in an episode of gamespot’s audio logs, disco elysium’s lead designer and writer robert kurvitz was asked to discuss ZA/UM’s approach to CRPG design, in which he makes clear the title’s great tabletop roleplaying game influence, contrasts disco elysium against modern CRPGS, and elucidates the rationale behind certain UI decisions the game had made. one of the very first things kurvitz highlights, and what was apparently one of the decisions given primacy in pre-production, was the concept of placing the text box in the righthand side of the screen in contrast to the game’s contemporaries, even outside the CRPG genre, which typically slot the text boxes in the lower middle of the screen. the benefits to this alternative organization seem immediately obvious as kurvitz spells them out: increased screen real estate, far more interesting visual composition, and a modality which seemed to emulate the engrained habits of run-of-the-mill technology. peer at disco elysium’s textbox and your mind may not immediately pick up on the contours of its design, but your subconscious will instinctively understand it relates to the modern desktop experience. it innately resembles the windows toolbar, where the clock and calendar is – the screen is visually ‘weighted’ to the right, where the center of gravity is, and it reflects the placement of the players right hand on the keyboard.

the deceptive genius of this UI design is that it wasn’t enough to simply reflect a desktop, which disco elysium’s target demographic was instinctually bound to – ZA/UM wanted to snuff out any and all competitors. that means taking inspiration from unlikely sources, one of which was social media. this helps explain why the prose of disco elysium is so confrontational, sharp, abrasive, sensational; it explains why the text-box was designed to reflect an addictive scrolling experience ala twitter; and it builds upon centuries of entrenched human behaviour in its column design, which may inadvertently reflect a phone but also reflects the structure of a newspaper article. in an era where developers have now fully committed themselves towards eradicating loading screens in a veiled effort to curb the impoverished, stimulation-craving instincts of their player bases (a major hardware decision which is replete with as many pros as cons), ZA/UM subtly adapted the topography of phones that so many players were already used to for their own purposes.

kurvitz’s final salvo is illuminating. every element of this design is an amendment which reflects a critical problem in the games marketability, that disco elysium, judging by its phenomenal success, ameliorated fully: how do you sell a modern CRPG that is simultaneously defined by its lack of combat and by its verbosity? well, it’s simple. everyone says they don’t like reading and claims they don’t want to read – but reading is all we do on social media, in private messages, in news articles. we take it for granted. player retention was a big problem for ZA/UM, so the designers intelligently made what seems like a very easy observation, but then engineered everything about the game’s flow in order to manufacture a state that hopefully will allow players to immerse themselves and to truly salivate over every last written word the game has to offer.

so, reading is something we do every day. no-brainer. but the same exists for writing. both exist in a connected equilibrium. just as we read every day, we write just about every day – whether we realize it or not. some research even suggests that where the mind is allowed to wander while reading, neurons will roar to life and the brain will mimic and simulate the act of pen flowing on paper, gliding betwixt margins with grace and individualized efficacy.

it would be more accurate, however, to make the claim that we’re typing every day.

are typing and writing of the same scholarship? could one make the claim that writing is therefore impoverished by the usurpation of typing – the same way kurvitz attributed to his audience a kind of destitution of readership? reflecting on this opens the floodgates of a perennial chirographic concern. the digital epoch has not responded with kindness to the eloquence of handwriting. surveys often suggest swathes of people go more than half a year without handwriting, and countries that are at the forefront of educational theory like finland suggest that it may no longer bear the same relevance on day-to-day activities as it once used to. the practice is fading, its dominance curtailed by the dissemination of keyboarding. this is in spite of a marked increase in literature suggesting the many benefits of handwriting. among the myriad cognitive benefits there are particularly noteworthy virtues such as attention sustenance, increased capacity for memory, improved self-regulation, and the ability to plan ahead. children who learn to write by hand are known to activate adult-like pathways in their minds which aid in facilitation of improved memory.

and for many, handwriting is an exercise in aesthetic pleasures, a distinct mark of individuality, and a reiteration of a practice undertaken by even their ancestry that innately links mind and soul, body and space, the sensate and the insensate, an unwitting cooperation between all the ontological elements of lived experience that inform existence and being, a unification of self and language. there is the concern that the abstractions of writing, that once in the past were nothing more than pictographs painstakingly carved into slabs and yet was still a decidedly intellectual, tactile, expressive, and intimate practice, are lost in the mechanical era and the complex beauty of it has vanished. many continue to remind and advocate for the pursuance of ‘bilingual writing’ – education that fosters children who can handwrite as well as they type and thus don’t fail to attend to their expanding minds. on a more anecdotal level, all of this rings as true – too often does the pursuit of typing education boil it all down to a callous, impersonal drudgery that serves only to prepare children for the rampant dehumanization inherent to the workforce.

if any of this discourse seems like a relatively modern concern, don’t worry – it isn’t. let me take a quick step back. walter j. ong indicated that our history in knowledge storage can be divided into two phases: the oral-to-literate stage and the chirographic-to-print stage. in the former stage, culture began to transition into a society that relied more and more on the written word and began to leave oral tradition behind – as far back as 3500 BC, sumerians sought to preserve their history by capturing and transcribing oration. in the latter stage, the individual handwritten texts began to be mechanically produced and widely disseminated by means of the printing press. this evolution of writing technology invariably altered the way humanity came to grips with their own awareness and how this changed the epistemology of the time. in ong’s view, it was this shift from the oral tradition to a society of literacy that broke apart the old ways of tribal unity, as fostering literacy operated in tandem with greater levels of individuality. the chirographic-to-print stage of the 1500’s only further reinforced this.

it is here where i must remind that typing is the apotheosis of these differing stages of written tradition, and one that has remained in the public consciousness since the late 1800s – far from a modern invention. the first commercial typewriters were made available in 1874, and the first stenograph was invented in 1879. the history of typing predates the personal computer. but nevertheless it is the fixed rigidity of typing – when taken from its latent form and iterated upon, recontextualized in the digital epoch as an apparatus to be used with the computer – that ong sees as a synthesis of the oral and the literate. it’s a kind of folding together of space and time, one of the arguments of this viewpoint being the idea that the premise of instantaneity central to typing on a computer transforms printed word into something more akin to oration and therefore reunites our own epoch with the era of oral tradition as a result of totally reconfigured relationships between all the constituent elements of the past two stages: the writer, the text, the audience, the interfacing, the medium.

others are not so kind – any technological evolution brings trade-off, and some philosophers note that history is simply an unfolding narrative of intangible gains and omitted losses. of the many philosophers to grapple with the heady question of how the modalities of writing inform existence, heidegger is an authoritative voice and spoke often of the cultural loss typing imprinted on society. it is his view, and that of his supporters, that typing represents something perverse and impersonal, something amputational in logic. the body is diminished and conveyance is thus diminished too; the essential realm of word and hand is shattered, depriving the person of dignity and irreversibly altering our relationship with language and distances ourselves from it, changing something from beautifully abstract transmission to simple transposition. certainly, this view seems almost supported by modern empirical studies that uncannily echo some of these concerns!

and yet, type dreams seems to believe otherwise, and treats all text within as something to be given primacy, something that is profound and bold and transcendent. richard hofmeier’s second developmental outing is an anachronism-laden victorian-set game about typing. so committed to typing it is that everything about interfacing with the game involves the use of keys rather than the mouse, removing yet again any semblance of a bodily gesture that might conflate modern typing with traditional handwriting. you enter a username and password to begin the typist’s journey, and from there depressions of the spacebar cycle through menus, tapping the enter key confirms, hitting the escape key…escapes, and the very act of typing itself provides shortcuts with which to access menus.

as you play type dreams, you get a greater sense of where its priorities lie, and it’s something coincidentally shared with tetris effect, another game i recently played and appreciated: the answer is transcendence. actually, it would be far more accurate to say that what type dreams pursues is something close to ong’s vision of modern typing: complete synchronicity across boundaries of space and time. and it does so by providing an utterly unique audiovisual experience that goes far beyond the simple educational value of a typing game. in type dreams you find a wealth of categories of typing exercises: rote exercises, poetry, classical literature, even smut and songs/lyrics. and in each ‘stage’, reconfigured as a kind of desperate arcade scenario, the player, alongside their chosen imitation avatar, competes with only themselves for faster and faster words-per-minutes, for fewer errors, for unapproachable streaks of correctly placed letters. at the onset of the game you must choose between digital keyboard and typewriter and i must wholly recommend the typewriter – passages are smartly fragmented by the continual rhythm of the player sliding their fingers across function keys f1-f12 to emulate the carriage of a typewriter, a sensory experience unlike anything else that inadvertently calls to mind musicality and instrumentation, suggesting that rather than representing a kind of blasphemous automatism typing may well be a new kind of instrument. a tidbit that is particularly noteworthy and relevant to my argument: typing activates an area in your brain that is equivalent to what drumming activates in your brain.

and it is this kind of ‘music’ and kinaesthetic experience that forms the basis of what type dreams achieves so excellently, as so few games do, interrogating ideas that similarly, so few games do. in type dreams the keyboard is an instrument, a weapon, a guide, an anachronism, a representation of shared consciousness, reflecting an understanding of the infinite forms of text as well. type out these chords of text via an angry letter to a newspaper and listen to the game channeling these frustrations in the forms of aggressive grunts with each letter misspelled or each error in keystroke; explore the textual melodies of some poetry and watch as the visuals accompanying your office change, freeing the mind and allowing poet and player and avatar to be intimately linked like nothing else; type out an account of keyboard rebellion and understand that the drudgery linked between workforce and the word processor can be subverted by the daring, that there is more to text than copying or correspondence; be transported across space and time to verbose scrawlings on prison walls, to the history of stenography, to socrates on trial. it’s a thrillingly evocative experience that lessens the temporal and spatial boundaries of history and literature and that is characterized by efficiency and dexterity in a way that recalls music, so it helps that the music accompanying each stage is really solid – the bimanual and repetitive nature of typing necessitates an audiovisual layer to allow the mind to coalesce with text and wander freely.

all of this serves to strongly re-evaluate typing in the modern era and to rebut most of the concerns of heidegger with new presumptions on what it even means to type, and it allows the self to feel the keyboard as something other than a symbol of workplace productivity. it filters in expression and individuality back into typist methodology, which may explain why there is no mechanical difference between the two typewriters on offer – only an aesthetic one. you begin to pick up on the subtleties of typing’s topography, on how hands moving across keys can influence emotion and thought, on how it serves as an appropriate contrast to the unimanual nature of handwriting. handwriting allows for reflection, for contemplation, but what type dreams suggests is that typing can become a tool for embodiment. this makes sense given the increased tempo that contrasts the two modes of writing, but it’s yet another point in the game’s favour- can you still feel the significance of the game’s text in spite of that breakneck pace, or has it slipped through the permeating fog of synchronicity? type dreams works its ass off to have your answer be a resounding yes. yes, in spite of the kaleidoscopic nature of digital text, in spite of its immaterial and infinite nature, in spite of the concern for the lessened significance of text and how it may erode at our senses and reduce our attention into fragments, transcendence can still occur. meaning can still be felt. text hasn’t necessarily been impoverished – not when it’s so lived-in.

that isn’t to say the game is perfect. in fact, the game is laughably imperfect, probably the most laughably imperfect game i've given such a high rating. it’s buggy, there are some UI issues and several technical dilemmas, and the greatest kicker of all: it’s unfinished. as i tried to unlock more of the game’s levels in proto-drakengardian fashion i came to realize there was only so much available, that the game was in an adolescent state and might never see completion. yet so much of the game contains the seeds of what is such an unexpectedly ideal game for me that i cannot help but give it such high accolades – the immensity of the experience is deserving of far more attention and far more interrogation from far smarter figures than i.

richard hofmeier is a complex figure for the games media to reckon with. after the smash hit success of cart life in indie games circles, he vanished from the public eye and released cart life in open source format, citing its imperfection as a barrier to its permissibility as a for-profit release. type dreams was his second major outing, released on itch.io in an incomplete state, originally at a price so that hofmeier could make ends meet. by his own admission, he disliked the fact that he had to do so, but he had been working away at this and several other projects over the course of several years, so he had to release at least something to get past his perfectionist tendency. since then the game has received several inconsistent updates before the pipeline of developer communication shut off entirely without warning in november of last year. currently, the game is listed as cancelled on itch.io. the version of the game you can download, uploaded 81 days ago, is listed as td_final.zip. when you try to click on the game’s “story” mode (one might assume the game’s main campaign would have been papers, please-esque; reliance on electricity was a drawback for the digital keyboard made apparent to the player when they are prompted to choose their instrument of choice), you are greeted with the following message:

“These stories were boring. Consider making up new ones; new stories about [PLAYER NAME] might be worth writing.”

as it stands, i have no way of knowing if the sentiment of this message and the title’s abrupt and unquestioned ‘cancellation’ are related. but in my heart of hearts, i hope hofmeier returns to this project. there’s nothing else like it.

https://hofmeier.itch.io/type-dreams

ALRIGHT, blanket announcement: on top of the game being available on the internet archive, as was wisely pointed out by DJSCheddar, MrPixelton was kind enough to get a mega link up and running for type dreams using their copy of the game since my laptop was indisposed. so shouts out to you guys, you both rock, and all of it helps to keep this game preserved and alive. i think the internet archive solution will be the public one and ill keep the mega link open for private channels/as a backup. thanks everyone for your efforts! whenever hofmeier returns to the public eye please try to financially support him, we need this kind of creativity in the medium

be sure to reach out if you'd like the mega link!

It's ok.

I'm aware at this point that Stray has been dissected to hell and back, but I did want to get my thoughts out there in relation to a lot of the similar games that I've dubbed "Journey-likes" that I've also gone through somewhat recently. You know, those games where you travel from point A to B to C with tons of emphasis on atmospheric exploration and environmental storytelling with maybe some minor puzzles and other limited interactions involved. Keep in mind that this review may have minor spoilers in the form of me discussing gameplay and story design choices, but I'll try to make the discussion general enough as to not impact overall plot enjoyment.

While playing through the first hour and a half of Stray, I kept thinking back to this video by Matthewmatosis, in which he argues that an over-reliance upon context sensitivity in modern games both limits player control ("press X to initiate cutscene of action for every case") and player agency (that is, just walking around in an environment until a context-sensitive prompt tells you that something can be interacted with) and thus results in less interesting experiences. Granted, I'd like to think that I'm acclimated to Journey-likes at this point, and so came in not expecting too much difficult or deep interaction, and yet I still think that Stray goes too damn far in abusing context sensitivity as to significantly reduce meaningful engagement or difficulty.

The main gameplay loop consists as follows; as a cat, you walk around various environments, and simply perform the correct context sensitive interaction when you approach the relevant objects/individuals. There are plenty of walls and rugs to scratch that are marked by a triangle button prompt, plenty of NPCs to talk to that are marked with a square button prompt, and plenty of objects and ledges to jump to that prompt you to press the X button every time. The latter is easily the most problematic case here, because this turns navigation into what is more or less a task of walking forward until the context sensitive prompt tells you to press X to jump forward. There isn't even a risk of falling off ledges or jumping into the abyss; just keep moving forward until the prompt tells you to jump to the next object. Again, I understand that Journey-likes are generally not difficult at all, but this design decision oversimplifies gameplay to a baffling extent beyond other Journey-likes, and it could have been easily fixed if the game was just a regular 3D platformer; I know I'm not the only one who's brought this up either.

If the strict gameplay loop for the entire game was just what I experienced in the first hour and a half, I would most likely be even more disappointed than I am now. Fortunately, Stray eventually opens up to a few "hub" areas in its runtime where you can meander about to find scattered secrets and memories as well as chat up NPCs. However, it's not quite entirely removed from the Journey-like formula, as there are two caveats. Firstly, these hub areas are still governed by the rule of context-sensitive jumps, so exploration can almost feel automatic at times just walking around and mashing X to see where the cat will jump next. Secondly, while there are sidequests and main-story quests of fetching key items, talking to important NPCs, and solving some fairly basic visual recognition puzzles, there's really only one "solution" for every problem, resulting in what is ultimately a pretty linear approach for finishing the side quests and following the main story fetch quests in these hub areas. I admit here that I'm nitpicking, as this is probably the least significant case of railroading in Stray, but I do lament that there was a great opportunity here for more player creativity and that ultimately, it's just a well disguised case of sending the player down the preconceived path that kills a lot of the joy of discovery for me.

Let's quickly go over a few of the other more gameplay-heavy segments inbetween these hubs too. After the first robot city hub, there's a "puzzle" section where you have to outmanuever and trap these goo monsters (called the Zurk) to safely progress; while this section is not particularly difficult either, it's at least engaging in that successfully luring and shutting traps on the Zurk brings some degree of satisfaction since you can actually die (albeit still fairly unlikely). There are also multiple straight corridors where you just have to outrun the Zurk; again, there's not much difficulty once you realize that strictly holding down R2 and tilting the analog stick forward will allow you to avoid most of the Zurk, but it at least provides a nice rush thanks to the hurried and tense accompanying tracks and the scourge of Zurk just descending upon you.

As a counterpart to these running sections, Stray also features a more horror-game inspired survival section filled with dimly lit tight corridors, alien red pulsating webs, and sloshing sewer water infested with Zurk eggs. This is probably the most engaging section of the game, since you're provided with a zapper that can eliminate the Zurk, and since it overheats quite easily, you often have to kite and funnel Zurk to successfully dispatch them; it's a slight shame that you don't get to play with your toy for too long, but it most definitely does not outstay its welcome.

Near the end of the game are three forced stealth sections, one right after another. Nothing like a good ol fashioned "stay outside of the lit cone of sight" segment to slow the pace down a bit and get a bit more out of the price tag, right? Interestingly, most of the forced stealth is actually somewhat trivial, because there are really few lasting consequences to getting spotted by the drones. You can just run at max velocity through all of the stealth sections, dodging the bullets by maintaining your speed and rounding corners, and then just mash circle when you see the circle button prompt to dive into a cardboard box at the end of the segment and wait for the drones to deaggro and leave once they're gone. Which leaves me with this question: if it's this easy to cheese and disregard the forced stealth sections, then why were they implemented in the game in the first place?

I've mostly been lambasting the gameplay for the last few paragraphs, so I'll give the game props where it's due; I really do enjoy the ruined yet nostalgic backdrops of Stray. The ambient tunes that drop in and out as you explore the subterranean wastelands as well as the decaying posters and hastily scribbled graffiti on the concrete walls really help etch this feeling that while something great has definitely gone to pass, there still linger a few strays (no pun intended) that seek to find their own sources of hope in the sprawling underground. I do appreciate that the game really lets you take your time soaking in all the details here and there, with plenty of snug nooks where your cat can curl up while the camera slowly pans out to let you breathe in and forget about life for a while.

Ultimately, I find myself somewhat frustrated because as great of an idea as they have shown in the final product, I feel like they could have done so much more. I love the little moments like the cat walking on the keyboard to communicate with the AI or random jumbled notes being played as the cat walks across the piano keyboards, so why are these cute cat interactions with the environment so sparse? The interactions between your cat and your lil beep boop buddy are heartwarming and set up the mood perfectly, so why do the writers also insist on inserting so many side characters in an already short timespan that leave after an hour or so with not enough time to develop any strong lasting impressions? It's a ton of fun just mashing circle to hear meowing through the speaker while attracting Zurks, but why is that NPCs have no strong reactions to my cat's meow? There's a section near the end of the game where you have to communicate and cooperate with another big beep-boop without your robot buddy translating, and it's a fantastic subversion after getting used to just reading so many textboxes of translation from random NPCs, but this subversion is ultimately over within ten minutes or so, and I really feel like there was a fantastic squandered opportunity to force players to think outside of the box a bit more.

I won't dismiss the possibility that perhaps, I'm just a bit jaded after playing plenty of fairly structurally similar games over the last twelve months, with a few more potentially on the docket. That said, I can't help but lament that as fantastic as the concept is on paper, the way it plays out leaves a lot to be desired on my end. Even while considering the often hackneyed genre of Journey-likes, Stray feels too safe, too straightforward, and too scripted. As cute as it is jumping and scratching your way back to the surface, I feel like it could have been so much more compelling.

Wonder Flower gimmicks are cute until they turn repetitious, which they do by the end of World 2. The badges largely make up for a lack of platforming aptitude which, as a seasoned gamester, means I have to play the game wrong to accommodate their use. But I'm not gonna unlearn my Mario skills so I don't remember to use them outside of when they are clearly necessary for side objectives like an over-polished immsim. You mean I should use the Dolphin badge on the levels right after I got it? Wowee Zowee!

Broadly speaking this feels like an attempt to teach the kids that grew up with the Switch what Mario is about. The hypersleek UI elements, mountains of spoken text as a replacement for other markers of design intent, the badges, the Wowee Zowee, the oodles of characters, the gacha elements of the standees, the multiple currencies (and decimalisation of Flower coins to further litter the field with shinies), the little emojis, the lack of points. These additions and subtractions are by no means bad but I won't lie, it feels a little like I'm playing a AAA game from the 2020s. Because I am. It's hard to read Wonder as a creative reinvention and reinvigoration of Mario because I know it took thousands of people to make this. That every decision was subject to board meetings and focus groups. It's the same problem as your New Super games -- the formula must be adhered to. And even if the formula changes, it's still a formula. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I look for at this point in my life.

I'll keep playing it, I'll probably finish it. It's like a Coca-Cola Creation, y'know? You see it on the shelf, you think 'what the hell do '+XP' or 'Starlight' taste like, the first sip is novel and enchanting, before long you're still drinking Coke. If I want true innovation, I'll reach for the local-made can of kombucha flavoured with some berry I've never heard of before. Like Haskap. Uhhh, for the purposes of this analogy I guess the random shit I pick up on Steam and itch.io are the kombucha.

And I gotta say, I'm sorry but I can't hear the Mario Gang say Wowee Zowee without having flashbacks to Game Grumps Kirby Super Star Part 2 where Jon and Arin argued for like a minute straight over whether or not Arin had said Wowee Zowee before. Back then life was so simple. I was so young. Games held so much potential. Eleven years, gone in the blink of an eye. In another life, I'm the Mario Wonder kid, growing up on a Switch. Who could have known things would turn out the way they did, that I'd be the person I am today...

Feels like a rebrand to cover up some controversial past half the time.

WOAH JUST LIKE GAME GRUMPS 😱

Review

I gave it a real shot, for 8 hours!

You can read my notes and thoughts here : https://twitter.com/han_tani2/status/1735187901296836666

Or read an essay in which I discuss TotK https://melodicambient.substack.com/p/why-ocarina-of-time-cant-be-recreated

The short version is: the game has its nice charming moments, I actually like the idea of janky physics dungeons and riding around on stuff. NPC designs are nice and some of the side quests looked interesting. But I hattteee the crafting stuff, it kind of ends up padding almost everything in the game out. There's also so much distraction, it feels like YouTube recommendations or TikTok...

Shitpost review

Zelda but if Miyamoto wasn't inspired by wandering the countryside as a kid but opening up Genshin enough times to get the 30 day login bonus

I played this game while I was at home suffering from a mental cocktail of anxiety and depression because I was furloughed from my job and forced to quarantine because of the 2020 global pandemic, and co-oping with a friendly stranger who helped me no matter how many times I fell down that tower with the lights moved me so much that it made me ugly cry during the credits.

Part of me wants to be cynical and say that the game wouldn't have been as impactful to me if I played it at a different time when I wasn't so emotionally vulnerable, but that part of me also realizes that bringing cynicism to the table when talking about Journey feels like missing the overall message of the game. A big thanks to the developers of this game for giving me just a tiniest drop of hope in an otherwise bleak time. I'd apologize for not playing this game sooner but I realize now that I played it at the perfect time.

generally i don't review anything based on first impressions but as a series veteran i just gotta say: this sucks, man

it opens on mindflayers on a spaceship fighting undead dragons in the sky or some shit to this effect and i look at it and i just feel nothing. it's so boring. it's so completely unearned.

every previous larian game i've played has just been the epitome of everything that bores me about fantasy rpgs so i guess i'm prejudiced. but this isn't even really baldur's gate 3, this is divinity 3 or whatever number they're on. let me explain.

far be it from me to uphold "brand identity" to the detriment of creativity, but think about what made both baldur's gate games work: they put in the work to situate you in the world, get you acquainted with candlekeep and everyone living there, before pulling the rug from under you, and then doing the same thing again on a much grander and scarier scale at the beginning of 2. they gave you a reason to care. this one just kicks off on epic and fucked up shit happening to you like it's a marvel movie.

i know it's early access and etc etc but you put the stuff that's supposed to hook people in the first hour or two, and that hook was clearly supposed to be a) the combat (about which i have no complaints but also it's unmemorable) and b) how cinematic it is -- which is the exact thing i'm complaining about. baldur's gate had the pace not of a movie, but of a fantasy novel; maybe not the most ambitious or literary one, but 250 pages in you just kind of get attached and keep going. this one has the pace of a youtube video. i don't want this.

EDIT: yeah i eventually finished the game anyway. i wouldn't say ALL my whining was vindicated, i was actually very pleasantly surprised at the quality of some of the character writing. however, overall, i really don't think i was wrong to rate it low. act 2 is a dull slog and act 3 would have been actually pretty sick if not for the ending sequence being so completely out-of-the-ass ridiculous. i can't describe it without spoilers, but if they were trying to replicate the experience of being railroaded by a DM who thinks they've come up with the coolest shit ever, it's a massive success.

also orpheus is not a fucking githyanki name. i'm sorry. the hook on the wall on which i suspend my disbelief is very sturdy, but it didn't survive that one. at least call your half-baked NPC that you had to invent on the spot "steve swordguy" like a real DM would.

Far too early to speak on this with any authority, but some early thoughts:

• As with Divinity: Original Sin 2 the potential for roleplay immediately crumbles if not playing as an origin character. Especially damning since they are all locked into a specific class and race except for the Dark Urge.

• Dialogue options being marked by skill checks and background tags deflates them. It would be more fitting for certain options to have the checks/tags but not convey this to the player until it is time to roll. If I see an option tied to my one-of-like-six background choices, I effectively have to pick it so I can get Inspiration. As for the checks, I can prep the face of the party with Guidance, Charm Person, Friends, what have you. Which itself leads into...

• Despite being a four-member party game, the other three characters might as well not exist for the purposes of dialogue. If you're lucky you'll see one of the origin characters milling about in the background of a conversation, but the person/people I'm playing with are forced to listen and suggest options. So just like with real 5E, it's best to have one person do all the talking since only one person can anyways, further displacing non-faces from the story they are meant to be involved in.

• Origin characters all talk like they're YouTubers, falling into a pillow at the end of a sentence, a permanent vocal sneer tainting each word (except for Gale). There is no space for subtlety in their characterisation either, their MacGuffins and driving purposes laid so bare like the Hello Neighbour devs trying to get MatPat's attention.

• Without a DM to actually intervene, to interpret the players' wishes, anything requiring interpretation is simply gone. Nearly every spell that isn't a very simple effect or damage dealer? Absent. This leaves players with options for what colour of damage they want to do, or what one specific action they might like to take. Creativity spawning from these bounds is incidental, not intentional.

• The worst part of 5E, its combat, is not improved in the slightest here, and if anything is actively worse. One of the great benefits of the tabletop setting is that the numbers are obfuscated. Statblocks need not be adhered to. Players typically don't know the raw numbers of a creature's health or saves unless they clue in through what rolls succeed for saves, or keep a mental tally of damage done before the DM says they are bloodied. The DM has the option of disclosing information, but here the player is forced to know everything. Every resistance. Every hit point. Every stat point. Every ability. Combat cannot be creative as a result because the whole of its confines are known the entire time. You even know the percentage chance you have to hit every spell and attack. It makes it all hideously boring.

• If spells are going to be one and done boring nothingburgers, the least Larian could have done was not have some of them, like Speak with the Dead, be tied to a cutscene that tells me a corpse has nothing to say. I get it, the random goblin body I found probably isn't a font of lore, but do you need to take me into a scripted sequence of my character making a concerned face with their fingers to their temple as I am told for the eighteenth time that it has nothing for me.

• When spells are being learned, there is no indication as to which are rituals and which are not, nor are there options to sort or filter choices. With so few choices maybe it doesn't matter.

• Despite a bevy of supplementary sourcebooks giving players countless options for their characters, you're stuck with primarily the base text. Perhaps it would be unrealistic to wish for every subclass, every spell, every feat, but not knowing this narrow scope beforehand meant my hopes for, for example, a College of Glamour Bard or a Hexblade Warlock were dashed. Without the spells that make those subclasses interesting, however, I suppose they might as well be absent.

• The 'creative solutions' of stacking boxes to climb a wall or shooting a rope holding a rock over someone's head are not creative, they are blatantly intended and serve only to make the player feel smart for being coerced by the devs into a course of action.

• The folks eager to praise Larian for not including DLC seem to have missed the Digital Deluxe upgrade that gives you cosmetics and tangible benefits in the form of the Adventurer's Pouch.

• As touched upon by others, the devs are clearly more invested in giving players the option to make chicks with dicks and dudes with pussies than they are in actual gender representation. This binarism only exacerbates how gendered the characters are. With no body options besides "Femme, Masc, Big Femme, Big Masc" and whether you're shaven and/or circumcised, the inclusion of a Non-Binary option becomes laughable if not insulting. Gender is expressed and experienced in countless ways, but here it comes down to your tits (or lack thereof) and your gonads. No androgynous voice options. No breast sizes. No binders. No gaffs. No packing. The only ways for me to convey to fellow players that my character is anything besides male or female are my outright expression of my gender, to strip myself bare, or hope the incongruity between my femme physique and masc voice impart some notion of gender queering. Maybe this is great for binary trans men and women, but as a non-binary person it comes across as a half-measure that seeks to highlight my exclusion from this world. More cynically, this, alongside Cyberpunk 2077 read as fetishistic, seeing the trans body as something for sexual gratification, rather than just that, a body.

I'll keep playing it, but damn if my eyes aren't drifting towards playing a real CRPG for the first time.

You fight three hundred and thirty cage matches against bats, slimes, mummies, goblins, knights, centaurs, and a pig man. If you don't lose your mind, you get the opportunity to do it all over again but tougher. A raw deal if ever there was one.

I am old enough to admit that most criticisms I have had of this game over the years are not actually flaws. You can hate it, but you can't really say the Legend of Zelda dropped the ball anywhere. When it kicks your ass, it is trying to get you to find ways to kick back harder with timing, evasion, and upgrades. When it throws another maze at you, it wants you to find the cave person who knows the way through. When it buries the way forward under some bush, it wants you to talk to other players and research. It is not random, it is not cheating, it basically invented saving on cartridges so it could let you hold on to your victories. It did always want you to succeed. Sequels would change things to a way I preferred, but I hesitate to say anything was "fixed", and the experience has just about killed any instinct to argue about games "aging poorly" for me.

Beneath every future iteration of Hyrule is the grid of this game's overworld. Not only landmarks like Death Mountain or Spectacle Rock or Lost Woods, but the idea of a continuous world broken up into discrete pieces. Only Link's Awakening would explicitly keep the pure grid structure, but most future games are iterating on this core idea rather than deviating or evolving. The thing about the grid here is how it hides information; you know where you are relative to the world as a whole, you have your memory of the path that got you there, but unless you've stepped on any given screen before you have no idea what awaits you when you push on north/south/east/west. I wonder if Wind Waker was at some point aiming to recapture that mystique: only silhouettes of islands adjacent to you that you couldn't properly see until you made landfall, and anything could be hidden within or beneath. As much as Breath of the Wild aims to resurrect the spirit of this game, that crapshoot element of navigation and discovery is largely lost by virtue of players being able to see long distances and follow whatever path from point A to point B. I've avoided Tears of the Kingdom trailers and details as much as I can, but I wonder if the sky islands and underground hinted at in what I did see are a swing of the pendulum back in the original's direction.

It took a lot for me to come to appreciate this game. I had to play almost all of the rest of the series. I had to keep coming back after over two decades of abandoned playthroughs. I had to gain some skill in Gradius and Getting Over It, Hades and Hollow Knight, Doom and Dark Souls and Druaga. Even then I had to use save states regularly, rewind somewhat frequently, and follow a guide almost to the letter.

I still don't love it or feel moved by it, but I have learned to respect it. Many things I love about the series were either impossible at the time or it had no interest in implementing, and thus what matters most to me is what I can now see of this game in those I do love. It is a hard blade on a table; it only knows how to cut, but with enough ingenuity one can use it to build a house.