Even the most enthusiastic reviews of Chants of Sennaar seem to feel obliged to mention the forced stealth sections as a weakness of the game. Depending on the critic, these portions are either labeled as an irritating diversion from the core gameplay or a negligible shortcoming in an otherwise novel and accomplished experience. While I definitely agree that the stealth is by far the shallowest element, I also found it to be symptomatic for a deeper problem that unfortunately affects even the best aspects of the game’s design. For a title about deciphering foreign languages, Chants of Sennaar is far too concerned with translating its encounters with the unfamiliar into all too familiar frameworks of video game tropes.

The game is at its most engaging at the start of each chapter, when you encounter a lot of still unknown signs of a new language at once and in various contexts, without any one of them offering conclusive evidence to their exact meaning. You observe the same symbols appearing in different combinations: there in a dialogue between two other NPC’s, here directly addressed at your character, and yet another time as part of a title for a painting on the wall, for instance. The comparison between the respective utterances sometimes leads you to more or less educated guesses about the meaning of individual words. This approach is greatly encouraged by the game’s single best system, which lets you write down your interpretations in an in-game notebook. These hypothetical translations then appear every time you encounter the corresponding sign from that point onward. You type in your definition and return to the same situations to see if they make more sense now. Some dialogue might suddenly transport a meaning that lets you infer even more translations, while other texts appear to be off just ever so slightly which forces you to adjust your hypothesis.

This simple gameplay loop is the beating heart of Chants of Sennaar and it would have been more than enough to sustain the whole game. That’s because the process of translating any given word is rarely just a matter of choosing the right or wrong answer to a question. Sometimes, there may be several possibilities that all make sense in every example available to you. At other times, there perhaps is no single completely accurate translation for the language you are playing the game in, or the meaning itself might vary, depending on the specific context of usage. None of the five languages in the game may seem very complex with only thirty-something words each to decipher, but ambivalences and ambiguities arise naturally when these symbols are transferred into your own language and its almost infinite semantic complexity.

Things get even more interesting when you start to translate between the in-game languages. Despite their limited vocabulary, the game introduces several layers of deviation that go beyond a mere terminological equivalence of all languages. It starts with small differences, such as the indication of plural forms, but later on new languages will have entirely different sentence structures, making it almost impossible to translate them word by word. Even in cases of denotative correspondence, the terms still can hold opposite connotations. For example, the Warrior’s term to refer to the group of the Devotees carries a strictly pejorative meaning.
In general, the process of learning a new language always provides insight into the culture of the respective group. If only the Alchemists have a decimal system in their vocabulary, then because they are the only ones who frequently need to operate with exact figures. This distinction is further underlined by the fact that their words are usually composed of abstract geometric shapes, while other groups like the Devotees use a more figurative sign language. Also note how every language is taught you to differently, according to the speaker’s culture. It makes perfect sense that you learn the language of the Devotees by their religious teachings, while the Warriors mainly communicate through orders, or that the Bards express their concepts in theatre plays and the Alchemists in scientific formulars. If you stay attentive to these indicators of social structure, you’ll find that there are conversely multiple ways to decipher the languages. Every written language follows its own inherent visual logic, which usually makes it possible to differentiate between different types of words prior to knowing their exact meaning.

Chants of Sennaar deserves most of the praise it is getting for how much sophistication it creates with its simple translation mechanics. I want to make clear that these qualities are not simply outweighed by its faults before diving into the next paragraphs full of criticisms. In fact, my main frustration with the game stems from how much other stuff was added, even though it contributes almost nothing to the experience. Basically, every element that is not directly linked to the act of translating remains awfully underdeveloped, and there is surprisingly much of it. Throughout the adventure, you’ll encounter block puzzles, several labyrinths, platforming, even scripted chase sequences and some embarrassingly misplaced horror moments. The real problem with the stealth sections therefore becomes that they are only the most prominent sample of a much wider array of poor gameplay segments throughout the whole game. Why in the world is there a Flappy Bird mini game in here?

Besides being a distraction from the game’s strengths, these components also sometimes work against them. Despite language being the central feature of the experience, the world is, for the most part, curiously devoid of its presence. Instead of creating a series of dense and intimate social spaces to explore, Chants of Sennaar tries way too hard to give your adventure a grandiose sense of scale of Babylonian proportions. As a result, you mostly traverse through wide, empty spaces with only a few scraps of text to be found each area. Far too much time is spent by just walking from one point of interest to the next, and the whole layout of the tower quickly becomes so confusing that it actually discourages you from revisiting old areas to test out your hypothetical translations, regardless of the fact that this method is incentivized by the mechanics.

Above all, the bloated emptiness and stuffed gameplay features for the sake of variety make apparent a certain lack of confidence by the developers in their own genuine systems, which shines through in the design of the core mechanics as well. I completely understand the reasons behind the decision to give official, “correct” translations to every sign, especially from a practical perspective. Periodic tests of your knowledge that gradually verify the meaning of each word were probably necessary for the steady pace of progression the story aims for, without running the risk of some players getting hopelessly lost in translation at some point. The tests themselves also mostly avoid the trap of giving away the answer too easily by making you translate multiple signs at once. Yet the drawings used to illustrate the supposed “proper” sense of the corresponding word are themselves the perfect illustration for why this correspondence between signifier and signified is itself impossible.

As individual sketches, these drawings are usually inept to represent the whole range of a sign’s meaning, especially if they are meant to visualize abstract concepts. To merely criticize this, however, would miss the point that the drawings do not actually attempt to provide a definition themselves, but to facilitate the process of translating the in-game languages into your own. In fact, the use of drawings sidesteps the much more rigid method of a direct verification through your own native tongue. If the game would ask you to formulate the translation directly, it would need to account for many possible “correct” inputs from the player. Even something as seemingly simple like the sign for “I” could also be translated with words such as “me”, “myself”, “my”, “oneself”, “selfhood” etc., depending on the sentence in which it was used. The options only multiply when you take more than the English-speaking audience into account. Instead, the drawings try to be consistent with all your possible hypotheses about the specific meaning of a sign, before arbitrarily deciding the “true” translation once you associate it correctly with the drawing. These official translations remain somewhat flexible, as the game will for example conjugate verbs according to the context of a sentence.

Yet despite every precaution taken to make it less restrictive, this system still asserts clarity and plainness where there was ambiguity and complexity before. No matter how different the process of translation was for each player, Chants of Sennaar makes sure that everyone arrives at the same conclusion at the end. The price of this approach is that once any sense of ambivalence about a word’s meaning is resolved, your translations stop being a tool you use creatively to understand unknown signs, and simply start to replace the foreign language, which in turn ceases to matter once it becomes “solved”. The goal is not really to learn a previously unknown language, but to reinstate the transparency of your own language into the world. Understanding a language has little to do with being able to find correspondences between another one already familiar to you. True understanding can only be reached inside the language itself.

Of course, this process takes years with any language in the real world and might seem like a tall task to ask for a puzzle game that only takes a couple of hours to beat. But I’d argue that games have been remarkably good at making you learn to think in ways that even make almost zero sense outside the experience. Think of Portal’s catchphrase “now you’re thinking with portals”, which is another way of saying that you have become a fluent speaker in the use of portals. Every good puzzle game adheres to this core design principle in its own way. They are never simply about solving a series of well-designed problems; they also gradually augment your way of seeing and interacting with its world in a way that make these problems solvable in the first place. In comparison, Chants of Sennaar is oddly reluctant to let you use the languages you learnt for yourself. The game could have linked progression to successfully communicating with the natives, or by acting as a translator between them. While the latter is in fact the penultimate and certainly most rewarding challenge the game presents, it is also inexplicably demoted in its entirety to a side quest to reach the “true” ending. For the most part, Chants of Sennaar wants you to learn its languages not to understand or use them yourself, but rather to enable you to understand its other mechanics, even though these are already so derivative of other games that they should require the least explaining of all.

__________________
More puzzle game reviews
Cocoon
Hitman GO
Mole Mania

only so many times I can go thru the same floors with the same enemies and the same bosses and the same weapons and the same everythings. for something so lauded I expected some variety. I'm sure some bozo will tell me "umm actually curse, there's six billion lines of bespoke artisinal stone baked dialogue" but you can blow it out your ass if the whole thing's contingent on slaving away in the metalayer currency mines for hours on end

every room seems to go on forever man. imagine if in isaac or monolith you cleared a room and then it filled back up with the same shit five more times. what the fuck guys? you have like four enemies per zone, you don't need to rub it in. is the expectation that I'm basking and luxuriating in these encounters? I'm not. I'm bored before I hit the third floor

maybe it gets better once I suck up to every NPC and collect all the gizmos and upgrade the weapons and upgrade the dungeon and upgrade the shop and upgrade the trinkets and fill out my pokedex, but I'll never know. I fuck with greek mythology when it's about cronus eating his kids and perseus cutting heads and severed testicles goin in the sea, but I don't think I'm the target audience for this kinda snarky post-tumblr young adult stuff. I'm glad folks like jacking off to it, I guess?

probably beats playing it!

Earlier this year, I played most Armored Core bar the PS3 games in anticipation for this game, though not really out of pure hype, but because I was curious what bedrock of design From Software was working with. I didn’t expect to like them much, as I'm not a big mecha fan and I rarely hear high praise for its gameplay, but I was pleasantly surprised. Armored Core had a great niche in which fast movement did not mean great flexibility. You can boost around at high speeds, but your ability to turn and aim is limited by your mech’s legs and your FCS Lockbox. It was an incredibly compelling way to design a console shooter in which traditional aiming was not the main skill, but instead the usage of movement and positioning to supplement your limited tank controls was heavily emphasized. It tickled a very different part of the brain than most games usually do, and this is not without getting into how deep and detailed the mech-building was and the way in which it very directly affected how you control and move with your AC.

I felt very positive towards Oldgen AC as a whole in spite of some issues with mission design, but I also felt like there was no chance FromSoft could replicate any of this. The core conceit of the system after all was limited and unintuitive controls. Without it, none of this would work, and in the year of our lord 2023 we’ve already had a couple releases whos primary objective to sand off anything awkward to the modern gamer even if it leaves glaring flaws in the design (looking at you, Resident Evil 4 Remake) so I prepared myself for Armored Core 6 to not really reach those same heights.

Having played it now, I can call it decent as a brainless mecha-themed action game, though only decent, as even on those metrics it is greatly brought down by poor balancing and some core mechanic weaknesses. It had cool spectacle, and the music was occasionally good, and the plot had enough intrigue going on with answerable questions if you cared to find hidden data logs. The challenge that some bosses give at the beginning was interesting, and I particularly liked the Ibis Chapter 4 boss, who moved too fast to brainlessly shoot at, demanding you wait for openings and keep closing the distance to make sure your shots don't ricochet. Though unfortunately that challenge faded and never returned, even as I completed the supposedly extra difficult content of NG++ and attempted to nerf my own builds to allow the game to shine more while it had the chance, and FromSoft missed the chance of fix Armored Core’s long standing issue of boring mission design, which in some ways is made even worse as they are all made much shorter and less demanding and ammo/repair costs feeling like a complete non-factor to the mission gameplay thus failing to incentivize you to play around saving costs.

The game’s greatest virtue in my opinion is the mech creation sandbox and how much flexibility you have with the ability to place numerous decals anywhere and change the material type of the different metals all over the mech. You can create some very beautifully rendered custom mecha in this game and it makes it easy to get attached to your particular creation if you put some effort into them, and I think that alone can definitely carry a playthrough of this game. However, that about sums up all the nice things I have to say about the game. The actual gameplay suffers and does not justify replaying the game three times to see all the content, and that's what the rest of this review will be dedicated towards.

One of the core issues that hurts this game’s vision is the Stagger system. It acts like a simplified but more extreme version of the Heat mechanic from the older games, however the changes made to it hurt the game’s balance severely. Armored Core 6 rewards the player exponentially for adopting a burst damage based playstyle, often turning fights into complete stomps in favor of the player once you put on a shotgun or grenade launcher. In contrast, anything that doesn't include some form of burst feels heavily undertuned and weak, try playing assault rifles in this game and you will have a bad time for multiple reasons. The issue is twofold here and I will be using it to segue into my other issue with the game’s design.
Stagger leaves the enemy open to critical damage for a small window, and so in order to take advantage of that window, some kind of burst damage is sorely needed. Building Stagger bar itself is also primarily dependent on the damage being dealt, and this makes it so slow damage over time weapons often are bad at causing stagger too, whereas burst damage options will both inflict Stagger very fast while also allowing you deal massive amounts of damage during the window. Finding a build that allows you to take advantage of the stagger system to a reasonable degree while also not completely invalidating the enemies is a far far more challenging task than anything in the game itself. But why balance it like this? Why are Shotguns so obscenely strong?? I suspect the answer to that lies in them being carryovers from Old AC design without much consideration put into how their power changes when the core limitations of tank controls were removed.

In Old-Gen AC, options like a shotgun or a stationary rockets/grenades were much harder to line up the shot for due to the nature of tank controls and FCS. This especially was felt with Shotguns, which demanded you to stick up close to an enemy to get worthwhile damage, which in Oldgen this meant that you were consciously moving into a range where you cannot track your target very well as they can move much faster than you can turn around to chase them, and thus lining up the shot properly took a lot of skill and finesse. Your movement needed to make up for your limited turning and made it so your ability to deal high damage was highly reliant on moving in smart ways, but this conflicted with the demands brought on by needing to dodge enemy attacks and keep yourself out of their sights. This created an incredibly complex dance of challenging priorities that made the high damage feel earned once you manage to land the shots.
However, in the world of Armored Core 6, the mechs are blessed with hard-lock auto aim and insta turning around, nearly all your shots will land, the negligible drawbacks of hard-lock are not felt whatsoever in PvE and the game’s much too stationary bosses. Your movement rarely needs to take into account your ability to land shots, just do whatever it takes to dodge the enemy’s telegraphed cannons and stay close while spamming the shoot buttons.
The assault rifles and other long/mid range options still had a strong place in Old Gen because in order to track targets within your lockbox, you had to keep a certain distance that made their movement manageable, allowing them to be good ways to chip away at enemies with ease. In comparison, AC6 gives you no reason to ever be far from opponents. With the increased power of laser blades, the addition of assault boost kicks, and the bosses who constantly dash up to you for Souls-like melee attacks, there is nearly never a reason to play long/mid range. You need to stay close to even dodge most boss attacks which ask you to hover over them and/or dash past them. It’s telling that most FCS given to you are close-range focused and that Sniper Rifles didn’t even make it into this game.

I find these flaws to be the result of the sacrifices made by the game for the sake of ultra-intuitive controls, but when you take away the entire skill of aiming and the movement, positioning, and weapon balancing factors that come with it, issues like this are bound to bubble up. It's also because of this that none of the mech types really feel as different as they used to, with the controls homogenized the way they are, many of the drawbacks and strengths of different mech-types are not as apparent. Of course the flipside of this is you can now bring a tank leg into any kind of fight you want, whereas Oldgen AC tended to railroad you into making a fast AC if you wanted to deal with its endgame challenges. But unlike this game, Oldgen AC often still had a lot of bite and challenge left to it even when you develop an AC that has the right tools for the mission. That isn’t to say that you can’t cheese difficult fights and challenges with some broken weapons/setups, but you had to go out of your way to make them and most challenges feel beatable without a cheese build, you just need the skills to push yourself over the finish lines. The demands of the build were only one half of the puzzle, but playing well enough to beat challenges was even more emphasized, which I don’t find be the case in Armored Core 6 as the “right build” is both even easier to make and once created, utterly destroys any challenge and doesn’t let me have any fun with the boss. Perhaps this is great for the type of player who likes the power-fantasy of crushing infamous Souls bosses by changing their build, but I was never that kind of player and even if I was, the relative ease and simplicity at which you can create a build that dominates all this game’s content makes even that part of the game unsatisfying in concept.

It's hard to look at the game in a good light after three playthroughs, with the flaws in the game’s balancing and the limited depth of its systems becoming more apparent as I attempted to find ways to make the game challenging. This a game where you never need to worry about anything but dodging once you’re locked on and while yes, the ways in which you dodge in this game are definitely more fun than Souls i-framing, dashing over forward moving attacks that every boss spams is not enough to make me fall love in with a game, especially not with the vast majority of missions being some flavor of “boring” with how little they demand of any of the systems in place. At the very least I hope the way this game introduces mech-building can serve as a nice way to ease players into the older games.

ethan: urgh…damn it…what the FUCK is happening in this village…

heisenberg screeching over the intercom: ethAN wintERS. have you ever desired a man carnally?

three years late but whatever. stinks. simultaneously the least charismatic and most self-serious entry in a series that usually threads a better needle with respect to its tone than whatever’s presented here. ethan is an unlikeable psycho, thoroughly unenjoyable riff on the ‘it takes a village’ proverb. forgets to be an action game for half the game and then when you get to that part you’re mostly doing a bunch of eighth gen arena strafing with minimal target feedback. semi-competent machine games campaign but lacklustre resi title and every insistence the game makes on deriving aesthetic and mechanical inspiration from re4 falls totally flat while the rest of the game is too much of a ‘greatest hits’ reel to really have much of an identity of its own. between resi 7 and resi 8 the guys over at capcoms resi team need to seriously consider couples therapy. may have been more charitable if i was from eastern europe 👍

i've played enough games in my life that something that's merely there to pass the time doesn't really interest me anymore, when i play a game i want it to really grab me with something, be it unique and engaging mechanics or interesting storytelling, just something that'll stick out my memory and make me go 'yeah!! that thing!!'

another thing i really value in a game is replay value, i generally enjoy diving deep into the games i'm interested in so that of course often leads to me wanted to do multiple full playthroughs, so i appreciate games that create adventures that retain their appeal in some form not just on the first time, but the sixth

so when i play a game like resident evil village where i spend the first ten minutes holding forward to put a baby to sleep, or holding forward to like walk through a load of snow before anything actually happens i'm not just bored, i'm thinking, 'oh, i will have to do this every time' and the game has moments like this so frequently and is so disgustingly average otherwise that i could only stomach the one playthrough, and with that, a large part of its staying power in my memory is eviscerated

the game's structure is similar to 7's, in that you meet a group of koopalings who all go off to their individual castles and you go to each one of them and kill them, this time to collect 1 out of 4 thingies to get you to the endgame, and also similarly to 7 they are by the numbers facsimiles of resident evil levels where you collect items and kind of solve puzzles and piece together the whole map and blah blah blah it's fine, it's serviceable, but not once was there anything that like wowed me or made me feel much or anything really, i'd like to be able to critique them further but i honestly don't remember that much about these areas aside from their general aesthetic, which i suppose is a step up from 7's one-two punch of 'brown house, grey boat'

there's one setpiece in house beneviento (generally my favourite area) that i found actually rather unsettling, but i knew after finishing it that it would never scare me again, there's hardly a gameplay element to it and it would be reduced to a glorified cutscene on a hypothetical second playthrough unfortunately

the dlc campaign, shadows of rose which i also played, has a different setpiece at this point that kind of blew me away honestly, as it wasn't just something creepy and unique within the series (to my knowledge) but also challenging to the point that i actually failed it the first time, and the second time was an incredibly close call, it actually had me panicked because i, the player, had to survive this part, i felt in sync with the character on screen in a way i've rarely felt playing 7 or 8, as i usually feel like an outsider watching the character trying to survive

i don't want to spoil what happens in the segment just in case, but it's something to do with manikins

these games are far too much of a reassuring prescence in what are meant to be horror games, coddling me and making sure i'm impressed and not too uncomfortable, wrestling control away from constantly so something scary can happen to ethan or rose in my stead, someone will jump on me and starting like eating my face or something and it'll be awkward because idk if this is just a cutscene and the game is proceeding as intended, or if i actually fucked up half the time, i'll be mashing one of the face buttons when something like this happens (probably a habit i picked up from resident evil 4) and then the little 'skip cutscene?' thing will appear in the corner and i'm like oh okay i'll just get comfy then

there's also a lot of segments that are railroaded to the point that they may as well be cutscenes, with the fish guy's area being a particularly bad offender, it all just feels so phony, the hand of the designer is so visible at all times i never just get lost in the world i'm meant to be in

i also think that the RE engine's bend towards realism just makes the games look incredibly bland and samey, everything's kinda lit realistically and all the environments are just kinda, normal looking, it feels like there's not really any interesting composition or focal points or any sort of mood to like anything i'm looking at, all this supposedly impressive detail all blurs together and washes over me and i'm really sick of how these games look, especially considering the very first games in the series still impress me with how well they're presented

i'd really like these games as well as devil may cry to move away from this kind of style personally, maybe then we won't have to rely so much on yellow paint to make things you can interact with visible

this review is probably very messy and i apologise if it sounds dismissive, just playing this back to back with 7 was very disappointing as this direction the series is going right now really isn't my cup of tea, it feels like we're resting on the series' laurels a bit, combat that get the job done, exploration that gets the job done, and a lot of showy, flashy setpieces and nods to older games that i like much more

i'm just always left feeling a bit empty after an experience like this, when i think about resident evil village in the future, will any memories of my experience come flooding back? what will get me talking about it and recommending it to my friends? what is so special about it that i'll end up with that itch, that drive to experience it all over again and return to its world for years to come? it's always a bit of a shame when i don't have an answer

Can gamers at least try to be consistent when trashing games for having MTX, it feels like such random games always catch heat for it when there's much bigger offenders even among Capcom's own library (Monster Hunter World & Rise lmao)

I can at least understand people being upset over optimization (even if in my experience I've had little to no issue in the 5 hours I've played so far), but obviously the issue differs from person to person.

Game is fun tho, I'm having a blast, this really is just an improved version of the original Dragon's Dogma and I'm all for it.

what at a first glance may seem like a return to its franchise's roots, is quickly hamstrung by adopting many design sensibilities of other modern AAA games

the opening at the guest house is a deadly combination of forced walking segments and unskippable cutscenes that make you mash a button or something occasionally to keep up a guise of interactivity. these not only harm the game's replayability, but even on a first playthrough the way they play out is quite stilted and hard to take seriously. between the limp animation and the abundance of cartoonish jumpscares, the only knot in my stomach was one of second-hand embarrassment

after a texas chainsaw massacre pastiche introducing our cast of villains, the main segment of the game begins, and this is where the game momentarily hooked me; jack baker is immediately intimidating, and being thrown into an unfamiliar environment with the looming threat of him coming to get you made me move with a lot more trepidation than usual, but after playing the game a little more i realised that jack's words were merely empty threats

if jack discovers you he'll chase you down and if he catches you, he does a bit of damage after which you can easily keep running, this combined with plentiful healing items and automatic checkpoints makes just going about your business and tanking the damage an all too inviting prospect, evaporating any and all fear or tension the game initially created

this is a major problem because the game hangs its hat on this one gimmick to make things interested because it has very little to offer otherwise. classic resident evil games are set in maze like maps that need to be slowly pieced together through puzzle solving and remembering points of interest and what goes where, the game's limited inventory and resources and well placed enemies adding another layer of strategy to navigation, saving your progress also being a limited resource in itself was always often a source a source of tension and relief as a resourceful player could go long stretches without their progress being locked in

meanwhile the house in resident evil 7 is like three floors right on top of each other that are all tiny and can be fully explored almost immediately, aside from jack being a mild nuisance (as you'll sometimes need to run in circles to shake him off to progress) the navigation lacks any sort of friction; aside from the basement, there are no other enemies, puzzles that almost solve themselves, unlimited saves and once again a mountain of resources around every corner. there is exactly one locked door that's more than a couple of rooms away from the key to it, which even then isn't too taxing, it just takes a quick trip down to the main room in the basement and there's the scorpion key, practically staring you in the face

to make matters worse, once you defeat jack in the basement, not only does he (obviously) stop chasing you, but all the other enemies, regardless if they've been killed or not, just magically vanish. the basement can very easily be tackled immediately, leaving you with a completely empty house, with a load of boring rooms with stuff to press A on in them

the rest of the game unfortunately follows a similar structure, the old house segment has an interesting gimmick with lots of hives blocking you which swarm you with bugs when approached, and you have to find the parts to build a flamethrower which has quite limited ammunition, meaning you have to pick and choose which hives are the most important to get rid of and make yourself a safe path through the house

except this isn't what happens at all, this segment is so short and the map is so tiny this concept barely has a chance to get off the ground. in other words, why would i even consider burning this hive when circumventing it takes seconds, this house is like six or seven tiny rooms total, and once again if the bugs do attack you they do far too little damage to become something to worry about. the biggest challenge here is noticing that you're supposed to crawl into a tiny fireplace behind one of the two mandatory hives which i didn't even know existed because it's so fucking dark all the time

marguerite has even less prescence than her husband, beginning her chase mere minutes before her boss fight and she won't leave her house for some reason, go out near the waterhouse and she'll just stand in the doorway cackling like a dumbass, one time i shot her in the head a few times to make her leave and she glitched out and ran back and forth up against a window before teleporting on top of me to do her janky animation where she knocks you over or whatever, it's impossible to take seriously

take away these poorly executed central gimmicks and you're left with more of the same; banal, unskippable cutscenes, shitty jumpscares, and the bare minimum for what could qualify as puzzles

lucas baker is the cheeky one with his house full of tricks, except his tricks are just like a load of tripwires and boxes that explode and boring shit like that. cheating his escape room is an enjoyable and clever sequence though, and i like that because there's a tape you can watch earlier that has someone solving it normally and getting killed, there's also an in-universe reason as to how ethan would know how to cheat it

after that's over though jack returns this time as a big blob with a silly voice that you have to defeat by shooting his fucking eyeball weak points, at it was this point that i felt myself fully checking out

the way enemies in general are handled is just terrible, mostly due to the fact that this game has literally one enemy type in it, just one (except for those bugs from earlier i guess) and it's just a pale imitation of the regenerators from resident evil 4. there are variants sure, some of them are a little bigger, some of them walk on all fours, but it's all basically the same sludgy lizard monsters the entire game, and flaccidly shooting their heads quickly gets tiresome

enemy variety is important for most games, and for horror games it's also just another tool to be scary, running into a new enemy you haven't seen before is inherently unnerving, you're not sure what they're capable of. returning to the spencer mansion in resident evil 1 and finding that the regular zombies have been replaced with these big lizard guys that run at you and rip you to shreds is terrifying, it imbues this previously conquered area with a whole new sense of life, a feeling resident evil 7 is never able to conjure up because you'll get to the end of the game and see the same enemy you've been seeing the whole game and you'll be like 'oh yeah those guys, nothing to worry about'.

the boss fights are equally terrible, they're overly long, overly scripted, and directed so badly it hurts. if i told you that there was a boss fight where two people fight with chainsaws like they're swords you might think that sounds pretty cool, but no it's just the most awkward looking janky shit you've ever seen it's just a headache if anything. also fuck that second fight with marguerite where she just leaves and hangs out somewhere off screen for what feels like minutes at a time that shit is so boring

anyway after all that is the fucking boat part which even people i've talked to who like the game seem to hate, because my god is it long and paced poorly. this is mostly due to the fact that you have to play through a boring extended flashback sequence on the boat, and then have to do a load more stuff in the same place again but now in the present where's it's like all dingy and old. i'd like to be able to be able to praise this segment as it's more of a challenge to piece together on a macro level than usual, due to its larger size and longer puzzle sequences, but it's just so dull regardless and i'm so tired of the game at this point that i just want it to be over, i suppose resident evil has never been known for its climaxes.

this area is where the game's story comes to a head, which i also find very dull. i don't think it's worth really going into too much but basically going with the 'little ghost girl who's evil because she was a biological experiment' thing they went with is so played out and presented in such a flat and uninteresting way with such nothing characters that it was hard for me to muster a single bone in my body to care about any of it. this is nothing new for resident evil but this game in particular wants so badly to be taken seriously that it's just miserable, especially when compared to something like resident evil 4 which is at least likeably cheesy.

the one bright spot of course being jack baker, who's an absolute delight any time he's on the screen, his manic energy is scary but mercifully also very funny, a perfect character for this franchise. i also think the scene near the end where jack like, contacts ethan from the afterlife or whatever while he's unconscious or whatever is quite effective. we get to see jack how he used to be before he was possessed; he's gentle, and speaks in a loving, fatherly tone, and is filled with remorse for the all the trouble he's inadvertently caused you. when he asks you to please save his family it's hard not to feel for the bakers, who were unfortunately swept up in all this.

the game unfortunately limps to the finish line though, with one more awkward stumble through the guest house as visions of your girlfriend with a chainsaw phase in and out of existence with sad music playing and it's just kind of silly, and the boss fight afterwards is more or less a bunch of cutscenes, not really worth mentioning

like i said at the start, resident evil 7 does seem like a return to the franchise's roots, a spooky house, puzzles to solve, inventory to manage, all the stuff you remember. but it's all surface level stuff, the things that made resident evil such an important staple in the survival horror genre are now severely stripped down, and you're just left with this generic, paper-thin, bottom of the barrel mush that's an absolutely mind-numbing slog to play, desperate to wrestle control away from you at every turn all for an endless barrage of cutscenes that all feel the same as each other or to hit you with a cheap jumpscare that can usually be seen coming from a mile away

what once frightened me, now bores me.

what once brought me satisfaction, now leaves me hollow.

and what should've been a glorious return to form, is anything but.

It’s okay when FromSoft does it.

Sekiro is guilty of everything that its staunchest defenders attack other games for. An unforgivably bad camera, bosses with surprise second phases, dreadfully simple and overpowered parrying, a near-complete lack of depth both artistically and mechanically, and a thematic retread of what the studio has been doing for fifteen years now all culminates to create something that can peak at the heights of interesting but mostly just lingers in the trenches of bland.

I knew that I wasn’t going to like Sekiro about an hour into it, but I also knew that it would be incredibly easy for someone to point out that I'm a quitter and say that I just didn’t like it because I was bad at the game. You get that a lot, with FromSoft’s titles: the implication being that the difficulty is the sole reason why anyone could ever dislike it. Set aside the red-headed stepchildren that are titles like Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III, where the premier Soulsheads are often pretty harsh on them, and look instead to the darlings like Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, and Sekiro. There are a certain amount of criticisms that you’re allowed to make — farming for blood vials or spirit emblems is boring, certain builds or weapons are imbalanced compared to others — but start pointing out flaws in the underlying systems themselves, and watch the wagons get circled as you’re told that you just need to git gud to appreciate them. I’ll outline what I disliked about the game itself in a bit, but all of this preamble is required to explain why I felt so compelled to finish Sekiro, in the hopes that it’d allow me to speak with some degree of authority.

I have to wonder if Hidetaka Miyazaki ever feels like Victor Frankenstein looking at the monster he's created. The ethos of the earliest Souls games were largely about strangers coming together to overcome the challenges imposed by the brutal and uncaring world they inhabited. Miyazaki famously said that he was inspired by an icy road on a hill that he needed a stranger's help to get over, and that he himself also helped a stranger get over; it was "a connection of mutual assistance between transient people", he said, because he couldn't stick around to thank them or else he'd get stuck again. This laid the foundations not just for the jolly co-operation summons of the original Dark Souls, but certainly reflected players on a more meta level, as well. We're all transient people to one another online, and we'll talk about these games for tips and guides and then dip out to take on the challenges with new information, often to never hear from the other players again. We get what we can and give what we're able.

Yet there's been an inarguable change, I feel, in the way that fans of the newest games talk about them. The seeds were certainly first sown with the whole "PREPARE TO DIE" garbage from the western Dark Souls marketing campaign, but there's been a marked shift in the way that people discuss these games. Complain that it's too hard, and you'll now immediately be met with derision instead of advice: well, you're just bad, you need to git gud, you just don't get it. God help you if you decide to drop the game because you're not having fun. There's no faster way to prove that you're a casual who hasn't earned the right to talk about it. Sekiro discussion in particular is especially noxious, with the community that exists today largely believing that anyone who has any complaints whatsoever is just mad because bad. Even if you beat the game, complaining about it is unjustified because you're actually still bad. If you were good, you would have liked it. Your complaints are because you're bad, thus they're invalid; any praise must then be because you're good, and thus valid. I complained about the shitty camera to a friend and he immediately shot back that it was my fault for being near a wall, and that it's actually intended behavior for it to fuck up near terrain because it'll push clever players to the middle of rooms where they'll be safer. This is the level of discourse we're operating at here. A decade and a half of making these third-person action-adventure games and they still can't fix the fucking cameras, but it's actually because they're playing 4D chess against the player. Can you imagine anything else getting this much leniency?

The camera is really the thing I want to hammer home as the worst element here, because it alone has killed me more than any other enemy in the game. I don’t know how FromSoft still haven’t figured this out. I intentionally sped through most of the game, skipping a lot of the optional content primarily just because I wanted to roll credits, and even most of the mandatory bosses introduced new problems with the camera. Guardian Ape would throw me into a wall that the camera couldn’t phase through, which meant that it tried to go for a birds-eye view and got me killed because I couldn’t see what was happening in time to block the follow-up; Summoner Monk similarly backed me into a wall and brought us both so close to the camera that our models turned invisible and I had to guess what the pattern was, effectively with my eyes closed; Sword Saint Isshin’s Phase 2 jumping attack would break the lock-on whenever I dodged under it, because the camera couldn’t keep up with where he was going. Mini-bosses like the Lone Shadow Longswordsman and the Lone Shadow Vilehand would similarly eat the camera with some of their dashing moves, and bounding off the head of the latter after dodging his sweep caused the camera to get stuck in the ceiling so hard that it started flashing Electric Soldier Porygon at me for a few seconds until it freed itself. It’s so blatantly wrong that I’m astonished both that it made it to production in the state that it’s in and that it isn’t a complete dealbreaker for significantly more people than it is.

I mentioned to another friend that I was having some trouble with Owl and that I was going to call it quits for the night there, and he excitedly mentioned that Owl had his favorite boss theme in the game. It was at this exact moment that I realized that I couldn’t actually recall a single track from the entire ten or so hours I had played up to that point. Even after rolling credits, I still don’t remember anything aside from the fact that I thought Divine Dragon had a cool theme. Music is constantly playing over every sequence of the game, ambient tracks and combat tracks alike; if you aggro an enemy, kill them, and then immediately aggro another, the combat track will start, fade out, and then start from the beginning again. Moving through an area to quickly cut down enemies who don’t alert the others when they aggro can make the combat track start itself over what I managed to get about five times in a row. It’s kind of funny in how sloppy it is.

The narrative is dreck, of course, and I doubt anyone was expecting much different. It’s the same story FromSoft has been telling for years now — unnatural life and resurrection, it’s all cyclical, you can choose to either break the cycle or keep it going, blah blah blah — with the added twist of “honor culture is actually dishonorable”, which has been massively oversaturated for longer than anyone reading this has been alive, and Sekiro has absolutely nothing interesting to add to the conversation. It’s certainly present. Owl shows up after seemingly dying, decides to be evil, actually dies unceremoniously, and the game just kind of moves along without really being interested in how or why any of that happened. I’ve seen praise for the story, and I can’t honestly believe that anyone is cheering this on. This is the fourth time FromSoft has shown that time is a flat circle in class, and the irony of how they keep doing it over and over again is really kind of giving me a kick as I type it out. You certainly can’t say they don’t believe in it.

Souls combat was never mechanically deep, but made up for it predominately just by giving you a lot of options. Sekiro throws this out in favor of exclusively allowing the player to play as a squishy, dex-based katana-wielder who dies in two hits on a good day and has to perfect parry the world or be crushed beneath it. I respect, in a way, the sheer commitment to this singular playstyle, but I also don’t think there’s any depth here to actually make me want to play this over any other similar action game. You get a parry and you get some basic sword swings, and if you’re a really good boy, you get to do Ichimonji Double. The actual parrying itself is ridiculously forgiving, and you’ll just end up psyching yourself out if you read online that spamming it will reduce your parry window to about seven frames; it’s active for so long and you’re actionable again so quickly after you use it that you’re in no real danger so long as you just keep hammering away at L1 fast enough. The fact that this got a port for the Stadia — with its inherent input lag that you can count in geologic time — should indicate how core these so-called “strict reaction times” actually are. What you’re left with once you get past that mental barrier is a game where you hit R1 until orange sparks fly, hit L1 until orange sparks stop flying, and then repeat the process from the start. When the kanji for danger occasionally appears, you get to hit either the jump button or the dash button. It is fucking boring. I managed to no-hit all three phases of Isshin not because I had downloaded him and completely figured out a perfect counter for every single one of his combos, but because his AI broke and he kept spamming the thrust attack in Phase 2 and the lightning sweep in Phase 3. I was getting rolled before that, because he was actually using his entire arsenal. I didn’t outskill him, I just got lucky that he kept picking the exact same attack over and over again. It’s like I got double-perfected by a world-class Zangief player and then in game two he just sat in neutral and spammed SPD. Sure, I’ll take the win, but it’s not because I earned it. I didn’t win, he just lost. Sekiro occupies an incredibly awkward middle ground between something slow and simple like Dark Souls and something fast and complex like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. The game is instead fast and simple, and I can’t think of anything that is less for me.

Speaking of, I think FromSoft has indicated with their last few releases that they’re no longer interested in catering to players like me. That’s fine. I say this with my teeth gritted and steam coming out of my ears, but, really, it is fine. They’ve clearly found a new audience who loves them dearly, and every new game they put out sells millions of copies and sweeps the Game of the Year awards from every publication giving them out. This beat Death Stranding and Resident Evil 2 at The Game Awards! It’s the fifth highest-rated game on Backloggd of all time! It’s sold over ten million copies as of September of this year! Clearly I’m the odd man out, here. What use is it even to complain? What reason would they have to listen?

I’ve been getting this sort-of old man doom sense lately — not just for game discussion, mind, but for a lot of things — about how saying what you feel about something doesn’t actually accomplish anything if you’re not in a position of power to change it. It’s got a purpose to just let others know how you feel about any given topic, but what does it actually do? If I find a group of like-minded individuals who think I nailed it with this review and agree that FromSoft ought to return to the good old days where they made shitty, clunky games that launched blatantly unfinished, what does that accomplish? If a group of Sekiro fans come in and dunk on me for just not understanding the game, what does that accomplish? I put myself through the ringer beating a twenty hour-long game that I hated, and for what? So that I’d be more credible when I said it was a pile of shit? What does that accomplish, then, when someone comes in and says that beating the game doesn’t mean anything and I’m still bad and that’s the only reason I hated it? Without anyone involved actually being in a position to change anything, what use is discussing it at all?

A large part of what bothers me is that I don't feel I've really gotten anything I value from my time with Sekiro. It's not just because of the difficulty; I do plenty of difficult things, play plenty of difficult games, and it's all given me something I value. Every piece I write makes me feel like I'm a little bit better at writing, and it helps me appreciate the writing of others more. Every fighting game I play tends to have wildly differing mechanics between them, but the fundamentals of squaring off against another player are transferable. Every song I compose makes me feel like I've got a deeper understanding of music. What I get from playing Sekiro is that I'm now better at Sekiro, which is a game I have no desire to ever touch again. There's hardly anything that plays quite like this — which is a massive point of support for those who love it — so I may as well have gotten nothing for all my time spent. There's nothing wrong with what I'll affectionately call "junk media", where there's no value to the piece besides what you feel in the exact moments where you're actively experiencing it, but you'd hope that what you feel is a sense of fun or reward. I felt neither from Sekiro. I thought it was boring, and it didn't give me anything I value. I could have gone to work and felt equally bored and unfulfilled, but at least work pays me.

It’s telling that the parts that I thought were most interesting — the Divine Dragon, the Armored Knight — are the parts that either go completely overlooked or disparaged by the broader fanbase. There’s a clear disconnect between me, this game, and everyone else. People all over the place online said to keep playing until the combat clicks, and that’s when you start having fun. I felt the combat click, and I felt bored. People said to play until Genichiro before you say you don’t like it, and I beat Genichiro and was still bored. People said you can’t call the game bad if you haven’t beaten it, and I have, and I still think it’s bad. Do I have the right to dislike it yet, or is there still something that I’ve missed?

Seeing a monkey in a conical hat firing a rifle was almost enough for me to justify giving this five stars.

A sapphic love letter - a daisy chain of vignettes that offer glimpses into other creative and influential media powerhouses, metered out by the task of juggling keys and receptacles in limited inventory slots across a vast steel complex. Too much mule work for its weight in silver in my humble. This search for lost love where ur body is weighed down by deprivations of liberty and soul rings so hollow to me when it's so clockable under a very narrow scope of media that strikes the same chimes so much better. More to the point I think I'm just too depressed to find any spark in this. Since I've been resorting to it recently, the flashes of self-harm imagery just piss me the fuck off.
Signalis a visual juggernaut that can dole out amazing one-two punches of sight and sound when it wants to, but the genre darling glazing is too sickly for my blood, I'd roll my eyes at practically every cutscene calling to something in the creators' Anilist Previously Watched stack. Not a classic survival horror head either, sorry not for me, not a problem in and of itself.

"improves" on the more polarizing elements of the original by almost completely removing what it excelled at and made it so unique while having nothing special to offer of its own.

combat gameplay sees an almost universal downgrade from the original (even after some considerable skill upgrades) so it's nice that the AI is so braindead and you can stealth almost everything. when you can't it's probably tragic but at least you should have plenty of ammo if you've been stealthy or even avoiding combat like i was.

the varied grab bag of horrific settings and aesthetics is (mostly) thrown out for a bland town based hub with side quests, enemies that you won't want to bother with, and random shit everywhere. in the later chapters of the game things become more linear in addition to finally getting somewhere in terms of having standout visual design but then it's over.

new Sebastian is a bit of a bummer both in terms of voice over and characterization. the sad dad thing feels like the most boring possible thing to have done. whereas TEW1 felt like a breath of fresh air when it released, this was blatantly of its time. (and that time was a bit shit lmao)

not unplayable but a massive disappointment regardless.

You're trying too hard, bro! More or less, the main reason as to why I'm generally disinterested in modern horror games, which tend to serve as vehicles for cryptic lore dumps for YouTube analysts to pore over rather than fright-enhanced decision making. I don't want mindfuckery, I want regular fuckery, something that I was hopeful would be present in this kind of return to form. This game was sold to me as the best of Resident Evil meets the best of Silent Hill, but, in reality, it's the worst of both: Resident Evil's cramped item management without any of the brilliant circular level design that makes Spencer Mansion thrilling to route through even after dozens of playthroughs, and Silent Hill's scary-because-it's-scary imagery without any of the dread that defines each and every one of Harry Mason's fog-enveloped footsteps. Instead, we've got jumpcuts to character closeups and spooky stanzas of poetry, pulsating masses of flesh on the ground, and handwritten notes conveniently censored at the most ominous places- surface-level stuff that makes horror games effective for people who don't understand what makes horror games effective. I'm not engaged enough to decipher your jumbled-up story, I'm not interested in your generic sci-fi setting, and I'm not even scared! But, maybe if I actually felt like the character I was playing as, I would be! Fast movement speed and wide hallways make enemies pitifully easy to juke, and thus not at all intimidating. Exploration isn't exciting or intriguing because of how straightforward it is on a grand scale. Plentiful items and infinite saves mean there's not any pressure on you even if you do wind up making a mistake somehow. I initially chalked this all up to misguided attempts at balance, but they get harder and harder to defend once you realize that all you're really doing is (often literally) opening up a locked door just to find a key for another locked door somewhere else on the map, which makes the experience feel more like a parody of classic survival horror games rather than an earnest attempt at recapturing the magic. I hardly took out any enemies, I didn't burn a single body, and, on several occasions, I killed myself on purpose because doing that was quicker than having to run back to the save room to retrieve the specific contextual item I needed, which is about as damning as you can get for this kind of game. The only strategy to pick up on is keeping nothing at all on your person in between storage box visits so that you can handle when the game inevitably dumps five key items on you in successive rooms. Mikami's rolling in his grave!

The lone bright spots are the traditional puzzles, which, although are few and far between, frequently nail the physical satisfaction of fiddling around with a piece of old, analog equipment that you're half familiar with and half in the dark on. If this game had understood its strengths better, it would've been a fully-fledged point-and-click or even a Myst-style free-roaming puzzler. The actual survivor horror feels tacked on, as though it's obligated to be this kind of game because it's attempting to tell a story in the same emotional vein as the Silent Hill series and the player needs to have something to do before being shown the next deep, thought-provoking cutscene. I can't even say that it understands the classics from a visual standpoint, forgoing the fixed-camera perspective that gives each of Resident Evil's individual rooms a distinct cinematographic personality and instead opting for a generic top-down approach that makes every location feel the same. Though, that's not to say the art direction itself is bad. In fact, it's phenomenal, and easily the standout of the game's features, but it doesn't make up for how bland everything else is. At some point, this one demoted itself in my eyes from 'mostly boring but worth playing just for the aesthetic' to 'downright painful.' Maybe it was after the game pretentiously transitioned into a first-person walking simulator one too many times. Or, more likely, it was when some of the small details- red-light save screens, items conveniently located right on top of their respective instruction manuals, and even the sound effect of equipping your pistol- started feeling less like homages and more like creative crutches, indicators of an entirely rudderless experience. I really feel terrible for ragging on something that's evidently a passion project and extremely competent from a technical standpoint, and I sincerely hope the devs keep at it. But, man. I wish I got anything at all out of this. The one game I've played that's managed get this done, I mean, spiritually succeeding an era/genre rather than a specific series by remixing several blatant inspirations so proficiently that it ends up feeling like something entirely new, is still Shovel Knight, but I'm not sure the world's ready for that conversation quite yet...