and the RNG will usually force you to pick weapons/items that aren’t optimal for your character.

Usually this isn’t a problem in the base game because players will have unlocked the necessary upgrades (skip/banish/reroll) to force the RNG in their favor. However, when you’re playing without these upgrades unlocked, I do think it really underlines how frustrating the early game can be.

Really, this would be solved by giving players unlimited Skips instead of nickel-and-diming them to Skip upgrades. Another Survivors game called (literally) “Yet Another Zombie Survivors” does this, and even in that game, because the item pool is so limited, it hardly feels necessary, but they give it to you anyways. Why doesn’t Vampire Survivors just let you skip upgrades for free??

I’m not 100% sure how the RNG is supposed to work but I’ve gone entire stages without the passive item I wanted appearing once. Maybe this is an outlier case but I hadn’t even unlocked all the weapons at this point, so I don’t understand how this could even happen.

Anyways, there’s no achievements associated with Adventures, so your mileage may vary here. I chose to complete all four adventures and I thought they were fine. It’s certainly more stuff to do, tacked on an extra 20 hours onto my 100 hour playtime.

My main complaint is that after you’ve finished an adventure, all you get is more gold to use in the base game – and not even a crazy amount, just like 10K-15K gold after an adventure is cleared IIRC. Then the game asks if you want to “ascend,” which lets you reset the adventure (and I assume the award?) but with extra greed/luck/growth/curse.

Am I the only one who’s confused about the purpose of this mode? The gold you’d earn by completing each objective in this mode pales in comparison to the gold you’d earn by playing normally, let alone using an AFK gold farm. I don’t get it!

There’s almost no utility to clearing adventures in terms of meta-progression. It feels pointless.

I still think they’re interesting. I think they’d be more interesting if ascending unlocked better rewards, or their completion was tied to unlocking specific relics/weapons/items in the base game. I don’t know. Needed more time in the oven. That’s all I’ve got.

So overall, does Vampire Survivors hit its stride with these latest updates? I’m not sure! On one hand, the free updates with new maps offer some new content and much needed variety, the actual paid DLC is a novelty, and adventures are… something! It’s definitely more content!

As I started writing this, the latest DLC – a Contra collab named “Operation Guns” – was announced, and is due early next month. I’ll probably give my thoughts on that, too. Will this next DLC drastically change my opinion of Vampire Survivors? Probably not.

It’s more Vampire Survivors. So there you have it.

Not a review just taking this out of rotation for now. I enjoyed what I played of it, so atmospheric and otherworldly in a way the original Doom games weren't. Enemy variety was kind of lacking. Some of the later levels got a little too heavy with the puzzles. Last one I remember playing had a Shell Game that would spawn in enemies if I picked the wrong one, and I just started quicksaving + quickloading and I still don't think I ever picked the right one so I have to wonder what I was doing wrong. Idk just not the kinda game I want to play at the moment but I love every other Doom game so I'll definitely pick this back up at some point and give a full writeup

“A BLAST PROCESSING SHOCKWAVE, THREE DECADES OUT”

Starting to reach a Genesis-era Sonic homeostasis.

As much as I appreciate what the original Sonic games represent, the nostalgia has long since worn off. I firmly believe Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the first really good one, although fans nowadays will take care to remind you: it’s only one half of the complete package.

My first exposure to Sonic 3 was through Sonic Mega Collection Plus on PS2 and, believe it or not, you actually had to unlock Sonic 3 & Knuckles! There were a few more unlockable games, but in hindsight it’s a little strange they did this.

Anyways, considering Sonic 3 as a standalone title… this one has the sauce.

Aesthetically, I think Sonic CD will always be my favorite looking and sounding 2D Sonic game (EU/JP soundtrack is an all-timer), but Sonic 3 (& Knuckles) is the peak of the Genesis era titles for me. There’s a level of spectacle and polish in this one that makes the whole thing pop. Consider those Genesis commercials where they’d have Super Mario World on one screen and Sonic the Hedgehog on the other. Yeah, Sonic 1 was flexing the hardware, but Sonic 3 is straight up overclocked. The sprite work, pseudo-3D depth of the stages, scripted sequences, everything here is cooked to perfection.

Each zone retains its two-act structure, but this time with an additional mini-boss between stages, and extra music arrangements for Acts 1 and 2 respectively.

The original soundtrack is so good that its substitution in the latest Sonic Origins collection actively hampers my enjoyment of that version. If you want to play Sonic 3 the way God intended, mod the original soundtrack into Origins, or use an emulator, or play it on any of the numerous Sonic/Genesis-era collections Sega has released over the years.

Mechanically, this is still Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic 3 introduces the insta-shield, an attack which I didn’t fully grasp when I was younger; now that I’m older, however, I think the insta-shield is one of the series’ many understated strokes of genius, and it’s surprising this mechanic wasn’t carried over into future titles (save for a select few).

Sonic 3 also introduces the elemental shields which may be the most important gimmick in the series’ history, which also wasn’t carried over into future titles (except for the electric shield, which also appears in a few 2D and 3D titles). I genuinely believe the elemental shields are the lynchpin holding Sonic 3 (& Knuckles) together. Each one alters Sonic’s insta-shield ability, and each one is fun to play with. The bubble shield – which also allows players to breathe underwater – adds an extra oomph to levels like Hydrocity.

Despite being the shortest Sonic game on the original Genesis (with only six zones, two acts each), Sonic 3 also introduces a save system. This is appreciated! Quitting the game and reloading a save file, however, resets a player’s score and extra lives. Again, it’s appreciated, but Sonic 3 is so short and the handicap for loading a game is so severe that a save system feels unnecessary.

One thing I prefer to the other Genesis titles by a country mile are the special stages. Instead of attempts being limited to the end of a level, or checkpoints, or depending on the amount of rings players collect, the special stages are separated into giant rings that can be found throughout levels. Personally, I really enjoy this approach to special stages because it rewards exploration, and experienced players will have no trouble collecting all seven chaos emeralds early on – I’m usually able to get all of them by Marble Garden.

Blue Sphere is probably my favorite special stage, but not by a wide margin. It’s the least frustrating, but sometimes the sensitivity/responsiveness feels a little off, which can lead to some frustrating deaths. I would say the frequency of this happening is few and far between, and something more experienced players would likely have an easier time putting to text. I think it’s fine.

Honestly, I think one of the reasons I have such fond memories of Sonic 3 specifically is because it was so easy to get all the chaos emeralds in this one compared to Sonic 1 and especially Sonic 2. Blue Sphere isn’t hard at all, and there’s plenty of opportunities to find giant rings hidden throughout a level. It’s still fun to breeze through the latter stages with Super Sonic, but I do wish there was a better way to turn it on and off. It’s crazy that nobody even thought of this until Sonic Mania almost 25 years later.

Also, I think it’s probably easy to discount the latter half of Sonic 3 because it’s so easy to collect the chaos emeralds before the halfway point. As much as I love the sound and aesthetic of stages like Carnival Night and Ice Cap, these levels honestly aren’t great!

Carnival Night Zone Act One is okay, but Act Two feels really uninspired. Just more of the same, but also it’s a water level now, too. I don’t even hate the barrel anymore, but also like, yeah, how is any new player supposed to figure that one out??

Ice Cap Act One starts with an iconic snowboard set piece, and the rest of the level is just super claustrophobic, tons of linear corridors, endlessly looping Labyrinth Zonesque slides… nothing fun happens. Act Two has some verticality with the trampoline things, but that’s about it.

Launch Base Zone feels appropriately difficult for a final level, and it’s probably the best of the final zones compared to Scrap Brain and Metropolis/Wing Fortress – but it still has too many instances of cheap enemy placement, instant death traps, obstacles that are nearly impossible to react to.

The final boss is separated into three discrete phases, phase one and two are separated by a minute long unskippable cutscene(!) where the timer keeps ticking(!!) and then concludes on phase three which, if you’re playing the & Knuckles version, is removed entirely.

The third and final phase is a lot more difficult, requiring precise jumps to deal any damage. This boss feels like an appropriately difficult final challenge. As Sonic, you can even use your mastery of the insta-shield ability to damage Eggman when he’s underneath you (if you time it just right).

Comparatively, the back half of Sonic 3 feels much harder to play through as Tails. Not only does he lack Sonic’s insta-shield, collecting all seven chaos emeralds does not grant him a super form. For the record, I did collect all seven chaos emeralds as Tails, and I did finish the game as Tails.

Though if we’re critiquing this game as is, without comparing it to anything released afterwards, I think that Sonic 3 is a great sequel and a great Sonic game. For me, it feels like the most quintessentially arcadey Genesis-era Sonic title. It’s still fun to blast through as Sonic, although Tails’ route leaves much to be desired.

Still a treat 30 years later.

“PROFOUNDLY UNSATISFYING”

In my last review, I briefly mentioned that I’d put 92 hours into FFVII Rebirth and that I’d started feeling both “physically and mentally unwell”. Much like Cloud Strife who suffers from severe Mako poisoning, induced via prolonged exposure to an element that is normally beneficial in smaller amounts, I had unintentionally poisoned myself from overexposure to Final Fantasy VII.

I needed a break. A detox. Between 12+ hour long play sessions (quite literally, before or after) I’d play a round or two of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.

I’d played the DRG:S playtest last year and walked away feeling generally positive. I thought it was an interesting foundation for a Survivors-like game. Now that it’s been in Early Access for over a month, I’ve racked up well over 20 hours. I think I’m now qualified to say this might be the most unsatisfying Survivors-like game I’ve ever played.

It really is that simple. Done and dusted. I could have easily chosen not to write a review for this game after all. But it’s the HOW and WHY this game is so unsatisfying that compels me to type this now.

At launch, there are four characters to choose from (one unlocked from the jump, three you need to progress to unlock) with three discrete classes for each character. These classes also need to be unlocked (each character’s first class is unlocked by default). Each character/class has access to different weapons, although there is noticeable overlap in terms of weapon availability between characters.

There are currently three biomes (a fourth biome was just added, more on this towards the end) and five hazard (difficulty) levels for each biome, each with unique objectives that contribute to the game’s meta-progression (i.e. new weapons, characters, classes, artifacts, etc.).

So, don’t worry about all this too much, let’s just focus on an average run in DRG:S. You pick a character, pick a class, and drop into a level.

The first thing you’ll notice in how DRG:S differs from other Survivors-like games is that its levels are procedurally generated, and rather cramped. DRG:S puts a big focus on mining for resources, the two most common being Gold and Nitra, although players can also mine rock (and stone!) to open new pathways, circumvent enemies, etc. On paper, this rules; in practice… it’s fine, but in a general sense, it works. There’s nothing egregious in what it attempts.

All right, so you’re playing the game now. Your character shoots some bugs, mines some minerals, and eventually levels up. You can only pick a new weapon at Levels 5, 15, and 25. It’s an interesting idea but one that makes the rhythm of progression noticeably lopsided.

Survivors-like games are not intended as longform endurance tests. They’re very simple arcadey games by design. DRG:S understand this but almost overcompensates by adding extraction game elements? Every run or “dive” is separated into five randomly generated levels, each around five-ish minutes long. As players explore and collect minerals, they’re also being attacked by bugs, and after players kill a certain amount of bugs (I believe the level progress meter is determined by bugs killed and not just a timer), a boss enemy called an “Elite” appears, at which point a countdown begins – if players don’t kill the Elite enemy in about 30 seconds (give or take), the bugs “grow stronger” for every tick (15 seconds or so) until the player is completely overwhelmed. If the player manages to defeat the Elite, the drop pod arrives to deliver them to the next area – but will leave without the player if they don’t enter the pod within 30 seconds, thereby ending their run.

DRG:S really, really wants players to manage their time wisely, but this feels like too much. On the first two hazard levels, this isn’t a major issue, I think it’s only when attempting Hazards 3 and 4 that it feels like almost too much RNG is happening.

It’s especially annoying as Elite enemies also gain ridiculous amounts of HP on higher Hazard levels, to the point where “Sudden Death” feels more like a promise instead of a punishment.

I also can’t overstate how many runs end during this “Sudden Death” phase, either. If the ridiculous amount of onscreen enemies doesn’t kill you, it’s definitely the drop pod timer. Again, on its own, the drop pod timer is fine. It’s only after entering Sudden Death and having the amount of bugs + enemy damage grow exponentially that both of these elements feel like being trapped between a rock and a hard place. I’m not stupid. I know this is by design. I’m just saying that it feels bad.

When Helldivers 2 released to glowing praise from critics and players alike last month, I remember reading a Twitter thread (that I cannot locate for the life of me) which wanted to explain why that game’s core gameplay loop was so satisfying. One particular phrase that stuck with me was the fodder enemies were described as being, “popcorn enemies”. After hearing that phrase, I started to realize how important these enemies were: they’re not meant just as cannon fodder, but as a collective unit – like bubble wrap for the bigger, beefier enemies that you’re meant to “pop” around the real big targets. Popcorn.

DRG:S’s popcorn enemies are not popcorn. On Hazards 1-2 maybe, but Hazards 3-4? They’re not popcorn. They’re small, inordinate, and deal way too much damage. Not only do they deal considerable damage, but because of the game’s isometric perspective, they’ll often disappear behind rock/stone. At present, the game offers no shadow/outline or anything to make these enemies visible, and the result is players taking constant, oftentimes avoidable damage.

After entering Sudden Death, these enemies can often hit for 30-40 damage apiece (keep in mind, this is with the regular armor/HP upgrades almost maxed out) which is a good 15-20% of the average character’s health bar (before acquiring armor/HP upgrades during a run, that is). Additionally, there are no i-frames between taking damage, meaning if you decide to run through a horde of fodder enemies, you’re sacrificing most of your health bar for every second you’re in physical contact with an enemy.

Beyond all this, however, there’s also no recompense in death. If you die, that’s it. No extra lives. No revivals. Miss your drop pod and it’s game over.

The game grants some leniency in the “dodge” mechanic, although its functionality seems limited to one class, and one artifact. It gives players a small chance to negate incoming damage, but it’s not a stat that can be upgraded.

Besides all this though, the weapons aren’t good. Although it is mechanically similar to Vampire Survivors’ preset weapon patterns, the most useful weapons are those that lock onto enemies automatically – in a sense, I would argue these are the only viable weapons.

Weapons either target the closet enemy, the enemy with the most HP, random enemies, or have a preset pattern. Avoid weapons that shoot in four directions or only shoot in front of your character, as these are often unwieldy at best and almost useless at worst.

Obviously you want weapons that target the closest enemy, although targeting the enemy with the most HP (as in Elites) is also very useful. The implementation of these weapons reminds me of another Survivors-like game I’ve played previously, “Yet Another Zombie Survivors” where the developers knew that the game was mechanically very simple, yet a little too chaotic with the amount of enemies onscreen, so all weapons automatically lock onto enemies. Seems like a no-brainer.

Both games have AoE weapons and throwables, too, but how DRG:S handles weapon upgrades is objectively (imo) worse. “Yet Another Zombie Survivors” gives players a variety of weapons to choose from, although only after upgrading your character’s main weapon to max level are you allowed to choose an “upgrade path”. Each weapon/ability can only be upgraded 4-5 times max. That means eventually players will upgrade each of their weapons/abilities, and move onto incremental stat upgrades (damage, reload speed, armor, HP, etc.). Vampire Survivors also does this, with weapons and items having specific synergies and upgrade paths, which later rewards players with incremental stat upgrades once each is maxed out.

DRG:S only has incremental stat upgrades. That’s it.

I hope you can understand why this might be boring. There are “Overclock” abilities that weapons unlock every six levels, but most of these are (frankly) underwhelming. Some choice Overclock upgrades include stuff like +25% damage and +25% fire rate (essentially two epic upgrades for one weapon rolled into one, which is a waste of an Overclock), or -25% Damage for the one weapon and +25% Damage for every other weapon. There are good Overclocks, but the best Overclocks are usually at Level 18 – and upgrading any weapon to Level 18 is a hassle, and there’s also no guarantee you’ll even get the Overclock you want. You also can’t reroll Overclocks.

The Overclock system also creates two problems: 1) before you can Overclock a weapon, you need to upgrade it to Level 12 in a regular run first, which means dedicating a significant amount of one run to upgrading a weapon so that it will be slightly better in later dives, and 2) there will be certain upgrades called Paint Jobs which are only meant to increase weapon level by 2/3/4 and offer no incremental stat increases otherwise, existing only so that players can obtain each Overclock slightly faster.

I think you could fix these problems in two ways: 1) remove the Level 12 requirement for Overclocking, it’s unnecessary padding; 2) have rare/epic/legendary upgrades raise weapon levels by 2/3/4 by default, so players obtain more Overclocks faster, thereby eliminating some tedium in Paint Job upgrades.

Additionally, I’m not sure if this is the RNG, but I feel like the game gives you a lot of weapon upgrades but hardly any HP/armor/critical/speed/mining upgrades. There’s also no easy way to view the weapon/stats increase when selecting an upgrade, you have to switch between the upgrade screen and the screen which shows your current weapons upgrades/stats. The game should realistically have both of these on the same screen just to improve overall UI/UX.

To tell you the truth, although I originally played DRG:S using the keyboard, I genuinely liked using the Gamepad much more. I wish that there was a mechanic to aim certain weapons with the right analog stick or mouse, because it feels like weapons with preset patterns are wildly ineffective without player input.

Really though, after 20 hours and one content update (the Salt Pits), I’ve reached a wall. Hazard 4 is too much. I’ve maxed out almost every persistent upgrade and the difficulty curve is still much, much too steep. There’s a person who has sunk 90 hours into this game and has not progressed Hazard 4. And honestly, as much as I acknowledge that all critique/criticism should be constructive, I can confidently say that I will not be committing 70 more hours to this game to unlock or attempt Hazard 5.

Also, with this latest update, even loading into the Salt Pits causes my entire OS to literally freeze and crash, and apparently this is a common bug that a lot of people have been experiencing?? I’ve never had a game cause my entire system to crash before. Anyways I’ll probably be retiring from this game for now.

tl;dr difficulty needs to be fine-tuned, game freezes/crashes my OS now so I probably won’t be playing for a while. I’d probably wait on buying this if I were you.

“THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES TO YOUR CRIMES AGAINST DRACULA…”

Honestly I don’t know what to say about this one. I don’t know how I’d give it a score.

At its best, this is like the side-scrolling sections in Zelda 2 but not nearly as mean, and it usually only sends you back a few screens if you die; at its worst, it’s trial-and-error, projectile spam, and a good amount of RNG.

The first half of this game is classic NES stuff. I’d recommend playing Castlevania for the first nine stages alone. It gets tricky starting on Stage 10 but nothing impossible. Stages 13 and onward are painful.

For the record, and I feel the need to disclose this whenever I’m playing a game on anything besides its original hardware, I did not use save states until Stages 13-15 specifically because the stage is very long, and the boss is very hard.

The final stages up to Dracula are difficult, but short. The game is also lenient enough to give you a checkpoint before Dracula that persists even if you Game Over. This was a huge relief.

Dracula’s boss fight feels like an interesting microcosm of the entire game. On one hand, it’s not particularly hard once players understand what they’re doing and what’s expected of them. It’s the fundamentals: positioning, timing, reflexes, etc. On the other hand, there’s some stuff in here that feels half-baked and is a lot more annoying than challenging.

Stuff like, for example, how Dracula will teleport on top of the player, giving them half a second to react before taking damage; or how you can only dodge Dracula’s second phase when he does a high jump, but during my numerous attempts, I couldn’t get him to activate this move consistently. The move seemed to occur at random.

I say, “seemed to occur at random,” because I don’t really understand if there is a random element to this fight, or if there’s actually some method to get him to do the high jump consistently. The easiest strategy for me personally was to stay close to him in his second phase, and whip him in the face when he started to shoot fireballs. I could hopefully hit all three fireballs at once, but otherwise I would usually be able to jump over the fireballs consistently.

So, it’s good that I could block that one attack consistently, more or less. But sometimes Dracula would just corner me and not do the high jump, and I’d end up taking – what felt like, to me – unavoidable damage. If he alternated between high jumps and low jumps, maybe that would’ve been easier to discern and plan around. As it stands, it just seemed like I kept loading a save state and hoping that he would Just Do The High Jump This Time.

I’m not really sure. It’s one of those things where I’m not sure if it’s a skill issue on my part, or the game being genuinely obtuse, or an issue with emulation or something.

I still really enjoyed my time with Castlevania and I’d like to play through it again at some point, but I am beginning to notice a trend that most NES games really ramp up difficulty-wise to a frustrating degree towards their conclusions. Obviously I believe games should have a difficulty curve but some of this feels far too demanding of most players. Also Castlevania isn’t the worst offender by a long shot.

There was a trend throughout most of the 2010s to call certain games “The Dark Souls of X” where X would be a series, or a genre, or a subcategory of some sort. Although it might feel like a cliché now, I kinda understand why reviewers flocked to using the expression. It captures the spirit of games that aren’t particularly concerned with concessions in the player’s favor, offering little in terms of accessibility or alternative difficulty settings. There is one experience. You either meet it on its own terms, or you don’t advance.

I’ll say this: the final level didn’t sap my enthusiasm for the title in such the same way as Mega Man, and for that I think it’s at least pretty good. You should probably play Castlevania at least once before you die!

“THE REASON YOU BOUGHT A STRATEGY GUIDE IN 1992”

My previous forays into Legend of Zelda have not been kind. Shortly after giving up on Zelda II, I decided – you know what? – let’s get into A Link to the Past!

I’d heard a lot of good things about ALttP. Many friends and longtime Zelda fans have claimed that this is where the series truly begins. This is where the Legend of Zelda gets good.

And well, hey, it’s definitely my favorite opening hour of any LoZ game I’ve played so far. For a fleeting sixty minutes I really believed I might’ve been playing the best Zelda game ever made. Captivating, deftly-paced, and a map with objective markers. Talk about an upgrade!

So what happened?

Honestly I haven’t been feeling very confident about my internal rating system as of late. Sonic 1 and 2 are a 5/10. Super Mario Land is a 5/10. Final Fantasy XVI is a 5/10. And now this. I can’t really reconcile with the idea that all these games are similar quality-wise, because they’re not. All scores are subjective. Maybe one day I’ll realize Super Mario Land is actually the best Mario game ever, and maybe I’ll revisit Sonic 2 and fall madly in love.

Likewise, a Link to the Past is not a bad game by any metric; for me personally, a 5/10 is not a bad score by any metric. I’m weighing everything but I’m also going with my gut here.

I believe that playing Link’s Awakening prepared me a little more for ALttP. Knowing that Link’s Awakening was released after ALttP makes me want to play through Link’s Awakening again at some point – but also, it makes me question some of that game’s mechanics/conceits a bit more.

There is a good amount of streamlining here, mainly with map markers and fast travel using the ocarina, but it’s still not enough. Link’s Awakening had Ulrira giving you hints through the telephone, which was a good way to give players some direction (or a necessary refresher if you took weeklong breaks like I did). ALttP has fortune tellers, which give you some hints and even refill your health to max when you consult them – this is great! I was very happy with the fortune tellers… until they stopped being useful.

Towards the second half of the game, I guess the developers decided that hints weren’t conducive to players making progress, and then relegated the remaining hints to optional side quests.

Unfortunately, I suffered from a lot of the same meandering in ALttP as I did in Link’s Awakening. I was always wondering, “Where am I supposed to go?” Even with a map marker, the exact sequence of steps needed to access some dungeons can oftentimes be a little confusing at best, and downright hieroglyphic at worst.

There was always a 50/50 chance that what I needed to do was tied to a puzzle within the vicinity of the place I was in – or it was on the complete opposite end of the world map. I hate playing games where I need to keep referring back to a guide to navigate. For this game, I only opened a guide when I needed to know – is the answer nearby or someplace else?

Unlike Link’s Awakening, however, I found that the answer was almost always close by. There were also only a few times where my progress was interrupted because I didn’t have X or Y items. You get the idea. It still ain’t perfect.

I really enjoyed the dungeons in the latter half of the game where I felt the difficulty was balanced more around a series of increasingly harder encounters and room-based puzzles instead of constant backtracking and guesswork. Or maybe I’m just getting better at the series’ vocabulary.

Sometimes, you push a block, and a door opens. Sometimes, you kill all the enemies in a room, and you get a key. Simple stuff.

Even so, and knowing full well this is a 30+ year old game that’s been endlessly reiterated upon, the game really should’ve been more explicit in its demands and expectations of players.

For example: in the seventh dungeon, Turtle Rock, the player gets a popup saying they shouldn’t proceed unless they have a magic potion (to refill their magic meter). What the game doesn’t tell you is that you need the Ice Rod to defeat the dungeon boss, which is an easily missable item on the other side of the Light World map that isn’t required for any other section in the game.

I understand most people that’ve played this game are speaking about it from a nostalgic POV. They played it growing up. Tips and strategies for certain areas were tribal knowledge. Games were journeys back then.

It’s a weird problem because I’m playing this game on my Nintendo Switch handheld, and I typically space out hour long play sessions over days or weeks. I feel like the average player back then would’ve spent double or triple the amount of time I did dawdling around looking for clues on how to progress. I would love to really soak in Hyrule and appreciate every pixel of the artistry on display here, but that’s just… not how I play games. Obviously I don’t like to rush through games either, but I have my limits. I don’t always need to know what I’m supposed to be doing, but I’d at least like some more direction.

I don’t approach games or films or television shows or books with the goal of “consumption”. But with games, it’s also a matter of ability – both latent skill and learned experience. I mean, other types of media can be “challenging,” sure, but with games, it’s not like films or TV shows stonewall their audience if they don’t understand the plot or the script or the visual storytelling. Movies don’t stop if you don’t ace a pop quiz or whatever. Video games are different. You’re getting pop quiz after pop quiz and if you don’t pass each one consecutively, you get held back.

Written guides feel like cheating if you ask me. But also, what else are you supposed to do? Spend countless hours trial-and-erroring your way towards victory? You do you, man. If you’ve got that kind of time – by all means, go for it. Thing is, I didn’t grow up with this. I’ve got hundreds of games I want to play. I’ll do guesswork until I’m red in the face and then I’m just using a guide because I need to progress.

Just tell me where I need to go. That’s it. If I need an item in the desert, tell me. Give me a popup that says, “Hey [playername], you might need an item from the desert to access this dungeon”. That’s all I need.

I also definitely abused the rewind feature on this one. Too many ridiculous traps and combat encounters to contend with later on. Way too much combat for my tastes. The i-frame windows are not generous at all, some enemies practically stunlocked me to death in some instances.

Maybe you’re a fan of the cryptic puzzles. Maybe it makes you feel like a real adventurer. That’s great! I love that for you. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum.

My enjoyment of the game was split 50/50: on one hand, when I was able to figure out a puzzle solution or traverse a dungeon on my own, I had a blast; on the other hand, whenever I ran into the myriad progression-halting puzzles or trial-and-error boss fights, I felt like I was banging my head against a wall. My score reflects this experience.

You might want to play this one with a guide.

“AN EPIC SLOG AND A HALF”

I’m not a Final Fantasy guy.

I’ve played FF7 and FF7 Remake and Dirge of Cerberus and I loved them! Dirge of Cerberus was a little weird!

When I picked up Final Fantasy XVI there wasn’t a lot of thought behind it. I got it Day One. My buddy Eric said it was “weird” that I was playing FFXVI because I wasn’t a Final Fantasy guy. I told him, you know, I figured XVI (sixteen) is as good a starting point as VII (seven), let alone any of the other mainline games.

In retrospect, it’s kind of funny how quickly the conversation around this game dropped off a cliff. Just completely vanished off the face of the earth after a month or two. I almost forgot about it until I saw a trailer for the DLC during the Game Awards. I haven’t played the DLC and I don’t think I’m going to.

Granted, what I did hear about Final Fantasy XVI during that launch window was that the boss fights were insane – and yeah, the boss fights are insane (most of them anyway). I heard so much buzz around the Bahamut fight that when I finally got there, I was a little bit disappointed. I mean okay, sure, DBZ fusion and outer space dogfight aside, at that point in the game I barely cared about who Dion was. I wouldn’t even put Bahamut in the Top 3 boss fights in this game.

This was also the first PS5 game I played on my big, shiny new 4K OLED TV. Some of the early game visuals were genuinely impressive and awe-inspiring. It’s unfortunate then that the performance mode framerate cannot keep a consistent 60fps. That might sound nitpicky, especially because it was almost never a problem during combat either, but usually just exploring hub areas or open fields my game would drop well below 40-50 consistently and it was very noticeable and almost always took me out of the experience. That’s my only technical complaint.

My real main complaints are the combat and the lackluster side content, the two usually going hand in hand.

It’s funny, I’d also heard the side content in FFXVI wasn’t that great, but I didn’t really mind it in the first half. Yeah, they’re kinda generic, short, and uninteresting side quests – but whatever, it’s stuff to do. It’s the second half of the game where the side content becomes chorelike.

Everyone approaches games differently, right? Maybe you’re only in it for the main story, so you make a beeline through the main quests and ignore all the side content until NG+. Maybe you’re a completionist, and you absolutely need to complete each and every challenge, get each and every trophy…

I’m not a completionist. I’ll rarely make a go for 100% in a game. However, and I believe this is partially my fault, if a game gives me an itemized list of side quests with map markers, I will almost always prioritize the side content over the main quest.

I’m not a completionist, but I’m very much a Monkey See, Monkey Do-type gamer.

FFXVI side quests are almost always fetch quests.

Well, all of FFXVI’s side quests are fetch quests, in a sense. I suppose it depends how you define a “fetch quest”. Some quests have you kill X amount of enemies in some corner of the world map, but is that not just a fetch quest by a different name? I mean you’re basically removing objects from someplace as opposed to retrieving them. I don’t know. There needs to be another term for a fetch quest to encompass the mundanity of primary game verb repetition. It’s busywork.

The reasons for half of these quests feel superfluous. There’s an absurd amount of expositioning happening towards Clive when he accepts these quests. Nobody can just cut to the chase.

There is something endearing about FFXVI’s European fantasy setting in how deadly serious its mood/theme/plot is. I was engrossed in the opening 10 hours but it wasn’t able to stay compelling throughout for me personally.

Since time immemorial, gamers have demanded longer, more polished, more unique experiences. Developers are unfortunately not soulless corporate husks without friends or families, and therefore must partition a particular work-life balance to stave off the creeping insanity of creating video games for a living. What does this mean for players? Ultimately, a whole lot of dilly-dallying.

Games don’t need to respect a player’s time. In a perfect world, each and every piece of media we choose to expose ourselves to will be worth the time we invest into it. Of course, this isn’t a perfect world. There is no metric by which we can determine that a game does or does not respect a player’s time. Even games that are considerably short can fail to respect a player’s time. There are, however, some noticeable recurring elements in games that don’t respect a player’s time, namely: 1) recycled content/locations/enemies, 2) not being able to skip cutscenes, 3) not enough checkpoints, 4) excessive fetch quests… to name a few.

Again, this isn’t a comprehensive list, and these aren’t necessarily bad design choices by default – there are games that I love which are guilty of these – all these elements are, to some extent, necessary evils. Whether it’s padding or filler or whatever, that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.

That’s not to say that there aren’t good side quests in FFXVI. There are some good side quests! There are some memorable side quests! But most of them are bland, forgettable, and got way too much exposition. I didn’t skip 99% of the dialogue, but most of it is genuinely, super painfully dull. Some of the later side quests I started a conversation with the quest giver and put my controller down for like 2-3 minutes and just went on Twitter or something. Started nodding off one time before my trademark comically large snot bubble loudly popped to wake me up and Clive was halfway through King Lear Act 2 Scene 1, what are these honkeys even yapping about!!

And for what, honestly? A quest where I need to find a very specific flower in the inhospitable wastes of the fallen kingdom of Waloed? Buddy, there’s a Mt. Everest-sized crystal on the horizon that threatens to exterminate all life on this planet as we know it. But sure, I’ll put aside the time to get you your flower. Did you need anything else while I’m out, dear? Coffee creamer? Black and milds?

It’s funny because some of these side quests are the culmination of multiple other side quests – the last batch of these obviously have the most amount of effort put into them with pre-rendered cutscenes and such– but it’s way past the eleventh hour by this point. It’s practically midnight.

I had subtitles on for a while. Found myself reading them a little too much and not focusing on the line delivery, so I turned them off. Instead of reading the subtitles, I started hyperfocusing on the game’s mouth/facial/body animations and realized there was absolutely nothing interesting happening in these conversations. Rote expository nothings. Go here, talk to this person, kill this, get that. Whatever.

All this is compacted by the game’s combat, which (for me personally) runs out of steam well before the game switches gears in its latter half.

For all the different Eikonic abilities Clive obtains during his journey, I never found experimentation to be all that rewarding or satisfying. Like I’m sure if I was crunching the numbers in my head and really seeing which abilities did the most damage I could really minmax my way to success but for 90% of the game I stuck to Ifrit/Garuda/Titan.

For me, I think it was because the game limits players to only 3 Eikons and 6 different abilities at once. I feel like giving players access to all Eikons (or maybe different loadouts to switch between on a dime?) would have been preferable. Because it’s fun to try out new abilities, but not always switching out Eikons/powers in menus.

I know the game is balanced around being limited to 3 Eikons/6 abilities at once, but I still think being able to switch between more Eikons on the fly would’ve been much appreciated. I also bring this up because of the Barnabas boss fight.

Of all the boss fights in FFXVI, this one was a real bummer. I played on Action Focused throughout and only Game Overed a handful of times. Luckily, the checkpoint system is generous, and the game will usually autosave between boss phases and refill your potions for you. However, during the third phase of the Barnabas fight, I was stonewalled by a particularly nasty instakill attack that I needed to interrupt by dealing a significant amount of damage in a short timespan. At that point, I had Garuda, Titan, and Shiva equipped as Eikons (experimenting with Shiva because her abilities were the most recent powers I’d unlocked). I tried to “press the attack” but wasn’t able to deal enough damage to interrupt Odin’s Zantetsuken. So, I died. I attempted this five or six times and eventually gave up. I might’ve racked up like ten Game Overs total, and almost all of those were during this instakill attack.

I would’ve loved to have swapped Eikon abilities, but you can’t change out your abilities in combat! So I had to quit, dropped the difficulty down to Story Focused, returned to the latest autosave, switched my Eikons, restarted the boss fight, spent five minutes watching unskippable mid-fight cutscenes, and only then was I finally able to survive Zantetsuken. Jeez.

That’s really all I’ve got. It’s such a frictionless combat system that when it demands anything of players, it starts to become a hassle. It’s not hard, just inconvenient.

There’s a bunch of other little quibbles I have with this game but also I just don’t care enough to elaborate anymore. It’s fine. It’s an okay game. But it could’ve been a lot better.

“A MASTER CLASS IN MEDIOCRITY”

Never actually tried Sonic Advance 1 or 2 growing up and now I’m kinda glad I didn’t!

Not an exceptional Sonic experience. There is a noticeable dip in quality and a spike in difficulty around the halfway point. Bottomless pits should not be the default punishment for players, you guys!

Mania devs had their work cut out for them. Angel Island Zone onwards is a textbook example of how NOT to build a Sonic the Hedgehog level.

Egg Rocket is just a bad level. Built in such a bizarrely punishing way – on a time limit no less! The level hardly communicates which direction you’re supposed to be headed, only decorating its steely corridors with spikes, or death pits, or drops that inexplicably return you to the beginning of an area, wasting minutes of precious time.

The penultimate bosses being a Sonic 1+2 throwback was cute. Final boss was forgettable.

I did not find a single Special Stage until my Tails playthrough, which I immediately bombed. Honestly I think the special stages in this one might be worse than Sonic 2 – the perspective is actually incomprehensible. The limited availability of these stages in-game is also bad.

Made an executive decision to not go for Chaos Emeralds. Don’t care enough. I’ve done this song and dance before.

Consequently, I didn't finish playing as Amy. Interesting idea but I wish her movement was closer to her Sonic Adventure 1 incarnation – would’ve liked to build up speed and jump with her hammer instead of screeching to a halt for a high jump. Weird character.

Also, the game saves your stage progress, but if you quit and come back it resets your lives and score. Pretty bogus.

Mercifully short.

“AN ARCHETYPAL BASEBALL BAT TO THE JAW”

I don’t think I’ve ever beaten Super Mario Bros. the intended way and I don’t think I ever will.

Honestly I can’t even remember the last time I played the original Super Mario Bros. unless it was on the Wii Virtual Console back when that was a thing, so maybe 10+ years ago? Sometime before middle school.

I finished the Super Mario All Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 1 when I first moved to Oregon and now I’ve finished the original Super Mario Bros. and all I can think about is how much better the All Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 1 is. Play that version instead! Or get your fill on the original I guess, do what you want. Be your own person.

Super Mario Bros. controls evergreen. Holds up surprisingly well. Not gonna break down each and every game design choice but it’s obvious that levels are built to encourage player mastery through discovery. It works!

I remember reading a quote from Yuji Naka about how Sonic was inspired by replaying through the first few levels of Mario after dying over and over. Playing through Super Mario Bros. again, almost 40 years after its conception, I feel like there is a certain poetry in how this quote is framed – as if the idea was to expand on Mario’s movement by creating a “faster” Mario, when in actuality, I feel as though this design ethos is reflected almost nowhere in the first Sonic game at all.

Mario feels more like a Sonic prototype than even the first Sonic game does. Players are given an astonishing amount of control over Mario’s movements. You can build up speed and gain height and distance by running, but you also need to plan around the ridiculous speed Mario can attain. This can cause friction as the game requires players compensate for Mario’s slippery movement. Don’t be intimidated! There’s a lot of nuance in Mario’s movement but the levels are constructed in a way that feels difficult but fair, accounting for players of all skill levels.

Yuji Naka was right in that he should want to complete World 1-1 as fast as he could, but this is by design. Not only the first levels, but every level is meant to push players towards being fast. Some levels almost feel suffocating, like you need to get through some areas as quickly as humanly possible. The stage timer and the inability to backtrack only reinforces this idea. The last few levels necessitate this mindset to an absurd degree.

Although, uh, the Naka quote specifically refers to the fact that he kept dying and had to restart the game from the very beginning (which I understand). I tried doing this playthrough without using save states – if I died, I sucked it up and made a beeline for the warp zones again. I did this maybe ten or fifteen times and just started using save states after each world. Sorry! It was really boring to keep playing the same level over and over again. The All Stars version actually lets you restart from the beginning of whichever world you died on instead of returning you to 1-1, which is the main reason I believe it’s the superior version.

My biggest complaints are that the game can be frustratingly punishing. I feel like unless you’re really scouring each and every coin and block in this game for extra lives, it gets in the way of the fast-paced platforming. Getting to the later worlds is no small feat but failing to learn enemy/environments in the paltry amount of attempts allotted to players and being booted back to World 1-1 can feel really mean and a little cheap!

Also, the Hammer Brothers. I’ve never been able to figure out these enemies. I understand them a little better now (they can only throw a maximum of around 6 hammers before they pause I believe) but these guys are real pains in the neck anyways. Apparently there’s hidden blocks in World 8-3 that can give you the powerups you need to transform into Fire Mario, which would definitely make the penultimate encounters with them easier, but there should still be a consistently more approachable strategy when dealing with them. It just feels like the game is going out of its way to inconvenience you instead of providing a fun or interesting challenge.

Overall though, I think Super Mario Bros. has aged remarkably well. These games are classics for a reason, after all!

Even so, the ridiculous difficulty and tedium of returning to the start of the game once you run out of lives did put a sour taste in my mouth. Even Mega Man felt relatively balanced (in terms of letting players retry levels after game over) until the very last level, where I think the difficulty goes way overboard.

Maybe you’ll get more out of this than I did. Either way I think you should play the All Stars version instead.