and i thought ddlc was obnoxious. wonderful everyday is an abysmally written shock factor focused cheese-fest that thinks itself smarter than what its philosophical sludge mouthpieced through cartoonish characters genuinely is. wrap all that up with some irony poisoning, pretentious characters, too much self awareness, and pure honest-to-god ego-stroking... and you have this visual novel. sit through four hours of trope jokes and time wasting to sit through another four of chunibyo philosophy and contrivances. dialogue that could be said in three messages are spent on thirty. the game actually thinks you've invested in its characters. if it's supposed to get better, eight hours is a poor cost of admission and i won't spend another minute.

what a frustrating read.

sitting at the top of a hill littered with 2010s western independent charmers with hamfisted attempts at satire, post-modernism, genre critique, societal reflection and subversive storytelling is this crown jewel; the crème de la crème example of the self-serving haughty pretentiousness of an entire generation of would-be internet geniuses scrolling through tv tropes page by page in hopes to form contrarian opinions on popular media based on the talking points and consensuses of other people. if you're of a certain age demographic, you know this person - the one who parrots the opinions of your nostalgic critics and mr. enters as if the information they siphoned by lazing about youtube in search of a personality might be enough to make someone go, 'geez, this guy KNOWS his stuff' without having to go through the effort of formulating their own thoughts, or even worse, having to experience the media they're responding to the response of firsthand.

doki doki literature club stands as an indulgence of saturated moe-era anime tropes under the guise of a critique of the wikipedia plot summaries of KEY, ryukishi07 and type-moon games without having the slightest bit of humility or self-awareness in its execution. it, its creator, and its audience herald itself as some massive deconstruction of the visual novel form, when in actuality it's about in line with the actuality of what it's criticizing as yiik is with jrpgs. there is no metatextual subversion to be had. doki doki is a children's birthday magician - a couple of flashy tricks capable of fooling someone who doesn't know how ren'py works, but beyond its cheap parlor tricks which might give the astute horror mastery of, say, happy tree friends a run for its money, the title lacks substance, it lacks any form of personality, and it lacks the competence to warrant these mistakes in the face of a greater picture or experience.

i won't even dip into the implications the creator has made about how this game is apparently a very real and serious approach to topics such as self-harm and abuse - as a survivor of both i find these claims bordering on insanity - but i will offer the benefit of a doubt and suggest that maybe this is a product of genuine, ineffable incompetence and misjudgment... rather than one of deep-rooted pretention and narcissism. you could get the exact same experience intersplicing five nights at freddy's jumpscare reaction videos, one of the upteenth saw sequels, and nyan neko sugar girls as one would have playing doki doki literature club, but at the least, the former is shocking, entertaining and funny when it intends to be. do your wallet a favor and pass on this one - and yes, i know it's free.

For everyone who played Resident Evil 4 and said "wow I wish this game was bad" oh boy do I have a game for you! This game adds literally nothing to its predecessor, at first glance they seem like the same game which isn't an inherently bad game there are lots of good asset reusing sequels out there and Resident Evil 4 is a great game so this should be good right? Well it's not, the gameplay is not fun the partner mechanic seems neat until you realise that the ai is so stupid that half of your deaths will be from your partner killing themselves. The story is uninteresting and complete nonsense ( even for Resident Evil standards which isn't an even remotely realistic series )

A lot of people here have been filtered by the levels with ghosts and ghouls, to which i say: Lol.

Real shit though, this is a good game, would be the only good game ever made if Thief II wasn't a Masterpiece Of Time. This is my favorite game ever though out of pure nostalgia, I played this one for hours mastering it, listening to the incredible drum'n'bass ost, and getting immersed in the INCREDIBLE storyline. The pacing is godlike, and the escalation to the incredible finale is so well-earned. Thief Gold fucks up this pacing by adding in 2 of the worst levels ever (thieves guild and mage's tower) and one pretty cool level (the opera house.) I wish there was a way to just play The Dark Project as originally intended but there is a cheat to just skip levels. Do NOT play the Thieves Guild it is like 3 fucking hours long.

It's moody, atmospheric, immersive, you can spend hours getting lost in the world and when you get up to use the restroom you'll feel like you just stepped out of VR. it's so good and the developers should be allowed to legally kill one person of their choice each as reward for working on it.

this game blew me away so hard that i genuinely had to reconsider my feelings on uchikoshi's other work in response. if i didn't have the attachment to ever17's best cast members and its final route that i do i might actually bump it down a peg because remember11 is genuinely all that much better. that said, with r11 itself and supplementary material from the game and interviews with the team under my belt, i feel satisfied in saying i understand what uchikoshi et al were doing here. and for all those who claim this game is unfinished? even if that were literally the case, in execution, this is the peak of uchikoshi's powers. outside of the mere complaints that i wish the game included documentation like the official timeline and interviews in some form of re-release, and the difficulty of achieving some of its TIPS, remember11 is a damn near flawless experience. in keeping my reviews here largely spoiler-free, i can't exactly dissect my feelings about the meaning of the game or my personal takeaway here - but what i will say is that uchikoshi achieves on a meta and post-modernist level here what many seemingly fail to years down the line. a downright masterpiece and i genuinely don't see how the fuck he could possibly outdo what he did here. i have to admit, 999 continues to seem like an even greater drop, much as i like it, in comparison.