myrrhman
24 reviews liked by myrrhman
Let him cook (longer)
Do the graphics suck? Yes.
Does it run like shit? Yes.
Do the load times suck? Yes.
Are all the assets reused? Yes.
Is this one of the most unique, creative and fun games in the franchise? Absolutely.
Lightning Returns's unique structure, combat and customization make it a total joy to experience. The key is how well all aspects of the game work with each other.
You want to do sidequests because aside from getting their cool little subplots you earn stats, equipment and extra in-game days with more quests, rewards and things to do. You're on a timer, so you want to get good at the combat because defeating hard enemies means being able to stop time for longer periods.
How do you get good at the combat? By playing the game! Experiment with the garbs, accessories and commands to find the most efficient way at defeating every enemy type. You'll not only get a lot of drops to complete sidequests and improve your commands but you'll also eventually make the monster extinct and earn a new (and usually very good) accessory or weapon along with materials to upgrade your commands to the next tier.
In sum: we have a really fun combat system that's extremely rewarding in every way which complements the extremely rewarding sidequest system which again furthers your combat options and capabilities.
The flow of the game feels very organic, I wanted to do things because they were fun and by doing fun things I unlocked even more fun things while also being handsomely rewarded in the process and understanding how I should play the game more efficiently bit by bit. Earning 100% feels more like a side effect rather than a goal, which to me is great design. I really loved this game and everyone should give it a fair shot, you might love it too.
Does it run like shit? Yes.
Do the load times suck? Yes.
Are all the assets reused? Yes.
Is this one of the most unique, creative and fun games in the franchise? Absolutely.
Lightning Returns's unique structure, combat and customization make it a total joy to experience. The key is how well all aspects of the game work with each other.
You want to do sidequests because aside from getting their cool little subplots you earn stats, equipment and extra in-game days with more quests, rewards and things to do. You're on a timer, so you want to get good at the combat because defeating hard enemies means being able to stop time for longer periods.
How do you get good at the combat? By playing the game! Experiment with the garbs, accessories and commands to find the most efficient way at defeating every enemy type. You'll not only get a lot of drops to complete sidequests and improve your commands but you'll also eventually make the monster extinct and earn a new (and usually very good) accessory or weapon along with materials to upgrade your commands to the next tier.
In sum: we have a really fun combat system that's extremely rewarding in every way which complements the extremely rewarding sidequest system which again furthers your combat options and capabilities.
The flow of the game feels very organic, I wanted to do things because they were fun and by doing fun things I unlocked even more fun things while also being handsomely rewarded in the process and understanding how I should play the game more efficiently bit by bit. Earning 100% feels more like a side effect rather than a goal, which to me is great design. I really loved this game and everyone should give it a fair shot, you might love it too.
Pentiment
2022
Pentiment reminds us that reading is an act of necromancy.
THE LETTERS MOVE! Even as you read the text in this game, it shifts and rearranges itself underneath your eyes. It is text as a living, breathing entity, and I am positively shocked in retrospect that no other game has done anything like this. Great innovations, I think, rearrange the world around them. They seem like the obvious solution in retrospect because they are so overwhelmingly right that it seems a travesty for any other solution to be used in their place.
Pentiment loves writing. It loves text, it adores the written word, and it is obsessed with the act of reading and being read. It makes every single other text-heavy game look worse by merely existing with such passion for this medium. How am I supposed to read a VN, play a CRPG, wander a walking sim, when the entire time I am now acutely aware of just how dead those texts are? They are cold and unfeeling, just a tool used to get across words to the player, and nothing more.
The text in this game has mechanical depth! I don't just mean the writing, which is a strong contender for the best prose in the entire medium, but the text itself -- the ink bleeds to life in front of you, filling in the outlines of the words as they appear. Several handcrafted typefaces populate the dialogue of this game, each of them accompanied by the scratching of a pen on paper or the satisfying clunk of a printing press, like the voice beeps of a visual novel on steroids -- it turns the act of reading into an awareness of the act of writing, intimately coupling the consumption of the text with the creation of the text in a way that somehow makes the characters in this game feel even more real and human than if they were fully voiced.
Each typeface refuses to just have one variant of each letter, but instead several varying versions of letters are used depending on where they are contextually located, causing the text to bleed and run into itself in a satisfying and natural way. The letters change as you read, but not in a lazy and random way, instead carefully handcrafted for effect. The speed of the changes is just so that, for those within an average range of reading speed, you won't so much notice the exact changes of the letters as they happen, but instead you will always be right on the tail of the rearranged characters, noting their presence in the corner of your eye and by the stains left beneath the newly written text. This is, of course, the titular effect, and it says everything about the historical and cultural themes explored in this game -- but that is for another review to discuss. For our part, we are here solely for the text!
In far more obvious ways, the way that characters write their dialogue reflects who we understand them to be, whether it's in the choice of typeface, the frequency of spelling mistakes, or the ways in which alternate colors of text are used. Some characters wield red text as if we are reading a Red Letter Bible, and other characters hold completely different things to be significant and holy, and thus represent that with red text instead. When characters are impassioned, or tired, or terrified, their text is filled with errors and rapidly changing letters. We get a sense of who they are without even reading the words that they have to say!
Pentiment is all about uncovering the vibrant life in that which we view as dead, permanently separated from us, and hidden by layers of dirt and centuries of distance. It argues that even the very words in which history resides are alive -- and if the text is alive, how can its contents not be? In a world of digital text and mass alienation, is all too easy to conceptualize of a relationship between us, the author, and the text that looks something like author --> text --> reader. The author creates a text, its own standalone object, and we consume it. Pentiment rejects this entirely, and reminds us that the relationship has always been that of a conversation! The act of reading cannot be separated from the act of writing. When we engage with a text, we are fundamentally engaging with its author as well, and by doing so reaching across continents, across millennia, connecting two living persons even if it means that we are resurrecting the dead to do so!
I did not think text could be something that I would find this beautiful. This is what the medium of gaming deserves, this is what it's always been capable of, and it is a joy to finally see the medium's potential fulfilled in such a loving and thoughtfully crafted manner.
Play this motherfucking game!
THE LETTERS MOVE! Even as you read the text in this game, it shifts and rearranges itself underneath your eyes. It is text as a living, breathing entity, and I am positively shocked in retrospect that no other game has done anything like this. Great innovations, I think, rearrange the world around them. They seem like the obvious solution in retrospect because they are so overwhelmingly right that it seems a travesty for any other solution to be used in their place.
Pentiment loves writing. It loves text, it adores the written word, and it is obsessed with the act of reading and being read. It makes every single other text-heavy game look worse by merely existing with such passion for this medium. How am I supposed to read a VN, play a CRPG, wander a walking sim, when the entire time I am now acutely aware of just how dead those texts are? They are cold and unfeeling, just a tool used to get across words to the player, and nothing more.
The text in this game has mechanical depth! I don't just mean the writing, which is a strong contender for the best prose in the entire medium, but the text itself -- the ink bleeds to life in front of you, filling in the outlines of the words as they appear. Several handcrafted typefaces populate the dialogue of this game, each of them accompanied by the scratching of a pen on paper or the satisfying clunk of a printing press, like the voice beeps of a visual novel on steroids -- it turns the act of reading into an awareness of the act of writing, intimately coupling the consumption of the text with the creation of the text in a way that somehow makes the characters in this game feel even more real and human than if they were fully voiced.
Each typeface refuses to just have one variant of each letter, but instead several varying versions of letters are used depending on where they are contextually located, causing the text to bleed and run into itself in a satisfying and natural way. The letters change as you read, but not in a lazy and random way, instead carefully handcrafted for effect. The speed of the changes is just so that, for those within an average range of reading speed, you won't so much notice the exact changes of the letters as they happen, but instead you will always be right on the tail of the rearranged characters, noting their presence in the corner of your eye and by the stains left beneath the newly written text. This is, of course, the titular effect, and it says everything about the historical and cultural themes explored in this game -- but that is for another review to discuss. For our part, we are here solely for the text!
In far more obvious ways, the way that characters write their dialogue reflects who we understand them to be, whether it's in the choice of typeface, the frequency of spelling mistakes, or the ways in which alternate colors of text are used. Some characters wield red text as if we are reading a Red Letter Bible, and other characters hold completely different things to be significant and holy, and thus represent that with red text instead. When characters are impassioned, or tired, or terrified, their text is filled with errors and rapidly changing letters. We get a sense of who they are without even reading the words that they have to say!
Pentiment is all about uncovering the vibrant life in that which we view as dead, permanently separated from us, and hidden by layers of dirt and centuries of distance. It argues that even the very words in which history resides are alive -- and if the text is alive, how can its contents not be? In a world of digital text and mass alienation, is all too easy to conceptualize of a relationship between us, the author, and the text that looks something like author --> text --> reader. The author creates a text, its own standalone object, and we consume it. Pentiment rejects this entirely, and reminds us that the relationship has always been that of a conversation! The act of reading cannot be separated from the act of writing. When we engage with a text, we are fundamentally engaging with its author as well, and by doing so reaching across continents, across millennia, connecting two living persons even if it means that we are resurrecting the dead to do so!
I did not think text could be something that I would find this beautiful. This is what the medium of gaming deserves, this is what it's always been capable of, and it is a joy to finally see the medium's potential fulfilled in such a loving and thoughtfully crafted manner.
Play this motherfucking game!
Breakdown
2004
I played this game when I was like 7 or 8 after I picked it up from a Hollywood Video barging bin, and I think the countless hours of punching half-naked hairless buff men made me gay.
Thank you, based Namco.
Thank you, based Namco.
Elden Ring
2022
This review contains spoilers
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
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"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
Tender Frog House
2020
Posting isn't praxis, and people who have just discovered leftism need to work the notion that it is out of their system in less embarrassing ways than this.
It's way, way, way, way too many words to make the incredibly brave claim that capitalism is bad and influences the art that we make. No fucking shit. Literally any understanding of material reality would dictate that. The only way that you could believe this to be in any way a shocking, revelatory statement is if you are so simultaneously self-important and clueless that you think nobody else has caught on yet. Unfortunately for us, the developer of Tender Frog House fits neatly into both categories.
I always feel a little bad shitting on the people behind the game rather than the final piece itself, but this has earned the ire. What a complete waste of time. Why say in this many bland, empty, boring words what so many other, better pieces of art already have? Do you really, truly believe "comfy" games to be such a damnable, corrupting plague that you need to crusade against them? Are they honestly the true progenitors and perpetrators of the worst aspects of late capitalism, or are you just making broad gestures towards an easy target? Considering how Molochian the gaming space already is at corporate levels, with the constant, unresolved, evidenced accusations of sexual, mental, physical, and fiscal abuse, why make frog games the subject that needs to be tackled? I think most of what you'll see at any of those Comfy Game Showcases seem creatively bankrupt and boring, but to say that they're the agents of Mammon on par with the rest of the industry is silly. Go outside.
Anyway, the only actual proof provided for any of the claims in this game is when Sister Cow says that the only interesting thing about her is the fact that she's mentally ill, and then she immediately pulls a quote from Capitalist Realism.
It's way, way, way, way too many words to make the incredibly brave claim that capitalism is bad and influences the art that we make. No fucking shit. Literally any understanding of material reality would dictate that. The only way that you could believe this to be in any way a shocking, revelatory statement is if you are so simultaneously self-important and clueless that you think nobody else has caught on yet. Unfortunately for us, the developer of Tender Frog House fits neatly into both categories.
I always feel a little bad shitting on the people behind the game rather than the final piece itself, but this has earned the ire. What a complete waste of time. Why say in this many bland, empty, boring words what so many other, better pieces of art already have? Do you really, truly believe "comfy" games to be such a damnable, corrupting plague that you need to crusade against them? Are they honestly the true progenitors and perpetrators of the worst aspects of late capitalism, or are you just making broad gestures towards an easy target? Considering how Molochian the gaming space already is at corporate levels, with the constant, unresolved, evidenced accusations of sexual, mental, physical, and fiscal abuse, why make frog games the subject that needs to be tackled? I think most of what you'll see at any of those Comfy Game Showcases seem creatively bankrupt and boring, but to say that they're the agents of Mammon on par with the rest of the industry is silly. Go outside.
Anyway, the only actual proof provided for any of the claims in this game is when Sister Cow says that the only interesting thing about her is the fact that she's mentally ill, and then she immediately pulls a quote from Capitalist Realism.
Cookie Clicker
2013
if you immerse yourself into this game -- and i mean total submersion, an unwavering commitment to efficient, effective cookie clicking -- you will come face-to-face with one of the primordial elements of Game. contained herein is the purest distillation of the Skinner box, that most animalistic, Pavlovian instinct buried inside each of us that lights up our synapses every time the number gets bigger. your eyes will reach superhuman attenuation to the slow pseudorandom fade-in of each precious Golden Cookie. you will turn the wiki upside down in a ravenous hunt for the power of cookie knowledge. you will experience billions of years of hunter-killer evolution bearing down on your left mouse button when you encounter your first Click Frenzy x Fever with its utterly broken, overpowered 5,439x cookie multiplier. in time, you will process all of this with the cool demeanor of a professional, unperturbed and unwavering in the quest for exponentiation.
yes, this is a profoundly stupid game, but it is no more absurd than any other game; it is simply honest in its embrace of numeric pornography
yes, this is a profoundly stupid game, but it is no more absurd than any other game; it is simply honest in its embrace of numeric pornography
One of the most baffling games I've ever played, from top to bottom.
A friend of mine has let me know that he doesn't enjoy anything as much as he enjoys watching me play through shitty games. This has resulted in me getting a sugar daddy who buys me free video games (good) which all suck complete ass and usually end with me annoyed (bad). Of the games I play and stream to my friends, however, none of them ever manage to get their hooks in all of us as well as the ones by David Cage. Blowing through titles like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls was quick, and David Cage is a man with a pretty limited catalog. Bad interactive fiction is a dime a dozen — the runaway success of Telltale Games lead to a lot of copycats who couldn't even match their general mediocrity — but rarely do they have the right blend of absurdity that really makes titles from the Cageverse shine. Where could we go to find shitty movie-likes that could rival David Cage's worst work?
It turns out that the folly of the great man theory applies to auteur video game creators, too. David Cage, for as outspoken of a voice as he is, somehow seems to have less input on the narrative direction of his own games than his ego would imply. Titles like As Dusk Falls have shown that Cage radiates a toxic aura that seems to infect anyone who remains in his presence for the time it takes to complete a single Quantic Dream development cycle. He's like a living Lovecraftian artifact that makes you lose more of your mind the longer you're exposed to him.
One more entry into the David Cage Extended Universe (DCEU) that absolutely nobody played is Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, as brought to us by one of the co-directors of Heavy Rain. If you also didn't know that Heavy Rain had a co-director, then congratulations. We're all learning, today. His name is Steve Kniebihly, and he's every bit a hack as David Cage. He doesn't put as much virulent bigotry into his games, at least, so he's got that going for him.
Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier is a confused game. It exists as an interquel between the middle two movies of a rebooted quadrilogy of a fifty-year-old franchise with at least five continuities. You'd think a series about what would happen if monkeys learned how to shoot reclaimed Heckler & Koch MP5s wouldn't be that complicated, but that would mean you aren't thinking like a cash-hungry film studio during the late-1960s. It's from this gray, soupy mire of plot threads and ambiguous constancy that Last Frontier attempts to develop a plot, and it's already stumbling before the starting gun has fired.
Since this game exists predominantly as a marketing tool for the film War for the Planet of the Apes, it can't do anything of consequence. Both the humans and the apes here have virtually nothing to do with any of the characters in the actual film series; there's an off-hand mention of Koba and Caesar at one point that never comes up again, the setting of the game is hundreds of miles away from those of the film, and all three of the endings and their many variations have zero impact on anything before or since. The game is so immediately dated less than five years after its release that it still advertises that it has Mixer integration. Your Mixer viewers can tune in to your Mixer stream and vote on what actions they want you to take through the Mixer chat box. They could, if Mixer still existed, but it doesn't, and the game just makes useless API calls that phone a dead address if you give it firewall permissions.
If it seems like I'm trying to avoid talking about the actual game in favor of focusing on the circumstances around it, you'd be right. This is because Last Frontier is barely a game. This is intentional; the design philosophy behind this was to make a TV movie and sell it to gamers for a $19.99 entry fee, because their standards are lower than the average Syfy viewer. That last part is paraphrasing on my part, but it's not wrong. Even then, they overestimated their writing acumen. This game bombed. Even among the people who willingly bought and played a Planet of the Apes movie tie-in game, this was seen as being a complete mess. Your only means of interacting with the game are pressing left or right to make a binary choice that can be negated within seconds by choosing the immediate opposite position right after, and an action button for timed scenes. Left, right, action button, that's all. This game has fewer controls than Pac-Man.
There's a relationship system between your player character (Jess for the humans, Bryn for the apes) and the other members of their species. It is completely arbitrary and operates on no human logic. At one point, while playing as Bryn, I went out of my way to side with my ape wife at all costs. I ended the chapter, and our relationship was listed as OKAY. The next chapter, I intentionally alternated between arguing with her and agreeing with her every other dialog option, and our relationship improved to GOOD. I don't know how this happened. Maybe she has Stepford wife syndrome.
This is an extreme budget title, and it feels like it. The game doesn't work on Windows 10, immediately crashing to desktop with the message "UE4-Apes.exe has stopped working". Plot threads come and go without any consistency. One scene gives Jess the option to toss aside her bolt-action rifle and take up an M4A1 as her everyday carry of choice. I picked this — "you gotta empty the clip if you want to kill an ape", as one of the game's two professional ape-hunters advises — and never saw it again. The developers either forgot to set the flag that would give it to me, or they ran out of money trying to render Jess in later scenes with one of two different guns and forgot to remove the option to take the M4.
These mistakes barely get noticed against the absurdity of what happens. I'm putting in line breaks here to really highlight this shit.
Clarence, the sole orangutan in the tribe of apes, gets captured and held as a POW by the humans. The ape-hunters bind him with chains, hang him by his wrists in a barn, and decide to torture him for information.
They torture an orangutan for information.
One of them menacingly leans down to Clarence and warns him that it won't end well for the apes if he doesn't start talking. He punctuates this point by beating the orangutan with a lead pipe. If Clarence doesn't tell him everything he knows about the ape tribe, the ape-hunter threatens, the humans are going to keep torturing him until he dies.
Clarence cannot speak English. They then publicly lynch him by hanging him from the neck.
It's at this point that I've started laughing so hard that I'm seeing stars. Tears are rolling down my cheeks. I am losing my goddamn mind. It's 1:30 in the morning and I am causing a disturbance. I've never felt my sides burn like this. I can't catch my breath for so long that I end up hurting myself. I don't know what they were even trying to do here. There's a later scene where apes start getting loaded onto a freight train to be shipped off to an open-air ape prison that I think is supposed to be evoking Holocaust imagery, but I can't say for certain. I don't know what's happening anymore.
The apes can win, or the humans can win, and none of it matters. Who gives a shit. This might be one of the funniest games ever made.
A friend of mine has let me know that he doesn't enjoy anything as much as he enjoys watching me play through shitty games. This has resulted in me getting a sugar daddy who buys me free video games (good) which all suck complete ass and usually end with me annoyed (bad). Of the games I play and stream to my friends, however, none of them ever manage to get their hooks in all of us as well as the ones by David Cage. Blowing through titles like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls was quick, and David Cage is a man with a pretty limited catalog. Bad interactive fiction is a dime a dozen — the runaway success of Telltale Games lead to a lot of copycats who couldn't even match their general mediocrity — but rarely do they have the right blend of absurdity that really makes titles from the Cageverse shine. Where could we go to find shitty movie-likes that could rival David Cage's worst work?
It turns out that the folly of the great man theory applies to auteur video game creators, too. David Cage, for as outspoken of a voice as he is, somehow seems to have less input on the narrative direction of his own games than his ego would imply. Titles like As Dusk Falls have shown that Cage radiates a toxic aura that seems to infect anyone who remains in his presence for the time it takes to complete a single Quantic Dream development cycle. He's like a living Lovecraftian artifact that makes you lose more of your mind the longer you're exposed to him.
One more entry into the David Cage Extended Universe (DCEU) that absolutely nobody played is Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, as brought to us by one of the co-directors of Heavy Rain. If you also didn't know that Heavy Rain had a co-director, then congratulations. We're all learning, today. His name is Steve Kniebihly, and he's every bit a hack as David Cage. He doesn't put as much virulent bigotry into his games, at least, so he's got that going for him.
Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier is a confused game. It exists as an interquel between the middle two movies of a rebooted quadrilogy of a fifty-year-old franchise with at least five continuities. You'd think a series about what would happen if monkeys learned how to shoot reclaimed Heckler & Koch MP5s wouldn't be that complicated, but that would mean you aren't thinking like a cash-hungry film studio during the late-1960s. It's from this gray, soupy mire of plot threads and ambiguous constancy that Last Frontier attempts to develop a plot, and it's already stumbling before the starting gun has fired.
Since this game exists predominantly as a marketing tool for the film War for the Planet of the Apes, it can't do anything of consequence. Both the humans and the apes here have virtually nothing to do with any of the characters in the actual film series; there's an off-hand mention of Koba and Caesar at one point that never comes up again, the setting of the game is hundreds of miles away from those of the film, and all three of the endings and their many variations have zero impact on anything before or since. The game is so immediately dated less than five years after its release that it still advertises that it has Mixer integration. Your Mixer viewers can tune in to your Mixer stream and vote on what actions they want you to take through the Mixer chat box. They could, if Mixer still existed, but it doesn't, and the game just makes useless API calls that phone a dead address if you give it firewall permissions.
If it seems like I'm trying to avoid talking about the actual game in favor of focusing on the circumstances around it, you'd be right. This is because Last Frontier is barely a game. This is intentional; the design philosophy behind this was to make a TV movie and sell it to gamers for a $19.99 entry fee, because their standards are lower than the average Syfy viewer. That last part is paraphrasing on my part, but it's not wrong. Even then, they overestimated their writing acumen. This game bombed. Even among the people who willingly bought and played a Planet of the Apes movie tie-in game, this was seen as being a complete mess. Your only means of interacting with the game are pressing left or right to make a binary choice that can be negated within seconds by choosing the immediate opposite position right after, and an action button for timed scenes. Left, right, action button, that's all. This game has fewer controls than Pac-Man.
There's a relationship system between your player character (Jess for the humans, Bryn for the apes) and the other members of their species. It is completely arbitrary and operates on no human logic. At one point, while playing as Bryn, I went out of my way to side with my ape wife at all costs. I ended the chapter, and our relationship was listed as OKAY. The next chapter, I intentionally alternated between arguing with her and agreeing with her every other dialog option, and our relationship improved to GOOD. I don't know how this happened. Maybe she has Stepford wife syndrome.
This is an extreme budget title, and it feels like it. The game doesn't work on Windows 10, immediately crashing to desktop with the message "UE4-Apes.exe has stopped working". Plot threads come and go without any consistency. One scene gives Jess the option to toss aside her bolt-action rifle and take up an M4A1 as her everyday carry of choice. I picked this — "you gotta empty the clip if you want to kill an ape", as one of the game's two professional ape-hunters advises — and never saw it again. The developers either forgot to set the flag that would give it to me, or they ran out of money trying to render Jess in later scenes with one of two different guns and forgot to remove the option to take the M4.
These mistakes barely get noticed against the absurdity of what happens. I'm putting in line breaks here to really highlight this shit.
Clarence, the sole orangutan in the tribe of apes, gets captured and held as a POW by the humans. The ape-hunters bind him with chains, hang him by his wrists in a barn, and decide to torture him for information.
They torture an orangutan for information.
One of them menacingly leans down to Clarence and warns him that it won't end well for the apes if he doesn't start talking. He punctuates this point by beating the orangutan with a lead pipe. If Clarence doesn't tell him everything he knows about the ape tribe, the ape-hunter threatens, the humans are going to keep torturing him until he dies.
Clarence cannot speak English. They then publicly lynch him by hanging him from the neck.
It's at this point that I've started laughing so hard that I'm seeing stars. Tears are rolling down my cheeks. I am losing my goddamn mind. It's 1:30 in the morning and I am causing a disturbance. I've never felt my sides burn like this. I can't catch my breath for so long that I end up hurting myself. I don't know what they were even trying to do here. There's a later scene where apes start getting loaded onto a freight train to be shipped off to an open-air ape prison that I think is supposed to be evoking Holocaust imagery, but I can't say for certain. I don't know what's happening anymore.
The apes can win, or the humans can win, and none of it matters. Who gives a shit. This might be one of the funniest games ever made.
Shenmue
1999
they aint never made a game to top this since ever
Trek to Yomi
2022
they saw ghosts of tsushima and thought nah we can make it worse