Felt energized after playing this. I'd heard of David Parsons's "Caught", but never seen a video, so imagined that and this would be a dancer moving chopily, like a sketched figure in a flipbook. The light flickers at the beat -- you see them only when there's sound, in silence you're alone. But it's not stretches of nothing or missing frames, anticipation fills those breaks entirely.

Kristallijn is set in a warehouse/club and it rips. The empty space evokes horror games, but there's no danger, and it's freeing to shed that association of strobe lights = monster, unreal movements = danger. It's safe to desire surprise. Something fascinating too about how Kristallijn grounds itself. Teaching how this would work in an art installation, then demonstrating something different.

I like slow, ritualistic games; I liked a lot about From_. Every day you leave your house to deliver mail or check up on a neighbor, and they hand you a letter or tell you something another should know, and you carry that story along. You sit with it in your boat, because this country is all water. Houses are on stilts and postmen like yourself navigate the waters between people. The snippet of stories you uncover each stop turn out to be familiar tales of star-crossed lovers (held back by a snobbish father), matrimonial strife (caused by an absentee father), and suicide (the result of trauma inflicted by an abusive father). And because there's a boat ride between each story beat, there's time to dwell on things, like fictional dads or real dads or depression or loneliness.

Then at the end of every day your character says, "Something is calling me... I can hear the sound of rain." They're telling you to go to the abandoned house, the place where it's always raining and where the background music turns quiet and sad. On top of a ruined house is a character who looks just like you, but who refers to you as "young man". He speaks distantly about the day's events: "Wouldn't you say it's easier to leave painful memories behind?" Some moral or point to consider, basically. Then you go home to sleep, wake to deliver another message, and think your thoughts as you row back to see the old man again. Followed always by a small ghost, forever right behind you. A form only you and the man standing in the rain can see.

It's all really evocative. The concept fits the art well: simple and lovely blue sprites on a black background. But the writing just felt really trite to me. The drama is played out and flat. Please don't explain the language of flowers to me, please don't convey a tragedy with stock tropes. This is all too formulaic to feel poignant, even though it's packaged and paced so nicely.

The English translation is bad, the combat is dull, and the characters are all less interesting by their arcs' conclusions than they were at the start. But Gujian 3 was the best adventure I'd been on in a minute. The story isn't just fantasy, it's mythic. It's the Yellow Emperor. The beginning of invention, the kind of human ingenuity the game constantly lionizes. The protagonist and villain are these xianxia ass characters but every chapter we need to put the high magic elements of the story aside to talk about how good humans are, how much we learn from each other, from our ancestors. And, uh, how great emperors and expansive kingdoms are. Anyway! Some truly lovely levels in this. I journeyed through a storybook collection of locales, from an undersea palace to an oversized tree to the red banks of the ancient Yangtze. I'd do it all again if I didn't have to slaughter a hundred nearly identical demons each area.

Also that crafting system is an education.