Some of the most fun I’ve had with a game in years was learning how to kill lizards in Rain World. In my entire time with the game in my first playthroughs, I’m not sure I ever intentionally killed one of these beasts. I saw them as impossible foes. But in order to reach many of my goals in Downpour, I had to learn how to conquer them. The first kill feels like a fluke, like luck, and in a way it is. But each spear that pierces their hide feels more real, more earned. They never stop being terrifying. They never stop being a threat. But I had to learn how to take them down anyway, backflipping, juking, stabbing, feasting. I had to learn how to slay dragons.

I have a brand, and part of that brand is that I really like Rain World. In all my poetic waxings, I often am remiss to mention what makes playing Rain World itself actually so cool. So for once, I’ll try to offer an admittedly vague explanation. I’m sure you can find no shortage of mechanical rundowns, so I’ll keep this brief: Rain World is a unique game where you play as a little slugcat trying to survive and find shelter before the devastating rain comes. It’s quite a difficult game where challenges may often feel insurmountable. What makes Rain World such a unique game is its emphasis on emergent and procedural systems. The vast majority of these systems are not explained to the player at all, and as such have to be learned by experimentation and exploration. The behavior and animations of all the predators and creatures you encounter is unpredictable and dynamic. The game is a bountfiul garden of consistently surprising gameplay.

The result, for me, is something unlike anything else: a constantly exciting game. It’s always a thrill playing Rain World. Even dozens of hours in, I find myself yelping and gritting my teeth. I can get into specifics but I don’t want to dispel the magic of experiencing it yourself. I adore this. It can also end up making making the game agonizing. This is why initial critical response was negative, and why many players will find the game simply too hard or too cruel to even play let alone enjoy. But that agony is a part of the experience, or at least my experience, and it’s part of what makes the slugcat’s journey so beautiful.

So what about Downpour? This is an expansion that adds a litany of new features. If you just want a straight recommendation, I don’t advise going into anything related to the expansion before playing the base game. It’s not a required expansion and frankly is extremely geared towards die-hard fans. Most of my time was spent with the new slugcats, but they also added co-op, Expedition mode, challenges, and other stuff. A major addition to the game was Remix, a suite of new options that is available to owners of the base game. This alone makes recommending Rain World significantly easier, because it now comes with a big list of checkboxes that can help you tailor the game to your own needs. (If you want help figuring out what to use, check out my forum post here.)

Now, there is a criticism that Downpour in many ways actually distorts and weakens the unique core identity of Rain World. I’m torn on this. On one hand, I think it’s a bit paranoid. Even with an expansion (which is still optional!), Rain World remains a singular game like no other. Hunter and Monk were already additions and didn’t distort that vision. On the other hand, this game has a lot of things in it. There’s five new campaigns, a bunch of new game modes, and major additions to the map. There’s a chunk of community easter eggs, which frankly rubs me the wrong way, and the involvement of fandom in art can get ugly fast. The expansion also ends up adding a fair bit to the lore and narrative, and I don’t have simple feelings about some of the choices. (I won’t get into it for spoiler reasons, but there are some big swings that I don’t love.) It’s so much that I couldn’t possibly cover it all, and all the implications and complications in this review; even what I’ve written here is longer than I wanted. I wanted to just talk about the lizards, but this is too dense with content that I can’t just leave it at that. I would never go as far to say that Downpour ruins or fundamentally changes Rain World, but it does definitely add a lot to the mix.

There’s a reason for all this. Let’s talk a bit about the history here: years ago, some Rain World modders began developing the More Slugcats mod, which would add new playable slugcats to the game. Eventually, Videocult took these folks onto the team directly and made the expansion official. This, perhaps, explains why there is a sort of eagerness and lack of restraint to the expansion. The developers have announced intent to continue working on Rain Word, though I get the sense that this will mostly be the Downpour team and not the Videocult duo. I won’t lie that this concerns me; I don’t necessarily want to see this game endlessly expanded. I’m still waiting on the Signal project, and I want to see what else these teams are capable of putting together.

I think part of this comes from the fact that I don’t really engage with games in the way a lot of others seem to. For some people, Rain World is there forever game. I don’t want a forever game. I don’t generally seek to play a game for an indeterminately long amount of time. When I see credits on a roguelite, that’s generally when I stop playing. I am so puzzled when I see people gripe about growing tired of something after several hundred hours in a game. Even my favorite games of all time I generally do not return to ad nauseaum.

But that’s sort of why Downpour ends up making me happy. In spite of some of my concerns and gripes. A messier Rain World is still Rain World, and Rain World is good. And at the end of the day, Downpour gave me a reason to play one of my favorite games again. It gave me a reason to learn how to slay dragons. And that’s worth a hell of a lot.

I am called to revere Elden Ring out of spite. I once heard someone I no longer speak to for various reasons say, upon seeing a then new trailer, that they wish FromSoft would making something interesting like King’s Field again instead of this. Now, I was playing the King’s Field games for the first time when they said that, and I happen to love those games a lot, and I certainly want them to make another one or something like it, even though they never will because the games industry is full of cowards. But I also happened to know that this person had never played King’s Field, and were probably only saying it out of a smug sense of superiority. And this made me angry.

Yes, yes, the familiar gang is here. Yet another lowly warrior usurps the eternal cycle. The fallen order, the god-kings, corruption, the moon, the flame. Invasions, summons, messages, bloodstains. Tragic sidequests, Patches is there, and multiple endings. Magic is blue, holiness is yellow. You can parry and backstab enemies. You upgrade your weapons to scale with your stats. You dodge roll and stagger. These are familiar. They are played out, to a degree. And yes, they are not exciting in that old way. But I don’t really care, because I’m a “fan of the genre”. I am enthusiastic about the new things that come from this company, and the genre they’ve inadvertently spawned, and I’m always ready for innovation. But that doesn’t preclude me from finding joy in the familiar. Because it was never the uniqueness that mattered most.

There’s this kind of jealousy surrounding the Souls series. The fans (myself included) view them as special, unique, and precious gems. When something besmirches their name, it is a disgrace, because there is something transcendent about these games that we hold sacred. But as the series has become a prototype, a whole genre sprouting from its seedbed, the things that made a game like Dark Souls special have become no longer so special. How many games can we find that are trying to be exactly like it? Those qualities, whether it be difficulty, inscrutability, atmosphere, even specific mechanics, they’re not special anymore. How quaint does Super Metroid feel now? How cliche is The Shining now? Are The Beatles run of the mill? Is Seinfeld funny anymore? It’s like the old joke: “I don’t get the appeal of Hamlet. It’s just a bunch of famous saying strung together.”

It becomes difficult to vindicate why these games are good. So, we get jealous. We get protective. “No, you see, these games are special. How else could I love them so much if they weren’t? They are doing something different. They are beautiful in a way only I can understand.” Everyone thinks they are the sole prophet of Dark Souls liking, and that everyone else is some misguided mystic. I do, too. But I know I’m fooling myself. I know these games are mortal.

See, I’m not sure these games were ever that special to begin with. I remember, years ago, sitting on a couch playing Demon's Souls, and wondering out loud how they made this game, how they reached something so specific. And he said to me that "it had to have come from someone with a vision". As years go on, I find that statement less and less true. They were and are unique, sure. But they didn’t come from nowhere, sprouting from Miyazaki’s forehead like Athena. They were made by people in a company making a software product. Elden Ring was building off of Dark Souls, which was building off of Demon’s Souls, which was building off of King’s Field, which was probably building off of Ultima Underworld or something, and yadda yadda. Iteration is underrated. I think what ends up getting underrecognized, ironically, is that these are good video games. It’s not because they’re special. They haven’t unlocked a secret to games that no one else can know. These games don’t have to be special to be good. They can just be good. Which they are.

Anyway. I liked Elden Ring. I thought it was fun. I thought it was cool. I liked exploring its world. I liked crawling through its dungeons. I liked fighting bosses. That’s enough for me. And so you might ask, “Is Elden Ring even that special?” And I’m going to say, “Who cares?”

Hey there! I’ll be honest, I don’t have a great deal of interest in talking about Elden Ring in any formal capacity. If someone wants to pay me to do it, I might, but no-one likely does. :/

Anyway, instead of a write-up, I’m just gonna list my 10 favorite proper nouns in the game.

-

10. Vulgar Militiamen (keepsies on this one for my future hardcore punk band)
9. Shabriri Grape
8. Ancient Death Rancor
7. Morgott, The Omen King
6. Flame, Fall Upon Them (the choice to make spell names full sentences is always sick, regardless of property)
5. Fingercreeper
4. Land Squirt
3. Albinauric Bloodclot (I would ride around on Torrent just mouthing “albinauric bloodclot” a lot)
2. [Bastard’s Stars](https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Bastard's+Stars)
and finally, 1. Godskin Stitcher

Alright, bye!!

The comparisons are too easy to make. A narrative driven independent game with lush prose that dabbles in magical realism and science fiction as it confronts visions of both the future and past. It also happens to be set in a version of our world (in this case, the American South) that has been skewed, deals with themes of labor politics and the plight of the working class, and draws on and reinvents design philosophies from decades year old games. The comparisons make themselves. That’s why I am doing my damnedest not to say those games’ names, because to do so robs Norco of its own, distinct identity. It’s torture not to draw line after line between its constituent elements to its counterparts for the sake of preserving that identity, maybe especially because I think Norco is experiencing an identity crisis of its own.

Let me be unequivocal: Norco is a good game. I think it’s worth playing. There’s a part of me that feels bad for offering an emphasis on criticism, as if I’m kicking down a darling indie game. So I’m trying to be particularly explicit here: I think Norco is a good game. It’s filled with beautiful writing, unique characters, and potent themes of grief and politics. It has things to say. But I’m not sure Norco is quite sure what those things exactly are.

I have biases, and two in particular that I arrive at here: I care disproportionately about endings, and I care greatly about “aboutness”. Norco’s ending fell flat for me, and I struggle to know for sure what it’s truly about. These are my biases. As I’ve just said, there are so many reasons to love this game. That’s not what I’m going to write about here. I’m going to write about what keeps me from truly loving Norco.

I think I disproportionately weight endings in narratives because they are what stories leave you with. When you walk out of the theater, the thing that is mostly immediately carried with you is the last frames before the credits rolled. Games, historically, do not have great endings. I don’t mean mechanically; there are lots of games with great final bosses and all that. But the narrative ending, the last moments, these are usually unnoteworthy, and it’s usually brushed off. With narrative driven work, however, this is a little harder to forgive. Of course, everyone likes different kinds of endings. I am picky with my endings, I’ll admit, but I try to have a nuanced understanding of what does and doesn’t work with me in an ending. Enter Norco.

Norco’s ending, by which I mean the exact final moments before the credits roll, feel rushed and incomplete. It is in desperate need of a denouement. It’s ironic, because the climax of this game is flanked, quite literally, with two beautiful moments on the left on the right, one of which is perhaps the game’s most beautiful sequence. I will not spoil it, but it is an ethereal, melancholy, and haunting image of memories and home. I almost wish moment was positioned as the Norco’s last moments, because this potency is immediately undercut by the climax, which felt bereft of catharsis. And I think the reason this climax fell so flat for me is because it relied on the motives of the main character, whose identity and desires are opaque and indistinct.

Kay, the protagonist, never feels like she is given the opportunity to become a character of her own. Blake, her brother, almost feels like one, but is mostly off screen. The companions you encounter feel like characters. They have motives, interiority, likes and dislikes, quirks. Catherine, Kay’s deceased mother, who you play as in flashbacks, gets to be a character, too. This is welcome; rather than just being a grief object for the protagonist, Catherine gets to be a person. So rarely are stories about grief as much centered on who we lose as how we lose them. But what about Kay? What are Kay’s feelings? What does Kay want, need? What does she like or dislike? I’m not sure I could tell you anything about her, despite having spent hours in her shoes. I felt more empathetic and understanding of its side characters by the end. All I know about Kay for sure is that she is detached.

A detached character is obviously not a bad thing, and detachment serves an important role here. Kay’s detachment, as I read it, is representative of a response to what feels to many young people like the slow march into a catastrophe by modern industrial society. It is very intentional, and the rare moments where Kay’s detachment is overtly characterized, it is felt strongly. But when a game builds up to a climax which centers on the characters goals, motives, and desires, her own specific relations and history, all of which are deliberately muted and blurred… I struggle to be moved by that climax and its ever brief ending.

Kay is neither a cipher nor a character you roleplay as. I don’t know what she’s supposed to be. She’s not me, but who is she? I can neither imagine myself as her or imagine her as someone else. Like the game itself, the player is in a crisis of identity.

Norco is kind of a mess, both narratively and mechanically. It’s modeled after classic adventure games, but the puzzle design is a far cry from that old school style -- which is not something I’m exactly mourning. Those puzzles were notoriously arcane and absurd, an ethos that has aged in quite a way, and it wouldn’t have worked here. Norco’s puzzles are relatively straight forward and signposted heavily, and you can ask for advice. But Norco also has a combat system. And it has mini-games. A lot of them. Most of these mini-game puzzles are fine. Nothing exceptional, but nothing horrible. There is one bit I did think was excellent and well executed, which I won’t get into again for spoilers, but involves a boat. But I truly have no idea why this game has combat. It’s not fun and just feels silly. And this lack of cohesion is also seen in its thematic underpinnings.

The themes are easy enough to identify: the struggles of the working class, religion’s social role, messianic myth, the desire to find meaning under late capitalism, ironic middle class hipsterism, the ever-extravagant machinations of the bourgeoisie, and so on. But these themes are neither explored on their own fronts nor are they unified by any central theme. The “Mind Map”, which is an interior display of the lore and relationships in Kay’s life (again, trying not to make the comparison here) is dense with connections but not with cohesion. There is some fascinating world-building and cool ideas in here. But where do they lead to?

Obviously I don’t think it’s necessary that a “message” be had in art, but when you neither pose questions nor offer answers, it can begin to feel more like these themes are props. Norco mostly acknowledges and maybe comments on its phenomena. Again, that’s not intrinsically bad, but I have my preferences, and the absence of direction doesn’t work for me here. All of it is cool, sure. But I don’t know what to make of it, and not in a way that fills me with giddy curiosity. I didn’t leave Norco with any questions, for either its world or for my own.

Again, I feel guilt, “damning with faint praise”, but I seem to be in the minority here, which is nice, I guess. It makes me feel a little more comfortable offering criticism. After all, I can find plenty of ecstatic analyses of Norco, but not as much where I’m coming from. I see why others have fallen in love with it. But I never got that far. Maybe I’ll grow more fond after reading criticism and other’s feelings. But this was my initial response, and that counts for something.

Norco, at its core, ends up as a collage, so scattered as to almost resemble a pastiche of itself. It’s soup full of scoopfuls of ideas that have been lightly emulsified. Collages can be good. And Norco is good. Its lack of thematic and structural direction does not nullify all the beauty therein, but it is why I don’t think I’ll ever get goosebumps when I think about it.

Metroid, in its own way, has always been a series about transformation. Early on, this was only in the most abstract sense, as Samus accumulated power-ups and the morph ball. The second entry begins to make its themes of transformation more literal with the metamorphosis of the metroids. From Super Metroid, to Fusion, to now Dread, Samus’s suit is a protean machine that constantly changes shape, color, and function. The Prime sub-series, too, deals with transformation constantly. Even if you stripped these thematic trappings away, you would still be left with a game that is fundamentally about transformation. It’s a series in which Samus (and thus, the player) constantly change, their abilities constantly expanding and shifting in scope.

So perhaps it’s fitting that Metroid went through its own dramatic transformation over the years.

Metroid Dread was pretty universally considered vaporware until recently. All that was really publicly known about it was that it existed at one point. Now, we know a bit more: it was originally planned for the DS, but the team felt they couldn’t create the game with the technology at the time. And so, Metroid Dread lay in its tomb for nearly two decades, like a dormant torizo, until Mercury Steam, the team behind Samus Returns, came into the picture. That this game even came out is shocking. But here it is, somehow.

Here is my question: where is all the dread in Metroid Dread?

It can be easy to forget, now that we live during a golden age of Metroidvanias, that the Metroid series was pretty radical at the time of its inception. It was a strange hybrid of platformer and exploration that wasn’t really seen before. Super Metroid might seem trite or quaint now that it is recognized as a blueprint for the genre, but it was (and in many ways still is) deeply ambitious. Decades later, select elements of those games’ design were absorbed into the cultural landscape, improved upon, experimented with, and modified. Metroid Dread reflects these changes by adapting to them, but the result is something that feels fundamentally different from its origins.

That isn’t a criticism. If Metroid has taught us anything, it’s that sometimes change can be good. Dread is a slick, visually stunning package, informed by well over a decade of iteration and innovation, designed with precision and intention, never letting you lose forward momentum for a second. Dread is a sublime action game that represents a peak in the 2D series’ combat. It all feels dynamic and sharp in a way fighting as Samus has never felt like before. In the early days, though, Metroid wasn’t really ever a game about combat.

Metroid Dread is an action game. Early games were games with action in them. Maybe that seems like an awfully fine distinction, but it represents a long lasting shift in a design ethos. This isn’t new, either; the series has consistently drifted closer towards action. Prime also showed this change, as the third entry, Corruption, was a far more linear action title than the first venture into 3D. Zero Mission perhaps exemplifies this the most clearly, as a remake of the original NES title that was far more action heavy and far more directed. The NES game was awkward and janky. Even in the ever-venerated Super Metroid, Samus can feel unwieldy and floaty. This would typically be seen as bad, but it also lends itself to a feeling of spaciness, weirdness, and unwelcomeness that fit the games well.

With the release of Dread, we’ve seen more and more newcomers come to the series, and this is perhaps the perfect entry point for many players. (Speedruns of this game are going to be beautiful.) The game is loaded with affordances and quality-of-life improvements. The whole game is designed to be an almost frictionless exploration experience. While past entries’ attempts to become more approachable had previously been fraught, Dread feels elegant and beautiful in its execution. Zero Mission and particularly Fusion were controversial because their sense of direction felt like hand-holding. Exploration was explicitly guided, and it was overbearing. (Personally, I think this could have been fixed by just providing the option to ask for hints, rather than forcing them onto the player.) Dread has no need for wordy signage, as it’s designed to guide the player silently and subtly through its world, rarely needing to instruct. Following along the critical path is a blissful glide through ZDR. There’s always a ragged edge, another door to open, another room to explore. It’s deeply satisfying and engrossing. Many of Dread’s optional upgrades are also puzzle-like, requiring strategic movement and platforming. This is a far cry from the old days when secrets were often hidden in random blocks with what seemed to be no real care.

Early on, Metroid wasn’t really about a frictionless experience, though. It was often just about getting lost. The original Metroid is filled with friction, with labyrinthine and repetitive corridors and dead ends. Metroid 2, on the other hand, pivoted hard into linearity, while Super established a more concrete formula. In it’s finest moments, Metroid was often about exploring without direction, beating on with uncertainty as the intrepid bounty hunter Samus. They were scary, weird, often incoherent games. For many, this makes the games altogether unapproachable, but it also conjured an enchanting mysteriousness that still affects me to this day.

Of note is also the series' gradual emphasis on plot. This climaxed in the near-universally maligned Other M, but Metroid had been showing more of its story for years, with dialogue and lore. (Yes, I read the manga, too, don’t @ me.) Dread has a veritable plot, with plot twists and worldbuilding and an antagonist with motives. It’s apparently the end of the so-called Metroid arc, and how it goes about wrapping that up is interesting indeed. Meanwhile, Super Metroid was a masterpiece of wordless narrative, telling a story about very little, but filling it with contemplation and moodiness. (Prime did this well too, while also featuring robust lore in its scan logs.) It didn’t really have characters, and the writing essentially boiled down to an opening monologue. The rest was told by the shape of space and its inhabitants. They were tone pieces, at least for a moment, ever brief. The series has shied away from silent storytelling, despite always being capable of it when it wants to be, and supplements with big dialogue boxes.

The truth is there is very little dreadful in Metroid Dread. After all, it’s designed to be an empowering and engaging experience, not an off putting one. There is plenty to be seen that is horrific or intense, but there is not much dread, no oppressive weight hovering over your shoulders as you stride into the dark. Even the E.M.M.I, the poster child of Dread, which upon encountering can be heart-pumping and tense, do not feel dreadful. They can instant-kill you and are unkillable (at first), but this design choice means that the generous checkpoint system implemented here was more or less necessary. As a result, the E.M.M.I become more like puzzles, and less like looming threats they seem to be. All of the game’s challenges can be overcome. The game is designed for you to overcome it. Metroid Dread is actually quite welcoming, inviting players both new and old into ZDR to romp through its caverns.

This is, by all accounts, to be recognized as good design. All these affordances, from improved game feel to improved world design, are what is considered in most circles to be good design. And I agree. Metroid Dread is impeccably well made. It is the current apex in years of iteration. Cruising through an alien landscape as Samus Aran has never felt so good. But it’s important to recognize that all these improvements end up changing the character of the series significantly. It’s still Metroid, don’t get me wrong. Dread is bursting at the seams with series staples. But it has also taken on a very different tone. It has fundamentally different design goals. The series is allowed to change. It doesn’t need to be ambitious and weird anymore, and in many ways, it can't be. It’s allowed to just be a great game. And Metroid Dread is not only a great game, but also one of the best in the series. After years and years of waiting, Metroid Dread finally emerged from its cocoon, and while it is fundamentally different, it really is stunning.

But I can’t lie. A part of me longs for the mystery and unease of the past, a past that perhaps barely existed at all. When Metroid was an eerie tone piece haunted by uncertainty and melancholy. When it was a world filled with dread.

Perhaps more importantly than making a good game, Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya has assured the world that, provided you have *a* computer (any computer still running can play this, I imagine) and an internet connection, you will always have free access to something universally cherished, something intelligent and forthcoming with ideas of simple design, and something (in its original form) untouched by the inherent evil that coats large-scale game development.

I love this game, but let's be real: it's a public service first, great game second. Give Pixel a key to a city or something.