i'm still not sure if i'm going to play this game again. i'm sure there's probably some true ultimate ending i can get if i bang my head at it for a few more playthroughs, but i loved the ending this game gave me too much to do that i think. it's a good game. the kind of game only the people who made it could've made. it's one of those games where every time it comes up in conversation, the people who have played it before will say "dude, you gotta try it. go in blind. just trust me." and that's a sentiment i will echo here, if you haven't played it i think you should!
in formula, this game is a lot like something like the stanley parable or there is no game. you are being directed by a snarky narrator to do something and given the power to either bark along like a good little dog or be a little shit and do what you want. the premise is simple: there is a princess in the basement of a cabin. if the princess leaves the cabin the world will end and everyone will die. you are here to slay the princess. past this point i'll be spoiling the basic twist of this game.
there are a lot of ways you can act when interfacing with the princess. generally, no matter what you will die. then you are back where you started and you notice what's going on. it's a loop. things are a little different though. in the first encounter, the only voices that spoke were the narrator and the voice of the hero, which could easily be understood as the voice of the character you embody. generally this voice was hesitant to harm any princess, but when it saw the princess behaving strangely became concerned. on the next loop though, you will be joined by a new voice. and holy shit there are so many voices it could be, all depending on how you acted. were you skeptical of everyone and everything? meet the skeptic, here to be accusatory and untrusting of everything around it. did you wait until the princess turned her back to do the deed when nobody looked? well let me introduce you to the opportunist! a smarmy, fence-sitting asshole willing to side with anyone or anything that looks remotely advantageous. do you believe every word the princess says and do anything it takes to save her? well now the voice of a dumb asshole desperate to fuck her lives in your ear. it quickly started to remind me of disco elysium, with these different voices giving me new ideas and dialogue choices. it's a really well done system and i'm impressed they pulled it off so seamlessly. also props to the incredible voice actor who plays all of them as well as the narrator, jonathan sims, who i guess did some kind of magnus chase fan-podcast or something.
you're not the only one who changes each loop though. the princess remembers everything each time too, and the way you chose to treat her changes her. stabbed her in the back? she hides in the corner, baring her fangs. saved her like a damsel in distress? now she lays with a hand to her forehead waiting for the brave knight to come rescue her. you get the idea. it makes for a story you always feel like you're steering even if you can't be sure where it will end up. these loops will end though. as soon as you see the princess leave the cabin. to explain further would give away the grander meta-narrative of the game and i don't want to delve into that, but i promise you it's very interesting.
as much as i enjoyed this game, it did almost lose me a couple of times. it's biggest issue is it can come across as far too cute. the player's relationship with the narrator can veer pretty far into stanley parable territory, and as much as i love this game i would get really frustrated at every argument with the narrator turning into comedy bickering of the same tone. i wanted to immerse myself in this game in a way that felt counter to that. at the end of the day, this content only showed up because i chose the "obstinate video game player" dialogue choices, but i think often the game is worse for including those choices at all, even if they can lead to some pretty interesting places.
the thing that assured me i would love this game were some of the first words on the screen.
"Whatever horrors you may find in these dark spaces, have heart and see them through. There are no premature endings. There are no wrong decisions. There are only fresh perspectives and new beginnings. This is a love story."
it makes an impressive piece of prose and a genuinely useful guide for how to play the game. you don't have to worry about wrong choices or missed opportunities. you will have time to explore and make mistakes without severe consequences. but you don't have forever. in the end, it's not a loop. it's a spiral.

the story of this game is like no other one. in 2016 the company responsible for some of the most strange and heartfelt interpretations of videogames i’ve seen decided to make a game using some of the most evil, exploitative monetization tactics ever devised. it feels surreal at times. it’s like watching papyrus and sans trying to sell me nft’s or something. granted, the game was rereleased in 2019 as an actual videogame that you buy once with money (this is the version i will be effectively reviewing.) despite a few hitches i think that it made the transition into real-game-hood quite elegantly all things considered and i praise the efforts of any studio willing to convert live service games into something that can be meaningfully experienced past the game’s lifespan. it’s still weird as fuck though.
i’ll tell you right now, the game is good. if you like the writing in moon and chulip, this game has it in spades! it is a game about a game developer that is written by game developers, and if 90% of studios try some shit like that it looks pathetic. onion is an easy exception though. they nail it. the gameplay might not be for everyone, but as someone who loves small form puzzles and long-term roguelite progression, this game is crazy good. if there’s one thing i genuinely appreciate about the game’s exploitative roots it’s how extremely grindy it is. it will b grating for most people, but i love running something small over and over trying to get the drop i need. some of the bigger dungeons end up requiring a little too much focus for my taste, but for the most part it’s so fun to turn my brain off and blast yamada through a room full of slimes and skeletons over and over until i get a sword with 5 more attack than my last sword.
so, as someone who briefly looked at this game at launch and only relatively recently learned it got rereleased as an actual game a question plagued me: how the fuck does all the pay to win garbage work? if you haven’t seen the game in either state, the main “pay to win” element of the original game is the rice ball. an infinitely reusable revive item. well as infinite as your wallet anyway (<- if any article written about the game from the time of its release uses this line, they stole it from me in the future right now. nobody else thought of this it’s my original thought.) it should also be said that using them makes you ineligible for leaderboards if you’re some kind of loser who cares about that. as well as your 99 cent continues theres also basically cheat armor and weapons you could buy. my knowledge of the game’s microtransactions ends there because i deleted the app pretty soon after seeing that shit and haven’t investigated much since. the current game replaces real money purchases with “clovers”. rare drops from the game’s metal slime equivalents (as well as a few other sources.) and honestly, clovers are pretty damn easy to farm for! there isn’t much stopping you from farming 999 1-ups and slamming your head into every dungeon until you win. one might stop and wonder why they didn’t just do away with at least the revives entirely. maybe the armor sets could just be drops from levels or something too. well… from my understanding of the late game content (which i haven’t cracked yet in my playthrough, my context is mostly walkthroughs i’ve skimmed for bits of info) the game content kind of needs cheat revives! which is such a massive endictment of what this game was as a live-service, but makes rice balls new place in this game’s economy an actual mechanic instead of shameless exploitation. do they deserve a point for that? i don’t know.
ultimately i feel weird about this game. this game used to be Bad. even if i like the writing and the studio that made it, i do not think making games like the one they made is ethical. i like it as it is now a lot, but would i have like it if it was just a normal game from the start? or is the part of the hyper-grindy gameplay loop that has me so hooked intrinsic to it’s fucked up microtransaction pinching origins? i don’t think i’ve decided that for myself yet, but i think it’s something worth considering if more live service games get rereleased like this in the future. i don’t see it becoming a big trend or anything since ultimately letting a live service fizzle out is a lot cheaper than turning it into an actual game. that megaman gacha thing nobody played is getting the same treatment though. how should we feel about games like this knowing they wouldn’t exist without taking advantage of people? if nothing else, onion games made one hell of a moral dilemma with this one. 5 stars.

today i finally got around to finishing the original layton trilogy! i played these games in a weird roundabout way. i played the phonic wright crossover first mostly just because i loved phonic wright. i was familiar with layton because i had a friend who played it, but even without prior knowledge i fell in love with the professor and the style of the puzzles there though. a few years later a friend of mine got unwound future (third game in the trilogy) at a yard sale. when they learned it wasn’t worth any money they gave it to me. i played the game over the course of about a week on my dsi xl. despite lacking more specific knowledge of some recurring characters, i don’t think my lack of series knowledge deducted from the experience at all. i adored it top to bottom. after that i would not play another professor layton game for a few years because of severe depression keeping me from enjoying anything. then i decided to finally give the first game in the series a shot. i played through curious village in a single day on the melonds emulator on my very nice computer. i missed some of the quality of life and more self-serious plot from unwound future, but i still found the game incredibly charming. i think the layton games are really good emulated, and if you don’t wanna hunt the copies down (they are probably pretty cheap) or don’t have a hacked 3ds (it’s really easy to do) emulation is an alternative that doesnt lose anything played with just a mouse.
anyway, back to the present day. i finally decided to fill in the gap i’ve been missing in the layton trilogy. i played diabolical box via retroarch on my modded nintendo 2ds xl. i beat it in about two days. i enjoyed it very much.
the game’s story manages to feel more far fetched than both other games somehow. i don’t want to spoil too much, but if you have any familiarity with the layton games, they tend to end with massive twists. i think professor layton vs. phoenix wright still takes the crown for the most outlandish one, i’d say this one takes second place for me. of the trilogy games i would say this one has my favorite main setting. i love folsense. the titular curious village of the first game certainly had creepy elements, but at least presented the facade of a normal place. and the world of unwound future was broadly the same. folsense stands out as an oddity. a town covered in ethereal lights under a blanket of eternal night. and there’s a vampiric castle looming in the distance. the small ds screen does compress the graphics of these gorgeous hand drawn backgrounds a bit sadly. it can also make some of the spot-the-difference puzzles a bit frustrating and eye strain inducing. i still love the look and feel of them though. the characters are a classic professor layton cast. i think compared to the first and third game they aren’t incorporated as well honestly. it felt like the game just kind of forgot about several characters past a certain point, some of the most interesting characters get almost no screen time, and flora gets shafted real hard. i think the strength of professor layton is that as long as layton and luke are still present and driving the story, you barely notice these things. it probably has my least favorite story of the trilogy, but it’s not bad at all. i thought the ending was beautiful and definitely cried during it.
i don’t have a ton to say about the puzzles. i think most of them had better quality of life features than 1. stuff like better input options that make it easier to understand the puzzle. also 1 i had to look up the answers to like the last 5 puzzles in a row and i only needed to look up a couple for this game. that might just be because i’m smarter now though.
now i’m thinking of starting the prequel trilogy. i’ve also been playing layton’s mystery journey a bit and i still don’t know how i feel about it. katrielle is a great character, but the supporting cast feels really weak so far. i might write a more in-depth review on it at some point, but i’m not sure if i want ot finish it yet!