[post-25th ward face] haha ummmm yea!

first thing to get out of the way: the presentation here is a beast, even by grasshopper's standards. if it weren't for killer7's audio design i'd call 25w their aesthetic peak, so it follows then that this is some of the coldest atmosphere in games ever. you'd think the original silver case was the mobile game.

i mentioned in my flower sun and rain review that i expected 25th ward to be a "return to the grime" after the vacation away, but it turns out that's not entirely the case. 25 coming after 24 implies sequentiality, certain concepts and people do make a return, but the 25th ward--both the game and the setting--won't provide as much continuity as you might assume. in fact it will at many points try to shatter that continuity, and then dare you to look for it anyway. the 25th is influenced by the 24th, its a more rigidly enforced and even more claustrophobic city box, but its acceleration and sterility also makes for a keener sense of meditation on itself from so many angles, honing on in not just the city-net idea but also on the dynamics of surveillance, identity within gender/work/metafiction, exorcising the past, anachronistic reflection on the work from the authors, and games and the player-character.

this is best felt in the interactive space of the game, hugely improved and more considered than its direct predecessor. tsc tries to connect urbanization with cold unfeeling logic by having you solve codes to unlock doors and shit, but they are too infrequent and don't have much behind them beyond the numbers and ciphers themselves. 25w by comparison utilizes wizardry-esque navigation thru indoor hallway mazes, sex chat as repetitive dialogue trees, and constant password/pin entering (i don't make a lot of comparisons to fsr but this element feels the most like that game) to hone in on tsc's original thesis, expressing it more starkly and confidently. one really vivid example for me being when you are dropped into an apartment complex of four 7 floor buildings with 10 rooms per floor, in order to find a man hiding out in one of those 280 rooms. the "city" has been crunched down to "the apartment building" as a database, dehumanized yet also video gamey, onto itself; your partner is a "searcher" who can feel out where he is, so you search by building/disk, then by floor/folder, in order to target a piece of data that is a person.

that said i really had to think over this one, i practically immediately replayed it to sort feelings on it. tsc has the clearest sense of "character development"--how i took it anyway--guiding it and concludes on a more directly emotional note, and the interplay between its two scenarios feels the most effective compared to 25w's further and further divergences between its scenarios. BUT 25w is much tighter its in thematic construction, managing to be ballsier and THE most weapons-grade cryptic shit without completely toppling its jenga tower, and its more fun to think about after the fact in some ways. your preferral of tsc or 25w may depend on, at the risk of oversimplifying what its doing, how willing you are to accept characters that are more seemingly static in their personality, or at least foggier (the big exception being in matchmaker, imo the weakest scenario that feels unfinished by its end but is enjoyable on its own terms for having the most bluntly dynamic arc for its characters) for the sake of interrogating their role in the world. in many cases the players perception of them changing with their understanding of the story is what matters, and that is admittedly used to great effect with further readings. but its difficult to say how i mean this kind of thing exactly

i was ready to call it my least favorite of the trilogy after first finishing it but now it may be slightly better than tsc? im still not 100% sure where to place this, other than that i know fsr was basically predetermined to be my favorite so i can say its not at that level for me, but ultimately all three games are bangers so yeah. did my best to make a review that wouldn't need a spoiler-tag but my god at this point i am just constipated to get into this more

its ok! not changing my life or anything, some of the puzzles overstay their welcome and its sometimes too transparently oversentimental to get all that invested in (it has the funny talking skeleton thats become the mandated source of levity for sad indie games with jokes) but its gorgeous and comfy and has some of that good freeware angst to it without being a total downer. sometimes youre just in the mood for that!

e: kind of eh for how shallow it is in retrospect but i guess i was in the mood for it at the time?? like having a very specific craving for gas station food

the combination of the aggressive sugary sweet vibes in this game and the inexplicable full english dub and subtitle options, which include some guy doing a cartman impression, honest to god made me feel like i was playing some fake game invented for the creepypasta im the victim in or something. not to be "childhood fucked up" reddit over a cute children's game w some p cool style on its own terms but i dont know how else to emphasize how bizarre it is that this came to be, and there is hardly any info on how it happened. just popped out of the aether to be actually scarily ahead of its time???

its true that you dont really need to play the first pathologic to play this one, its a remake of 1/3rd of the original (as of this writing, please god let ipl be able to release on the other two thirds in due time e: lost interest in really pushing for that after seeing accusations against director nikolai dybowski of ephebophilia https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KeKKptAkn1D662UZYdWWg-mr16YbYK-S/view) with some pretty major differences more than it is much of a sequel. but playing the first several years ago, specifically doing just a bachelor run in 1 with the original weird translation and then going to haruspex in 2, really affected how i experienced this.

i originally came to the town on gorkhon as a pompous city slicker suddenly faced with an alien culture, being forced to discard certain "facts", though perhaps not enough. with so little making sense, i followed the lead of the town's idealists perhaps too closely, only out of trusting the most friendly and hospitable people i see out of the gate like a newborn baby. some people died and i felt responsible. back then i took this as a compelling game that was horribly broken, so i often cheated. why not right? the game being so buggy vindicated me, so if its too cruel then why not fall back on an out, to move things forward? why not noclip for a bit, in the interest of finding immortality? its only logical.

then, in the second go at it, i became shaman turned doctor trapped between two worlds, one of reason and one of mystery. i thought i knew the town, things about it were definitely familiar, but the years i spent away from it changed it and made me less confident in my memory. everything felt too foreign to be recognizable, but also too recognizable to be foreign. some of the people i knew back then were now indifferent strangers, others resented or lamented that i left them in a way that made them more than strangers, even if they seemed like they were before. i spent alot of time trying to get in these people's good graces again, and occasionally even trying to check in on ones i failed before, the ghosts from a past life. i let unfortunate mistakes and disasters i couldn't foresee happen...well most of the time. i realized playing this time that i can't try to save everybody, i shouldn't cheat, i should sometimes let logic fall by the wayside, for better and for worse, for some greater understanding of how a world can breathe and choke. but i didn't want kids to die. pathologic 2 told me that that was my weakness, but also my strength.

also, maybe this is unethical to say in terms of faithful translation, but props to the localization team for mixing in that mystical quality of the machine translated english in the first translation of the first game. i want to give classic hd a real shot sometime and im not gonna say "its so much better when i have no idea what im being told to do", but idk. its a little too direct, and it feels wrong to not be called an onion

so badly want to dispel certain preconceptions of this game--ones set by some who dismiss it ("its a vn with no real agency/choices dont do anything") AND ones set by some who gas it up ("the next great american novel" canonization discourse). so badly want to just talk about the many little optional-to-contend-with details ive come to love in this game that's so dizzingly full of them, interpretative or intertextual or something snuck into the code or otherwise, that i immediately forgive it for not caring much abt how indulgent it must look. so badly want to express the episodic experience as bad and good with the excruciating waits, tantalizing peeks of a world that crosses the boundary of the game space into other mediums and irl, and having a closer understanding of a work that changes from part to part, on an almost exponential scale, with the shifting priorities and moods of the creators--and the ideology of obsolescence that extends to both unity as an engine and the game's themes and perceived relevance--over time. and so badly want to talk about my own cowriting of this story that became a mirror into myself; fear of genetic alcoholism, anxieties on separation between "work" and "hobby", the shame of guillibly falling into something i couldn't really foresee but well you shouldve, the worry of constantly forgetting, the difficulty of accepting records and archives and memorials as washed away and lost, for me all of these and more are in it. but ky0 sprawls in my imagination so far and wide that its so intimidating, with so much i want to address.

maybe ill just lose any sense of restraint someday and spread out thoughts on the other nine or ten entries of acts/interludes that count as kentucky route zero on this website, because its an anthology of smaller games strung together at its heart and there's something to say about each element on its own. or maybe ill express how much i love the game in an actually useful and productive way instead. but for now ill settle with saying this is my favorite of them all. sometimes i forget why but i only have to go back to it, slowly replaying it all and loving the finale so much more the second time around, and then i remember. i realized why i love games most of all, after forgetting for a while, because of this one.

replayed on switch and imo, pc is the slightly better option if you got one that can handle it. i dont think its that demanding but idk how the complete version's specs are, plus on pc you can "hack" into the save files by opening them in a text editor and see the variables for yourself, becomes another aspect of playing ky0 for me. no idea if other consoles are better or worse.

this, majora's mask, animal crossing, and sakura momoko no ukiuki carnival are the small handful of games i know of in which my hunch is that they took notes from moon's game design in pretty clear ways, without involvement from moon's team. this is only a theory of mine i can't prove so take that with a grain of salt, but it's funny to me that ghs, a tie-in game to a CG anime, is the one out of these that feels the hardest to ignore for possible love-de-lic influence. it's got a stamina bar/timer to contend with before you need to go to sleep, requires observation of characters' schedules and gathering information on them, and even tries to be meta (if you know anything about the arc of the main narrator in each season of the show, its like that. better handled as a game honestly, though still kinda out-of-place imo).

ghs actually takes that character observation in ldl-likes to its logical conclusion, contextualizing your voyeurism of others with stealth elements. the whole idea is you are snooping on creepy halloween monsters that want to trap you here forever and mock you constantly as they do it, when they arent more indirectly causing you grief, and you want to get some advantage over them. its interesting this kind of format of walk-and-talk rpg-ish adventure game lends itself to a haunted hotel scenario, as a way to inject character-based humor n camp into horror while disempowering you, something that wouldnt be the same with a more straight-laced clock tower approach (there is quite a bit of that in this of course).

and the game itself is pretty decent for what it is too!! fuck getting the souls from tv fish and my son though. you read that right, "my son" is in this and i hate him

an odd one out of suda's ouevre. largely avoids the fixation on violence grasshopper's games are known for, foregoing the hard boiled cybercrime noir of the silver case, the post-9/11 sentai horror bloodbath of killer7, and the sillier nerdfighter grindhouse bloodbath of no more heroes (which would set a pattern followed by most of the studio's subsequent games as bloodbaths, with suda only occasionally as the director. its humor is also pretty close to fsr's at times). tonally very different from these but thematically very familiar, flower sun and rain should be taken as both sequel AND side story at once to tsc, and its very hard to talk about without also bringing up that game, in a way i dont think is as true for the more standalone k7 or nmh. there really is an appeal i'm finally starting to understand with taking tsc, this, and likely 25th ward--which is next up for me--as a trilogy with its own arc.

the silver case itself, as the starting point, is obsessed with the internet and the city, finding a formal link between the two. it's in the clacking text boxes, the film windows, the backgrounds with rotating numbers and flashing shapes and out of context phrases, altogether an abstracted space of words and pictures that feels like website presentation. its also in the player movement thats restricted to hotspots with rigid pathing befitting of street grids, apartment buildings, your home that you make the same linear motions in everyday. both feel non-naturalistic and cramped, but that just emphasizes the experience we have with these spaces. surrounded by cold geometric cells online and off, everyone so close together yet so far away. it gets exhausting, being unable to find ourselves outside of these boxes, to get some picture of truth. the game recognizes the need to reach for the light within yourself, outside of this darkness, but what would that even look like?

fsr shows a world "outside" by taking the reverse approach. your movement is "freer", your sense of space perceivable with the player character's own two legs in relation to analog control. hotel guests, staff, and people of the island get in your way to ask for "help", more or less, with tasks that are nonsensical in their solution and often ridiculous in their premise too, but the experience of it creates a sense you are working for a net good out of mondo's own developing kindness. you gain more and more of the world to move in until you eventually feel your sense of self stretch across long roads and pathways--literally as the in-game guidebook itself says. you can check bathrooms, take unnecessary detours, hear the rolling waves and the chirping birds. maybe this is where you can find the light.

but this "naturalistic" feeling of freedom the game allows compared to tsc, however, belies the truth of lospass's paradise as being just as artificial as the 24 wards, in a different way. the puzzles you help others with are just solved with codes based off relevant trivia from a pamphlet, blatantly mechanical logic as it can get (reminds me a little of riven, though the juxtaposition of natural and unnatural here is more unmistakably intentional). the staff hide themselves behind friendly smiles, and some of those you help may be tricking you. the hotel, a temporary place to stay, is the only "living space" you can find. structures feel too new, too slick, to feel some engrained identity behind them. the island lost its own past, perhaps even had it stolen, with whatever it is that looks like "history" you find not necessarily being factual. it goes beyond feeling touristy, it's like people can't really live and be oneself here for all that long.

what i like about flower sun and rain not being a silver case sequel in name is that its another way the game frames itself as an escape from the confines of the wards--meaning then that 25th ward may be a return to the grime so to speak, to confront that space again. fsr is trying to forget the past that built it, only to find a new kind of artifice that reminds you of the one you knew before. this doesn't mean the game is saying its escapism is ultimately useless and selfish though, because when you're in the dark it might be a matter of needing to see something different, anything else, to gain a better understanding of yourself and your past that made you yourself. new memories tinged by a new sun, even as artificial light, might be whats needed to really move forward.

loved doing math homework and taking daily jogs on my tropical vacay. ps the walking around wasn't even as bad as it was made out to be, you guys are just weak and need to break your brain like i did with aimlessly backtracking for no real reward in other games that have even larger and emptier worlds

the epitome of what halo was meant to be in the devs minds after halo 1, with its scope finally matching the product, but it only made me realize i didn't want that. like imagine being a teenager and getting to the part with TWO scarabs!!! and somehow feeling nothing. it might be good to come back to but i genuinely do not remember much about the campaign in this one, compared to the isolated feeling of 1 and that twist in 2 (not to say 2 is all that great but i do at least remember liking the campaign's best moments enough to come back to it). its like too much of a good thing to me.

probably was the game to make me slowly start to realize 7th gen shooters weren't gonna be my thing, and that games on this graphical quality actually kinda hurt my eyes.