SIX ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ STAR GAME

6/5❗️

wasn’t expecting this at all.

I use game controllers like I use paintbrushes: loose and vibey. Precision platforming has never been my thing. But this bish rite here??!?!

going into this, I knew EVEN THE OCEAN had been criticized as being “preachy,” but not much else. I didn’t know it was going to make me “feel” like I’m capable of clearing megaman levels.

The art: the sidescrolling background illustrations, the platforming level design. Larry David voice Pretttty good. The visuals have an autumnal, unfussy cuteness. However, the people in the game don’t look cute—they look real.

The depictions of our natural world are the most adorable looking parts of this game. The world is magical place, and the depictions of how we treat our world, and each other, are the ugliest parts of this game.

Our protagonist is a technician starting her first day working for the city’s power plants. The 2D platforming occurs while she is on the job. Our hero is a young woman of color risking her life to save her hometown, Whiteforge, from odd occurrences that seem related to the energy these power plants are generating.

And that is why this game is not very popular. It seems that much of the same Games Media that praised Anodyne 1, was not tryna fuck with a real game talking bout real shit. This is the reason why, for years, Capcom was not tryna release those Ace Attorney games, here in the west, that depicted the normalized racism of British people in the 1900s—it’s not prudent to impugn the status quo. “Go woke go broke” they say.

If I recall correctly, in this game, all the main characters (antagonists notwithstanding) are brown, and both relationships given screen time are homo. That resembles my daily life, and perhaps that’s why this game is literally $3 on steam at the time of this writing (i paid the $20 for it on switch, and was a lil saddened that my new favorite game is available at 80% off, and may be relegated to ‘hidden gem’ status, like so many works of art I adore).

Another reason this game will make you uncomfortable is its spirituality. Instead of enemies to kill, your health bar is your ongoing challenge, which begins half light/half dark. Bulbs of light or dark energy shift the balance and you die when you are 100% light or dark. People hate games symbolically about aspiring to find balance within self & within community. Maybe a game about the next mass shooting is more to their liking?

Yeah. So this is New Age Megaman Ferngully, featuring a heavily lgbt cast. 🤯 To make a game with all these ideas figuring prominently sounds unwieldy. That’s why it such a triumph. Analgesic Productions got their chakras aligned all the fucking way down and pulled it off.

I want more bravery from my games, in a world where every big game studio’s toxic culture is being brought to light, I commend those who not only aren’t on that fuck shit, but are making art to inspire kids (FYI this game is still a PG-rated experience) to do better than we have done. That’s love!

P.S. the gameplay is fun af! Figuring out how to navigate certain parts didn’t take more than 3 or 4 attempts. Now I’m over here wondering what other puzzle platformers I might vibe with. But I ain’t gon lie, by the last fourth of the game I did adjust the settings to make it less impenetrable for me. The accessibility options in this game are brazy: if you don’t have time for platform hopping, you can make our hero float through the platforming…or choose story mode and skip them all together. The devs already knew that this was a story worth telling, with or without the gameplay. 🕊

Portraying the complexity of the human condition through a most inclusive lens: 5/5

Speaking truth to power: 5/5

Being written more like a good book/play/film, rather than a video game: 4.5/5

Menu design sometimes being lowkey frustrating: yes

Nuanced sense of humor: very yes

Far and away the worst game Capcom have ever made, a uniquely fascinating and objectively awful experience from a company whose lesser games are typically let down by near-imperceptible balance flaws for hardcore gameplay enthusiasts; a “bad” Capcom game is normally undone by subpar netcode or an overpowered character, but here we must suffer through actors falling through floors, textures upside-down on walls and enemies who forget to wake up and fight you, perhaps protesting at the unsanitary working conditions they’ve been asked to perform in. Rotten to the core in ways big-developer games are never allowed to be any more, Spanish bootleg-ass Devil May Cry game, fuckin El Diablo Puede llorar: Dos on a cigarette-burned DVD you got at the market this morning, buried deep in a spindle with Animal Soccer World. Hooooly shit dude, it’s funny like a bad movie for the first hour or two, rinsing bosses in minutes without taking damage by just standing still and shooting your guns and cackling maniacally about how little brain you used, but the novelty of a mute Dante’s hexagonal eyes clipping through their pentagonal sockets soon gives way to a depressive despair when you’re begged by a nervous stutter to pull off a series of chaotic wall-runs in order to beat a battle that I’m pretty sure was compiled and saved moments before Hideaki Itsuno had to load copies of this shitpile onto the back of a busted dumptruck headed straight to the cemetery. I persevered past the attack chopper’s infamy in hope of more epic-fail frivolity but was only rewarded with more mechanical misery; being able to activate Devil Trigger amidst what appears to be a knockdown state and have it expire before you can even jank yourself to your feet is a fun five minute feat, but my remaining shreds of self-respect prevented me from subjecting myself to ten more hours of bosses you can beat by simply walking behind them. Huge admiration for Capcom putting this in the HD Collection, presumably as a cautionary tale for generations to come about what happens when you release a CAG without combos, care or competence. Drakengard, eat your dragonheart out.

I am just over six months older than Ocarina of Time. It's one of the recurring thoughts I had while playing through this game. Seven months and five days, to be exact, is what separates the beginning of me and the release of one of the landmark achievements in the medium, a watershed work often lauded as one of the greatest the medium has ever seen. Despite this, Ocarina of Time feels older than me. Much, much older. I'm not the right person to equate just how much today's games industry genealogically descends from this game alone, so I will leave that for someone more qualified, but suffice it to say, Ocarina of Time feels part of the very fabric of video games. It is a primordial emblem of video games. Video games didn't start here, of course, but Ocarina of Time might just be the video game, the main character of the medium. Much the same way that Vertigo seems to re-centralise and gravitate cinema around its existence, consumed as it is by the very act of looking and creation, Ocarina of Time is the perfect encapsulation of video games for the sheer virtue of being a work about growing up in a medium still very much in an adolescent state. It arrived at the generational crossroads of those who grew up with arcades and those who would grow up with Ocarina of Time. Looking back at the game now, it is impossible to shake the feeling that the game's legacy, as a timestamp for the art of video games, is no accident. We are supposed to return to Ocarina of Time as adults, of course we are. We are supposed to return to see, to realize, the truth of those prophetic passing years. To see the brutality of adulthood as the shadow looming over childhood. To witness, with blinding familiarity, fascism rise from the shallow grave of inaction. There are rough spots in here, sure, but how many legitimately canonical titles retain their statures simply by being good, rather than being technical powerhouses or through the economy of nostalgia. I hope Nintendo does it justice and remaster (not remake) it for the Switch, so that I never have to play it with the fucking Wii U gamepad again in my life, thank you very much.

Joyfully tasteless like a massive fart that begins with an explosion of pure chaos, gradually receding as it fills the room with its stench, petering out into nothing but laughter and disgust. I know people get angry hairs on the backs of their necks when others compare video games to movies and use words like “auteur”, but I think it’s fair to say that Tomonobu Itagaki filled a role in the 2000s Gamerworld that was similar to that of Michael Bay’s in the the 2000s Movieworld: all stops pulled out at expense of any pretentious good taste, maximising the potential of computers to delight insane teenage boys worldwide. The inclusion of Playable Rachel in Sigma somehow finds a way to crank the dial on what was already there, allowing you to control a bikini sexbot of the classic Dead or Alive inflatable mold, strutting around The Vigoorian Empire with an iron thong up your arse that makes your walk cycle look like you shat yourself, balloon boobs flailing in wildly different directions every time you land a mechanically-sound-and-tactile Square, Square, Square, Triangle ground combo. This shit is practically gift-wrapped for a painfully horny kid on their 14th birthday, lol. Painfully, painfully awkward to be seen playing this edition, a mortifying ordeal of being known. Imagine showing the tentacle boss to your grandmother! It would fucking kill her on the spot, right? Big jets of polygonal blood spraying all over your shame. Game Over.

Still absolute mad fun to play, though. Don’t get me wrong.

Having the Scott Pilgrim guys and the co-developers of Streets of Rage 4 on the dock here meant this was never gonna be a failure, regardless of its status as a pretty ridiculous exercise in nostalgia for folks who are still wrapping their arms around a childhood long past expiry. Sometimes a shameless cash-in can also be a fantastic beat 'em up, and that's okay - the miracle of video games is that sometimes really good ones are created to promote some shitty movie.

Although based on the secret ooze that created Turtles in Time, you can feel the SOR4 in this from the moment you first grapple an enemy. We're back. Tribute Games and Dotemu have done a technically-marvelous job of taking that original arcade/SNES framework Konami developed and polishing its rough, unforgiving edges off with fairer, more thoughtful mechanics from other brawlers that folks know and love. This game isn't quite as mechnically dense or strict in the challenges it lays down in comparison to other 2D beat 'em ups, but that makes total sense because this also has to be a 90s reverie for people who just want to see Mikey eat pizza or hear a 67-year old man try to sound like a teenager again or listen to the boss themes Wu-Tang composed. And that's cool by me - I want more people to experience the joys of the genre.

Mechanically, I'd say this thing plays like the Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 to Streets of Rage 4's Street Fighter IV - you're allowed far more leeway with OTGs, wall bounces and cancels compared to the precision of Wood Oak City, which leads to tons of incredibly satisfying juggle pathways that can even integrate obstacles from the surrounding environment. For example, with Raphael you can jab-loop a dude, cancel the last hit into a dash, cancel the dash into a shoryuken, roll-cancel over to the other end of the room and wall-bound the sandbagging body back to you by lunge-kicking it with a roomba. It's mondo bodacious, and goes to show how fulfilling fighting/brawling video games can be when you let the player "power fantasy" themselves as a lean green fighting machine with lengthy, stylish, free-flowing combos. A great way to show people how fun beat 'em ups are.

Six-player more or less throws all of the above out of the window in favour of a pizza party game, which is totally cool and lot of fun too, even if you're like me and don't know who anyone on the screen aside from the Ninja Turtles is (I am the right age for this flavour of TMNT, but they were called the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles over here and my mum didn't like me watching violent things and/or buying little post-Reaganite/Thatcherite plastic frog guys). A great beat 'em up should exist both as a big bashing exercise and a Sifu-like pathway to combat mastery, and no doubt some wise old masters will come along and show us multi-character juggle combos in the months to come that are like, mega bonkers radical, dude. Despite being PvE experiences, great beat 'em ups always end up developing fighting game-like communities around them who all end up complaining about patch notes and balance changes - it just goes to show the passion a great entry in this genre can inspire.

Only finished it twice so far - once solo and once in a random party - but feel like this could comfortably be a game like Streets of Rage 4 where I end up beating it like 10 times on different difficulties with different characters because it's clear they put the work in, making every character their own game to learn and every stage on every difficulty its own challenge to understand. What I'm trying to say here is that you should play Streets of Rage 4. Cowabunga! This thing has the fuckin Nickelodeon logo at the start and it could be Game of the Year lmao

its called pastiche you dipshits and it rocks

honestly this game is basically perfect, surf maps sega dreamcast sonic adventure gun game good sound design good platforming good leaderboards good skips good everything. adore it!

also here's my spiciest take: if you dont like the writing in this but you do like the writing in hades then you need to get better at having fun because they are The Same, but this one is more joyous

𝓬𝓻𝓾𝓮𝓵𝓽𝔂 𝓼𝓺𝓾𝓪𝓭 𝓻𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀


𝓒𝓡𝓤𝓔𝓛𝓣𝓨 𝓢𝓠𝓤𝓐𝓓 by 𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖘𝖚𝖒𝖊𝖗 𝖘𝖔𝖋𝖙𝖕𝖗𝖔𝖉𝖚𝖈𝖙𝖘 🄶🄴🅃🅂 🄰🅆🄰🅈 with 🄰 🅆🄷🄾🄻🄴 🄻🄾🅃 🄾🄵 ˢʰⁱᵗ 🄹🅄🅂🅃 🄱🅈 🅅🄸🅁🅃🅄🄴 🄾🄵 🄸🅃🅂 คєรՇђєՇเς รєภรเ๒เɭเՇเєร. ₛᵢₘₚₗy ₜₕᵣₒwᵢₙg ₒᵤₜ wₒᵣdₛ ₗᵢₖₑ 🅲🆁🆈🅿🆃🅾🅲🆄🆁🆁🅴🅽🅲🆈 and l̶̦͍̖̪̂̄a̸̧͖͍̠̤̜͇̮̯̅̈́̈́̔ͅt̷̳͈̔̀̑̓̌͝ȅ̵̛̥̠̯̖̯̮̹̃̅͛̓̂ͅͅ ̵̪̜̹̏̆̃̂s̸̭̙̱̰̓̎̋̇͋̿́́͝t̷̥͔̤̰̻̥̱̪̝̄̊̇̉̓̌͜a̴̡̨͔̙̦͓̮̠̦̮̾̉̎̈́̕͝g̵̰̻̥̊̎͗̂̈́ẹ̷͉̼͉̠̲̪̰͑̈́͆̉̀̔̄͜ ̷̼̩̣̪̺̎̏͋͊ͅç̴̭͕̹̼̓̎̽͛̆̈̚͝a̶̡̟͖̫̫͙͙̤͖̾͂̉̄͒͛̌̓͘p̸͚̖̰̓̓̓̈́͛͋̎̏͠͠i̵̧̮͓̎͛̕ͅͅt̷̠͇͊́̒̃̽̃͌͗̊͒ą̷̝̹̥͇͖̫͖̭̉́̀̄͋́̌̏̕͜͠l̴̺̈́͐͒͋̾͑͊̈́͊̿i̷̧̞̹͗͆̓̆s̵̡͙̝̖̳̳̭͕͚̣͊̌̀̓̕m̷̧̉ seems to be enough to ֆǟȶɨֆʄʏ (っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ online video game critics ♥ 【ｔｈｅｓｅ　ｄａｙｓ．．．】! "𝙀𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙪𝙣𝙧𝙚𝙫𝙞𝙚𝙬𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚" is the 𝓒𝓞𝓦𝓐𝓡𝓓'𝓢 𝓒𝓛𝓘𝓒𝓗𝓔 𝓒𝓡𝓘𝓣𝓘𝓠𝓤𝓔 𝕨𝕙𝕖𝕟 𝕚𝕥 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕤 𝕥𝕠 V⃣ I⃣ D⃣ E⃣ O⃣ G⃣ A⃣ M⃣ E⃣ R⃣ E⃣ V⃣ I⃣ E⃣ W⃣ S⃣, but I think ｃｒｕｅｌｔｙ░ｓｑｕａｄ（ゅヮ桜）, by [̲̅v][̲̅i][̲̅r][̲̅t][̲̅u][̲̅e] of its ιⓝşίˢᵗ乇ᑎς𝐄 on 𝓃𝑜𝓃-𝒸𝑜𝓂𝓂𝒾𝓉𝒶𝓁 𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓅𝑜𝓈𝓉-𝓂𝑜𝒹𝑒𝓇𝓃 𝟤𝟢𝟤𝟢𝓈 𝒾𝓇𝑜𝓃𝓎. truly đỖ𝕖Ⓢ ʏᎸɘb ᴎɘƚᎸo 𝘵𝘺𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦-𝘫𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘦. . . . . . . . ᶜᴬᴺ ʸᴼᵁ ᴵᴹᴬᴳᴵᴺᴱ ᴼᴾᴱᴺᴵᴺᴳ ⒺⓁⒺⒸⓉⓇⓄⓃⒾⒸ ⒼⒶⓂⒾⓃⒼ ⓂⓄⓃⓉⒽⓁⓎ OR 🅶🅰🅼🅴🆂🅼🅰🆂🆃🅴🆁 🅼🅰🅶🅰🆉🅸🅽🅴 αɳԃ ｒｅａｄｉｎｇ 𝕤𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝓁𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 about c̴̢̹͔̦͍̯̮͙̜̓̕r̸̦̭̮̼͉̲̒̈́u̴̫͉̞̓̅͌̓̾̚͠e̵̡̠̹̩̱̓̄͂͆́̾͜ļ̷͉͇̱̈́͝ť̵̨̺̗̹̪̑̚ỵ̷̰̥̥̼̈́ ̶̪̙̘͇́̉̉͗̑̇͊̄͌̕ş̶̠͕̭̈́̄͌q̸̧̤͋̎̈̑̈́̆̐̈́͌̿u̸̼̞̟̬̪̻̰̖̇͝a̴̢̞̻̹̩͌̍̅̅d̵̨̨̳̖͔̈̓͠?


🄶🅁🄰🄿🄷🄸🄲🅂0/10
🄶🄰🄼🄴🄿🄻🄰🅈6/10
🅂🄾🅄🄽🄳4/10
🅁🄴🄿🄻🄰🅈🄰🄱🄸🄻🄸🅃🅈7/10
🄾🅅🄴🅁🄰🄻🄻8/10

it's hard for me to write a review about this game. i feel like it was designed in a lab to be optimally enjoyable for exactly me, much like how McDonald's french fries are chemically engineered to be Mathematically and Provably Delicious for the general American public.

i can't talk about Neon White without talking about Arcane Kids. in the mid-10s, being someone who staked a lot of identity into playing games was profoundly embarassing. ignoring the truly heinous shit that goes without saying, year after year, AAA studios continued to pump out "mids at best." on the other side of things, "indie" games were no longer new and were in something of an awkward puberty. i can't tell you how many "physics-based puzzle platformers with a gimmick" i had pitched to me that promised to be Actually Good. they weren't. however, during this time, the Unity weirdos were churning away in their art scenes around the globe. the new derisive joke became "make a game in unity, make a million dollars." of course, the people making these jokes didn't know what they were talking about, but i guess none of us really did back then.

---

Arcane Kids existed as something of an antithesis to the games of the time. when we had more than enough pixel-art RPGs, they gave us ZINETH. when we got innundated with walking simulators, they gave us Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective. when indies decided to try and be funny with things like Goat Simulator, we got Sonic Dreams Collection, CRAP! No One Loves Me, and this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RNCyc3hzAw). while a lot of these games were "funny" or "jokes," they always had deeper ideas to them beneath the surface around player agency, the joy of moving your avatar, the love of Videogames As Videogames.

i cannot possibly explain how strange it felt to turn on the game and have the title screen after the intro cutscene splash in with a voice echoing "NEON WHITE" as the moodiest witch house track creeps in through your headphones. the fake scanlines, the neon glow on the characters, the tone, the vibes. i thought to myself, "they finally did it." as i played more, i confirmed my suspicions.

Arcane Kids finally made the game it feels like they had been working toward all these years. blazing fast, huge jumps, easy-to-learn-but-hard-to-master, tight, violent, horny, loud, freaky, all at once. in Mission 11, as breakneck-paced breakcore blasted out of my screen, i screamed aloud in my room to my partner who was watching me play "I. FUCKING. LOVE. THIS. GAME." in time with each click of the RMB that shot me across the map at incredible speeds. in moments like this, you know for a fact that moments like Bubsy pulling out an uzi and a katana at the end of Bubsy 3D or them subjecting a crowd of people at a game conference to vape trick videos that inspired their previous game (https://youtu.be/2pO23GTaBtk?si=ldB9w6CU2UC3TkHI&t=1791) was not just them contributing to the general irony-poisoned sense of humor of the time; they legitimately thought that it was tight as fuck.

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one line from the infamous Arcane Kids Manifesto (https://arcanekids.com/manifesto) that i always think about is "the purpose of gameplay is to hide secrets."

at a time when even FromSoft has started to move away from their smaller, more-focused world design in favor of chasing the lucrative open-world design potential in Elden Ring, it feels amazing that we have a game like Neon White that is about intricately crafted and infinitely replayable level design. after years of waiting, we finally have the one true Indie Puzzle Platformer, but this time it has guns.

the gameplay (for me, usually) fell into a flowchart like this:
-beat a level once and get whatever medal you get
-go back to find the secret gift
-during this second trip, notice which parts of the levels you can skip or save time on that were hidden to you before
-play the level a 3rd time to get a gold medal
-use the hint from the Gold medal to get an Ace medal on your 4th time
-over time, you begin to amass a collection of "hey, did you know this quirk" movement secrets like shooting bullets, bunny hopping after a dash, or sliding with the shotgun's discard

game design that calls attention to itself like this is beautiful. level designers are artists. we've known this since Doom WADs. however, in the time since Doom we've had several games like Gears of War, Halo, and their ilk that said "wasn't the sickest part about Doom being a huge buff guy with loud guns just blasting disgusting freaks and seeing them explode???" while that does indeed whip, Neon White is on the other side of the coin saying "wasn't the best part about Doom the level design and the joy of figuring out how to move as fast as you can through a level???"

after 11 years of watching speedrunning streams nearly every day, Neon White finally made me feel like maybe i could do it too. first you pit yourself against the Ace medal time, then your friends, then the Dev Times, then your own ghost, and then the world. to this day, i have yet to have a global #1, but i've had a #2 and two #3s. i'll keep going though.

[EDIT 7/17/23: i did it :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWT2b9pwRMI]

---

Neon White is a love letter in videogame form

One year after Racing Lagoon put Livejournal behind the wheel of a Subaru, Square performed another proverbial kick of the monkey through Topman with The Bouncer: a dependable PS1 genre concept basted in Square's signature century-turning style, applying firm-hold hair gel, Hot Topic chokers and tribal-fonted loading screens where they don’t necessarily belong but are nonetheless appreciated for how f#cking c00l and aw3some they are. Like The Matrix, this is 100% the sort of thing that has slingshotted itself round the wormhole of bad taste and come howling back into the 2020s with Evanescencent avengence, a lifer lesson kerranging in the past that sends a machine-head’s message to a future with faith no more. Does for Fighting Force what Racing Lagoon did for Ridge Racer, for better and very much for worse - mechanical function giving over to stylistic form.

Sadly, the buck stops with aesthetic appreciation. The Bouncer can’t muster up anything more interesting than a re-run of Midgar, making this perhaps the first of many times Square would return to FFVII’s well for waters of uninspiration, a cycle of Nomura-headed rebirthing, retreading and reheating of Sector 7 pizza that’s sustained us all the way to 2020’s VII: Remake; but are you all that bothered about playing through one of the best settings in all of sci-fi one more time? Think about how many times we’ve been to Middle Earth and Tatooine and Colony 7 and Deep Space 9 and maybe you can find it in your heart to accept that there should be more stuff set in Midgar, the cyberpunk setting where ponytailed CEOs wield meito-grade katanas… Tempting to live in this world, isn’t it? This push-and-pull between pish-and-pill is at the heart of the game - two wolves within with lip-piercings fighting over whether a dude with jorts and a Gerard Way haircut is cool enough to compensate for the fact you can barely walk him in a straight line without your controller registering a busted input.

Unfortunately for me, the Lawful Gamer within won out. As intimated earlier, New Millennium Square simply couldn’t cut it outside of their usual turn-based fare. Combat is clunky and stinky and sticky and lacking in anything of note to someone who’s played pretty much any other beat em up ever made - each enemy seems to have a weakness to one of your three face buttons, so fights simply devolve into basic 1-in-3 guesswork that leads to your guy headbutting a sentient load-lifter sixteen times in a row, the menacing model “dying” by simply becoming an unresponsive clutter of polygons in the way of you Square-Square-Squaring another Shinra goon.

Fights being sheared into two, three, four or even five different pieces by cutscenes that dole out your little brother (Tetsuya Nomura)’s Final Fantasy VII fanfic feels like an intentional design choice to cut down on the number of times in a row you’ll have to press the Triangle button, but was in truth probably an attempt to showcase how super-duper impressive the PlayStation 2 was in the year 2000. Despite being alive and fully cognisant of the console’s grandeur at the time of its release (I powerfully remember seething with jealousy when someone showed me SSX Tricky at a time when all I had was an N64), I can no longer perceive that element of the game’s appeal so many years after the fact, in much the same way we no longer lose our minds at the transgressive nature of old Seinfeld episodes or the fact our phones have a little camera built into them. Such is the fate of almost every launch window title for a games console…

Woodaba said that games (namely this one) do not have to be good to be great, which I think touches up against what I’d say about The Bouncer - it’s a “theoretical” game, one that exists more powerfully as a cool box art, a collection of short twitvids shared among friends, character names (Sion Barzahd, Dauragon) that can be ironically idolised from a distance but aren’t really all that funny when you’re hearing them in your sixteenth cutscene before fighting your five-hundredth cut-paste enemy soldier. A 2000s artefact to be placed in a glass case; a cautionary tale of Y2K design-hedonism for the youth to heed, lest they too think it’s acceptable to wear two crucifix chains on your jeans.

Look at this with the Roger Ebert philosophy of rating something on the relative merits of what it’s trying to achieve and it’s a huge success. The original Devil May Cry’s gameplay is a perfect fit for the world of Buffy, and this Fox Studios imitation brand of Capcom’s masterpiece is surprisingly satisfying to play. Land a stake through the heart of a vampire who’s spinning in the air with all the aggression of an LA stunt actor and you’ll be in a heaven that feels incredibly close to the world of the television show it’s trying to replicate.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the game also has you spending hours collecting keys for doors and fuses for fuseboxes and levers for broken switches - anyone remember the episode where Buffy does a block puzzle? I guess this item-fetching filler is a natural drawback of this being a budget TV tie-in that needed to have “OVER 20 HOURS OF GAMEPLAY!” in its Game Informer review.

The story here is straight out of the Whedon mid-season template, which certainly isn’t a complaint. The dialogue has a decent number of the corny chuckle-able quips that the show was known for, and the writers somehow managed to work in a bunch risque lesbian riffs that I’m surprised exist in a mid-2000s 20th Century Fox product. My only complaint is that the game never gets meta with itself - not that I love metanarratives or anything, but the show was always down to get outside itself and examine itself in a fun way fitting of its Twilight Zone roots. Sadly, there’s nothing here like the iconic dream or musical episodes, and the game’s all the poorer for it. Go collect another crypt key.

The best thing about Chaos Bleeds? Anthony Head - who played Giles on the show - is the game’s 'tutorial voice'. I have never heard a trained thespian sound so deeply, utterly strained in my life before and it is amusingly unpleasant. You haven’t lived until you’re heard Giles say “Buffy, press the UP D-PAD button to use an item in your inventory, or press SELECT to see this again.” and punctuate it with a huge sigh that the sound techs simply chose not to cut out. Brilliant.

I can't rate this. It's a magical initial 20 hours, followed by a slow petering out with insane zigzags in quality near the end. It's a gorgeous world and you can find adventure in any direction you go, but the rewards start feeling less and less substantial the further you are, especially when you realize how unbalanced and contrived some of the underlying stat systems are. For everything enjoyable here, there's something annoying or detrimental to the experience. I really want to love it, but there's too many forks in the road for me to remember it as the studio's masterwork (the way most people seem to be treating it).

But enough about Breath of the Wild,