4238 Reviews liked by moschidae


people need to realise that in 2024 Shenmue is more interesting than it is good.

There are many mysteries in this world. What cosmic force put us here on this planet? How deep does the ocean go? And most importantly: Why do Shenmue fans hype their games up so damn much?

Shenmue is secretly a fusion of 20 Questions and the longest game of Telephone ever conceived. 80% of your time in Shenmue is spent doing two things: walking around and asking random people about your current objective. Rinse and repeat until you get lucky and talk to the correct person, granting you a new thing to ask the whole town about. There is damn near nothing else to do outside of these two things. Buy gachapons, practice punching air in an empty parking lot, play a couple arcade games, or gamble your life savings away at the slot machines. If you're not interested in these meager side activities, then too bad! Ryu's not gonna diverge from his unbreakable circadian rhythm, because you can't go to sleep and move on to the next day until 8:00 PM in-game. Ryu would rather stand motionless in his room, like a statue, than go to bed.

The next 10% is spent on combat. Of the 3D fighters I've dabbled in, I've managed to neglect Virtua Fighter. I'm going to guess that this game plays nothing like it though. It's extremely stiff, inputs feel inconsistent at best, and your worst enemy is the damn camera. You can't control it, nor can you control what enemy Ryo is facing, making the process of picking your fights feel nigh impossible. The game neglects having much combat at all until the last third, at which point it eventually hits you with the 70 Man Battle. This is a 15 minute long ordeal of nothing but fodder enemies, until you hit the very last one, a boss who will most likely kill you and make you experience the monotony again. I speak from experience. On the other hand, I beat Gollum using nothing but the low sweep kick move over and over, and that was pretty funny.

The last 10% is (and final third of the game) is spent on the god damn forklift. If there's one thing I can commend Shenmue on, it's how it perfectly depicts the 9-to-5 wagecuck grindset like nothing else I've ever experienced in a virtual medium. Your first time on the forklift will feel like magic, a sudden shift from your mundane lifestyle. Next morning, you'll even be greeted by the glorious forklift race! And then you start to do your work, and the magic fades, like it was never there to begin with. That's because it never was there, the forklift job is work. You wake up, go to your job, (do the damn race,) work your shift, get off at a time when nearly everywhere is closed, go home, and play Sega Saturn games far past your bedtime. That last sentence describes my personal lifestyle in a way that hits a bit too close to home, but that's how it feels ingame. When I come home from work, I play video games to de-stress and escape the mundanity of real life, but coming home to Shenmue has legitimately kept me trapped in my work mindset. That in itself is one hell of an achievement.

People talk of this game being "revolutionary" back in 1999, and I see where they're coming from. Detailed items you can pick up and observe, a town of NPCs with their own daily routines, voiced dialogue for anyone you can talk to, a full day/night cycle, in-game weather that could match the real-life weather by using an internet connection, the list goes on. It makes for a very impressive tech demo, but it never clicked with me as an engaging video game. Anyways, I can hear the Shenmue fanbase coming to run me down with their forklifts. I'm not certified, so excuse me while I run away from a potential OSHA violation.

This is an interesting sequel. It’s a much MUCH better single player experience, I had a ton of fun, but there are much much less minigames. And that’s odd to me because this one is actually multiplayer, unlike the first. There’s only 4 and while they’re very fun, I had a lot more fun just running in the main world and making friends with pokemon. The ways you make them are way more interesting too, lots more stuff to do. Story was also oddly dark, I liked it. The new playable characters you get are cool but you’ll just mainly use Pikachu and Oshawott. Far and away the best. I’d recommend this just as much as the first if not more, it was super fun.

I feel like, intellectually, I only have nice things to say about Not-Bloodborne Kart. Its got incredible presentation, with a mix of well-planned and well-choreographed cinematics as well as a faithful but lively PS1 user experience. The inclusion of guns and combat in a kart racer feels pretty solid, managing to avoid feeling unintuitive or janky in like 99.9% of situations you can find yourself in. The kart racing itself is mostly competent, I find it difficult to complain about the game itself - and certainly I find this to be a better platform for Liliths creativity than Bloodborne Demake was.

But man…. something about it makes me feel slightly hollow. I guess the best way I could phrase this is: its still not a very exciting use of Bloodborne. Yeah, its Not-Bloodborne now and yeah, its mostly a comedy game, but theres also attempts at staging tension and bravado with Nightmare Karts facsimile of Bloodbornes narrative and..... idk. It just leaves you wondering why some parts were so important and worth being tributized and other parts werent so much. No Yahar’gul? No forest race track? Shadows of Yharnam but no Rom? No Amygdalas? You got Astral Clocktower and Maria but no mfing Fishing Hamlet?? Theres just weird representation choices here - but thankfully the humor takes the opportunity to incorporate quite a few. Church Giants squeezing into a kart or the fact that the Bloated Pig is a vehicle are excellent decisions.

In fact despite some of my reservation I actually have to give it a full star exclusively for the fact that, in addition to Nicolas J Micolash’s kart being just him running like a lunatic on foot, his death scream is also like a 15 second long reverb-laiden howl that can be heard no matter where you are on the track. It just absolutely floors me every single time I hear it like "ooooooooooooyyYYYAAAAARGHAHHHHHHHH"

I'd fuck those lightswitches and I'm not even going to pretend otherwise.

Anyway, OWB doesn't have much to chew on, so this'll be brief.

Humor is the name of the game here and they've unfortunately put it on the same shelf where the other parts of New Vegas put themes and actual writing. I feel like everyone's opinion of OWB is always going to be coloured by how well the humor lands for them, and for me OWB's never has.
There is a token attempt made to add some depth to the story - which is debatably about losing one's humanity through clinging to the future in opposition to Dead Money being the same but with the past - but it gets about as much focus as the Lobotomite NPCs do.
In many ways the 'story' is a microcosm of New Vegas actual; someone took your brain, go get it back, oops more complicated story. Except, since this DLC is about an hour or four long depending on how inquisitive you are, the format results in it feeling like an anticlimax? I have vivid memories of younger Mira being deeply confused that the DLC ended.

At the very least I do somewhat appreciate how tightly the developers cling to the pulp sci-fi influences. The LAER and Sonic Emitter in this DLC are better "b-movie alien weapons" than Mothership Zeta's attempt at such in the last game. Same goes for the Trauma Harnesses, the Stealth Suit, and the other doo-dads hanging around. It's a nice degree of aesthetic coherence that I don't typically expect from Gamebryo games.

That said, as a relatively neutral aside: Some of the asset reuse from Fallout 3 is hilarious. Tranquility Lane is reused for Higgs Village - interiors and all - while an entire cell of Fallout 3's Citadel is reused for a lab. There's an entire cave which is just ripped from somewhere in Little Lamplight and, in general, a lot of this DLC reuses Fallout 3 stuff more than anywhere else in the game. I don't mind, it's just funny.

Really, the only emotions this DLC stokes in me aren't even related to Old World Blues. Instead, I only feel things when I think about how this DLC reflects on the rest of NV.

OWB is an odd prequel to Dead Money. Traces of Christine and Elijah's conflict dot the landscape, telling their story in whatever dysfunctional order you find them in. Admittedly, I don't actually like most of this? NV isn't the most subtle masterwork of CRPGs, but it knew when to leave some things up to interpretation or in subtext. Almost all of the stuff relating to DM in OWB amounts to little more than saying the implicit part out loud. I know it was probably planned - the Big MT is mentioned in NV and Elijah mentions coming here a few times in DM - but it still feels very condescending.

But also... I find the repeated assertions that the Big MT are responsible for so many of the evils that dot the landscape of the Mojave to be kind of annoying. It's an ongoing theme in NV that you can't exactly pin all evil on one person or institution, so having the Big MT pop up and go "Hi! We made Cazadors and Nightstalkers!" is eye-rolling. I'd call it un-needed, and I say that as a person that hates being a prescriptive critic. Not helping matters is that these reveals pretty much exist solely as the butt of jokes involvin Dr Borous and not much else?

Oh, and before I forget: I hate the chat with the brain. People unjustly lambast Lonesome Road for "forcing a backstory on the player" (and they're wrong to do so) but IMO forcing the Courier to be an obnoxious redditor is even worse.

I came into OWB expecting it to be an unremarkable stepping stone until I start Lonesome Road, but I was amazed to realize just how unremarkable it is.

Ah well, time to end it.




the way this leverages hyakkimaru hunting down 48 demons to recover his 48 body parts to slowly dole out more and more features is so system shock coded. it's soo good. killing a boss in the prologue and seeing the game transition from black&white to full colour cos you reclaimed your eye is absolute tip top stuff. being forced to amble as slowly as possible before you get your leg... yes... yes... I love this. this was made for me. I am the one person on earth who likes that you can't recover from knockdowns without an ear

I'm so on board with everything here that I don't care that the hitboxes largely range from active to lingering to humungous to vertically infinite. don't care that the maps are gigantic and full of nothing but enemies and swords like it's drakengard. you bet your ass I hunted down every last yokai to get my chakra and lymph nodes back even tho I still don't understand what half the stats do. I'm vibing man, who cares

it's cool that the common moral thruline across every story beat is that those who desire disproportionate wealth and power should probably be killed. also cool that one of the major metroidvania upgrades you get half way thru the game is controller vibration. sega was on some astral shit with this one; if someone told me modern camera controls were hidden behind an optional boss I'd nod like it was the most obvious thing I ever heard

as a reimagining of the manga it oscillates between playing stuff 1:1 and riffing on the source material in a way only a 2004 hack-n-slash called BLOOD WILL TELL ever could. the new twist reminds me of the scene in adaptation where the goofy nicolas cage twin describes his screenplay for a film called "The Three" about a killer, victim, and cop who all turn out to be the same person with multiple personality disorder. it's such a dumb ass Whoa Dude way of answering questions that don't matter, and it rules

sick ass game

you flap 360 degrees and walk away

incredibly solid, fun, and charming but i can't help but feel like the monsters series of spinoffs are missing an undefinable "something" that the mainline series has and it makes it really hard for me to click with them. there's a lot thats good in these games to the point that i'll have fun with them for a dozen hours or so but not so much that i'm ever compelled to even get close to the finish line

Well, I really liked the game as a kid (unlike the movie, I found it pretty underwhelming) and yeah in my rating today there is a nostalgia bonus.

The soundtrack is, in my opinion, pretty fine. Nothing special, but not bad. It might get a bit annoying to hear the same tracks over and over.
Like your typical move tie-in game on the GBA it uses stills from movie and text boxes to tell the story. Interesting enough that the intro and end of the game are low res versions of movie scenes.

The gameplay is more or less a typical platformer where you solve smaller puzzles with each characters abilities, collect totems and go to the end of the level. Sometimes there is a hunting level where you have to escape from the brother of the protagonist.

[Estimated read time: 3 million days]

Paradise Killer perfectly captures the vibe of occupying an abandoned digital world. The constant shuffle of the in-world radio, walls lined with sloppily designed ads for in-game products, the rapid cycle of day and night rolling light through tightly spaced social hubs, now left empty but no less ready to host a party than they ever were. Island 24 is not unlike an emptied Second Life instance, where the digital buildings and streets are preserved and timeless and the only decay is interest.

I like to hop into my old Second Life account sometimes and just throw myself into random worlds with the specific intent of drinking in that atmosphere. There's something about that experience that is faintly evocative of liminal spaces, though not quite. It's liminally-adjascent, as the function of these spaces is well understood, yet not without a fog of melancholy hanging over those worlds like the ghost of a dead friend group. Occasionally, you'll find a world that is still somewhat active, kept alive by a tight nit community that remains ever dedicated to communicating in an increasingly inconvenient way. I observe them like one would animals in a zoo, from the bushes of a bimbofication server, just... learning, listening.

The reasons for Island 24's abandonment are of course far more sinister. It's the end result of a ritualistic culling of Paradise's lower class, conducted at the behest of a syndicate of certifiable freaks to appease their alien gods. This usually doesn't happen in games like Second Life or VR Chat, though I am convinced that (like Paradise) their economies are sustained by kidnapping victims who are forced to make bullshit meshes all day.

A Second Life murder mystery is so targeted towards my specific interests that my flawless 5/5 score might be owed in part to predisposition. I think it does a great job of packing the feeling of exploring those desolate spaces into a focused and full experience. It also has an incredibly esoteric reference to Resident Evil 5's egg duplication economy, something I only ever see mentioned in conversations between myself and Larry Davis, so that might just be a clue pointing to a larger conspiracy, of which I'm the target. At least that's the truth I've divined.

And truth is exactly what the disgraced and exiled former head of the Paradise Psycho Unit, Lady Love Dies (born in The Longest Tower, Britain in AD 1000 under the sign of Kiss Me To The Moon) is here to provide. Called back into action after the murder of Paradise's ruling council, Lady and the player need to build a compelling case and arrest a culprit so the few remaining inhabitants of the island's exalted upper crust can migrate to Perfect 25. Said upper crust is almost unanimously convinced the murder was committed by Henry Division, a citizen hosting a demonic presence who was found at the scene of the crime with the council's blood in his belly, but early evidence suggests a greater conspiracy. And why not? The Syndicate's interpersonal drama has long since played a role in the rise and fall of previous island simulations, and Henry might just be yet another consequence of their scheming.

Paradise Killer repeatedly makes clear that truth is a construct informed by facts but not beholden to them, and that what objectively happened is unknowable. You'll run around the island picking up evidence, reviewing crime scenes, pulling phone records and interviewing suspects, but how you assemble the facts and what truth you ultimately craft is the real meat of the game. Go for a completionist run like I did, and you'll find that there's enough dirt to pin everyone to the wall, with the strength of your case hinging entirely on how you present it in court. You can also implicate multiple suspects in a variety of crimes, so if you really want to you could execute everyone by presenting the ultimate, unassailable case that these dudes all suck.

Well, except for Crimson Acid and Dr. Doom Jazz. I just slept with them instead.

This also means you can wrap the game up at any time, even right after starting it by accept Henry as the scapegoat, something the remaining syndicate members are all too happy to go along with as it's the truth least disruptive to their power structure. You can spend exactly as much time exploring Island 24 as you want, which for me meant playing until I stopped seeing unique dialog.

Just as Perfect 25 is not the perfect island simulation it's purported to be, Paradise Killer is not a perfect video game, even if my 5/5 might lead you to think so. Some people just aren't going to have the patience to run around apartment blocks looking at discarded pull tabs for a crumb of lore, or waste hours drinking in the sad mundanity of the enslaved working class. Like I said, I feel uniquely predisposed to liking this one, so even the elements that were more akin to a collecathon or walking sim still got something out of me. I got every Starlight skin, I solved the mystery of the holy seals, and I put together a case that for a game with no "true ending" by design still felt as conclusive as it could get. I poured over my case file multiple times, I gave it serious and deep thought. I am the Investigation Freak, and that is why this is a perfect 5. For me, specifically.

BUT IS IT A SUMMAH GAME?

IT IS TIME TO START THE TRIALS AND CROSS INTO THE ABYSS OF SUMMAH!

Considering how often characters talk about how oppressively hot Island 24 is, right down to the heat of the pavement, I'm not sure a trial is even necessary. It is a tropical paradise flanked on all sides by an endless expanse of ocean and blanketed in palm trees. The haughty statues, gold trimmed marble buildings and obsidian obelisks adorn 24 with a 90s posh that really ties it all together. It's the most overtly Summah-coded game I've played since Mario Sunshine, but to not investigate would be a dereliction of duty, negligence of the most grotesque order, and just plain lazy.


I put Paradise Killer up against the Summah Index and the results were astounding. At 141 points, it is the highest rated Summah Game yet, but because the scale cannot exceed 100, I do have to round it down to a more solid figure. Nevertheless, it is a perfect score. Paradise Killer has a lot to say about the follies of reaching for perfection, but I fucking scalded my whole entire sole off walking barefoot outside the citizen housing block, and that was before the reality folding drive sent off a radiation blast that cooked me alive.

Now I'm a ghost on a beach in a failed simulation, rattling my chains and moaning "Ooooh, I can't move on... until you have a Summah!"

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I don't typically like to think of games as "products" and I know this is super reductive but the entire team I was playing this all I could think was "ALL OF THIS FOR $20??" and this became more astonishing to me every chapter I played. Seriously, this felt like eating at a 5 star buffet for cheap.

Im having a hard time figuring out where to start in unpacking my thoughts on Nine Sols, their pullulation of which make them hard to grasp . Im going to try coming at this in a more procedural way, starting with more superficial things I could say and digging deeper from there. The most useless thing I could say about Nine Sols is: its one of the best games Ive ever played in an era of some of the best games ever made.

The next thing I want to say that is a little clumsy but I dont think I can leave out: Nine Sols is Hollow Knight if, instead of “Dark Souls meets Metroid”, it was 30% Metroid and 70% Sekiro. This isnt a shallow comparison, Nine Sols directly shares some conventions with Hollow Knight (map acquisition, charm analogue, pogo-style platforming) but with a reduction in the platforming and map complexity in favor of more dedicated combat systems. As a Metroidvania curmudgeon, this ratio of influences suits me so much more.

Heres the rub tho: very few games even begin to come close to Fromsofts level of quality and combat spectacle, especially Sekiros - so its in fact breathlessly exciting that Nine Sols, a game made by a dev who previously only made horror games, manages to stand shoulders with titans and deliver some of the most badass combat experiences in gaming to date. Part of what drives me the most in video games is “gamefeel”, a term used somewhat nebulously but which for me refers to the experience of moving around in the game world. Nine Sols has a sense of speed and momentum, youre zipping back and forth around your enemy leaving them pockeyed with explosions in your wake; youre leaping into the air to bounce and fling yourself between the deflections of your enemies attacks like some sort of lethal bird poised to swoop down and deliver a flurry of blows in every brief window you can find. To me this is like opium, the humming nirvanaous frequency my mind vibrates at while it processes the complex array of swords and knives being thrown my way is the closest thing to euphoria Ive ever experienced without a heavy prescription and I cannot overstate how much I fucking love that shit.

I feel like I need to expound on this. Theres just...... something about the sensation of being airborne in a video game. When its done right theres a mezmerizing and immensely satisfying rhythm to sustaining the lofting of your character. Its surprising then how rare this is, among action games, how terrified most games are to let you waft and fly around an arena. The crown is left uncontested for Nine Sols as it engineers moments of fluttering aerial jousting, swaying in elliptical lateraluses through your enemies with motions that feel vageuly Tai-Chi. "There is frankly not enough here" cries the man hopelessly addicted to the flow state.

But it wasnt good enough that Nine Sols could exceed my expectations just as an action game, no, Red Candle had to also somehow create a dense, expertly crafted, brilliantly laid-out taoist parable of ambition and suffering. The withholding, secretive style of narrative popularized by the Souls games is fashioned into a faceted character-driven drama in an unexpected and kinda visionary sort of way. Red Candle demonstrates an almost capricious amount of creative range, even somehow figuring out ways to infuse Nine Sols with moments of their horror pedigree. On a kickstarted budget of $420,000 Nine Sols eclipses the stories of AAA games working with 10x the financial backing, hands down, not even close. Who the hell let them cook??? For as excellent as Fromsofts work is, you wanna know one thing their games usually dont do? Make me mfing cry during the ending !! Shout it so people in the back can hear you: “Hurt People hurt people”.

1. There’s something about Silent Hill that makes everyone want to write very wordy explorations of trauma, and like I get it, y’all are queer and flock to the generational trauma game about body horror, guilt and religion like flies to honey (in fact, it’s a testament to the series’ quality as a landmark in the horror genre that people are not weirdly horny about it; a lesser work would be all over nsfw Tumblr tags with that combination of themes); but yea, ultimately that’s never been what I got from those games. Like there’s a good depth of themes to delve into after playing it, but my in-the-moment experience has always been more focused on “damn these games are scary”.

And like, scary in a way that I don’t think any other game has ever been. There’s just something in the framing and structure of Silent Hill, that really “gets me”, in a way that goes beyond the pleasant spooks of most survival horror, and starts veering into borderline unpleasant. To the point that actually going through one of these games takes way more effort than it should for me.

A couple of weeks ago I had this weird nightmare; Like, nothing particularly spooky or meaningful, just some weird thing about getting in a car accident; But upon waking up from it, for a couple of minutes, I was filled with this ominous feeling that something unspeakably horrible was going to happen to me. That there were, in fact, evils beyond our human comprehension in this world. And like, of course it wasn’t (most horrible things that happen to me are fairly speakable), and of course there aren’t (the world is full of evil but it’s fully within our comprehension), but the mix of remembered trauma, general sleepiness and the quiet of the night really enabled all the wrong brain receptors to flare up in that moment. And I dunno, Silent Hill games remind me of that feeling in a way no other game does.

These games really commit to building unsettling and hostile environments in ways that hit pretty much the same wrong brain receptors in me, and while it makes it kinda difficult for me to play them through, it also rules. It’s the small things sometimes, like how, in this case, Silent Hill 4 abruptly cuts to black when going through loading transitions, often placing the transport points way early than you’d expect. That shit’s genius, but it also makes me feel the kind of anxiety that makes me want to die.

2. We talk a lot about how flawed art can still be incredibly appealing and creative despite its structural limitations, but I think that sometimes we fail to understand that there are innate important politics in recognizing where those limitations come from.

Horror itch games are generally limited in their scope and polish because they’re smaller projects, generally from solo devs, often outsider or otherwise marginalized voices. We overlook their technical “flaws” because we value their unique perspective more than we value those other bits that might not feel right (sometimes those other bits not feeling right is actually part of a successful aesthetic and not a “flaw” to be fair, but hold on, I’m going somewhere with this).

The original Silent Hill games are games forever bound to that “flawed” label, and Silent Hill 4 is the poster child for those flaws. Too long, stretches its length with some backtracking escort segments that are more irritating than scary, misplaced focus on combat, etc.; But I think it’s important to recognize that the source of these flaws is very different from what we see in smaller more modern projects.

Silent Hill games were, in the end, mainstream 00s console games, and despite all their genius and structural innovations, they are still clearly trapped in that framework. I am personally much less forgiving of structural flaws derived from this context because, while I want to see more flawed itch horror games, I definitely want to see less stretched, uncommitting, mainstream games.

Some Silent Hill games thrive, despite being locked into having to be early 00s mainstream disc releases, while others, like Silent Hill 4, can’t get there.

This game has some amazing ideas, and some great execution in places. But can’t really make them work in the context of a game that needs to have 10 hours of content.

I don’t feel more scared or anxious when I’m carefully dodging and striking while engaging monsters, that a minute ago were terrifying, in boiler-plate overlong melee combat. I don’t feel more scared or anxious when half of the game length feels like pointless filler (and I’m not only counting the backtrack levels; which could have been fine in moderation). And I don’t feel the need to justify these choices, because they could be avoided if this game was made in a better game industry.

3. This is all to say, I haven’t finished this game. There’s so much I enjoyed from it. So many little details it gets right. But ultimately It started feeling like an unpleasant chore. I watched the rest on YouTube tho and it was neat. Ngl I think the plot is kinda dumb and the environments are not varied and interesting enough to justify its length, but throughout it I was furiously taking notes about the cool shit it does. So that’s definitely worth something.

4. Like, the first door you open in the game leads to a corridor that immediately leaves you facing another door (in first person). It's a small bit of weird and confusing layout that's neat af.

5. This is clearly not what this game committed to, but I'd love to see some similar takes on mundane urban horror. The quiet surreality of hanging out in the apartment and peeping at its surroundings is something I really loved in the opening hours of the game (I'll gladly take recommendations on games with similar vibes as those bits if anyone has any)

6. I feel like I wrote a bunch of words and said nothing here lol. Originally, before I stopped playing the game, I was thinking of writing something about how there's this weird tension in horror games, where they're built to be, on a fundamental level, unpleasant, but they also kinda need to find a hook for the player to keep them playing (and for a lot of games their solution is generally to... just not be unpleasant... which is kinda the coward's way out). I think that would be an interesting thing to talk about... but like... maybe on some other Silent Hill games, cause the break here for me wasn't really about the game being too scary/intentionally unpleasant, and more about me not caring nearly enough about managing my supply of golf clubs to continue playing.

7. I love my Steam Deck, cause it's allowing me to casually go back to a lot of stuff I never had access to as a kid, but Silent Hill is the one time where I really wish I was playing it on a CRT instead. For how cool the Deck's OLED screen is, the jagged-ness of emulators in this case really makes the game lose something over the ominous blurriness of PS2 games played over original hardware.

Maybe, one day, I'll reach the kind of life stability where buying a big-ass CRT TV might make logistical sense. I've kinda been waiting for that moment for a decade though, and life has only gotten More unstable, so y'know, probably not.

Gris

2018

Can probably name a dozen or two other indie games that this feels and looks and acts like, but, I mean, it is not doing those any worse (or better) than any one of those games whose name I put into this hat. Let’s pull one out, now, hm… Oh, it’s She Remembered Caterpillars, a colorful little puzzle game that’s light on story and heavy on themes. Let’s try another, here, um… Ah, yes, it’s Florence, an early Annapurna game that had players engaging with a sweet story using minimal gameplay and sweet, hand-drawn styled graphics. Okay, you get my point. For me, Gris’ biggest deal is that a lot of it feels pretty automatic. This puzzle-platformer is not much of a brain-scratcher or a hand-twitcher. Though, it most definitely stays true to this genre in being designed to entice players to 100% it or try and complete it as fast as possible. There’s a type of game that’s experimenting with little to no UI and trying its hand at guiding the player in ways other than the tried-and-true. I think Gris is interesting, and had curious and thoughtful designers at the helm, but it also feels merely like a stepping stone for a bourgeoning studio. This game was on deck to be crossed off my backlog and I could tell it would be a short stint, so I took some hours out of a vacation day to float through it. Would probably just recommend looking up speedruns for this game. It’ll be just as engaging and probably a bit more exciting, and you’ll see all you’d want to see, anyways.

This seems like a pretty good Aria of Sorrow knock-off. Kind of put off that it isn't a big map but level based. Died on the first boss and super feel the need to try harder, but maybe if I read Shaman King I'll come back.