I need to bury my parents.
No, you're not allowed. God be with you.
God save good mate o'mine but I need to be off now to bury my parents.
No, I can't let you do that. God smiles on you this day.
Listen here ye olde buddy I need to bury my parents.
Yeah alright fine who cares. God save.
HE'S GOING TO BURY HIS PARENTS! ALARM! GOD STOP HIM!

Between having the most consistently piss-poor game mechanics, characters bugging out of scripted events, broken quest design, ropey ass combat, and the fact that it's made by an actual gamergater... ugh, why even continue this sentence tbh.

It's just Christian Skyrim. And Skyrim had been released 6 times before this mess came out. I was over it by proxy before even booting it up.

Yes, the map is nice, don't @ me holy roman empire

I had a lot of goodwill in the reserves heading into this, being incredibly fond of the team's other works. And as such I'm conflicted about I feel now it's over.
My top line take is that I love everything about this game other than playing it - the characters, story, music, a world that transcends dimensional space... but the experience is marred by hostile design choices and so, so many puzzles that got me riled up by their obtuseness or finicky solutions. Not to mention the backtracking, janky traversal in the overworld, and potential late-game grind if you aren't mindful of the game's primary resource. Also some sections are just agonisingly long.
The writing is again the star of the show here, but for such an explicitly anti-capitalist game, I didn't expect to feel so... alienated, I guess, by the game's design philosophies.

How many of the following points apply to you will determine your suitability for this product:

1: A proclivity (past or present) for drugs
2: Overworked and underpaid
3: Depressed
4: Fantasise about the return of Guy Fawkes and/or billionaires toy spaceships burning up on re-entry
5: Tell people Bela Tarr is your favourite director when really its David Lynch
6: Feel the last remaining shreds of optimism for the human trajectory leave your body every time you open Twitter and yet another sickeningly bad faith talking head swings downward and is met with a resounding cheer
7: Proselytise experimental indie games providing there's some familiar mechanics
8: Have frequently tried to radicalise moderate friends and family by demonstrating any number of tangible examples of oppression and inequality the world over
9: Worry you may actually, permanently lose it one day, whatever "it" is
10: Have sat in a gallery staring at a Rothko or Pollock or anything similar that people call pointless, pretentious, not-art, whatever and F E L T S O M E T H I N G

If you've scored 6 or above on our Hypercapitalist Revenge Fantasy Suitability Test TM, may we offer you our most heartfelt sympathies, and welcome.

After a short life break from gaming, I find myself with COVID, housebound, and nothing to do. Fittingly I've decided to punish my fevered mind with the weirdest shit in my backlog.

I'd guess this beautiful, alien creation is vaguely about being a round peg in a world of square holes - or a lone Dali hanging in an exhibition of renaissance paintings - but who can say for certain. While baffling and overwhelming for the first 15 minutes, confusion quickly falls away to reveal a mechanically sound micro-RPG with some of my favourite art and sound in recent memory.

To echo the disclaimer in my review of Even the Ocean, I'd already decided I like Analgesic's games before I played them, and now I've actually played two, my confirmation bias is getting, erm... more confirmed?

Anyway. If you don't already know, Anodyne is a dreamy, vague tale set inside a copy of Link's Awakening. You play as Young, who is sent out on a quest to rescue Briar from the Darkness. And that's about as specific as it gets, for the most part.

How this plays out is a mechanically familiar affair, exploring from one tile to the next, chatting to NPCs, collecting bits, battering enemies with your broom. Where this shines though is in the v i b e s it creates through the twisted and diverse world that Young inhabits, and the uncanny way the game unfolds.

Oh, and the soundtrack absolutely slaps. Big Radiohead feels in the hotel level.

I'll leave you with a quote from one of the NPCs, looking out over a cityscape at night:

"Behind every light is a person with hopes and fears and secrets... Looking out is both terrifyingly lonely and fiercely personal.
"I think I love every person behind every window.
"I love you, people, for being my stars.
"I love you no matter how fucked up your life is or how far you think you've fallen. You are lovely for tonight..."

You know when you're at a family dinner and that one uncle you don't like much but aren't sure why starts to tell a story and you know it's gonna go on for a bit too long and that the punchline is gonna be taken straight out of a 90s lad mag and by the time he eventually gets there all of your younger cousins are visibly cringing and you STILL laugh for some reason, against your will, forever a pariah to the cool youngsters, and end up feeling a bit conflicted and at odds with yourself? Anyway what was the question?

This was my first Analgesic game after eyeing up their works for years and years at this point. I remember being excited for Anodyne 2 coming out despite not having the played the first. I tend so often to decide who my favourite artists or works of art are before I've even interacted with them, based on some intangible impression I can get for whatever flighty reason happens to strike me at any given moment.

So with my disclaimer to impartiality out of the way, I've set about this Easter weekend to see how much progress I can make through this series of games, starting with Even the Ocean (spoiler: I loved it. Who saw that coming).

Over an unhurried eight hours - which could be done quicker if you don't exhaust all dialogue, try all the food from supermarket, make friends with the librarian, etc - you play as Aliph, electrical engineer extraordinaire, on a journey to fix a series of energy plants for reasons and increasing stakes that I won't spoil here. The overarching plot reminded me in part of a few other things that I love, but to note that comparison here would be to invite spoilers. What a sentence for you, eh, dear reader. Words for words sake.

The interpersonal exchanges are where the writing really shines though, as the characters tackle all-too-human issues, and ground this strange, alien world for the player.

As a final thought too, I was almost expecting the "gameplay" to exist in service of the story, and play out like a walking sim with some light platforming, which is something I've no problem with if I'm enjoying the story. But, I was pleasantly surprised to find some genuinely tight and well designed puzzle-platforming sections, with a ramp up in difficulty as the game progressed.

All said, a beautiful work, and I'm off to start Anodyne now.

Now listen here you son of a king - if you can deal with the bizarre dialogue (spoiler: press literally any button to skip if you're that bothered) and overlook the occasional bug like supermanning off the face of the Earth for no reason then you'll find a lot to love here when you unlock the full mountain range and just mess about nailing the perfect line and boring your mates with your replays.

It's basically Skater XL in the cold. You can move the sun around in the sky like some eldritch god. It's great.