Okay so maybe we all got a little scared by what we had going on in Castlevania II, this is fair. That is an adventurous game, even a Simon’s Quest sicko like me will admit it’s not for everybody. It’s certainly not a bad idea to go back and iterate upon Castlevania 1, and that’s what this is, for the first time in the series: an iteration. I don’t think there’s really very much to actually say here.

The colors pop in wild and spectacular ways; it’s not at all uncommon to see reds and blues and greens and yellows and purples all coexisting on the screen, bright popping ones that feel like that should clash but really only add to the feverish sense of phantasmagoria that permeates this game. If Castlevania 1 is iconic by necessity and ingenuity, Dracula’s Curse feels iconic by statement, aesthetically maximalist in every way. Colors pop, enemy designs leak and groan and emote, the music is more tailor made to locations but when it rips it rips harder than anything in the series so far. This does feel like a culmination, and although this game was considered a sales disappointment that began the long death knell of Hitoshi Akamatsu’s career, there’s a palpable sense of excitement, of a team at the top of their game at the height of control over what their console could do.

While the many many levels and their branching paths and three main routes through the game are very cool and have a lot of good setpieces (in the famicom version at least, the American version sucks shit lol I will never play it ever again and happily never look back), the real stars of the show are the three new playable characters, a real bunch of fuckin freaks if I’ve ever met any. There’s Sypha the wickedly OP vampire killing church Sorceress who according to the ending scroll is in the midst of some sort of gender crisis and frankly I support you sister me too. There’s GRANT DA NASTY the biggest homie of all time who has fuckin sicko wall climbing abilities and animations along with a throwing dagger attack that makes him also absurdly useful (IF YOU PLAY THE FAMICOM VERSION WHERE HIS ATTACK WASN’T TAKEN AWAY FROM HIM FOR NO REASON HEY IDIOTS ENJOY THOSE TRUNCATED SALES IN AMERICA BECAUSE EVERYONE THINKS THE GAME IS TOO HARD), forgotten by history, turned into a Voldo in Castlevania Judgement, omitted from the cartoon based on this game, funniest name of all time, love this guy. The best one though is Alucard, you can’t dethrone him he’s such a fuckin doofus in this game, not yet a sexy Ayami Kojima painting, here he is a full on Hammer Horror ass Christopher Lee ass fake Dracula ass widow’s peak ass loser with awful attacks and a mostly useless power compared to his peers, mostly just kind of a bad version of stuff the other each do better, but he can do both at once. His ending is two bros dudes rocking on the corpse of his dad but he’s a little sad about it because you did kill his dad after all, he’s great. I love each and every one of them and most of all I love the very cute little handshake animation that plays when you accept them into your party.

Dracula’s Curse doesn’t do much that is genuinely fantastically new but it doesn’t really need to; what it offers instead is a hyper stylish, more polished, version of a game I already liked with more stages to choose from and the best Dracula sprite they’re probably ever going to have, calling it now (it’s his second phase where he is a clump of blood-vomiting heads that rot into dead skulls as you whittle his health down, sick as fuck bro). It’s a game that could be skating by on aesthetic charm, it has plenty, and maybe it's not as cohesive a package as either of its console predecessors, but it nails the fundamentals too and SOMETIMES that’s all I need y’know.

PREVIOUSLY: THE ADVENTURE

NEXT TIME: BELMONT'S REVENGE

I’ll say this for Simon’s dad, Christopher Belmont and our star in The Adventure: he has a significantly less fucked time of it than his dad had or especially his son will have. I’ve played a handful of castlevanias from across the series timeline and it’s kind of a general blindspot for me – I just don’t care to read about stuff I don’t care about, and for most of my life I didn’t care about Castlevania. I didn’t KNOW that this game EXISTED until like a month ago and I didn’t realize it was REVILED until like last week when I saw a friend comment on Detchibe’s review which as a contrarian-by-circumstance I’m very excited to finally read. Having played it now it seems absurd to me that this thing is sitting at a 1.6 average rating? Damn guys.

I think this is a pretty smart adaptation of Castlevania to the constraints of first year gameboy development. Sure you move slow as molasses but it’s only a little different from how every other castlevania moves, only a little bit more extreme, and your enemies certainly slow down to accommodate you. There aren’t any subweapons but the bad guys you fight don’t necessitate them, and if you keep your whip powered up you get a sick fireball attack that shoots from it. You lose this if you get hit even once, and that just goes back to the central focus of the game. The thing it asks of you, again and again, is to master its movement. Get good at jumping, especially, and I think it’s a fair ask. The game is tuned around your stripped back abilities, an adaptation rather than an attempt to condense the full NES experience to the Gameboy. If there’s one black mark here that I never quite acclimated to it’s that Christopher’s hitbox is enormous, a giant invisible rectangle that occupies a lot of negative space around especially his head and shoulders, and this fucked me up primarily when I was trying to duck under projectiles. As if in answer to this, though, the game’s candles drop a pretty generous number of healing items, something unique to this entry in the 8-bit life of the series so far.

There’s a variety to the game that surprised me, too. Level 2’s cave maze admittedly sucks lol but level 3 being a really evil take on the ever-present gear theme in this series to first create a ceiling of crushing spikes that can only be stopped if you destroy the pillar gear that is bringing it down on you in time, followed by a really challenging (but imo not unfair) vertical platforming section as the instakill spikes rise from the bottom of the screen to greet you. Level 4 is similar but with horizontal scrolling and more gothic set dressing and I WILL say that the enemy difficulty is a little wild here but just like every other Castlevania game you get infinite continues, so to some degree it is a nonissue I think. Bosses are a similarly mixed bag; 1 and 3 are standard gameboy type guys who just sort of run or fly at you and do their attack while 2 and Dracula have patterns and interesting gimmicks to them.

ALSO the music is STILL GOOD and this is the sickest Castlevania design so far, a bulbous mass of lumps and protrusions, very cool looking, even if you only see it in silhouette.

So I dunno man, is this the least of the three NES games plus this one? Absolutely, for sure, no question. But I find a lot to like in it. I think in it being the least it’s easy to throw the kid dracula out with the evil bathwater but to do so overlooks that this game did try to creatively tackle the problems inherent to making one of these games as they existed then on this system and I think that for the MOST part they pulled it off well if you’re willing to practice it some. I think Christopher did a great job, but considering he’s got a sequel in two years, he is about on par with his son as a vampire hunter, because presumably Dracula is going to also not be really dead for him. Who said these guys are the best vampire hunters? They’re two for two family members who can’t seal the deal.

PREVIOUSLY: SIMON'S QUEST

NEXT TIME: DRACULA'S CURSE

Perhaps it is appropriate that Simon’s Quest is a game that is eternally losing. As one of those sequels to a hugely popular, foundational NES game that against common wisdom broke out in an exciting new direction rather than building upon the strongly laid groundwork of its predecessor, it’s been arguably doomed from the start. While reception upon release was largely positive, it fit into the landscape of its day a lot better than it does a retrospective one, and when it became one of the earliest internet punching bags its fate was truly sealed. Even consdering the sort of mild critical evaluation these sorts of games tend to get today, Castlevania II’s seems more muted, probably due to its low excitement factor, low level of challenge but high level of Annoying Tedious Bullshit, and most infamously its pretty-bad-even-by-the-standards-of-the-time localization that makes an already-cryptic game that much more obtuse to muddle through. I thought this game was solid the first time I played it despite these things, but now that I’m replaying it in the context of its status as a sequel to Castlevania, I think those maligned elements are essential to the powerful ludic experience Simon’s Quest offers that’s by far the most potent of the NES trilogy.

Simon Belmont’s got a problem. In the wake of his duel with Dracula in Castlevania (the game, and also, I guess, the location) things should be good, but instead they seem fucked up! The country is still overrun with monsters who become even more aggressive at night, there are weird cultists everywhere, and Simon himself has been afflicted with some sort of Castlevania III Dracula’s Curse, which is slowly killing him! His, and Transylvania’s, only recourse is for Simon to gather the bits and bobs of Dracula’s corpse that remain - claimed by his followers - resummon the vampire, and settle this thing once and for all, again, in another duel, I guess. I am not super clear on why Dracula isn’t dead or why just killing him again will supposedly work out this time I guess Simon just kinda sucks at his job. He’s a vampire hunter not a demonic progenitor of all evil hunter!

Even accounting for like, Gameboy games and Arcade games and ports and shit, Simon’s Quest is the most different that one of these will be probably until Symphony of the night? It’s an open world structure, essentially, with complete freedom of movement in left or right directions from your starting town, gated only by your skill with your whip and your ability to traverse the environment, which expands with your arsenal of skills, magic, and equipment. There are RPG elements that dictate your health pool, hearts act as a currency and subweapons are permanent zelda-like equippables that you select from the pause menu rather than semi-random powerups. Infamously there is a day/night cycle, and night time is significantly more dangerous, doubling enemy power and closing off your access to everyone in all towns, which includes shops and the churches which are the only means of healing in the game. The goal is to discover and explore five haunted mansions, claiming a piece of Dracula at the end of each, gruesome shit like his rib bone or his eyeball, so that you can reenter Castlevania and fuck him up.

What makes Simon’s Quest feel special is the relentless tone the game strikes via all of its combined elements. There is so much less color to the world now than there was in Castlevania. That’s funny, isn’t it? You were fighting for humanity at the gates of hell itself in that game, and surrounded by lush color at all times. Bright oranges, deep greens and blues and reds. Even the stones underground stood strongly contrasted to their waterways, the prison tower vibrated with supernatural malice. In the hills of cursed Transylvania things are brown and gray and earthy but not in a life-supporting way. They are dull, they look faded. The most vibrant color you see in the game is the toxic purple of the corrupted, poisonous marshes that sometimes there is no choice but for Simon to trudge through, one more self-inflicted pain to suffer in his quest not to triumph but to find any ending at all. The ending drives home that Simon's quest is leading him to finality rather than victory and with that in mind every step of the game leads morosely to that thematic endpoint.

Because the land is not the only thing that is cursed – Simon himself suffers now, and the game works to make you feel it. The would-be triumphant hero is mistrusted and feared by the townspeople. Sometimes they lie to him outright and that’s occasionally true even in the original text. People tell him to leave town, he’s scaring people. The single person living alone in the dilapidated castle town outside the ruins of Castlevania beckons him to stay there forever. He is like her, and he belongs there. She can tell. YOU can tell. Despite the fact that his sprite is the same size and nearly the same shape as it was in the first game, Simon is significantly smaller on the screen. There’s no letterboxing anymore, no points or weapon indicators or lives displayed anywhere; the entire screen is dedicated to the world, and it swallows Simon. He is diminished.

There is not NO challenge to be had here but there is nothing resembling the kinds of screens one might find in Castlevanias 1 or 3. It begins to feel like work, like part of the malaise. There are only two bosses in the game prior to Dracula himself and you only HAVE to fight Camilla! You could just walk right by Death if you really felt like it, but he’s an easy kill considering he rewards the game’s best subweapon. Every mansion otherwise has a unique layout and occasionally a unique and usually frustrating (but sometimes cool, finding fake floors with your holy water is sick fuck you) mechanic to them but they are always long and anti-climactic. When you arrive at Castlevania itself for the final confrontation it’s not the game-long, opulent nightmare from Simon’s first visit. It’s a ruin. It’s a gray husk. You don’t climb the iconic towers to the throne room but descend, going a long, long way down the bones of the castle, meeting no resistance. As much as the Curse continues to ravage Transylvania, it is unchecked and unimpressive in the same way Simon is withering and in the same way that Dracula ultimately is, no more threatening than any other boss in the game. The final kicker is that even despite all of this, it is borderline impossible to get the one ending of three where Simon survives the curse. You can’t do it without finishing the game within seven in-game days, that’s like forty-five minutes, basically speedrun times. And so almost every playthrough of this game ends the way it’s supposed to end, the only way that really fits with the vision of the world that’s presented to you across the more realistic 3 to 5 hours you’re going to spend with it: Simon dead, succumbed to the curse even in victory, maybe remembered for his service to his countrymen, maybe not, ambiguously relieved of duty and ambiguously at rest.

Even if it’s not as much a rip-roaring good time in the arcade sense, Simon’s Quest obviously has the same amount of thought and care put into the things it chooses to emphasize as its predecessor does. It’s a more challenging game, not in difficulty but in engagement, asking for more patience and more active synthesis on the player’s part between elements of play and aesthetic and narrative and tone (something that gaming reviewers famously and formally refused to do until like 2012 MAYBE lol). Once I did meet it on that level I found an experience that was enormously rewarding. I already liked this game quite a bit but now it’s one of my very favorites of its era.

PREVIOUSLY: CASTLEVANIA

NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA THE ADVENTURE

I’d call myself the most casual of Pokémon fans; big into it as a kid who was the perfect age to get in on the ground floor of this Whole Thing, but after gen 3 and bar a brief but frenetic romhack phase in my late teens, I’ve settled into the kind of distantly pleasant relationship with the series where I pick up each new game and have a good time playing through to credits but then never touch or think about them again, and repeat every two years. I couldn’t tell you the names of most new guys, but I CAN see a picture of them and go damn, that’s a cute critter. Casual. So no one was more surprised than me when Pokémon Violet turned out to be not only my favorite Pokémon game easily and by far, but one of my favorite games this year?? I play a lot of games man, and mostly bangers too.

A big big part of this accomplishment is that Pokémon has finally cracked the code on writing, like really for real this time. I know Pokémon guys like to talk about gen V and I am even a gen Whatever Sun and Moon Were liker for the stuff those go for at the end but there is simply nothing as consistently and thoroughly well done in this series before now and certainly not on the scale we see here. Every single person pops with huge personality, and for the first time those personalities are supported by like, stories that while not REVOLUTIONARY are certainly a tier above the stock standard baby anime tropes we’ve seen in the past. Hearing that Team Star were like the what, third antagonist group in a row who were a spin on Misunderstood Waylaid Youths had me groaning at first but their stories and motivations land! There is nuance in the laying out of their situation, there is acknowledgment that institutions in power and authority, especially over children, can and do fail to care for them and also are able to accept responsibility. Arven is a great little guy, firmly in the “wanna stick him in a little glass bottle and shake it up” tier. A potent blend of condescending and pathetic with a genuinely deserved chip on his shoulder at the way his life has turned out. And I’ll acknowledge that it’s because I have a chronically (and someday probably sooner than later it will become terminally) ill cat who has been having a really bad month, but his scenes really hit for me and I extremely cried near the resolution of his story.

The idea that a Pokémon game can have that power over me is only possible because Game Freak’s writers have subtley but definitely expanded the scope of maturity in how they treat the world of Paldea compared to previous games. Arven’s story fundamentally cannot work without acknowledgment of violence, real violence outside of the context of Pokémon battles – of death and dying, active dying that is happening now and happening TO us rather than in abstract stories of ancient struggles. This sort of thing is evident everywhere you look in Paldea. The Pokémon League isn’t the centerpiece of your life or anyone else’s, even the people who work for it; and they DO work for it, in an employment capacity. But there’s a distinct feeling that it’s not in its heyday even if it’s still a Big Deal. Almost every single gym leader does this as more of a side gig than their whole thing, and sometimes they’re not around or there’s an implication that these events have to be scheduled around their availability to some degree. Gym tests are based on the local town culture more often that they are on hard battle prowess and those cultures are a much greater and more foregrounded part of the town identities. When you get to the Elite Four finally, the building has two rooms that you get to see, a sort of lobby foyer where you’re interviewed with a classic gray office carpet floor pattern that every American desk drone knows intimately, and the single battle arena that everyone shares. It’s a much more realistic take on the idea than everyone having a giant customized zone within a huge tower or something. Everyone stays to watch after you beat them. It’s more informal but it’s been formalized. Even though you can’t walk into everyone’s houses anymore Paldea feels so much more like a real place where people live than any other region.

In keeping with this new emphasis on storytelling both explicit and implicit, Violet rewards role playing. Sure, you’re a kid in a magical world on a fantasy school assignment with completely free reign to stop about the country at your leisure, but you’re allowed and encouraged to like, go to class also! And if you’re pacing them out you unlock a handful of classes as you hit major milestones in the game’s three concurrent storylines. These vary in usefulness and the degree of information you learn from them is extremely fucked up lmao, like this is the first time I can think of that Pokémon explicitly explains a LOT of the underlying mechanics that are going on beneath the simple surface of the menus but these explanations are meted out mostly in a math class that you won’t see all of for 80% of the game it’s very funny. I don’t know that these are for actually learning anything, they’re all flavor, and I think it was incredibly brave of Game Freak to ferret away like eight or nine completely fleshed out unique NPCs in the school, only two of whom you would ever even see after the tutorial if you weren’t coming back for all this completely optional shit. There’s even a social link system separate from the classroom stuff! The school nurse has a series of social link cutscenes and she doesn’t even TEACH a class! There’s your math teacher, right, and via some hints in dialogue and her character design you can figure out that she is a retired gym leader and she used rock type Pokémon and she is the sister of the current gym type leader before any of this is told to you and you can DO THIS because she has geometric shaped hair, geode-themed jewelry, her name scheme fits her sister’s, and in one of her classes she name drops specific moves in her examples. There is simply a degree of care here that may not be particularly DEEP but is deeply REWARDING to engage with, if you’re willing to engage with it.

I also find Violet to be a quite beautiful game, beyond the way it stylishly makes use of a lot of smart 2D assets and cleverly implemented recycled animations to paper over places where it’s clear development was rushed and there wasn’t time to finish or polish everything (the food eating cutscenes are charming and incredible I don’t make the rules!). If the Galar region felt a little generic in the styles of the environments, Paldea has it beat in two important ways: first by having a more creative set of locales to trudge through, including things like wildflower rich stream beds, misty lakes, spindly cliffs, and bamboo groves among others. These unique little treat areas do a lot to separate out the expected plains and deserts and snowy mountains and make things feel less monotonous. It’s always a treat to wander into somewhere pretty and special, and to see which Pokémon are thoughtfully placed to live in them. The second way Paldea marks itself as the better of Game Freaks 3D environment outings is that the terrain is just generally more varied. I was a little worried to hear about “entire game world wild area” because frankly the wild areas kind of sucked ass??? Like it was cool to run around and catch guys at will but I found the more authored routes in Sword and Shield ultimately more compelling even if I couldn’t just go catch a Flapple or whatever anytime. Here though, even when you are just running up the grassy plains there’s always a LOT going on in terms of mountains and trees and elevation – no two areas feel truly the same even when they’re the same biome. This makes the game world feel more like a place even as it cleverly routes the player roughly along only a few pathways to see most of the leveled content in a more or less proper order without compromising the ultimately nonlinear nature of the game.

I wanna give a special shoutout to Area Zero, the secret fucked up super big crater that occupies the center of the map and is where the last bit of story content in the game takes place after you’ve finished your initial three threads. It ties everything that’s cool about this game together really well. As you descend into this harsh and dangerous zone you may quickly realize that it’s the only place in the game where your minimap isn’t active and why would it be, Area Zero isn’t mapped. The music is sedate and uncanny, and when it breaks for battle it’s weird and anxious. The Pokémon here are weird ones, or rare ones, or fully evolved ones, or, at least on the very top levels, ones that can fly in and out of the crater’s rim. The Pokémon you find will become stranger the deeper you go. There’s an otherworldly shimmer in the air, and the twinkles mimic the ones that outside the crater indicate an item to pick up on the ground; here they trick and disorient you. It’s the only place in the game where your constant companion, the legendary on your box cover, won’t come out of their ball, which leaves you without a mount, so no bike, no jump, no glide, no easy way out of the crater. The distance feels huge when you have to hoof it. You bring the protagonists of each of the other three stories in the game with you on the trip and while it’s delightful to see them all interact with each other (it would have been TRAGIC for this to have not happened) it also reveals more about them even this late in the game; Nemona, my favorite character in the game for being a fucking freak ass weirdo who loves blood more than anything, in unimpeachably cheerful and energetic but when you see her out of her element in the Pokémon League circuit she’s revealed to have a hard time relating to other people outside of her one interest, and kind of generally rude and thoughtless with their feelings. Penny gets to show herself to be deeply empathetic towards and protective of others in a more proactive way than in her own story but she’s also harsh and quick to anger in doing so. Arven is the true protagonist of the game and its emotional burden rests with him, and his mask cracks the most. So ultimately you get a small sad story about the ways families can fail each other and these three awkward kids who bond through one pretty fuckin bad day and it’s like, y’know it’s good! There is a lot of cool stuff here.

Nobody is more surprised than me! Truly! I have always basically liked Pokémon but I’ve never been ENTHUSIASTIC. It’s just that this one did a lot of inacore stuff, gave me a bone with a lot of meat to chew on just to my tastes, and when you slap that on top of Pokémon's general play which is rock solid as ever, and what I feel is a real nailing down of the open world side of things this time? I dunno man, I think they really knocked this one out of the park.

THIS is MY SHIT man. Removing the competitive element of the Toree games and wading chin deep into the waters of Vibes Only, Siactro has really unlocked something within me here. Visually a direct homage to Rare's Nintendo 64 ouevre, Super Kiwi 64 puts you in the backpack of a cute little guy with a surprisingly robust set of verbs at their disposal.

You've got your sprint and your single jump only (!) along with a very empowering glide and a stabbing attack that ACTUALLY is mostly useful to lodge you into the wall and refresh your jump. With these abilities in concert (which the game elegantly and confidently leaves you to discover with no tutorials) you are essentially fully able to navigate all spaces at all times. Ostensibly you have a few units of health and I guess you COULD die but enemies and environmental hazards are SO unthreatening as to be so much more set dressing for the potent atmosphere on display.

The atmosphere is pitch perfect too; Siactro replicates a genuine facsimile of N64 textures and colors than anyone else I can think of here, from the deep greens and purples of the underground levels to the representation of the inexplicably omnipresent-in-the-era pirate level set, it's all pitch perfect and admirably un-fluffed up for modern tech. You get an infinite draw distance, sure, but I can't think of another game I've played this year that looks this blurry on my shitty tv on purpose!

Super Kiwi 64 is a relatively mild collectathon, with a small list of objectives to spawn your six gems in each of your eight levels (and two lil secret guys if ur paying attention wink wink), but the small levels that aim really just to evoke the Feeling of their influences rather than provide an homage to them coupled with the complete lack of challenge anywhere could be seen as a negative for others but it made a for a really meditative tone for my hour spent with this game before bed.

Honestly it was really nice! I would not trade this experience for one that was more traditionally gamey. I've been shifting this year towards valuing the movies I watch and games I play as overall aesthetic experiences, not even for the emotions they produce as much as the ambient feelings they put into the room, and Super Kiwi 64 is doing that before it's doing ANYTHING else. Another one knocked right the fuck outta the park from Marcus The Siactro Guy and his collaborators.

Alright I'm going to bed ya girl's tired as fuck good night everybody

idk what I would have thought I'd have wanted from a Toree sequel when the first game felt like a perfect get-in-and-get-out experience that put all its ideas on the table, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see that rather than try to further push out, Toree 2 really just tightens everything up. This is a streamlined experience that places more emphasis on the speedgame side of the original to its benefit, with a lot more moments of twitch motion and small routing decisions that can make or break your grade. Levels feel punchier and grading is accordingly stricter. It just works!

Throwback 3D Platformer That Sits In The Vague Nostalgia Memory Zone Between N64 and Dreamcast Presentation is a booming genre these last few years and i'm a 3D platformer sicko so i'm having a great time with all these games, but it's especially gratifying when one is just sick as hell? Just knocking it outta the fuckin park? Which is what Lunistice does.

A tight set of short levels, controls just loose enough to demand a little care in your movements but tight enough to never give trouble, gorgeous soft pallet visuals and great tunes that always enhance the tone, we're doing everything right on the surface level.

I think the actual level design is deceptively good, though. You get a lot of skip opportunities and even in my few hours futzing my way through a couple playthroughs it's easy to see where the speed tech will develop here. The gimmicks unique to each level set do a lot to characterize them and the diversity they offer makes them feel distinct more than visually; all my homies hate level 4 (complimentary), this is natural. My favorite detail though, is the enemy placement, which feels innocuous on a first playthrough but once you unlock a second character (after finishing the game once) who doesn't have a triple jump or an attack and who dies in one hit, suddenly the entire geometry of the game is radically transformed. Where before you almost always had a convenient breather between bits of levels, now almost all of those are populated by seeking enemies you can't do anything but run from, and previously simple gaps and platforms are now occupied by guys who exist only to make your margin for error tiny (and it's not like later levels are TERRIBLY generous; Lunistice offers a pleasantly ramping challenge).

I don't think the writing that's here does much for me, kind of a situation where what's here is pretty thin and there's not actually enough of it to evoke much to begin with, but if you engage with all of it you get the rough sketch of a story that does sort of inform what's going on, and I think more importantly is enriched itself by the game that props it up.

I've put a solid five hours into Lunistice so far, having maxed most of the content on one character, a fair bit for a second, and nothing for a third, so I think I could easily squeeze fifteen hours out of it overall. The spark to make my times better and top off my scores hasn't diminished with completion, which usually happens to me, and I think that's a sign of something that's really clicked with me.

I think what’s going on here is a lot of really fun and interesting ideas that play on the base concepts of Digimon Adventure and I do really for the most part quite like the story here and I really like the characters but I think this game is almost completely sabotaged by it mechanical structure that has you spend so much time in menus and really barebones fights that take a good 80% of the game to get fun, interesting, or most importantly, NOT SLOW.

I don’t have as much of a problem with having to talk to everybody every time anything happens as most other people seem to because I do like these characters a lot (shoutouts to Saki, shout-outs to Falcomon and Dracmon) but damn the amount of slow menuing you have to do constantly to make anything happen even outside of battle grinds everything down, especially when this game has such a hard time keeping it all going under the hood in a smooth/fast way.

This stuff isn’t a deal breaker and like I said I do think it’s worth it when I’m in the right mood but I haven’t felt compelled to finish any of the other three routes I didn’t initially see, even though it seems like there’s cool stuff in at least two of them!! The game has so much personality but I do think this is a thing where you wanna know what you’re getting into.

Incredible Little Guy stuff though, Digimon Survive extremely understands that the most important part of Digimon is having between three and nine little guys be cute and say funny things and there is a LOT of that so truly who can say whether it’s good or bad

I don't know if I can properly "review" this game because i've played it in several ten hour bursts every like six months for the last three and half years and that's a difficult way to get one's head around a long story's Whole Deal so I guess in a quick and scattershot way I'll say that while this is certainly the messiest and most overtly stupid installment of the first three games, it's also BY FAR my favorite. You can really feel the change in writers, and this is clearly the start of the Vibes Road the series is gonna continue down for better and worse. We're in full soap opera mode here and while I think that really muddles the potential this series had to homage the yakuza cinema it so often overtly loves and loves to pay respects to (steal from?), I don't think these games have ever worked particularly well as the awkward blend of first and second wave yakuza movies that they so clearly want to be so I can't say I miss it SO much.

The plot of this game is unfocused and often nonsensical but what this means is that it plays more like a collection of smaller stories that are actually often really good? The early drama with the Ryudo family in Naha, the mini-Tojo power struggle with those three really great asshole weasels in the midgame (sidenote it's very funny that every game sees the Tojo Clan's fortunes somehow fall lower and lower, some of the most perennial losers in all of gaming, truly cruel of Kiryu to take advantage of his relationship with Majima to handcuff him to that sinking ship lol) , spending a night showing Rikiya around town, and of course, two separate, very long stretches of nothing but Running Your Orphanage, being the best paternal figure Kiryu knows how to be, wearing a COMICALLY inappropriate Sonatine cosplay all the while.

The orphanage content is far and away the best stuff in the game, probably in the series up to this point. Where these games always portray Kiryu as a guy whose life in the yakuza has a lot to do with how closely he values really really old timey values that never really existed in real life but would make him a perfect fit for the chivalrous ninkyo eiga films of the 50s and 60s, Yakuza 3 I think tends to overplay his Essential Goodness and overstate how much his value system is worth materially. He is a borderline messianic figure, giving speeches about the literal powers of friendship, extolling virtues of forgiveness and belief in his fellow man no matter what even in moments where he believes he’s actively dying as a result of his own misplaced trust. Other adult characters revere him for this, almost everyone he knows has mythologized him beyond the level of his famous deeds in previous games. These games have been critical of Kiryu before, and having played 0 I know that this same writing team will someday get a lot of dramatic irony out of the fact that application of this exact ideology will completely destroy his life and kill everyone he loves more than once, but in this game particularly it’s played up ridiculously.

When he’s acting as the paternal figure for the orphanage is the only time we see a truly naturalistic side to our guy. He is still able to solve every problem, charm every person, and get it all done by the end of the day in time for a good family supper, but we often see Kiryu obviously out of his depth. He’s one of those adults who feels like he’s just always existed fully formed in his mid-40s and does not remember what it’s like to be a kid, and as much as his honesty and realness with them is a generally good thing, Kiryu is also brash and temperamental and prone to honest mistakes. He’s a good guy though, and because you have access to his internal monologue at all times you see a lot of his anxiety. Big picture stuff, like making sure the kids feel at home and like they are part of a real group in a society that places particularly high value on traditional family dynamics and where orphans face a really intense stigma, like making sure they can all afford to eat and to live on the land their building sits on. But small stuff too, like fretting over how harshly he chastises kids for small infractions sometimes or how stupid he sounds when he’s like “i’m gonna scold all nine of them for this thing” only to realize halfway through that three of them don’t really have anything to do with it. It’s also good to see the game formalize the parts of Kiryu that are warm and friendly and solve problems without his fists? That stuff is so often reserved for side content that putting it front and center for the first long chunk of the game and again towards the end is really refreshing.

The orphanage has wider thematic implications for the game too; a lot of stuff plays out there in miniature that the game will return to over and over again. One kid is bullied at school and also by one of the OTHER KIDS at the orphanage for his dark skin and this is treated like normal racism and addressed but it’s a specific racism that comes from Japan’s long imperial history in Okinawa (this kid specifically has mixed African heritage but his story echoes the racism present in other parts of this game and certainly in real life). This tension is represented in the main plot by the orphanage being threatened by a government land deal that wants to place EITHER a resort complex (the tourism industry destroying indigenous culture in the pacific islands damn such a familiar tune) OR a US-backed military defense complex (I feel this does not require elaboration lol). Okinawa’s culture being slowly erased from its own land is an omnipresent motif in the substories that take place in the game’s Naha map. Mainlander scammers selling cheap imported pork at premium prices with meaningless but exciting marketing gimmicks that undercut a longstanding local industry. When someone asks the owner of a long-closed local juice stand to make a cup of a famous drink for them, Kiryu is asked to retrieve the ingredients but the juice lady lists the names of the ingredients for him in Okinawa’s native language rather than Japanese, and the kid who wanted the drink, himself a native Okinawan but a very young one, has no idea what any of the words mean. It’s all creeping away but it’s not happening naturally, it’s happening by force. There’s not much anyone can do about it individually in real life but in Yakuza 3 Kiryu can certainly punch enough people that eventually that fucking resort won’t get built and displace all his neighbors and children.

There’s more right, there’s so much more – the way the ultimate villain’s story mirror’s Kiryu’s but also Haruka’s (who is becoming old enough that her Childish Wisdoms are giving way to adolescent naivete as she enters a world she cannot academically apply herself to beneath the notice of everyone else because she's being actively coerced into participating it as a teenager who is recognized as preyable by the systems that exploit vulernable people) and every other kid at Morning Glory’s. The dark echoes between Taichi’s asthma scare and the advice of “don’t do more than you can do now and burn out before you have a chance to do anything” and an adult character’s story being cut tragically short because they couldn’t overcome their impulsive need for yakuza justice. It’s incredible stuff all the way around, I would love to see these characters grow up alongside Haruka for the rest of the series but I assume they’ll be relegated to cameos at best; ideas this un-formulaic rarely stick and with what I must assume is a reduced presence for Kiryu in the coming multi-character entries I can’t imagine there’s a lot of room for them.

I think the villain is a much better anti-Kiryu than Goda from Yakuza 2, there’s a lot more to his character and being driven by specific ideology makes him much more effective as a moral and intellectual counterpoint to our guy. He’s cool and scary and he has one moment in particular that I think is absolutely incredible A+ shit (it’s when he says “you’re all his victims” and the stuff that comes after that it rules so hard.)

uhhhhh what else what else

oh yeah the combat right uh the blocking sucks and how unaggressive enemies are sucks but really if you take the time to unlock the moves on offer via side content you can get around that stuff pretty easily, I think this is, again, the best combat in the first 3 games. No Yakuza has much depth to the fighting but you get a ton of options and it starts to open up the versatility space in a way that will be elaborated upon significantly by 0’s time.

So I dunno clearly I ended up writing a lot actually but I don’t have a coherent point like I said I played this game weird but obviously it’s floating around a lot in my thoughts. I think there’s a lot on this game’s mind and maybe part of why I can’t come to a point here really is because I don’t think the game does either? It certainly ESPOUSES a point very clearly right at the end but that point is STUPID and NONSENSE and BARELY FOLLOWS the events of the game lol. That’s okay though. A thing doesn’t have to be clean to be good, and if nothing else I have a hard time imagining Yakuza is gonna be this INTERESTING for at least checks to see when Dead Souls came out one more game lol.

It’s interesting to find that as we enter a new, what I assume to be essentially final era for the Her Interactive Nancy Drew series, with the slight graphical refresh and completely overhauled UI that goes along with those shifts, Tomb of the Lost Queen spends a lot of time looking back instead of forward. It’s not weird for this series to look back, like, to the past (that’s kind of the whole thing we do around here) but it IS unusual for a game to be in such direct conversation with a previous entry in the series, Secret of the Scarlet Hand. Both games concern themselves with the museum industrial complex, and both games feature Nancy clumsily and indefensibly insulting brown people whose cultures she’s actively participating in the looting of while acting incredibly skeptical of their entirely, factually correct grievances with her organization of the week. Where Scarlet Hand was a stateside story about the inner workings of the museum system, however, Tomb of the Lost Queen centers directly on the archaeological process at a fictional dig site in Egypt (although in an echo of Treasure in the Royal Tower, this fictional tomb contains a very real and famous historical figure in it lol, but they don’t make up a revisionist backstory for her this time so it’s a lot less weird).

And “Nancy is in Egypt at a dig site” is kind of all you get going into it, which is a jarring change of pace after twenty-five entries of booting the game up to a cute little intro or case file to set up the proceedings. Instead there’s an ominous introductory monologue from Nancy about the last crew who came to check out this tomb decades ago all died mysteriously, and then a cutscene of a sandstorm ravaging the dig site and injuring the lead of the American team there. Only it turns out that Jon wasn’t just fucked up by the storm, he was ATTACKED in the commotion of the storm. So most of the crew is gone, leaving only the uptight and secretive American PhD student Lilly, famous and abrasive Egyptologist Abdullah, who is himself Egyptian and in fact the government liaison to this largely American team, and Nancy herself. Now Nancy is left to at first just do some work without getting in trouble with either of these strong personalities before the dig inevitably gets shut down because of the serious injury sustained there, as everyone has a feeling this tomb is the true resting place of Famously Missing Real Life Egyptian Queen Nefertari.

The thing is, none of this is really told to you? You kind of have to just go by the context of the dialogue, get all this information out of these guys as you go, because without the usual framing device and with the story starting in media res, you’re really thrown into a scenario that is not particularly urgent for what feels like not a lot of reason. What we have then is one of the more freeform Nancy Drews in structure, similar to (but imo much more successful than) Curse of Blackmoor Manor, where you have essentially all of the tomb that you’ve opened available to you at all times along with usually more than one ongoing puzzle or series of puzzles that you can kind of work through at your leisure with some degree of nonlinear progression. There are still key moments that flag big status quo changes, but there is certainly less overt direction on what to do next and little urgency to Nancy’s travails. This is because the threat is more subtle than usual. The acts of villainy in this game that are physically violent are all attributed to a supposed Mummy’s Curse, and no one is making explicit threats, but this is a rare Nancy Drew game where the answer to “whodunnit” ends up being a combination of basically everybody? To greater and lesser degrees. There is one ultimate culprit who goes to jail at the end, but for the most part this is a game about building suspense and suspicion, and I think it might be the single most successful Nancy Drew game in that regard.

Around a third of the way through the game, once you’ve hit the first big event flag, the cast is completed when two new people just kind of suspiciously Show Up at the dig site, Ancient Aliens Fanatic Jamil and Suave Tour Guide Dylan, both of whose stories are immediately, obviously suspicious. Dylan is fine, okay, he’s a charming enough red herring character who is taken out of the action first in the game to make the Supposed Curse seem more dangerous.

Jamila is where I start to sweat a little bit. The ancient aliens stuff is not as bad as it could be, I think, because while the game doesn’t grapple even slightly with that fact that every single one of those conspiracies is rooted in intentionally manufactured racist lines of thought predicated on the idea that nonwhite people and for some reason only nonwhite people could not possibly have made big architectural or technological strides without outside intervention, I didn’t really expect it to? That’s pretty explicitly political stuff to get into for these games, and they do not usually think that hard or do a lot of research when they’re trend chasing, which I assume was happening here. They also specify that their stupid made up alien conspiracy (peddled by Until Now Joke Easter Egg Character Sunny Joon whose increasing prominence worries me as someone who finds his bits painfully unfunny) does not involve aliens literally building the pyramids, only uplifting humanity and inspiring them to do it? Which I don’t really think is much better honestly.

The clincher for Jamila though is her true motive for being at the dig site: she is a member of a cult of Egyptian women that has existed for thousands and thousands of years, passed from mother to daughter, who are sworn to the service of Ramses II and whose mission is to find and protect Nefertari’s mummy. Despite thinking this group she’s in is stupid she is willing to both die and kill for it – there is a light implication that if she tries to cut and run she will be killed by her sworn sisters. I just don’t understand what we’re really going for here beyond adding some vague mysticism to the proceedings? It’s goofy, it’s outlandish. She already hates Abdullah, she already has proof that he’s been planting artifacts he already owned in his dig sites to make his career more prestigious and exciting, and her ending has her happily working with Jon, the same man she would ostensibly have also tried to murder had he been present for the events of the game. It’s all just a little much, for me.

Abdullah is his own can of worms. As the resident Guy From The Country We’re In Who Is Rightfully Mad About What America Is Doing Here he is obviously treated like a crazy person by Nancy, and his portrayal as a blustering, buffoonish guy doesn’t help the dignity of his arguments. But his perhaps overacted dialogue prompts are the only place in the game where you’re offered the perspective that not only are the governments of the countries that fund these digs often doing so with irreputable motives, but that the tourism industry that has sprang up around them has also done irreparable harm to Egypt’s cultural legacy by actively, physically destroying it with their millions and millions of feet and breaths inside fragile ancient tombs and eagerness to steal small souvenirs, again by what adds up to the millions. Looting by degrees.

All of this is equivocated though, in the game’s eyes, because Abdullah is in fact Our Guy, he’s playing on fears of the curse to freak people out, he attacked Jon, he has faked a lot of his career successes, at the end of the game he tries to kill Nancy and Lilly (who is also an attempted murderer by the end of this game but who suffers zero consequences for that hmm weird). He’s a criminal! He’s gotta go to jail! Bye! This is not new right, this happens all the time in these games. It’s not reasonable either to expect Nancy Drew, Collegiate Detective to be able to address structural problems like this. It is interesting, though, how often those problems seem to be understood by the developers of the game and even presented within the game – often by people who turn out to be, within the game’s moral purview, Bad. And if that is what we’re bent on doing than these things should at least be motivators, they should be the thing that the game is ultimately About, they should be at the center of it. Instead Abdullah just wants to be more famous than he is; he’s the most successful guy in his field, everyone says so, but he wants to be a CELEBRITY archaeologist, and I guess he just wants full credit for this discovery? It’s kind of unclear, I never got a moment where he actually explained himself. It’s messy.

The actual good reasons he might have wanted to get rid of the Americans, even if he ultimately profited as well, or was otherwise morally compromised (Dylan, for example, is working for some black market people to scope out the tomb before he’s taken out of the game, but is ultimately portrayed as a sympathetic guy). The best Nancy Drew games understand this or even stumble into strong thematic cores by accident. But Tomb of the Lost Queen, like many other lesser entries in this series, is left with something much worse at its center:

Nothing at all.

PREVIOUSLY: ALIBI IN ASHES
NEXT TIME: THE DEADLY DEVICE

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

Hello! If you follow me here you may know that like lots of people I've made a project of cataloguing all of these games, and that they were my first exposure to Nancy Drew. I didn't realize I was going to do this when I started in mid-2021, and I erroneously logged my experience in the entry for this game's 2010 remake, Secrets Can Kill Remastered, which is by all accounts actually a substantially different experience that I will properly play someday. I've been cleaning up my Nancy Drew list and I thought it was time to finally put this bad boy under the game where it belongs. So, below, although I'm sure I would do it very differently today, I've pasted my original review of this game unedited.

Additionally, all of my Nancy Drew pieces will now link to my piece on the next one and the one that came before it, along with the hub list that has every review in release order, at the bottom of the page. This is mostly a clerical thing for my own peace of mind. Thanks!

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the closest i’ve come to engaging with Nancy Drew in any form before now was when a piece of ND memorabilia became key to solving a mystery in the second season of the CW’s Riverdale, but i’ve always loved the cozy mystery genre that seems like it must at least partially have its roots with Nancy, and I’ve always longed to correct my unfamiliarity with the point n click genre, so these seemed like a great place to start and oh boy, this game was not made for me!!

which was not to say that it wasn’t a good time! it’s only to say that Secrets Can Kill CLEARLY expects you to know who Nancy Drew is and what she’s about AND be down for 90s adventure game realities (although thankfully it never leans into the terrible design difficulties that made the genre’s most famous 90s franchises infamous).

Nancy is either 19 or 40 (VA makes it very hard to tell) and has been enlisted by her aunt to go undercover at a high school to investigate the murder of a local shithead. The need for a cover story is funny because she literally solves the case in two hours but don’t worry about it.

At any time you can call any of a cadre of Nancy’s friends/boyfriend, all of whom are so unhelpful it’s actually funny, but also none of them are characterized in any way so if George or Ned, who I assume are major players in the wider world of Nancy Drew, actually have personalities, this game offers piss poor fanservice for them even if in doing so they end up making a pretty good joke out of the extremely abrupt way they hang up on you after telling you like i dunno you’re in a school go to the library bitch???

and she’ll need to go to the library because this is a bizarro high school where everyone is posting rumors and clues about the recent murder and all associated parties in rhyming acrostic code, like everyone at school is a tricksy little devil and not uh, stealing steroids from the local pharmacy or blackmailing the exchange student who’s afraid of being deported if he can’t get a scholarship next year. It’s this weird mix of whimsical puzzles and like, extreme video game simulacra. the football player guy gives you some exposition and then tells you “okay now get lost I gotta go to practice” but he'll never move, he'll just continue to stand there in a corner tossing his football hand to hand like a jackass forever. Despite dialog constantly alluding to all the cops crawling around the school the halls are EERILY empty.

this strange mix of very grounded high school dramatics with very funny video game artificiality all adds up to something that isn’t particularly substantial but is very fun and a great foundation for one of video gaming’s unsung franchises.

NEXT TIME: STAY TUNED FOR DANGER

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

At the end of my review for the first Faith I said that I was worried that the sequels would lean further into the issues I took with the combat in that game, which seemed like the most obvious way one might “go bigger” in a more expansive sequel to a surprise indie hit. Chapter II does, in fact, have way more fights and they are, in fact almost all terrible. It also has a lot more screens, multiple locations, scripted events, much more text, and, most tantalizingly, significantly more of that sweet sweet rotoscoped animation that everybody loved so much.

I don’t think that these things automatically disqualify this game from being a good time. I try to meet games where they’re at rather than where I wish they were and Faith: Chapter 2 is certainly striking a different tone than its predecessor. It’s not just that there’s more stuff crammed into the framework of the previous game, there’s an expansion of scope in the story and with it comes a shift in the overall tone. Although we’re still in hardline horror territory, and the player character is still haunted by what he perceives to be his past mistakes which are used to attack him spiritually and mentally to a more extreme degree than before, your role has shifted. Rather than pursuing one exorcism and finding yourself prey to greater forces, ones that are essentially unstoppable, you are the hunter now.

You go to the church, the cemetery, you fight those terrible battles against the demonic bosses that haunt it, you’re pursuing the end to a looming apocalypse coming from a cult that is retroactively responsible for the events of the first game too (something that was once cheekily implied by one of the many endings in chapter one, now made the explicit crux of the plot). The uptick in schlock and violence and narrative stake making lends the whole thing a vibe more akin to low budget ACTION horror movies where guys blast vampires and zombies and demons with shotguns and shit than straight up catholic themed giallo or something but it works, I think!

It is just a shame that it’s all attached to some truly dire fights. The initial batch is maybe on par with the fight from the end of the first game, but the final boss in this game is beyond the pale, absolutely torching the substantial good will that the final sequence had otherwise built up for me with its oblique puzzles, slower atmosphere, and multiple genuinely inventive monster designs (ones that were never dependent on the DIRE combat mechanics, always other unique ones instead), things that had been lacking to this point. To squander that by asking me and my also one-hit-and-he’s-dead AI companion to survive a multi-phase, multi-enemy fight with all the same problems with perfect response times and necessary but randomized pattern memorization sucks ass man, it took me I’m not kidding, must have been thirty tries.

AND YET these games have hooked me enough to play the third one still, I’m all in, I really liked the monster that kills you if you move and it has a scary tentacle face.

I played this game, or a version of it, way back when it first came out in like 2017, and remembered liking it quite a bit, and didn’t really think about it again until just last week when I saw some friends on here playing Faith THREE. So I have some revisiting to do and I was quite excited to do it because I do recall this game making a pretty big splash in its original release.

If video games are a medium overly concerned with the frantic, masturbatory exercise of pastiche writ large, Faith is a game whose pastiche is focused and intentional. A schlocky story evoking aesthetics of the real fearmongering of the American satanic panic in the early 80s and 90s, its small bits of explicit text evoke not books like Michelle Remembers or McMartin documents, but the industry of exploitation media that sprang up underfoot of the media blitz surrounding this stuff.

Faith’s visual style homages the systems of the day and in mimicking Atari 2600-era graphics, developer Airdorf gets away with two really cool things: first he absolutely shows off his talent as a sprite artist, able to stake out this incredible sense of atmosphere MOSTLY through visuals that push how evocative you can be with the most minimalist sprites possible to represent at turns complex and esoteric shit. The second cool thing is the one this game is famous for and that’s the way it punctuates the big moments with these shotgun blasts of beautiful, intense, frightening, explicit fully animated rotoscoped cutaway shots, breaking the established graphical style to REALLY sell those ah fuck oh jesus oh piss moments. It works! It’s fucking sick bro!

It’s not just the graphics either, music sets a good tone but Airdorf is wise with when to cut it out entirely in the second phase of the game, or when you’re coming up on an important moment in selecting one of your five endings (all of which are some shade of funny or clever, and which immediately reload you to the decision point again, painlessly encouraging a full sweep of the game’s content). Sound effects are sparse but explosive, an unearthly hum reverberates through the most haunted moments, and all of the speech, be it human or uhhh less so, comes from the iconic SAM voice synthesizer so that when you blast a demon in the face with a prayer to buy yourself one more panicked screen of respite and he screeches “I GO UNWILLINGLY” in a computerized howl it is as unnerving as it is often unintelligible.

If there’s one complaint I have with the game, and it really is just one complaint, it’s that it has like, a Boss Fight at the end of it lol. Well actually it has two boss fights if you pay enough attention to ferret out a secret one towards the end but they are both pretty awful, and in a game where you always die in one hit no matter what I think it’s a really enormous mistake to suddenly incorporate a long, long fight that relies heavily on learned patterns and twitch reflexes. The really excellent and scary animation that plays before it repeats every time you have to start over, so not only does the tension completely go out of the actual game but those fantastic explosions of climactic terror that those animations represent are also cheapened when I had to sit through one of them like ten times.

That one moment isn’t great but it is ultimately one moment that took up maybe ten minutes of the hour or so it took to get through this bad boy? So certainly not a deal breaker on the experience. Given how much of a specific skill set goes into these it’s no wonder it took so long for sequels to come out, and given the nature of the indie space it’s no wonder they slipped right by me, but I’m glad I’ve found them again. I can only hope that the next two follow the better instincts of a game that is ultimately pretty restrained for the space it’s playing at. I think there are versions of this that open themselves more fully to schlock and bombast but if that comes along with more TERRIBLE FIGHTS, well, lol I’ll find out won’t I.

Content warning for non-explicit discussion of real life death, expulsion of bodily waste and fluids, pregnancy, childbirth, needle use in a medical context

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I am a woman. My experience as a woman is one of the less common ones, statistically, because I didn’t have it in me to assert that I was one until a good quarter century after most women are informed that this is what they are. That there are rules to this, and ways to perform womanhood, and perhaps most importantly for a lot of people, certain baseline genetic requirements that separate women from non-women. That last part is the sticky one for me, and because of this there are a lot of people out in the world who hate me, who want me to simply not be. Many of these people are powerful and they make decisions every day about my privilege to exist, but many many more of them are regular people out in the world. Sometimes it’s easy to tell who they are by the looks they give, the things they say; sometimes it’s not so immediately obvious. It is stressful to go outside, often, and occasionally it is outright difficult. Nevertheless, I am a woman.

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Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French writer who has been prolific in many fields over her six decades of writing, but I often find myself thinking of her most famous work, one of her earliest publications - 1980’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, because it is the only thing by her that I’ve read. It’s a 200-ish page book that builds heavily on old Freudian theory to, among other things, consider the ways people use powerfully negative experiences to define and value the self.

Kristeva defines abjection like this: “The human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.” Abjection, in a way, forces us to choose our identity; we define ourselves via rejection, by how we think of ourselves in opposition to things that disgust or harm us. It preys upon this idea of selfhood, of the boundaries we construct and maintain to create identity. It preys upon the divisions we create when we erect these boundaries. One example of this that Kristeva uses is things we naturally expel from our bodies, stuff like blood from a wound, teeth that fall out, semen, piss, shit, vomit. One second these things are subject – they’re part of you – and the next they’re object – separate from you entirely. This may not seem like much but this intrinsic mental separation from what was a part of you as soon as it leaves your body highlights how fragile these boundaries actually are.

I am, because I am not.

Kristeva thinks it’s a thin line.

She most often frames abjection in terms of violence, revulsion, disgust, and trauma. And it’s true that we tend to use the word “abject” as a maximalist adjective to highlight negative things. Abject terror. Abject misery. Abject poverty. But for Kristeva it’s not actually a bad thing in the grand view; on the contrary it’s an essential part of making us who we are as a collective and as individuals. She talks a lot about childbirth as the first moment of abjection. Birth being as much a kid fighting to live, to create a self, a sense of being, even as they tear away from the safety of their mother’s womb. It’s an inherently violent act and it’s the only way to become. It’s an ongoing process throughout life; kids have values imposed on them - language, culture, law - all things contrary to totally natural impulses but also things that most of us agree are necessary for them to grow into society as we know it. This is a process that repeats constantly throughout life to varying degrees. It can be painful, horrible, and disgusting, but it’s necessary. These experiences sharpen our sense of who we are, in our sense of opposition to the things that cause us pain, horror, and disgust.

I am not, so I am.

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Silent Hill 4: The Room has, if I’m remembering all My Gaming from last year correctly, the largest cast of characters of any Team Silent game, but it is almost entirely concerned with the thematic opposition of its player character, Henry Townshend, and its central figure and villain, Walter Sullivan. Henry is cursed, you see, trapped inside of his apartment by supernatural forces, unable to be seen or heard by anyone on the outside even as he becomes increasingly aware of a deadly, ghostly threat haunting the complex and its inhabitants. Walter uh, IS that threat, the ghost of a serial killer returned partially from the grave to finish his cruel sacrament with the six-ish murders he had to leave off in life (all according to his grand plan, of course). His ultimate goal, it’s eventually revealed, is to get permanent access to Henry’s apartment, which he sees as the vessel for his own mother, whose spirit he believes will awaken when he completes his twenty-one ritual murders.

Walter has a tragic past, raised within an evil cult, abused constantly by his caretakers, turned out onto uncaring streets with only his brainwashing and occult dogma to motivate him to go on. He’s a man who experiences moments of abjection and rejects them, becoming singularly focused on rescinding his identity. He is in constant pursuit of a mother he doesn’t remember, his mission to return permanently to the safety of her womb, where he can exist eternally, unburdened and unfettered by both his trauma and his self.

In all of the early Silent Hill games, aspects of the world take on attributes specific to the psyches of particular characters central to the story, and in The Room that person is Walter himself, whose fears and hates dictate the worlds that Henry and his neighbors are dragged into throughout the game. Walter’s fears are decidedly more mundane than previous Silent Hill fear generators, with environments like normal forests and subway stations, urban blocks and apartment complexes. Walter is afraid of, generally speaking, the Out There. He wants to retreat. Enemies are other people. They squish, they slurp, they burp grotesquely (bodily expulsion is a hallmark of abject experience, remember). Ghosts pursue you doggedly, without pause, and the worst thing they can do is just be present, their very auras radiating sinister energy that hurts Henry without action.

Henry himself is a mirror to Walter, trapped seemingly eternally in the thematic womb, his only escape the long long tunnel that forms in his bathroom wall, one that spawns him into these frightening outside worlds, often in the fetal position (I know writers who use subtlety and they’re all cowards, etc). While he does face trauma in these worlds and after every moment of abjection retreats back to his apartment for nourishment and healing, Henry does, ultimately, want to get the fuck outta there bro. He’s desperate for human connection too (and connection beyond murder – his moments of abjection always come via Walter doing something fucked up to one of his neighbors), desperate enough to peep on his direct next door neighbor Eileen through a hole that a previous tenant left in their shared wall. Tellingly, Henry can’t even begin to have a real connection to Eileen, or anyone, until he symbolically begins to separate himself from the room; once they meet for real and succeed in evading Walter’s attacks for the first time, the room stops healing Henry, and becomes open to hauntings that actively harm him.

The titular room is Henry’s place of refuge and comfort, at first, but it’s also his ultimate enemy. This is true the entire game, not just after Walter’s influence begins to infect the space. He’ll die if he stays here. He has precious little food, and during gameplay he gives away his last bottle of chocolate milk (milk being one of Kristeva’s confessed personal objects of great disgust, in a moment of fun serendipity). He has no one to interact with, and even though it’s stated in game that he was not a social guy before he was cursed, once you’re down to zero everything seems like a lifeline. Eventually, of course, he’ll be literally killed by the curses that infect the room. He can’t stay. He needs to be born, and he knows it. It’s a false security, and it intrinsically can’t last.

Walter and Henry aren’t the only figures central to the game, though. There is, of course, a third pillar here: you. Er, me. Y’know, The Player. There is essentially nothing to Henry – this is part of why he exists primarily as a thematic contrast to Walter, and part of why it’s hard to ascribe much character to his actions. You’re Henry in large part. When he’s in the apartment you even control him in first person. You are the ultimate voyeur, in the same way that Henry is to Eileen and Walter is to Henry. And this is part of why Walter’s worlds and the creatures that populate them are on the surface so much more generic than the places and monsters of past games: applicability.

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I have this uncle who died in his apartment. I didn’t know him, really. From stuff I’ve been told he wasn’t a good guy. I was a kid, and we lived states away. I only met him a handful of times at big family parties. The only reason I ever think about him at all probably is because he died in his apartment, and even then I’ve only started thinking about him so much recently, in the last couple of years, because we’ve all been spending a lot more time in our apartments. It’s covid, bay bee. The reason I think about him so much is because when he died in his apartment, nobody knew. Nobody cared to check in. They only found him, weeks later, because his landlord went into his place because they had assumed he had run out on it because he hadn’t paid rent or responded to any communication, for weeks, because he was dead.

So I think about that a lot the last couple years.

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I mentioned that Walter’s hellscapes are mundane places and his monsters are other people and I do think this is a reflection of where the developers thought maybe a lot of their presumed audience was at when Silent Hill 4 came out. Which is pretty funny. But it’s real, too, for me. There’s not a lot that’s scarier for me as a trans person than An Only Vaguely Familiar Public Place With An Off Vibe. That’s alarm bell central. It’s hard out there, man. Rarely do I feel outright unsafe but often do I feel eyes. It’s difficult to tell a lot of the time if the eyes are real or if I’m inventing them, and that doubt can make it even harder to feel confident in my place in perfectly normal spaces. Just yesterday I was actively frightened waiting in line for the bathroom in an inexplicably crowded gas station in the middle of nowhere in Iowa. You just never know when it’s going to be a problem. I was never the most confident person, but this low level thrum of unease colors every moment of public life. In talking about abjection in an academic sense and especially when talking about fiction it’s easy to forget that part of it is that it is upsetting by nature. But in life it sharpens me. I know who I am.

It’s a harsh dichotomy – every day I am more visibly transgender in more irreversible physical ways. Every day I become more obviously Neither Male Nor Female and while I love this about myself and I am truly happy with these changes they are the same changes that make me less safe and more vulnerable in ways that become harder and harder to cover up with clothes and masks. It would be easy to retreat to my womb, metaphorically. I want to, sometimes. I work remotely on a permanent basis. I live literally across the street from the grocery store. My girlfriend is here, my cats are here, my friends are online.

But I am transforming. Every week I stab myself with a needle. I force through this needle the fluid that makes my body into what I want it to be. A violent transmogrification. I feel the most beautiful in these moments. They are moments of clarity, of self expression, of definition by rejection. I am not a man. I am a woman. This needle in my leg is my signature. Living in fear of living in fear can’t be the way.

I am not who I was. I oppose that. I am becoming. Every week I am new. I need to tear away.

I want to be born.