poochy
2011
This review contains spoilers
To The Moon was one of those games I've heard about here and there before playing it, more than most other RPG Maker games I've been playing over the past few months. It makes perfect sense why: a well-made heart-wrencher of an indie game right at the beak of the indie boom is a recipe for acclaim. So here I come 12 years late to the party, thinking this is just some quaint story that handles autism well and seeing the game has spawned 2? 3? 4? 5 (kinda) sequels????? And one of them is called Im-im-IMPOSTER Factory??? What could be going on here! Frankly, I'm still not sure what's up with Imposter Factory, but To The Moon has left me very interested to find out.
Gonna be honest, my first play session was rough. The WASD keys did nothing and the game prompted me to click to interact with stuff... a point and click RPG Maker game? A lot of devs have wrangled a lot of different things out of the engine, but this I was really unsure about. Having to wait to see my character trawl across the screen had atrocious feel as opposed to just moving them manually. After about 20 minutes of playing, I put it down for the night, wanting to return but feeling unsure if I could stand the control scheme...
...then 2 minutes into my second session I realized the manual controls were mapped to the arrow keys. Oopsies!
Still, with all that said of my misleading interpretation of the game feel, it's not like there's much game here! Even compared to many of its RPG Maker contemporaries, the gameplay here is incredibly straightforward. Even during the short "exploration" segments, I don't think I ever had to double-back because I missed something, large in part thanks to the mouse cursor showing you interactable objects. There's a tile flipping puzzle repeating more times than really necessary, though one that's too brief to cause any pain, a sparse few segments that change up the gameplay a bit, aaaaand... thats about it. Everything here is laser focused on the story.
Which is perfectly fine by me, because the writing here is wonderful. It explores the relationship of couple John and River in a montage of memories spanning their entire lives. Each scene offers a unique perspective into their relationship with absolutely beautiful dialogue that manages to feel extremely real. Bolstering it is the incredibly novel way in which their lives are shown —reverse chronologically—watching the layers of their relationship slowly peeled back to reveal what brough them to where you saw them previously in the story. It's truly hard to overstate how well developed John and River feel, and how compelling it is find out more of the mystery behind who they really are in such a genuine way. My only real wish is that more time was spent with the older versions of the characters, which is by design the focus of the earlier portions of the game, but the stuff I felt was ultimately the most compelling. Peppered in is some commentary from the scientists scrubbing through these memories, which despite a select few bits of writing that feel distinctly early 2010s, remains charming and complements the emotional core well.
I know I added a spoiler warning for the review, but considering how much of a story focused game it is, I want to talk in depth about the ending from here on out. Second spoiler warning! It's genuinely a story worth experiencing and is on sale on Steam for like $2 if you're reading this within 4 days after I write this... or y'know... whenever there's a Steam sale... but you do you!
The reverse chronological playback of memories takes up the first act of the game's labeled three acts, which feels odd considering the second act lasts all of 15-20 minutes. As the game rockets towards its climax, it starts to focus more on the logistics and the ethics of tampering with memories. The emotional core is never lost, but I myself felt a bit lost as the game tried to explain some of its timey whimey (memory schmemory?) to me and it just kind of... mostly making sense I guess? There's a part towards the very end where one of the doctors suddenly starts making decisions without the input of the other doctor, and the game frames it as a heel turn of sorts. Of course, it ends up that she had a very specific plan of altering memories such that everything would turn out well. What was the plan? Um. Erm. Don't worry about it.
—Hi, Poochy about to post this here. Let me bundle my kinda-nitpicky comments on the game together by mentioning that for some reason the sole "beat the game" achievement simply does not seem to unlock. Weird! Good thing I don't care about achievements! Anyways—
Truly, don't worry about it. I wasn't worrying as the final scene played out before my eyes. Watching John and River fulfill their dreams of heading out to the moon, seeing their rocket pierce the gleaming sunset. Them getting their last moments of happiness together, at this point multiple lifetimes of memories. Hearing John's heart monitor steadily beep in the background, hanging on it its last moments out of sheer willpower. Everything is just as it should be.
Then, his heartbeat goes flat.
Then, credits.
Everything is just as it should be.
Gonna be honest, my first play session was rough. The WASD keys did nothing and the game prompted me to click to interact with stuff... a point and click RPG Maker game? A lot of devs have wrangled a lot of different things out of the engine, but this I was really unsure about. Having to wait to see my character trawl across the screen had atrocious feel as opposed to just moving them manually. After about 20 minutes of playing, I put it down for the night, wanting to return but feeling unsure if I could stand the control scheme...
...then 2 minutes into my second session I realized the manual controls were mapped to the arrow keys. Oopsies!
Still, with all that said of my misleading interpretation of the game feel, it's not like there's much game here! Even compared to many of its RPG Maker contemporaries, the gameplay here is incredibly straightforward. Even during the short "exploration" segments, I don't think I ever had to double-back because I missed something, large in part thanks to the mouse cursor showing you interactable objects. There's a tile flipping puzzle repeating more times than really necessary, though one that's too brief to cause any pain, a sparse few segments that change up the gameplay a bit, aaaaand... thats about it. Everything here is laser focused on the story.
Which is perfectly fine by me, because the writing here is wonderful. It explores the relationship of couple John and River in a montage of memories spanning their entire lives. Each scene offers a unique perspective into their relationship with absolutely beautiful dialogue that manages to feel extremely real. Bolstering it is the incredibly novel way in which their lives are shown —reverse chronologically—watching the layers of their relationship slowly peeled back to reveal what brough them to where you saw them previously in the story. It's truly hard to overstate how well developed John and River feel, and how compelling it is find out more of the mystery behind who they really are in such a genuine way. My only real wish is that more time was spent with the older versions of the characters, which is by design the focus of the earlier portions of the game, but the stuff I felt was ultimately the most compelling. Peppered in is some commentary from the scientists scrubbing through these memories, which despite a select few bits of writing that feel distinctly early 2010s, remains charming and complements the emotional core well.
I know I added a spoiler warning for the review, but considering how much of a story focused game it is, I want to talk in depth about the ending from here on out. Second spoiler warning! It's genuinely a story worth experiencing and is on sale on Steam for like $2 if you're reading this within 4 days after I write this... or y'know... whenever there's a Steam sale... but you do you!
The reverse chronological playback of memories takes up the first act of the game's labeled three acts, which feels odd considering the second act lasts all of 15-20 minutes. As the game rockets towards its climax, it starts to focus more on the logistics and the ethics of tampering with memories. The emotional core is never lost, but I myself felt a bit lost as the game tried to explain some of its timey whimey (memory schmemory?) to me and it just kind of... mostly making sense I guess? There's a part towards the very end where one of the doctors suddenly starts making decisions without the input of the other doctor, and the game frames it as a heel turn of sorts. Of course, it ends up that she had a very specific plan of altering memories such that everything would turn out well. What was the plan? Um. Erm. Don't worry about it.
—Hi, Poochy about to post this here. Let me bundle my kinda-nitpicky comments on the game together by mentioning that for some reason the sole "beat the game" achievement simply does not seem to unlock. Weird! Good thing I don't care about achievements! Anyways—
Truly, don't worry about it. I wasn't worrying as the final scene played out before my eyes. Watching John and River fulfill their dreams of heading out to the moon, seeing their rocket pierce the gleaming sunset. Them getting their last moments of happiness together, at this point multiple lifetimes of memories. Hearing John's heart monitor steadily beep in the background, hanging on it its last moments out of sheer willpower. Everything is just as it should be.
Then, his heartbeat goes flat.
Then, credits.
Everything is just as it should be.
I think, for the most part, it is reasonable to expect (or at least hope) that a studio slowly improves their game-crafting skills with each new release, ideally making them better and better. Of course, that can't always be the case. Some games are good enough to beckon the question "how the hell are they supposed to top this", and which follows the acceptance that it'd probably be okay if what follows is comparatively as good or even a little worse. AstralShift's Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum (a title I will always type out in full out of sheer amusement) from earlier this year, for as much obtuseness and opaqueness as it relished in, was a pretty good game! Then apparently, they already had their next game right around the corner: a step away from RPG Maker, an incredible looking artstyle, more meat added to the gameplay, and being a prequel to Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum? It felt like this game had the potential to be something really special!
And now we're here... and now I've played it... and it's... fine.
The biggest up-front appeal here is clearly the visuals, something the game is completely unashamed of. Of course, the game is drop-dead gorgeous, almost every frame of it looking like 90s anime eye candy. In motion, it looks even better, with well done animation and a really subtle static-y noise filter at night that adds soooo much to the vibes. The dungeon areas you go through every night double down on the wonderful aesthetics, with so many little visual effects and setpieces that love to mesh together different artstyles in ways that are a sight to behold. Shoutouts too to the minigames, presented as fancifully-decorated arcade machines that really sell the experience. I do think Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum ultimately went further with its setpieces and playing with different artstyles, but this game still manages to impress all the same.
Funny anecdote: the game's credits are split between the art team and the programming team for the game. You're only able to skip the later one for whatever reason. I don't think it actually means anything, but its very clear how (rightfully!) proud they are of the aesthetic work put in here.
Yet, under the veneer of these fanciful graphics, the underlying game is kinda lacking? Focusing on the gameplay, it's split between its time management-y social sim elements during the daytime and going through short dungeons more reminiscent of Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum at night, and both are unfortunately pretty rough around the edges.
A lot of the game focuses on meter management with your health, hunger, sanity, and suspicion meters. The cycle is pretty simple: various things in the game lower these meters (raise in suspicion's case), you get money by selling items/playing minigames, then use the money to buy items to rectify those drops. If you don't, you die. On paper, a fairly simple system to add stress to the player, as one does in a kinda-sorta-horror-y game. However, the scope of the game is small enough that it basically throttles you into playing just enough minigames that you have enough money to get all the items you need to survive, but not much more. When combined with how relatively-consistently these meters drain, buying items to manage the meters becomes more of a chore than anything, ESPECIALLY with how overbearing the UI becomes when you're low on one of them.
Shoutouts to when I had to go through half a dungeon with low sanity while the edges of the screen were covered in dark tendrils and the music was muffled by the constant murmuring of ghosts. It wasn't an issue of "oh do I have enough money to survive???", but "oh I guess I'm stuck dealing with this until I can reach the next shop". I wasn't under threat, I was just annoyed.
Speaking of the dungeons, they're the classic RPG Maker horror game mechanics: enemies to avoid, fairly simple puzzles to complete, and a good few chase sequences—as one does. For the most part they're alright, with some interesting puzzles here and there, but as you go on in them they start to get a bit unwieldy. The second-to-last one stands out as the biggest offender, asking you to wander two large lake areas fairly aimlessly while high-damage ghosts chase you down as long as you're not standing on land, which sometimes is just impossible to reach in-between first seeing the ghost and it hitting you. There's a reason the first Steam guide for the game was made specifically for getting through that dungeon. The final chase sequel also to throw out obstacles that are impossible to naturally react to (including one that appeared while i was in the middle of an animation and killed me) while the camera loves to barely show what's in front. Not to mention the door shuffle puzzle you have to repeat THREE times over the course of this sequence that instantly kills you if you get it wrong. The dungeons have just enough moments of bullshit to them, it was hard to look through to their good, largely aesthetics-based, elements. There was also the forbidden fruit of puzzle design: a SLIDE PUZZLE. It was optional but still. What the fuck?
Don't think I forgot about you putting one in, Origami King. Fuck you.
ANYWAYS, aside from all of this, the rest of the game comprises of dealing with an increasingly paranoid village who might or might not think you are a witch, while courting the girl of your desires. Both of which are fairly interesting and well-done! I personally chose Freya as my bride-to-be, and it was all really sweet, fluffy, gay as hell romance. I loved all of the adorable portraits that popped up during their dates, showing them gingerly grow close together. In contrast, the village was a really compelling showcase of mass paranoia and how it overtakes communities. The dynamics of the various villagers as various blights infect the town were simple, but still engaging. This is where the suspicion meter comes into play, gauging how close you are to being hung by the townspeople or something along those lines. I never got close to filling up the meter, and I don't really know how you can even do so unless intentionally seeking it out or being really really stupid, but I still can appreciate the ludonarrative element to it.
All of this dialogue is nicely written and such, but even that gets a tad dicey when having to often replay segments and, in one of the most baffling things I have seen in a videogame recently, it's a total coinflip whether or not you can skip through dialogue! Seriously! There is a fast forward button that only appears during certainly dialogue sequences and cutscenes for reasons totally beyond by conception. It's awesome to go die in a tough boss-like segment or accidentally choose a dialogue option that instantly kills you/locks you out of something (the game loves to do this), multiple times, then the cutscene you're booted back before is—of course—unskippable!!!
And all of this to experience a story that's... pretty straightfoward. While Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum forced you to pull the story out of it like you were desecrating a corpse, that mystique to it was a big reason as to why I liked it as much as I did. Being a more mainstream-targeted game, especially published by Square Enix, it makes sense that this game's story is a lot more outwardly comprehensible, and really I have no issues with that. For what it is, the story is still fairly well done, enhanced a lot by the aforementioned dating and town paranoia elements. Yet, as someone who had already played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum, I was hoping I wasn't able to intuit the entire story from the very beginning of the game. Hoping for some twist that shaked things up while still keeping up continuity with the game prior, but then I reached the end and everything rolled out... exactly as I expected. That said, I was waiting the entire game for Him to finally appear, and then He did appear and I Leonardo DiCaprio pointed at the screen and it was awesome. So who can say if it was bad or not?
There are so many other smaller things that prick me with the game I could delve into, like the map design basically being a straight line that you walk back and forth across WAY too much for there to be no fast travel system. A lot of these things could probably (hopefully!) be rectified in a few patches, but it's a bit too late for me now. By the end of it, going through that last chase sequence, I was pretty ready to be done with the game. Yet, looking at the amount of time I put into it in a mere 4 days, only a bit less than I put into Eastward for what was still a much less frustrating experience. Getting through all the gruff the game has, there's a pretty decent experience underneath!
I kind of feel like if I went into this without having played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum and the world had more mystique to it, I probably would have had a better time. Conversely, if I played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum after this, I probably wouldn't have found that game quite as engrossing as I did at the time. It feels weird and a bit bad bad to feel like the games are stuck in this zero-win situation together. I would love to talk to someone who played the games in reverse order to me and how it affected their thoughts on the game. If nothing else, its a really interesting duology for every interesting decision they do, and its hard not to respect them.
And now we're here... and now I've played it... and it's... fine.
The biggest up-front appeal here is clearly the visuals, something the game is completely unashamed of. Of course, the game is drop-dead gorgeous, almost every frame of it looking like 90s anime eye candy. In motion, it looks even better, with well done animation and a really subtle static-y noise filter at night that adds soooo much to the vibes. The dungeon areas you go through every night double down on the wonderful aesthetics, with so many little visual effects and setpieces that love to mesh together different artstyles in ways that are a sight to behold. Shoutouts too to the minigames, presented as fancifully-decorated arcade machines that really sell the experience. I do think Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum ultimately went further with its setpieces and playing with different artstyles, but this game still manages to impress all the same.
Funny anecdote: the game's credits are split between the art team and the programming team for the game. You're only able to skip the later one for whatever reason. I don't think it actually means anything, but its very clear how (rightfully!) proud they are of the aesthetic work put in here.
Yet, under the veneer of these fanciful graphics, the underlying game is kinda lacking? Focusing on the gameplay, it's split between its time management-y social sim elements during the daytime and going through short dungeons more reminiscent of Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum at night, and both are unfortunately pretty rough around the edges.
A lot of the game focuses on meter management with your health, hunger, sanity, and suspicion meters. The cycle is pretty simple: various things in the game lower these meters (raise in suspicion's case), you get money by selling items/playing minigames, then use the money to buy items to rectify those drops. If you don't, you die. On paper, a fairly simple system to add stress to the player, as one does in a kinda-sorta-horror-y game. However, the scope of the game is small enough that it basically throttles you into playing just enough minigames that you have enough money to get all the items you need to survive, but not much more. When combined with how relatively-consistently these meters drain, buying items to manage the meters becomes more of a chore than anything, ESPECIALLY with how overbearing the UI becomes when you're low on one of them.
Shoutouts to when I had to go through half a dungeon with low sanity while the edges of the screen were covered in dark tendrils and the music was muffled by the constant murmuring of ghosts. It wasn't an issue of "oh do I have enough money to survive???", but "oh I guess I'm stuck dealing with this until I can reach the next shop". I wasn't under threat, I was just annoyed.
Speaking of the dungeons, they're the classic RPG Maker horror game mechanics: enemies to avoid, fairly simple puzzles to complete, and a good few chase sequences—as one does. For the most part they're alright, with some interesting puzzles here and there, but as you go on in them they start to get a bit unwieldy. The second-to-last one stands out as the biggest offender, asking you to wander two large lake areas fairly aimlessly while high-damage ghosts chase you down as long as you're not standing on land, which sometimes is just impossible to reach in-between first seeing the ghost and it hitting you. There's a reason the first Steam guide for the game was made specifically for getting through that dungeon. The final chase sequel also to throw out obstacles that are impossible to naturally react to (including one that appeared while i was in the middle of an animation and killed me) while the camera loves to barely show what's in front. Not to mention the door shuffle puzzle you have to repeat THREE times over the course of this sequence that instantly kills you if you get it wrong. The dungeons have just enough moments of bullshit to them, it was hard to look through to their good, largely aesthetics-based, elements. There was also the forbidden fruit of puzzle design: a SLIDE PUZZLE. It was optional but still. What the fuck?
Don't think I forgot about you putting one in, Origami King. Fuck you.
ANYWAYS, aside from all of this, the rest of the game comprises of dealing with an increasingly paranoid village who might or might not think you are a witch, while courting the girl of your desires. Both of which are fairly interesting and well-done! I personally chose Freya as my bride-to-be, and it was all really sweet, fluffy, gay as hell romance. I loved all of the adorable portraits that popped up during their dates, showing them gingerly grow close together. In contrast, the village was a really compelling showcase of mass paranoia and how it overtakes communities. The dynamics of the various villagers as various blights infect the town were simple, but still engaging. This is where the suspicion meter comes into play, gauging how close you are to being hung by the townspeople or something along those lines. I never got close to filling up the meter, and I don't really know how you can even do so unless intentionally seeking it out or being really really stupid, but I still can appreciate the ludonarrative element to it.
All of this dialogue is nicely written and such, but even that gets a tad dicey when having to often replay segments and, in one of the most baffling things I have seen in a videogame recently, it's a total coinflip whether or not you can skip through dialogue! Seriously! There is a fast forward button that only appears during certainly dialogue sequences and cutscenes for reasons totally beyond by conception. It's awesome to go die in a tough boss-like segment or accidentally choose a dialogue option that instantly kills you/locks you out of something (the game loves to do this), multiple times, then the cutscene you're booted back before is—of course—unskippable!!!
And all of this to experience a story that's... pretty straightfoward. While Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum forced you to pull the story out of it like you were desecrating a corpse, that mystique to it was a big reason as to why I liked it as much as I did. Being a more mainstream-targeted game, especially published by Square Enix, it makes sense that this game's story is a lot more outwardly comprehensible, and really I have no issues with that. For what it is, the story is still fairly well done, enhanced a lot by the aforementioned dating and town paranoia elements. Yet, as someone who had already played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum, I was hoping I wasn't able to intuit the entire story from the very beginning of the game. Hoping for some twist that shaked things up while still keeping up continuity with the game prior, but then I reached the end and everything rolled out... exactly as I expected. That said, I was waiting the entire game for Him to finally appear, and then He did appear and I Leonardo DiCaprio pointed at the screen and it was awesome. So who can say if it was bad or not?
There are so many other smaller things that prick me with the game I could delve into, like the map design basically being a straight line that you walk back and forth across WAY too much for there to be no fast travel system. A lot of these things could probably (hopefully!) be rectified in a few patches, but it's a bit too late for me now. By the end of it, going through that last chase sequence, I was pretty ready to be done with the game. Yet, looking at the amount of time I put into it in a mere 4 days, only a bit less than I put into Eastward for what was still a much less frustrating experience. Getting through all the gruff the game has, there's a pretty decent experience underneath!
I kind of feel like if I went into this without having played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum and the world had more mystique to it, I probably would have had a better time. Conversely, if I played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum after this, I probably wouldn't have found that game quite as engrossing as I did at the time. It feels weird and a bit bad bad to feel like the games are stuck in this zero-win situation together. I would love to talk to someone who played the games in reverse order to me and how it affected their thoughts on the game. If nothing else, its a really interesting duology for every interesting decision they do, and its hard not to respect them.
There I was, October 18th, idly scrolling through Steam for, as one does. Usually there’s nothing all too interesting in my bored searches, especially with a Steam recommendation algorithm that thinks I would be even the slightest fraction of a bit interested in Mortal Kombat 1. But that time around, there was a game presented under “Because You Liked Tales of the Black Forest” (tangent: I never got around to writing a review for Black Forest, but it was a pretty solid RPG Maker horror game that felt like an interesting window into the Japanese Lost Decade, despite being made by Chinese devs). Another RPG Maker horror game, with a good art style and a hell of a tag line—and a hell of a lineup of art in the game’s news feed! It seemed like a curious thing, but still I made a small note of it in my mind and moved on.
Then, the next day, I saw a huge post about it on Twitter—several in fact! It had appeared to me that I had discovered this game a day before most everyone else had. What a weird feeling it is to be ahead of the curve like that. Seeing it thrown into the discourse piqued my interest and I just had to know what was actually up with this game beyond what everyone can see on its Steam page. And y’know what? It’s pretty damn good!
Now of course, it goes without saying this game is not for everyone; not for most people even. It pretty heavily features cannibalism and incest and other topics of the sort, and it’d be disingenuous to claim it’s not at least somewhat fetishistic about some of that stuff. Even as someone who is personally not bothered with most stuff, a few specific, visceral parts to when you’re butchering a human body made me squirm. It’s not a bad thing of course, horror games are made to bring us into uncomfortable territories.
Despite me calling it a horror game, largely because it follows the structure of a typical RPG Maker horror game, its not a scary game at all. It’s a black comedy, and damn, it’s funny as hell. The writing captures a very specific snarky, almost irony-poisoned vibe to it that really landed with me, way more than I anticipated. It hashes well with the absolutely FUCKED world it takes place in.
Even more fucked is the relationship between the sibling protagonists, Andrew and Ashley Graves. Truly they need to be taken apart from each other, but seeing their constant struggle with their deeply engrained codependency issues is really compelling. The constant highs and lows of seeing Andrew maybe come close to making the sheer toxicity of their relationship not wear him away, before collapsing back into the norm. Seeing them stumble down the path of engaging in cannibalism out of pure survival to doing it more out of spite. In a lot of ways, its a similar experience to what I loved seeing in Scott Pilgrim’s journey. Though, while Scott trends more or less positively, while the Graves… not so much!
The story is all complemented with a surprising amount of really good looking art, for what I believe is a solo dev project. Practically every scene has half a dozen illustrations expressing it. The world itself sells its dourness well, and I particularly love the overworld sprites. Look at these little depressed scrimbly creature things.
The gameplay exists. You walk around to do simple tasks, a couple rudimentary puzzles, exactly what you’d expect for this sort of game. It was pretty funny reading a dev thing about how they got help implementing the puzzles and, not to be judgmental to a solo indie dev but, wondering what exactly the help was needed for. It works!
Really, I’m left just wishing I waited to play the game until after it was finished. The last chapter, which seems to be very (completely?) different depending on the ending gotten in Chapter 2, is coming sometime next year. Now that I’m legitimately invested in where the fucked up twins end up, it sucks to wait! But hey, that’s a significantly better outcome than I could’ve expected first finding that Steam page.
Then, the next day, I saw a huge post about it on Twitter—several in fact! It had appeared to me that I had discovered this game a day before most everyone else had. What a weird feeling it is to be ahead of the curve like that. Seeing it thrown into the discourse piqued my interest and I just had to know what was actually up with this game beyond what everyone can see on its Steam page. And y’know what? It’s pretty damn good!
Now of course, it goes without saying this game is not for everyone; not for most people even. It pretty heavily features cannibalism and incest and other topics of the sort, and it’d be disingenuous to claim it’s not at least somewhat fetishistic about some of that stuff. Even as someone who is personally not bothered with most stuff, a few specific, visceral parts to when you’re butchering a human body made me squirm. It’s not a bad thing of course, horror games are made to bring us into uncomfortable territories.
Despite me calling it a horror game, largely because it follows the structure of a typical RPG Maker horror game, its not a scary game at all. It’s a black comedy, and damn, it’s funny as hell. The writing captures a very specific snarky, almost irony-poisoned vibe to it that really landed with me, way more than I anticipated. It hashes well with the absolutely FUCKED world it takes place in.
Even more fucked is the relationship between the sibling protagonists, Andrew and Ashley Graves. Truly they need to be taken apart from each other, but seeing their constant struggle with their deeply engrained codependency issues is really compelling. The constant highs and lows of seeing Andrew maybe come close to making the sheer toxicity of their relationship not wear him away, before collapsing back into the norm. Seeing them stumble down the path of engaging in cannibalism out of pure survival to doing it more out of spite. In a lot of ways, its a similar experience to what I loved seeing in Scott Pilgrim’s journey. Though, while Scott trends more or less positively, while the Graves… not so much!
The story is all complemented with a surprising amount of really good looking art, for what I believe is a solo dev project. Practically every scene has half a dozen illustrations expressing it. The world itself sells its dourness well, and I particularly love the overworld sprites. Look at these little depressed scrimbly creature things.
The gameplay exists. You walk around to do simple tasks, a couple rudimentary puzzles, exactly what you’d expect for this sort of game. It was pretty funny reading a dev thing about how they got help implementing the puzzles and, not to be judgmental to a solo indie dev but, wondering what exactly the help was needed for. It works!
Really, I’m left just wishing I waited to play the game until after it was finished. The last chapter, which seems to be very (completely?) different depending on the ending gotten in Chapter 2, is coming sometime next year. Now that I’m legitimately invested in where the fucked up twins end up, it sucks to wait! But hey, that’s a significantly better outcome than I could’ve expected first finding that Steam page.
2020
I've had my eye on World of Horror for a long time now, patiently waiting for the game to come out of early access. It feels pointless to even discuss what pulled me into the game; it basically sells itself 'cause... just look at it! Look. at. it.
Every single screen of this game drips with one of the most incredible aesthetics I've ever seen in a game. The 2-bit art works so perfectly at making its gruesome imagery and overload of information put upon you at all times so evoking to look at. Even opening an item's submenu and seeing 20 different icons I can't click on and don't know what they do is interesting here. Combined with a really well-done soundtrack, it's hard not to be completely enraptured by what's in front of me at all times playing the game. I can imagine how the simple art allowed for the solo developer (who apparently made the game part time while being a dentist?!) to flesh out a lot of unique scenarios, which is of course vital for a rougelike.
Indeed, the game has an immense amount of things going on throughout the five different mysteries you tackle each run. So many different encounters with a breadth of different, often very precarious effects, a stupidly high number of unique enemies, and different permutations of survivors, old gods, and backstories to shape the entire way you have to play, there's a lot unique going on. I've beaten 3 runs of the game so far, with 2 more I fucked myself out of victory in the very final stretch out of greed and bad memory (and very precisely those two things!). Even as I slowly work through the game's systems, it's kept up the feeling of being arcane and dangerous.
Indeed, the world never lets you breathe for too long, constantly having to keep up the spinning plates of your two different health meters, injuries you can sustain, and an almost ever-increasing DOOM meter that does exactly what you'd expect it to if it ever reaches 100%. (Spoilers: You're doomed!) This is where most of the game's horror comes in, constantly under stress of being just a couple of bad decisions away from all of reality crumbling away. The game definitely has a couple of scares and plenty of unsettling things as you'd expect—a few of the DOOM-based game over texts have been lingering in my mind since I've first read them—but it's all very manageable and interspersed with a solid layer of shlockiness.
At first, I was really unsure about the game's structure, as the genre's fatal question lightly flickered in the back of my mind: "would I have liked this more if it wasn't a roguelike?". The way each case you take lays out is admittedly strange. Each case's story advances when you explore a certain area, but the encounter you get while exploring is not one tied to the case and you can go explore other areas at your... something vaguely approximating leisure. The case stories are fun little experiences, but of course with the roguelike nature, you'll be seeing these cases several times over (more often than the individual events for certain), so what's left?? Then I realized, even as the exact case events fade into the background on successive runs, so pops out the natural stories of a playthrough.
Getting a particularly bad skill check roll and catching the attention of a being known simply as [SOMETHING TRULY EVIL], a constant presence just out of sight throughout the run, slowly getting closer... When I tried to save and quit out of the game, all I was told is [YOU CANNOT RUN FROM SOMETHING TRULY EVIL]. When I tried to rest at my very own home, I was threatened with [SOMETHING TRULY EVIL KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE]. When the mysterious figure finally lurched upon me, the screen glitching nonstop, all I could do was [CRY FOR IT], [BLEED FOR IT], and finally [DIE FOR IT], and in my struggle against these options, I was forced upon the third one. I later found out that this series of events ruining my entire run were something I could have survived through, but it still left it an incredibly visceral, awesome experience.
Contrast that, on one of my last runs, I came out of a boss literally as close to death as possible, getting rid of all my items and spells in a play that I'm still surprised got me out of the fight alive. I spent the rest of the game getting by on the skin of my teeth and then, by the highest grace of god, that ended up a run I won. All of the stress and fear of what could destroy me around the corner in the face of glorious victory. It's the best rougelike feeling you could ask for.
So, the game works really well as a roguelike, one that keeps pulling me back in the more I think about it, like it's an elder god of its own. Sure, there's a couple of small issues I have with the game that I could elaborate more upon, namely the limited feeling combat system with defensive options that feel like they cost too much to be worth using. I'm sure as I play a bit more the repetition of the 24 cases will start to grate on me and I will start to really see the seams of repetition and eventually I will get bored of continuing it, just as I do with every game. However, even if I stopped right now, the time I put into the experience would be more than satisfying. It's all not a very big deal though in the face of everything else feeling viscerally unique and interesting. Definitely one of the best games released so far this year.
Every single screen of this game drips with one of the most incredible aesthetics I've ever seen in a game. The 2-bit art works so perfectly at making its gruesome imagery and overload of information put upon you at all times so evoking to look at. Even opening an item's submenu and seeing 20 different icons I can't click on and don't know what they do is interesting here. Combined with a really well-done soundtrack, it's hard not to be completely enraptured by what's in front of me at all times playing the game. I can imagine how the simple art allowed for the solo developer (who apparently made the game part time while being a dentist?!) to flesh out a lot of unique scenarios, which is of course vital for a rougelike.
Indeed, the game has an immense amount of things going on throughout the five different mysteries you tackle each run. So many different encounters with a breadth of different, often very precarious effects, a stupidly high number of unique enemies, and different permutations of survivors, old gods, and backstories to shape the entire way you have to play, there's a lot unique going on. I've beaten 3 runs of the game so far, with 2 more I fucked myself out of victory in the very final stretch out of greed and bad memory (and very precisely those two things!). Even as I slowly work through the game's systems, it's kept up the feeling of being arcane and dangerous.
Indeed, the world never lets you breathe for too long, constantly having to keep up the spinning plates of your two different health meters, injuries you can sustain, and an almost ever-increasing DOOM meter that does exactly what you'd expect it to if it ever reaches 100%. (Spoilers: You're doomed!) This is where most of the game's horror comes in, constantly under stress of being just a couple of bad decisions away from all of reality crumbling away. The game definitely has a couple of scares and plenty of unsettling things as you'd expect—a few of the DOOM-based game over texts have been lingering in my mind since I've first read them—but it's all very manageable and interspersed with a solid layer of shlockiness.
At first, I was really unsure about the game's structure, as the genre's fatal question lightly flickered in the back of my mind: "would I have liked this more if it wasn't a roguelike?". The way each case you take lays out is admittedly strange. Each case's story advances when you explore a certain area, but the encounter you get while exploring is not one tied to the case and you can go explore other areas at your... something vaguely approximating leisure. The case stories are fun little experiences, but of course with the roguelike nature, you'll be seeing these cases several times over (more often than the individual events for certain), so what's left?? Then I realized, even as the exact case events fade into the background on successive runs, so pops out the natural stories of a playthrough.
Getting a particularly bad skill check roll and catching the attention of a being known simply as [SOMETHING TRULY EVIL], a constant presence just out of sight throughout the run, slowly getting closer... When I tried to save and quit out of the game, all I was told is [YOU CANNOT RUN FROM SOMETHING TRULY EVIL]. When I tried to rest at my very own home, I was threatened with [SOMETHING TRULY EVIL KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE]. When the mysterious figure finally lurched upon me, the screen glitching nonstop, all I could do was [CRY FOR IT], [BLEED FOR IT], and finally [DIE FOR IT], and in my struggle against these options, I was forced upon the third one. I later found out that this series of events ruining my entire run were something I could have survived through, but it still left it an incredibly visceral, awesome experience.
Contrast that, on one of my last runs, I came out of a boss literally as close to death as possible, getting rid of all my items and spells in a play that I'm still surprised got me out of the fight alive. I spent the rest of the game getting by on the skin of my teeth and then, by the highest grace of god, that ended up a run I won. All of the stress and fear of what could destroy me around the corner in the face of glorious victory. It's the best rougelike feeling you could ask for.
So, the game works really well as a roguelike, one that keeps pulling me back in the more I think about it, like it's an elder god of its own. Sure, there's a couple of small issues I have with the game that I could elaborate more upon, namely the limited feeling combat system with defensive options that feel like they cost too much to be worth using. I'm sure as I play a bit more the repetition of the 24 cases will start to grate on me and I will start to really see the seams of repetition and eventually I will get bored of continuing it, just as I do with every game. However, even if I stopped right now, the time I put into the experience would be more than satisfying. It's all not a very big deal though in the face of everything else feeling viscerally unique and interesting. Definitely one of the best games released so far this year.
This review contains spoilers
From the very beginning, I knew I was going to love this game. From well before it's very announcement, in early twinkles of the game being a job listing for a 2D action game at EPD, I knew it would be an incredible experience for me. What can I say, I'm a Super Mario girl at heart. Far too many words had been waxed about the creative stagnation of the New Super Mario Bros. series—a series of 4 games released over the course of 6 years, the last game of which having released almost twice as long ago as the series itself lasted—and the will-they-won't-they of is the series would continue—again, a series of 4 games released over the course of 6 years, the last game of which having released almost twice as long ago as the series itself lasted. But I always held strong in the belief something special was on the way.
And yet, despite my full faith going in, exponentially compounded by every single prerelease video released for it… the game still managed to go beyond what I could’ve possibly hoped for. Much like Pikmin 4 earlier this year, Wonder crosses the incredible tightrope of packing its playtime to the brim with new ideas and executing on basically all of them well. Every single section of every single level feels meticulously crafted to be a unique, vivid experience overflowing with soul. And it ends up doing this all with such an effortless grace, as if this experience was just spawned into the world as a perfect specimen, just as Nintendo does at their very best.
The most impressive part about the game is how, despite maintaining the tried-and-true broad strokes of the series formula, the small changes it makes in a million different areas do a lot to make the Flower Kingdom feel so alive. The game is not afraid to shake up the standard level formula, with thing like little cutscenes interspersed throughout a few levels. Worlds 3 & 5 provide a different context to your journey through the world than the typical "defeat the boss at the end of the area!", and despite them ultimately being the (relatively) weakest worlds in the game, they still add an interesting flavor to their levels even if the underlying gameplay is unchanged. It's obvious the devs were greatly inspired by the structure of the 3D Marios, particularly Odyssey, as they should've been! Even the talking flowers, despite their frequent Marvelisms, have a lot more dynamism and interaction than was suggested prerelease. It becomes an active conversation between the player and the game while in the middle of play, just another way of making it all feel more alive.
Naturally, the biggest shakeup to the game is the Wonder Flower sections, which as I said before are incredibly impressive in their variety and quality. Having one per level was the best decision they could have made, giving each level a core identity and always changing up what's going on. Even when wonder effects are repeated, which even then doesn't happen nearly as often as you'd expect, they're recontextualized in different ways that still make them feel different. The only wonder effect that feels like it outstays its welcome is the wall-clinging slimes transformation, where you just kinda use it again in the final stage of the forest world for... some reason? It definitely stood out as a weird decision amongst a sea of very much good decisions. The musical segments were also a wonderful little surprise, making even the King Boo appearance I already knew from the commercials into a treat to experience!
All of the wonder effects are wrapped up incredibly with the final few sections of the game, between the final level, credits, and The Final Test. With how sparsely each one gets used, watching them all come back for a redux, constantly switching from effect to effect... it was wonderful!
Continuing the magic of the game, by some miracle we also got a Nintendo game with a... really good multiplayer experience, both offline and online??? Offline multiplayer being good goes without saying, not just because I played most of the game in bed with my partner (love you <3), but with how they changed the multiplayer experience. All the handwringing prerelease about removing the player interaction didn't anticipate how it allowed the levels to be way tighter designed, and in many ways be more chaotic than their New Wii/U counterparts.
Online though somehow managed to be a really seamless and innovative experience I've never really seen from a platformer, again, from Nintendo of all companies! The game does well to install a mindset of working with the people you're playing the level alongside: helping show others secrets, placing down standees at opportune places, doubling back to save someone who became a ghost. It's all so easy and joyous to do, I built a bunch of connections with players as we struggle through a level together. I even liked the lambasted Search Party levels, which despite being a big too far on the arcane side, made helping each other out all the more valuable. I do feel bad for those playing through the Search Party levels in offline mode... but sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a unique experience! They'll get through it.
There is one area of the game I'll eat crow on though. I was so certain they wouldn't stick with the ugly tile based level geometry of the New series, but its back (well, point-based now to be pedantic) and it looks... really good! Turns out varying the colors and lighting and having models that weren't made for Double Dash in the levels does most of the work! Each level finally feels like it has its own visual identity, with even ones that utilize the same geometry and backgrounds varying up the lighting or architecture in some unique way. Then the wonder effect comes in and changes the world yet again in some unique way, often making it feel like you're playing through two levels in one. It's such a drastic contrast to the set level templates of the previous 2D Marios, and so good to see. The music is also really good in a fairly subtle way. While not too much stuck with me throughout the playthrough, probably in part because how many different tracks the game goes through, listening to some of them on YouTube let me appreciate the highlights a lot more. Shoutouts to the palace music that sounds ripped straight out of Super Paper Mario.
The only thing I'm left wishing is that there was more game. I devoured this game with a voraciousness few games trigger in me. I 100% it, which while not a particularly intensive ordeal, means a lot if you know anything about me! I already feel the pull to replay the game, which if you know anything about me means even more. I want more of it not because I feel any dissatisfaction with what was given, but it being such an magical experience that I feel like I could feast on it forever. It feels good for Super Mario to finally be back.
And yet, despite my full faith going in, exponentially compounded by every single prerelease video released for it… the game still managed to go beyond what I could’ve possibly hoped for. Much like Pikmin 4 earlier this year, Wonder crosses the incredible tightrope of packing its playtime to the brim with new ideas and executing on basically all of them well. Every single section of every single level feels meticulously crafted to be a unique, vivid experience overflowing with soul. And it ends up doing this all with such an effortless grace, as if this experience was just spawned into the world as a perfect specimen, just as Nintendo does at their very best.
The most impressive part about the game is how, despite maintaining the tried-and-true broad strokes of the series formula, the small changes it makes in a million different areas do a lot to make the Flower Kingdom feel so alive. The game is not afraid to shake up the standard level formula, with thing like little cutscenes interspersed throughout a few levels. Worlds 3 & 5 provide a different context to your journey through the world than the typical "defeat the boss at the end of the area!", and despite them ultimately being the (relatively) weakest worlds in the game, they still add an interesting flavor to their levels even if the underlying gameplay is unchanged. It's obvious the devs were greatly inspired by the structure of the 3D Marios, particularly Odyssey, as they should've been! Even the talking flowers, despite their frequent Marvelisms, have a lot more dynamism and interaction than was suggested prerelease. It becomes an active conversation between the player and the game while in the middle of play, just another way of making it all feel more alive.
Naturally, the biggest shakeup to the game is the Wonder Flower sections, which as I said before are incredibly impressive in their variety and quality. Having one per level was the best decision they could have made, giving each level a core identity and always changing up what's going on. Even when wonder effects are repeated, which even then doesn't happen nearly as often as you'd expect, they're recontextualized in different ways that still make them feel different. The only wonder effect that feels like it outstays its welcome is the wall-clinging slimes transformation, where you just kinda use it again in the final stage of the forest world for... some reason? It definitely stood out as a weird decision amongst a sea of very much good decisions. The musical segments were also a wonderful little surprise, making even the King Boo appearance I already knew from the commercials into a treat to experience!
All of the wonder effects are wrapped up incredibly with the final few sections of the game, between the final level, credits, and The Final Test. With how sparsely each one gets used, watching them all come back for a redux, constantly switching from effect to effect... it was wonderful!
Continuing the magic of the game, by some miracle we also got a Nintendo game with a... really good multiplayer experience, both offline and online??? Offline multiplayer being good goes without saying, not just because I played most of the game in bed with my partner (love you <3), but with how they changed the multiplayer experience. All the handwringing prerelease about removing the player interaction didn't anticipate how it allowed the levels to be way tighter designed, and in many ways be more chaotic than their New Wii/U counterparts.
Online though somehow managed to be a really seamless and innovative experience I've never really seen from a platformer, again, from Nintendo of all companies! The game does well to install a mindset of working with the people you're playing the level alongside: helping show others secrets, placing down standees at opportune places, doubling back to save someone who became a ghost. It's all so easy and joyous to do, I built a bunch of connections with players as we struggle through a level together. I even liked the lambasted Search Party levels, which despite being a big too far on the arcane side, made helping each other out all the more valuable. I do feel bad for those playing through the Search Party levels in offline mode... but sometimes sacrifices have to be made for a unique experience! They'll get through it.
There is one area of the game I'll eat crow on though. I was so certain they wouldn't stick with the ugly tile based level geometry of the New series, but its back (well, point-based now to be pedantic) and it looks... really good! Turns out varying the colors and lighting and having models that weren't made for Double Dash in the levels does most of the work! Each level finally feels like it has its own visual identity, with even ones that utilize the same geometry and backgrounds varying up the lighting or architecture in some unique way. Then the wonder effect comes in and changes the world yet again in some unique way, often making it feel like you're playing through two levels in one. It's such a drastic contrast to the set level templates of the previous 2D Marios, and so good to see. The music is also really good in a fairly subtle way. While not too much stuck with me throughout the playthrough, probably in part because how many different tracks the game goes through, listening to some of them on YouTube let me appreciate the highlights a lot more. Shoutouts to the palace music that sounds ripped straight out of Super Paper Mario.
The only thing I'm left wishing is that there was more game. I devoured this game with a voraciousness few games trigger in me. I 100% it, which while not a particularly intensive ordeal, means a lot if you know anything about me! I already feel the pull to replay the game, which if you know anything about me means even more. I want more of it not because I feel any dissatisfaction with what was given, but it being such an magical experience that I feel like I could feast on it forever. It feels good for Super Mario to finally be back.
2021
Ah, how many games I have lined up on my list to play by year's end, a list full enough it's likely I won't even get to all of them even if I tried! Yet, here I was, seeing the Nintendo Switch Online offer to play Eastward--for free! For a week! A game I've heard fairlyyyyy good things about before! How could I say no to that? On a whim, it was written, Poochy is playing Eastward.
God I wish I liked it.
Eastward is a post-post apocalyptic adventure game that, like many of its kin, explores that value of human connection. Kinda. It's depiction of the world is so rich, both in terms of the ideas presented in each area and the . Just look at any screenshot of the game, it's got some of the best pixel art work I've ever seen, with a ridiculously level of animation work and lighting that makes everything feel so alive. My Switch album is filled to the brim capturing every luscious landscape and setpiece it has in store. For that alone, it made my time in the world not regrettable.
Prior to finishing, I was under the belief every other element of the game besides its aesthetics and world design undershot what they really should have been by like 20%, but unfortunately then the ending happened. The game makes a really dangerous gambit, by spending almost the entire game setting up question after question that are all loaded onto the final act to pay off. Plenty of my favorite games go forward with this structure and are so beloved precisely because of their gambit. Eastward, however, does a number of things throughout that makes its story not just rote but kind of actively bad!
Its compulsory need to layer on mystery after mystery without explaining even fairly rudimentary things that happen. Stuff as simple as how the two main characters met each other, or basic character motivations are barely touched on and the game just treks along as if it doesn't matter. Major characters, including who could best be called the primary antagonist of the game, drop in and out of the story without much elaboration on what their deal is, and then reappear way later on having undergone radical changes that still are barely given any elaboration. So often, the perfect opportunity for characters to discuss what their deal is with each other is set up and then they just... walk away? For no real reason???
In place of focusing on its story, the game loves sending you on adjacent objectives with side characters that don't really amount to much of anything, like the beginning section of Twilight Princess strung out across an entire 20 hour adventure. In general, the game's pacing is totally fucked, with a largely nonsensical chapter structure and a really bad gameplay-to-cutscene/fetch quest ratio. There is an entire chapter where basically all you do is go through an entirely inconsequential dungeon to save two completely inconsequential NPCs, something that in any other game would be a side quest. At another point, you're going through a section about cooking food, then while you're in the middle of cooking the food the characters decide to fuck off and do something completely unrelated. Then, when they get back, the food is, predictably, ruined! So much of the game feels like its strung together via a series of disconnected "and then this happens..." instead of being based in the realm of cause and effect. It results in a story experiencing experience that often feels like pulling teeth.
Then, I reached the final chapter, the game rapidly approached the end, and... as you can probably imagine, did not stick the landing as I hoped it would. The ultimate answers to the questions it proposes are either the most obvious ones they could be or left more or less unanswered. It ends up being so frustrating to see these scenes with some absolutely jaw dropping, beautiful visuals play out with amazing music accompanying, and yet I just don't care for the emotional beats they depict. It hits all the story beats you would expect a game like this to hit, but the game hasn't done the work needed to really make me character about these characters. And the unanswered questions... I did a bit of digging afterwards to make sure I didn't just miss out on elements of the game's story, but no! The subreddit is filled with people left confused about fundamental aspects of the world and characters with responses that amount to "well I think it might be this but idk that's just my best guess".
I want to make a particular shoutout to the bizarre lack of characterization given to John, the father figure in the main playable father-daughter duo. He's a silent protagonist, which I do not have any issues with on the face of it, but the game barely gives any texture to him beyond the first 10 minutes of the game outside of a sparse few scenes. Sam, the daughter of the pairing, is talkative as all get out though. The way this ends up playing out in the vast majority of cutscenes is John being a mindless automaton following Sam while she makes every decision, including several that a father figure really should provide at least a little pushback to her making! It's hard to shake the feeling he ended up being silent because it wanted to recapture the vibe of playing as Flint in Mother 3 and his legendary cutscene at the beginning of the game. Yet, much like Mother 3's handling of Duster and Kumatora, it feels like his silence just comes at the expense of having a character that's way less fleshed out than he really should be.
Anyways, as I said before, a far larger chunk of the game is dedicated to cutscenes and fetch quests than the quality of the writing mandates. When it's not that, however, the duo goes venturing into areas fashioned similar to Zelda dungeons--and they're pretty solid! It's a good enough time exploring each beautiful looking area, uncovering secrets, and going through puzzles that often rely on switching between the two different characters. None of it is particular novel, and I do wish the game had a few more tricks up its sleeve than the switch puzzles it loves so dearly, but it all remained fairly chill and just taxing enough on the brain to remain interesting.
The combat is similarly decent enough, but really starts to strain itself towards the end of the game. Your main methods of dealing damage are almost all short ranged or take an annoying charge up time until close to the end (and the option you do get then is... too weak to depend on). When enemies start getting more aggressive and agile, it becomes increasingly hard to keep up, especially considering that your hitbox consists of both the character you're controlling AND the follower. It's never frustratingly difficult with how many resources the game dumps on you, as well as a cooking system for more healing dishes I never really bothered with, but still. Why doesn't the game have a dodge roll or something? It would fit right in. Again, it's one element where it feels like the game falls 20% short of where it really should've been.
So here I am, left just feeling rather deflated by the whole experience. The most I dwell on it, the more frustrated I become with the story and writing. There's clearly a lot of effort and passion put in from top to bottom, plenty of stuff I enjoyed in the moment, but it just doesn't come together into a cohesive product. What a shame.
Adendum: I forgot to mention this, but the game crashed SIX! times over the course of playing. Fortunately, the game had a good autosave system that left me only losing ~10 minutes of game time total, but it was still a tad frustrating.
God I wish I liked it.
Eastward is a post-post apocalyptic adventure game that, like many of its kin, explores that value of human connection. Kinda. It's depiction of the world is so rich, both in terms of the ideas presented in each area and the . Just look at any screenshot of the game, it's got some of the best pixel art work I've ever seen, with a ridiculously level of animation work and lighting that makes everything feel so alive. My Switch album is filled to the brim capturing every luscious landscape and setpiece it has in store. For that alone, it made my time in the world not regrettable.
Prior to finishing, I was under the belief every other element of the game besides its aesthetics and world design undershot what they really should have been by like 20%, but unfortunately then the ending happened. The game makes a really dangerous gambit, by spending almost the entire game setting up question after question that are all loaded onto the final act to pay off. Plenty of my favorite games go forward with this structure and are so beloved precisely because of their gambit. Eastward, however, does a number of things throughout that makes its story not just rote but kind of actively bad!
Its compulsory need to layer on mystery after mystery without explaining even fairly rudimentary things that happen. Stuff as simple as how the two main characters met each other, or basic character motivations are barely touched on and the game just treks along as if it doesn't matter. Major characters, including who could best be called the primary antagonist of the game, drop in and out of the story without much elaboration on what their deal is, and then reappear way later on having undergone radical changes that still are barely given any elaboration. So often, the perfect opportunity for characters to discuss what their deal is with each other is set up and then they just... walk away? For no real reason???
In place of focusing on its story, the game loves sending you on adjacent objectives with side characters that don't really amount to much of anything, like the beginning section of Twilight Princess strung out across an entire 20 hour adventure. In general, the game's pacing is totally fucked, with a largely nonsensical chapter structure and a really bad gameplay-to-cutscene/fetch quest ratio. There is an entire chapter where basically all you do is go through an entirely inconsequential dungeon to save two completely inconsequential NPCs, something that in any other game would be a side quest. At another point, you're going through a section about cooking food, then while you're in the middle of cooking the food the characters decide to fuck off and do something completely unrelated. Then, when they get back, the food is, predictably, ruined! So much of the game feels like its strung together via a series of disconnected "and then this happens..." instead of being based in the realm of cause and effect. It results in a story experiencing experience that often feels like pulling teeth.
Then, I reached the final chapter, the game rapidly approached the end, and... as you can probably imagine, did not stick the landing as I hoped it would. The ultimate answers to the questions it proposes are either the most obvious ones they could be or left more or less unanswered. It ends up being so frustrating to see these scenes with some absolutely jaw dropping, beautiful visuals play out with amazing music accompanying, and yet I just don't care for the emotional beats they depict. It hits all the story beats you would expect a game like this to hit, but the game hasn't done the work needed to really make me character about these characters. And the unanswered questions... I did a bit of digging afterwards to make sure I didn't just miss out on elements of the game's story, but no! The subreddit is filled with people left confused about fundamental aspects of the world and characters with responses that amount to "well I think it might be this but idk that's just my best guess".
I want to make a particular shoutout to the bizarre lack of characterization given to John, the father figure in the main playable father-daughter duo. He's a silent protagonist, which I do not have any issues with on the face of it, but the game barely gives any texture to him beyond the first 10 minutes of the game outside of a sparse few scenes. Sam, the daughter of the pairing, is talkative as all get out though. The way this ends up playing out in the vast majority of cutscenes is John being a mindless automaton following Sam while she makes every decision, including several that a father figure really should provide at least a little pushback to her making! It's hard to shake the feeling he ended up being silent because it wanted to recapture the vibe of playing as Flint in Mother 3 and his legendary cutscene at the beginning of the game. Yet, much like Mother 3's handling of Duster and Kumatora, it feels like his silence just comes at the expense of having a character that's way less fleshed out than he really should be.
Anyways, as I said before, a far larger chunk of the game is dedicated to cutscenes and fetch quests than the quality of the writing mandates. When it's not that, however, the duo goes venturing into areas fashioned similar to Zelda dungeons--and they're pretty solid! It's a good enough time exploring each beautiful looking area, uncovering secrets, and going through puzzles that often rely on switching between the two different characters. None of it is particular novel, and I do wish the game had a few more tricks up its sleeve than the switch puzzles it loves so dearly, but it all remained fairly chill and just taxing enough on the brain to remain interesting.
The combat is similarly decent enough, but really starts to strain itself towards the end of the game. Your main methods of dealing damage are almost all short ranged or take an annoying charge up time until close to the end (and the option you do get then is... too weak to depend on). When enemies start getting more aggressive and agile, it becomes increasingly hard to keep up, especially considering that your hitbox consists of both the character you're controlling AND the follower. It's never frustratingly difficult with how many resources the game dumps on you, as well as a cooking system for more healing dishes I never really bothered with, but still. Why doesn't the game have a dodge roll or something? It would fit right in. Again, it's one element where it feels like the game falls 20% short of where it really should've been.
So here I am, left just feeling rather deflated by the whole experience. The most I dwell on it, the more frustrated I become with the story and writing. There's clearly a lot of effort and passion put in from top to bottom, plenty of stuff I enjoyed in the moment, but it just doesn't come together into a cohesive product. What a shame.
Adendum: I forgot to mention this, but the game crashed SIX! times over the course of playing. Fortunately, the game had a good autosave system that left me only losing ~10 minutes of game time total, but it was still a tad frustrating.
2010
I've paged over all of the various games vgperson has translated over the years, making a mental repository of which ones had my interest and I wanted to give a try. Yet, all those times, Re:Kinder always fell squarely in the "not interested bucket" because, well, just look at any screenshot of it. Look at it! On the surface, this game is fucking grody, an amateurish mashup of default RPG maker assets that all clash against each other. Every character looks like they're missing one of their eyes when their sprite is facing to the side. Where the fuck is that Backloggd icon from? Everything at face value would suggest that this is a hastily slopped together thing in the sea of the thousands of other RPG Maker projects made over the past several decades not worth caring about.
And yet, what if I told you that underneath this presentation, somehow, some way, this was not only a good game, but one of the best experiences I've had with a RPG Maker game??? It's kinda crazy.
Re:Kinder stands out on two fronts. First, the number and novelty of gameplay situations it sets out during its short runtime is incredibly strong for the genre. The puzzles are generally well thought out and play with the standard RPG Maker elements of inventory and interactables. There is also some combat, but the leveling and inventory systems are stripped out to make each fight more of a puzzle using a limited set of tools. The apartment towards the end of the game is certainly the highlight, with a clever interaction puzzle and one of the most novel combat encounters I've seen in one of these RPG Maker games pasted back-to-back. The combat encounter has you run around a room collecting items and gaining new skills as you fend off a boss constantly trying to engage in combat with you, until you obtain the tools necessary to ignite the boss for an instant kill. It was a bit on the obtuse side (I consulted vgperson's guide for it, which even she admitted some of the elements of the fight were quite inexplicable), but that didn't take away from how novel it felt.
It's other main appeal is the writing and tone it goes for, with a poignant discussion of the impacts of mental illness. The game takes place in a world where mental illnesses are treated as quack science by society, examining how people deal with not having an outlet for or even recognition of their issues. It's a clear reflection of our own world, and it explores the concept with a pretty hefty depth, again, for its short runtime.
Yet, the main villain Yuuichi throws in a hefty mix of off the wall, often dark humor into the game, sometimes right in the middle of some serious moments. Nothing quite prepares you for the main villain coming out after just having murdered a kid to an intense track with Spanish lyrics, nor a stock photo of a dog suddenly flashing on screen (more than once!) in the middle of a conversation. There's a great sense of humor here, making me laugh at several points from the sheer absurdity of what happened. The soundtrack to the game is diverse and shocking in all its own ways, adding a lot to each scene, even if sometimes that a lot is a "wtf is happening right now". By the end of the game, even the seeming mess that is the graphics feels, somewhat, kinda, almost the intent, feeding into the chaotic vibes of the chaotic world.
The craziest part about all of this? Re:Kinder is not some avante garde title, but instead indicates its a remake of the TWO THOUSAND AND THREE game Kinder. Finding out about this after beating the game made its novelty and strong theming feel even more potent. The framework of this game is over 20 years old! It's older than Yume Nikki! From what I understand--there's no English translation of the original release--the dark comedy aspects of the game were added into the remake, where the original kept a thoroughly dark tone throughout. I believe this addition ultimately made the game more interesting. Still, the rest of the game, how it handles mental illness and even touches on some queer themes, and how it plays on the conventions of the RPG genre is radically ahead of its time. Honestly, it pulls a lot of these things off better than many other RPG Maker games I've played that released a decade+ later.
The longer I sit with this, the more profound it feels to be experiencing this creation of an individual 20 years after it was first released, almost in tandem with when I was born. One of the main reasons I play RPG Maker games is the way the pastiche reveals these experiences revolving around, in most of the cases I've seen thus far, a single person's thoughts and identity. In the best case, stepping out of my world to delve into someone else's mind for a couple hours, seeing everything they have to say. These minds enshrined in code that will be available for time in memoriam, from times I didn't get to experience the way I am able to now. And, idk, Re:Kinder is one of the best enshrinements of this.
And yet, what if I told you that underneath this presentation, somehow, some way, this was not only a good game, but one of the best experiences I've had with a RPG Maker game??? It's kinda crazy.
Re:Kinder stands out on two fronts. First, the number and novelty of gameplay situations it sets out during its short runtime is incredibly strong for the genre. The puzzles are generally well thought out and play with the standard RPG Maker elements of inventory and interactables. There is also some combat, but the leveling and inventory systems are stripped out to make each fight more of a puzzle using a limited set of tools. The apartment towards the end of the game is certainly the highlight, with a clever interaction puzzle and one of the most novel combat encounters I've seen in one of these RPG Maker games pasted back-to-back. The combat encounter has you run around a room collecting items and gaining new skills as you fend off a boss constantly trying to engage in combat with you, until you obtain the tools necessary to ignite the boss for an instant kill. It was a bit on the obtuse side (I consulted vgperson's guide for it, which even she admitted some of the elements of the fight were quite inexplicable), but that didn't take away from how novel it felt.
It's other main appeal is the writing and tone it goes for, with a poignant discussion of the impacts of mental illness. The game takes place in a world where mental illnesses are treated as quack science by society, examining how people deal with not having an outlet for or even recognition of their issues. It's a clear reflection of our own world, and it explores the concept with a pretty hefty depth, again, for its short runtime.
Yet, the main villain Yuuichi throws in a hefty mix of off the wall, often dark humor into the game, sometimes right in the middle of some serious moments. Nothing quite prepares you for the main villain coming out after just having murdered a kid to an intense track with Spanish lyrics, nor a stock photo of a dog suddenly flashing on screen (more than once!) in the middle of a conversation. There's a great sense of humor here, making me laugh at several points from the sheer absurdity of what happened. The soundtrack to the game is diverse and shocking in all its own ways, adding a lot to each scene, even if sometimes that a lot is a "wtf is happening right now". By the end of the game, even the seeming mess that is the graphics feels, somewhat, kinda, almost the intent, feeding into the chaotic vibes of the chaotic world.
The craziest part about all of this? Re:Kinder is not some avante garde title, but instead indicates its a remake of the TWO THOUSAND AND THREE game Kinder. Finding out about this after beating the game made its novelty and strong theming feel even more potent. The framework of this game is over 20 years old! It's older than Yume Nikki! From what I understand--there's no English translation of the original release--the dark comedy aspects of the game were added into the remake, where the original kept a thoroughly dark tone throughout. I believe this addition ultimately made the game more interesting. Still, the rest of the game, how it handles mental illness and even touches on some queer themes, and how it plays on the conventions of the RPG genre is radically ahead of its time. Honestly, it pulls a lot of these things off better than many other RPG Maker games I've played that released a decade+ later.
The longer I sit with this, the more profound it feels to be experiencing this creation of an individual 20 years after it was first released, almost in tandem with when I was born. One of the main reasons I play RPG Maker games is the way the pastiche reveals these experiences revolving around, in most of the cases I've seen thus far, a single person's thoughts and identity. In the best case, stepping out of my world to delve into someone else's mind for a couple hours, seeing everything they have to say. These minds enshrined in code that will be available for time in memoriam, from times I didn't get to experience the way I am able to now. And, idk, Re:Kinder is one of the best enshrinements of this.
2023
This review contains spoilers
I remember getting into Pikmin the same way as many others did. I got Mario Kart 8 on Wii U and got to reap the benefits of Nintendo's own desperation, choosing Pikmin 3 as my complementary game. In another universe, I went through with getting Wii Party U like I originally planned—a much worse universe certainly. It ended up as one of my favorites games as a kid, loved enough for me to end up playing through it three seperate times. If you know me, you know how big of a deal that is!
Yet here we are now in 2023, almost a decade later. I remember a conversation with a friend in early 2018, discussing the games we expected Nintendo to release for the year. After Miyamoto said the mythical game was almost done in 2015, certainly the game had to be right around the corner! Lol. Lmao. It's a damn shame Nintendo never went that deep into the game's prolonged development in the developer interview like they did with Nintendo Switch Sports. The "what happened" is probably not all that interesting, but it'd still be nice to know!
The Pikmin 4 we did end up getting though, almost a decade in the waiting, was worth every day it took to get here. It manages to rest in an extremely niche valley otherwise only occupied by the N64 Paper Mario in my head, games that are incredibly flat quality wise, but that line of quality is propped incredibly high. From beginning to end, essentially every single area and cave and mission feels incredibly well-crafted and is a joy to go through. There's not much in terms of setpiece moments or surprises, which you would expect to make the game feel fairly monotonous across its 30 hour(!!!) runtime, but the challenges faced are kept so diverse and, again, well-crafted it's barely even an issue.
Dandori is the main focus of the game, pushed at every moment. Of course, the previous games mandated the same type of strategy (the word Dandori was also used heavily internally during the development of Pikmin 3), but the way this game constantly keeps it in your mind really helped me encapsulate an efficient mindset. The game never really puts that much pressure on your strategy. The main campaign lacks any day limit stressors, caves make per-day time run so slowly they might as well freeze time as 2 did, there's a spoil of options to let you manage idle Pikmin without having to go out and get them yourself, and it's all wrapped in the rewind option making the per-action risk end up fairly small. Yet, the game realizes the core of the game: being efficient with your Pikmin is just inherently cathartic. There are few pleasures better than watching your Pikmin carry a bunch of items back to base from various points on the map like a fine clockwork as you revel in how much of a Dandori expert you really are.
The Dandori Challenges are the pinnacle of focusing on Dandori and ended up being the highlight of the whole experience. Sure, completing a challenge with a bronze medal is fairly simple, but the platinum medals are the one area of the game that give a big extrinsic reward for Dandori-ing well, and they're incredibly satisfying to get. The Trials of the Leaf Sage, while I didn't go back to platinum them, mandate good routing for those fast completion times and feel like they'd be especially fun go for. I would love the game to get some DLC packs with extra Dandori Challenges, just like how 3 did.
Another really impressive thing the game deals with is its handling of the series' legacy. The game revels in using elements from the previous games, yet it never feels like nostalgia baiting. Everything feels like it's done with a knowing smile, playing off a previous knowledge of the series. The most obvious example is with the Water Wraith, of course. I knew it was in the game ahead of time, but little did I know going into the Engulfed Castle how early in the game it appeared. Then after that appearance, the game continues to use the creature as a tool for its "level design", culminating in it being a little bitch pain in the ass owned by Purple Pikmin in the very last challenge. It was really cathartic in a sense. Another great experience was the one-two-three punch of seeing the treasure mandating 100 Purple Pikmin to move, getting the mission to getting a 7th colored onion after I already got the Red/Yellow/Blue/Ice/Rock/Winged core, and seeing the Purple and White Onions fly off when I first hit the game's ending. They know how world-rocking a Purple Onion is, and even after getting it and growing my centennial army of purple dudes, it still feels kinda sacrilegious.
The only really weak part of the game is the boss design. Oatchi is a wonderful tool in the game and built really well into its design, even if it does make most combat a breeze. However, when bosses are focused specifically on combat, and many are taken from previous games without much change to the core boss design, they end up feeling rather samey. Just ram into them, watch your guys bop bop bop away at the boss, then whistle them back before the boss tries to shake them off. The game's lack of per-action risk also comes most at fault here, and ultimately most bosses just end up feeling like slightly beefer versions of normal enemies. None of them are bad, and the final boss is actually really good, but it still feels like a big step back from the really great roster of setpiece bosses Pikmin 3 had.
Have I mentioned the game is ridiculously cute? The series has always been extremely charming, but all the touches here just make it all the better. The jingle as you exit the ship in the morning as Oatchi comes up to you in excitement filled me with joy every time it happened. And Oatchi himself, oh my god. He was tailor made to be the most loveable, precious thing of all time ever—and hey, they succeeded. I need a plush of him right now. Moss too, I love her dearly.
I could go on and on gushing about this game, about all these certain moments and challenges and interactions, about how funny Louie's treasure and Piklopedia descriptions are ("No one and nothing tells me what I am supposed to eat."). It's a beautiful, lovingly-crafted game in every single way, easily my GotY so far. And with how well it's done, I rest easy knowing Pikmin has a blazingly bright future ahead of it. I love Pikmin.
Yet here we are now in 2023, almost a decade later. I remember a conversation with a friend in early 2018, discussing the games we expected Nintendo to release for the year. After Miyamoto said the mythical game was almost done in 2015, certainly the game had to be right around the corner! Lol. Lmao. It's a damn shame Nintendo never went that deep into the game's prolonged development in the developer interview like they did with Nintendo Switch Sports. The "what happened" is probably not all that interesting, but it'd still be nice to know!
The Pikmin 4 we did end up getting though, almost a decade in the waiting, was worth every day it took to get here. It manages to rest in an extremely niche valley otherwise only occupied by the N64 Paper Mario in my head, games that are incredibly flat quality wise, but that line of quality is propped incredibly high. From beginning to end, essentially every single area and cave and mission feels incredibly well-crafted and is a joy to go through. There's not much in terms of setpiece moments or surprises, which you would expect to make the game feel fairly monotonous across its 30 hour(!!!) runtime, but the challenges faced are kept so diverse and, again, well-crafted it's barely even an issue.
Dandori is the main focus of the game, pushed at every moment. Of course, the previous games mandated the same type of strategy (the word Dandori was also used heavily internally during the development of Pikmin 3), but the way this game constantly keeps it in your mind really helped me encapsulate an efficient mindset. The game never really puts that much pressure on your strategy. The main campaign lacks any day limit stressors, caves make per-day time run so slowly they might as well freeze time as 2 did, there's a spoil of options to let you manage idle Pikmin without having to go out and get them yourself, and it's all wrapped in the rewind option making the per-action risk end up fairly small. Yet, the game realizes the core of the game: being efficient with your Pikmin is just inherently cathartic. There are few pleasures better than watching your Pikmin carry a bunch of items back to base from various points on the map like a fine clockwork as you revel in how much of a Dandori expert you really are.
The Dandori Challenges are the pinnacle of focusing on Dandori and ended up being the highlight of the whole experience. Sure, completing a challenge with a bronze medal is fairly simple, but the platinum medals are the one area of the game that give a big extrinsic reward for Dandori-ing well, and they're incredibly satisfying to get. The Trials of the Leaf Sage, while I didn't go back to platinum them, mandate good routing for those fast completion times and feel like they'd be especially fun go for. I would love the game to get some DLC packs with extra Dandori Challenges, just like how 3 did.
Another really impressive thing the game deals with is its handling of the series' legacy. The game revels in using elements from the previous games, yet it never feels like nostalgia baiting. Everything feels like it's done with a knowing smile, playing off a previous knowledge of the series. The most obvious example is with the Water Wraith, of course. I knew it was in the game ahead of time, but little did I know going into the Engulfed Castle how early in the game it appeared. Then after that appearance, the game continues to use the creature as a tool for its "level design", culminating in it being a little bitch pain in the ass owned by Purple Pikmin in the very last challenge. It was really cathartic in a sense. Another great experience was the one-two-three punch of seeing the treasure mandating 100 Purple Pikmin to move, getting the mission to getting a 7th colored onion after I already got the Red/Yellow/Blue/Ice/Rock/Winged core, and seeing the Purple and White Onions fly off when I first hit the game's ending. They know how world-rocking a Purple Onion is, and even after getting it and growing my centennial army of purple dudes, it still feels kinda sacrilegious.
The only really weak part of the game is the boss design. Oatchi is a wonderful tool in the game and built really well into its design, even if it does make most combat a breeze. However, when bosses are focused specifically on combat, and many are taken from previous games without much change to the core boss design, they end up feeling rather samey. Just ram into them, watch your guys bop bop bop away at the boss, then whistle them back before the boss tries to shake them off. The game's lack of per-action risk also comes most at fault here, and ultimately most bosses just end up feeling like slightly beefer versions of normal enemies. None of them are bad, and the final boss is actually really good, but it still feels like a big step back from the really great roster of setpiece bosses Pikmin 3 had.
Have I mentioned the game is ridiculously cute? The series has always been extremely charming, but all the touches here just make it all the better. The jingle as you exit the ship in the morning as Oatchi comes up to you in excitement filled me with joy every time it happened. And Oatchi himself, oh my god. He was tailor made to be the most loveable, precious thing of all time ever—and hey, they succeeded. I need a plush of him right now. Moss too, I love her dearly.
I could go on and on gushing about this game, about all these certain moments and challenges and interactions, about how funny Louie's treasure and Piklopedia descriptions are ("No one and nothing tells me what I am supposed to eat."). It's a beautiful, lovingly-crafted game in every single way, easily my GotY so far. And with how well it's done, I rest easy knowing Pikmin has a blazingly bright future ahead of it. I love Pikmin.
2001
Kuru Kuru Kururin is a Nintendo game through and through. At first blush, the game appears to not have much going on; you’re in a spinny thingy and you have to maneuver it to the goal. Yet, as you go through each level, see all the tricks the game has up its sleeve, you realize… yeah, it’s a simple as hell game! Simplicity isn’t a bad thing if the core idea is strong of course.
In this game’s case, I wouldn’t consider its spinning mechanics strong enough to leave me like “oh shit, Nintendo are geniuses once again!”, but it still manages to squeeze a fun time out of what little there is to it. Each world is set apart by its own mechanical and level design focus, never substantially changing how you tackle the levels, but fresh enough to keep me from getting bored.
It’s surprisingly challenging too—perhaps to a fault. The expectations of execution precision and the length of levels by the end left me abusing rewind frequently, lest I have long given up on the game. In a way it feels very retro game-y, a short experience intended for a child to play over and over for days/weeks on end until they’ve mastered it. The design, even for it’s 2001 release, feels fairly antiquated.
Even if I don’t think it’s that good of a game, it’s undoubtedly charming: a fun little toy to beat in a couple short bursts. Nothing too mentally taxing, with cute graphics and surprisingly good music. Also, having 10 birds rest on my spinny thingy and fly around when I bump into things is wonderful.
In this game’s case, I wouldn’t consider its spinning mechanics strong enough to leave me like “oh shit, Nintendo are geniuses once again!”, but it still manages to squeeze a fun time out of what little there is to it. Each world is set apart by its own mechanical and level design focus, never substantially changing how you tackle the levels, but fresh enough to keep me from getting bored.
It’s surprisingly challenging too—perhaps to a fault. The expectations of execution precision and the length of levels by the end left me abusing rewind frequently, lest I have long given up on the game. In a way it feels very retro game-y, a short experience intended for a child to play over and over for days/weeks on end until they’ve mastered it. The design, even for it’s 2001 release, feels fairly antiquated.
Even if I don’t think it’s that good of a game, it’s undoubtedly charming: a fun little toy to beat in a couple short bursts. Nothing too mentally taxing, with cute graphics and surprisingly good music. Also, having 10 birds rest on my spinny thingy and fly around when I bump into things is wonderful.
Uhhhhhhhhhhhh-huh. I just found this game while randomly browsing Steam and I really don't have that much to say about it. It's a short story in the form of a RPG Maker experience that just feels incomplete.
You wander around a house completing small tasks, sometimes whisked away into short memories where you may have to complete another task? Tasks have you perform a series of button presses under a time limit (ultimate classic RPG Maker minigame) and you're ranked on doing it at the end for some reason? There is one puzzle in the game just kinda thrown in there towards the end and its the most basic version of "some of us are telling the truth, some of us are lying" possible? You collect a series of 7 clues just kinda as you go? There's a system to combine clues together to get new clues, but it feels incredibly arbitrary what the clues combined end up doing and you only use the system twice and as far as I can tell the game never brings up the clue combining system at all?????
All of these weird, disparate elements circle in to complete a story I do understand, and there is some neat elements to this story. The moment-to-moment writing is really well done and there's one scene at the beginning of the game where you discover a barrier that slices nature in two and coats everything behind it in permafrost, the image that captured my interest going into it. But the story as a whole isn't that interesting--much less that the way the game struts itself in an almost avant-garde fashion. It's a 1000 word kinda-neat-I-guess short story told in a structure and a medium that feel like they add nothing but a (very thin, the game is only 45 minutes long after all) layer of tedium.
But hey at least it's not Wadanohara LOL
You wander around a house completing small tasks, sometimes whisked away into short memories where you may have to complete another task? Tasks have you perform a series of button presses under a time limit (ultimate classic RPG Maker minigame) and you're ranked on doing it at the end for some reason? There is one puzzle in the game just kinda thrown in there towards the end and its the most basic version of "some of us are telling the truth, some of us are lying" possible? You collect a series of 7 clues just kinda as you go? There's a system to combine clues together to get new clues, but it feels incredibly arbitrary what the clues combined end up doing and you only use the system twice and as far as I can tell the game never brings up the clue combining system at all?????
All of these weird, disparate elements circle in to complete a story I do understand, and there is some neat elements to this story. The moment-to-moment writing is really well done and there's one scene at the beginning of the game where you discover a barrier that slices nature in two and coats everything behind it in permafrost, the image that captured my interest going into it. But the story as a whole isn't that interesting--much less that the way the game struts itself in an almost avant-garde fashion. It's a 1000 word kinda-neat-I-guess short story told in a structure and a medium that feel like they add nothing but a (very thin, the game is only 45 minutes long after all) layer of tedium.
But hey at least it's not Wadanohara LOL
2019
Grimm's Hollow sweet little experience that unfortunately reaches the end just as it feels like it's getting started. The premise, getting dropped into purgatory as a reaper not yet ready for the afterlife is pretty damn cool and explores the idea fairly well for as long as its given to do so. The main cast are all fun and nicely fleshed out, again relatively to the game's length. This is all accented with a solid soundtrack and visuals, including some nice little visual set pieces, all working very well together. The last area in particular really sells its strong feeling of mourning, an appropriate endcap to where the game ends up at.
One of my least favorite forms of combat rears its head again, Active Time Battle, and this game sure doesn't change my mind on the system--but it's fiiiiiine. The game has solid fundamentals, with a nice variety of enemies, with each one having its own tangible niche: one gives shields to other enemies, one slowly picks up speed to steamroll you if you don't take it out quickly, one constantly buffs other enemies, etc. On paper, each combination of enemies could be an interesting enough fight to take on, if not for the combination of the game feeling both fairly nebulous and overly easy (the former playing into the later).
A standard level up system is eschewed for XP being used on a skill tree, where you can directly level up your core stats and unlock or upgrade new spells to use. Its a novel enough system, and there is something fun to being able to pop points into something new every few battles, but it makes the player character feel incredibly amorphous. There's never really a point when you can get a sense of how much damage you're dealing or taking when those numbers end up changing after almost every battle, making it hard to ever form much of a strategy. Not to mention the ever-present spectre of ATB, where enemy moves just kinda... happen when they happen. These rough parts don't matter all too much though, when the game is near-trivially easy, even when playing on the harder difficulty. Most enemies would go down with a standard attack to build MP, then a defense-piercing blow to finish them off.
Once I reached the end of the game, there is a bit of a feeling of "oh that's it huh?" as you get backloaded with a lot of details on the main characters at once. It's also where I cleaned up unlocking the rest of the skill tree to reach the true ending, which oddly required reloading the game twice (the only way to respawn enemies as far as I know) since otherwise collecting every item and defeating every enemy got me bizarrely close to the total XP needed without actually reaching it. Still, going through the true ending itself was really sweet, just like the rest of the game! Yes, I do wish there was more meat here, but it's largely because the ideas and systems present feel far more well developed than warranted for a game of this scope.
It's kinda funny to come out of it with my main "complaint" being that the game feels too good for what it is, but I hope it just means the developer is using this to make a bigger experience in the future--and that could really be something special.
One of my least favorite forms of combat rears its head again, Active Time Battle, and this game sure doesn't change my mind on the system--but it's fiiiiiine. The game has solid fundamentals, with a nice variety of enemies, with each one having its own tangible niche: one gives shields to other enemies, one slowly picks up speed to steamroll you if you don't take it out quickly, one constantly buffs other enemies, etc. On paper, each combination of enemies could be an interesting enough fight to take on, if not for the combination of the game feeling both fairly nebulous and overly easy (the former playing into the later).
A standard level up system is eschewed for XP being used on a skill tree, where you can directly level up your core stats and unlock or upgrade new spells to use. Its a novel enough system, and there is something fun to being able to pop points into something new every few battles, but it makes the player character feel incredibly amorphous. There's never really a point when you can get a sense of how much damage you're dealing or taking when those numbers end up changing after almost every battle, making it hard to ever form much of a strategy. Not to mention the ever-present spectre of ATB, where enemy moves just kinda... happen when they happen. These rough parts don't matter all too much though, when the game is near-trivially easy, even when playing on the harder difficulty. Most enemies would go down with a standard attack to build MP, then a defense-piercing blow to finish them off.
Once I reached the end of the game, there is a bit of a feeling of "oh that's it huh?" as you get backloaded with a lot of details on the main characters at once. It's also where I cleaned up unlocking the rest of the skill tree to reach the true ending, which oddly required reloading the game twice (the only way to respawn enemies as far as I know) since otherwise collecting every item and defeating every enemy got me bizarrely close to the total XP needed without actually reaching it. Still, going through the true ending itself was really sweet, just like the rest of the game! Yes, I do wish there was more meat here, but it's largely because the ideas and systems present feel far more well developed than warranted for a game of this scope.
It's kinda funny to come out of it with my main "complaint" being that the game feels too good for what it is, but I hope it just means the developer is using this to make a bigger experience in the future--and that could really be something special.
2011
As the RPG Maker horror game bug bites me again, it feels like I keep falling deeper and deeper into some rabbit hole not meant for humans. The steps taken to make this game boot up were bizarre in a way I've never experienced before. RPG Maker games all have a standardized Runtime Package used for the graphics included with the engine, and most games simply just include the RTP within their files. Yet, you can also just have it be downloaded on the computer and every game on that version of RPG Maker could theoretically just reference that one set of files. Paranormal Syndrome goes for it--and hey its file size is uh. Well. Not that much smaller than its contemporaries. Oh well! All I need to do is go deep into Windows settings to change my PC's locale to Japan, download the Japanese RPG Maker 2000 RTP (but NOT from the dead link the translator includes in the near-decade-old tumblr post of the game's translation), install it, download the game, and then it is playable! Cool! Now I just press F4 to make the game full screen and we are ready to pl- the game crashed.
With all this setup and having to play the game in a 480p window that doesn't even take up a fourth of my monitor's screen, was it all worth it??? Yeah I guess so. It's fine.
The enticement for me here was each chapter of the game being based off a different Japanese urban legend, being stuck in a location where a paranormal entity is trying to hunt you down. The game starts out very appropriately, with a cryptid vibe keeping up the tension while you're exploring each area and looking for a respite. In a way, all of the setup I had to undergo to play this and the small window added to the experience, almost like I was experiencing one of those creepypastas with a haunted videogame ooooo spooky.
Chapter 2 of the game is where the game plays into its strengths the best, where you're magically entrapped within a small village with a disappearing population. You find a man willing to help you get out, but then he peers far off into the distance and starts to go mad. When you peer out yourself, in the distance, upon a real life landscape photo, a white humanoid creature lurking: a youkai known as "kurokuro". It approaches you, chasing you down until you find a noise loud enough to make it dissolve, keeping you safe until your next encounter with it. Later in the chapter, after a phone call with your soon-to-be rescuers, you try to leave the house you're in when the tv with its power cut suddenly plays a rogue signal: a several minute long eulogy of all the townspeople disappeared that day by the youkai.
Those two events engrained themselves into my mind, showing the heights of what the game is capable of. I was genuinely creeped out by it! Unfortunately, its not able to keep this up for the rest of the experience, where it slowly gets too indulgent in its gameplay. It's all standard RPG Maker Horror Game Gameplay(TM), with exploration focused lock-and-key puzzles, and it largely gets the job done. The game LOVES it's chase sequences, surprising you with one as you walk into a room, playing almost comedically intense music as you scramble for an item to either hide or fend them off. Again, it gets the job done, but in the later chapters both of these elements of gameplay are inflated onto much larger, very same-y maps with entities that can require finding multiple objects in one chase sequence to fend them off. It's not actually that fun to be meticulously checking rooms when you suddenly are chased to the other side of the map and don't really remember the route to get back to the room you were checking. Combined with a general lack of guidance, I broke down a bit over halfway through the game and used a kinda shitty guide made by the game's translator--as far as I could tell the only one that exists--to get me through to the end.
Another thing, the game's writing has a fairly stilted feeling to it, loaded with stilted dialogue that was difficult to read at times. I'm not sure if this comes down to the initial writing, or an amateurish translator, but considering that the blog post the translator released implied they were in high school at the time... sounds like it was the later! It was never unreadably bad, and I'm not going to go off too hard on the work of a high schooler over a decade ago, but it did make me appreciate vgperson's translation work just a bit more!
Despite all these issues, I still come out of the game feeling more positive that not. What works in it works really well, and underlying all of it is a neat little story with a protagonist that undergoes an endearing sense of growth throughout. It's not anything exceptionally good, nothing anybody needs to go out of their way to experience, nor is it good enough for me to try out its two sequels. But ultimately, I'm glad to have given it a try! There's something profoundly special about pulling an incredibly obscure media out of the void, something nobody else has ever heard of, and finding something one person put a lot of heart into. A gift directly to me that I will be sure to cherish, warts and all.
With all this setup and having to play the game in a 480p window that doesn't even take up a fourth of my monitor's screen, was it all worth it??? Yeah I guess so. It's fine.
The enticement for me here was each chapter of the game being based off a different Japanese urban legend, being stuck in a location where a paranormal entity is trying to hunt you down. The game starts out very appropriately, with a cryptid vibe keeping up the tension while you're exploring each area and looking for a respite. In a way, all of the setup I had to undergo to play this and the small window added to the experience, almost like I was experiencing one of those creepypastas with a haunted videogame ooooo spooky.
Chapter 2 of the game is where the game plays into its strengths the best, where you're magically entrapped within a small village with a disappearing population. You find a man willing to help you get out, but then he peers far off into the distance and starts to go mad. When you peer out yourself, in the distance, upon a real life landscape photo, a white humanoid creature lurking: a youkai known as "kurokuro". It approaches you, chasing you down until you find a noise loud enough to make it dissolve, keeping you safe until your next encounter with it. Later in the chapter, after a phone call with your soon-to-be rescuers, you try to leave the house you're in when the tv with its power cut suddenly plays a rogue signal: a several minute long eulogy of all the townspeople disappeared that day by the youkai.
Those two events engrained themselves into my mind, showing the heights of what the game is capable of. I was genuinely creeped out by it! Unfortunately, its not able to keep this up for the rest of the experience, where it slowly gets too indulgent in its gameplay. It's all standard RPG Maker Horror Game Gameplay(TM), with exploration focused lock-and-key puzzles, and it largely gets the job done. The game LOVES it's chase sequences, surprising you with one as you walk into a room, playing almost comedically intense music as you scramble for an item to either hide or fend them off. Again, it gets the job done, but in the later chapters both of these elements of gameplay are inflated onto much larger, very same-y maps with entities that can require finding multiple objects in one chase sequence to fend them off. It's not actually that fun to be meticulously checking rooms when you suddenly are chased to the other side of the map and don't really remember the route to get back to the room you were checking. Combined with a general lack of guidance, I broke down a bit over halfway through the game and used a kinda shitty guide made by the game's translator--as far as I could tell the only one that exists--to get me through to the end.
Another thing, the game's writing has a fairly stilted feeling to it, loaded with stilted dialogue that was difficult to read at times. I'm not sure if this comes down to the initial writing, or an amateurish translator, but considering that the blog post the translator released implied they were in high school at the time... sounds like it was the later! It was never unreadably bad, and I'm not going to go off too hard on the work of a high schooler over a decade ago, but it did make me appreciate vgperson's translation work just a bit more!
Despite all these issues, I still come out of the game feeling more positive that not. What works in it works really well, and underlying all of it is a neat little story with a protagonist that undergoes an endearing sense of growth throughout. It's not anything exceptionally good, nothing anybody needs to go out of their way to experience, nor is it good enough for me to try out its two sequels. But ultimately, I'm glad to have given it a try! There's something profoundly special about pulling an incredibly obscure media out of the void, something nobody else has ever heard of, and finding something one person put a lot of heart into. A gift directly to me that I will be sure to cherish, warts and all.
2022
Getting into Splatoon 3 about a year after launch, I've heard much about the game's apparent mishandling. Starting the game up, the pure amount of stuff thrown at you from every angle is overwhelming in a way the first two games never were. A dizzyingly big hub, seasons and challenges and the catalogue, so many different little currencies, all the objects to collect and a locker that can clearly be customized to be bigger and colored but who knows how that's done. So much stuff to spend money on with the feeling of knowing how long it would take to even begin catching up... it's so much to take in and feels so tangentially plagued the same way more monetized GaaS games are, it puts me off from wanting to engage with the multiplayer systems entirely.
Luckily for me, I've never really been able to get super invested into Splatoon's multiplayer anyways. The base game campaign of 1 was the highlight of the entire experience, and 2's, while I understand the flack it gets for its general derivativity, was still a really solid time. And of course, Octo Expansion is one of the best single player campaigns Nintendo has ever made. I got 3 almost exclusively to try out the campaign (and have it for when Side Order releases) and--surprise, surprise--its another one of them!
The campaign builds off Octo Expansion akin to 2's campaign built off one, also in a way that feels a tinge derivative. Fortunately for the game though, there's a LOT worse things you could be derivative of than Octo Expansion. The bite sized level system is a joy, offering a ton of variety in its use of all the weapons the game has to offer. It's a refreshing treat to go into a level and the only thing on your squid is a sub weapon or a super, and you get to explore that item in novel ways you never would've been able to in a normal multiplayer battle. One of my favorite levels in the whole game gave you a single Curling Bomb in each section that you had to carefully aim to maneuver through enemy ink. The game never stops offering fun, new ideas to play with, even into the secret level after finishing the game, and I appreciate it a lot.
Keeping secrets out of levels was a boon to the pacing; it never was much fun scrounging every nook and cranny of the levels to find a Sunken Scroll. Scrounging every nook and cranny of the hub however... now that's a lot more enjoyable. Each one is laid out almost like a little puzzle box, slowly chipping away at obstructions by completing stages, finding little items dotted everywhere, trying to find the path to new areas in the hub. It's a fairly simple joy, but it led me to really appreciating the construction of each hub, especially towards the end of cleaning up, once I've cleared enough goop to be able to do the balloon challenge that laps around the area.
Despite all this, the strain of the series' relative inertness is becoming fairly apparent. This is the fourth Splatoon campaign and seeing the same core set of enemies with a new texture on them has gotten incredibly dull and knowing Side Order is going to be utilizing them essentially-unchanged for the fifth time is the only real knock against my anticipation for it. Even going into this game's finale gauntlet, it was just a bit frustrating realizing--oh, this is just a carbon copy of how Octo Expansion handled its finale. The entire game felt a bit of a retread of Octo Expansion, but just a notch lower (probably because the prior one was a dedicated campaign vs one made as more a tutorial for a general audience of the game). Again, Octo Expansion was incredible, so this isn't much of a knock against the game, I just hope Splatoon 4 offers something that feels truly new single-player wise. The series needs it.
Luckily for me, I've never really been able to get super invested into Splatoon's multiplayer anyways. The base game campaign of 1 was the highlight of the entire experience, and 2's, while I understand the flack it gets for its general derivativity, was still a really solid time. And of course, Octo Expansion is one of the best single player campaigns Nintendo has ever made. I got 3 almost exclusively to try out the campaign (and have it for when Side Order releases) and--surprise, surprise--its another one of them!
The campaign builds off Octo Expansion akin to 2's campaign built off one, also in a way that feels a tinge derivative. Fortunately for the game though, there's a LOT worse things you could be derivative of than Octo Expansion. The bite sized level system is a joy, offering a ton of variety in its use of all the weapons the game has to offer. It's a refreshing treat to go into a level and the only thing on your squid is a sub weapon or a super, and you get to explore that item in novel ways you never would've been able to in a normal multiplayer battle. One of my favorite levels in the whole game gave you a single Curling Bomb in each section that you had to carefully aim to maneuver through enemy ink. The game never stops offering fun, new ideas to play with, even into the secret level after finishing the game, and I appreciate it a lot.
Keeping secrets out of levels was a boon to the pacing; it never was much fun scrounging every nook and cranny of the levels to find a Sunken Scroll. Scrounging every nook and cranny of the hub however... now that's a lot more enjoyable. Each one is laid out almost like a little puzzle box, slowly chipping away at obstructions by completing stages, finding little items dotted everywhere, trying to find the path to new areas in the hub. It's a fairly simple joy, but it led me to really appreciating the construction of each hub, especially towards the end of cleaning up, once I've cleared enough goop to be able to do the balloon challenge that laps around the area.
Despite all this, the strain of the series' relative inertness is becoming fairly apparent. This is the fourth Splatoon campaign and seeing the same core set of enemies with a new texture on them has gotten incredibly dull and knowing Side Order is going to be utilizing them essentially-unchanged for the fifth time is the only real knock against my anticipation for it. Even going into this game's finale gauntlet, it was just a bit frustrating realizing--oh, this is just a carbon copy of how Octo Expansion handled its finale. The entire game felt a bit of a retread of Octo Expansion, but just a notch lower (probably because the prior one was a dedicated campaign vs one made as more a tutorial for a general audience of the game). Again, Octo Expansion was incredible, so this isn't much of a knock against the game, I just hope Splatoon 4 offers something that feels truly new single-player wise. The series needs it.
2024
Played the "prologue" demo of the game on a whim after a friend brought it up, just to try something a bit out of my usual wheelhouse. I don't have much experience with the roguelike deckbuilding (/dicebuilding?) genre outside of a couple hours in Slay the Spire, so my opinions are probably a bit undercooked. Still, I had a decent enough time with it, enough to make me return to it a day later to finish off what I presume is the final boss of the demo.
The game is surprisingly imposing up front, throwing you right into the first floor, with a little tutorial button in the corner. That part is presumably just the framing of the demo, but then you travel floor after floor, fighting enemy after enemy, seeing the same hallways with no real progression tracking. My first run through, after reaching 19 floors with no real variation and wiping out, I was left believing that this demo was just an infinite tower with little ulterior purpose to it. Turns out... the first boss was on the 20th floor. And then the second boss is on... the 25th floor??? Extremely baffling pacing there.
The moment-to-moment gameplay of positioning dice on a grid is fairly well thought out and the demo introduces a decent number of fun ways to play on the concept. Dice that remain on the board for multiple turns, enemies adding their own dice, dice that depower most tiles but strengthen a select one, enemies that are weakened if you cover a certain area of the board with die--there was a decent amount of variety at play! Still, the game starts out pretty slowly and once things pick up, feels like it can swing wildly between being overwhelming and almost impossible to lose.
There's a heavy incentive to prioritize setting up a consistent shield-building per turn, such that you always gain more shield then damage the enemies can do, then slowly pick them off from there. The demo never provides any sort of push back to this strategy, one that was fairly easy to build up in a run, and once that is done essentially every enemy could be defeated in a war of attrition. It's not inherently a bad thing, and I'm sure this will be handled better in the full game, but it ultimately made things fairly boring. Fast forward to the final boss and there was nothing he could tangibly do against me, but conversely it took soooooo long to whittle down his health, especially with his constant putting up of shields and healing. I was almost convinced I reached a point of deadlock where neither of us were able to defeat the other, but eventually I was able to take him down in a fairly unsatisfying conclusion.
Nothing is really offered aesthetically either. The art is cute enough, the music is functional, the world doesn't offer anything that caught my interest (though I presume-slash-hope this is, once again, just a demo thing). It was just a fine little experience with a lot of room to grow, and I hope it does grow into something a bit better in the final product! Will I buy and play it? Shrug, I'll probably end up forgetting about the game. BUT, if I don't, sure--I'd be willing to give it another chance.
The game is surprisingly imposing up front, throwing you right into the first floor, with a little tutorial button in the corner. That part is presumably just the framing of the demo, but then you travel floor after floor, fighting enemy after enemy, seeing the same hallways with no real progression tracking. My first run through, after reaching 19 floors with no real variation and wiping out, I was left believing that this demo was just an infinite tower with little ulterior purpose to it. Turns out... the first boss was on the 20th floor. And then the second boss is on... the 25th floor??? Extremely baffling pacing there.
The moment-to-moment gameplay of positioning dice on a grid is fairly well thought out and the demo introduces a decent number of fun ways to play on the concept. Dice that remain on the board for multiple turns, enemies adding their own dice, dice that depower most tiles but strengthen a select one, enemies that are weakened if you cover a certain area of the board with die--there was a decent amount of variety at play! Still, the game starts out pretty slowly and once things pick up, feels like it can swing wildly between being overwhelming and almost impossible to lose.
There's a heavy incentive to prioritize setting up a consistent shield-building per turn, such that you always gain more shield then damage the enemies can do, then slowly pick them off from there. The demo never provides any sort of push back to this strategy, one that was fairly easy to build up in a run, and once that is done essentially every enemy could be defeated in a war of attrition. It's not inherently a bad thing, and I'm sure this will be handled better in the full game, but it ultimately made things fairly boring. Fast forward to the final boss and there was nothing he could tangibly do against me, but conversely it took soooooo long to whittle down his health, especially with his constant putting up of shields and healing. I was almost convinced I reached a point of deadlock where neither of us were able to defeat the other, but eventually I was able to take him down in a fairly unsatisfying conclusion.
Nothing is really offered aesthetically either. The art is cute enough, the music is functional, the world doesn't offer anything that caught my interest (though I presume-slash-hope this is, once again, just a demo thing). It was just a fine little experience with a lot of room to grow, and I hope it does grow into something a bit better in the final product! Will I buy and play it? Shrug, I'll probably end up forgetting about the game. BUT, if I don't, sure--I'd be willing to give it another chance.
2015
the ron desantis of moon remix-likes