the video game equivalent of reaching into a bowl of candy and discovering it's a 50/50 mix of skittles and m&ms.

there's parts of this game i abhor, and there's parts of it that i love. i absolutely adore the drama, and there's definitely the patented Kojima Cool Factor dripping off venom snake's adventure. but also: quiet and paz did not deserve that. what the hell.

there's this nagging feeling through out that there's something more, and the status of mgsv has been debated for years. mystified, even. it feels like people have been chasing the idea of a complete mgsv since it dropped. despite being a technical marvel, it lacks in heart more often than not. maybe if the relationship between kojima and konami had been more amicable, this would have been a much different game. in the years following it's release, though, it's become abundantly clear that this is just how it is, and how it was always meant to be. the leaked scripts confirming that the game always just kind of looked like this rubs salt into the open wound.

it's not really bad. it's just lacking, and with this being the "end" of metal gear, it feels like mgs itself will always be lacking, now. it's okay, though, at least we got some sick memes out of it

outlast if it happened in chuck e cheese and was rushed out for the holiday season so parents would buy their tweens and early teens the new fnaf game at launch

hilariously glitch-drunk and determined to ruin it's own atmosphere, fnaf: security breach seems to be held together by hopes, dreams, and maybe a little bit of chewing gum as a back up. controls are too sensitive or too unresponsive. you can break the AI, or use it to break the game. security breach regularly interrupts itself, freezing cutscenes to deliver information in an obtrusive manner. it feels like watching someone argue with themselves, and thoroughly disrupts any attempt at atmosphere. i haven't touched a fnanf game in literal years, and seeing the animatronics move around and talk like people saps all the unease out of their presence. they are, more often than not, comical to witness. it's consistently bizarre, if nothing else.

the real kicker is that it's not scary, nor is it particularly clever. even if it had been complete upon release, every detail fine-tuned to perfection, it would have drifted somewhere toward mediocre at best. there is nothing about this that sticks out other than the fact it's a tried and true mess.

anyway, i laughed so hard when roxy cried about not being able to catch a 12 year old on foot that i slapped myself

replayed because rebirth made me question whether i actually would enjoy amnesia in this day and age. not only did i enjoy this, it made me remember being like, 15 and sleeping on the floor of the living room with all the lights i could find on, because i was too scared to sleep in my bedroom. lmao

the expected issues persist (gameplay and puzzles in particular can be frustrating or just plain boring) but the genuine terror i felt is still there. a remarkable feat for something so short-- this feels like what every steam horror game in early access with no hope is trying to be.

many years ago, every friday my family and i went to blockbuster. i was allowed to pick out one game. i spotted doa xtreme beach volleyball one night while perusing the shelves, and immediately looked away, as if anyone would care to notice little ol' me, at the tender age of ten, glancing at scantily clad video game women. for weeks straight when i wandered past the shelf this game was left on, i shyly kept my gaze trained to the gummy, navy carpeting. it ultimately took me months to work up the courage to grab it, and even MORE time to ask for it up front. for several weekends, i would put it back, too worried about what people would think.

turns out i'm bisexual. thanks, team ninja!

i feel like some of this content should have been in the 2.0 update to the base game as opposed to dlc only. the furniture store, for example, feels kind of egregious since people have been asking about a nook's cranny update or gracie's return since launch.

it's fun. a little over-priced, and slightly too long, but the charm is all there and i had a big, goofy smile on my face when i saw what they did for the credits. designing facilities in particular was very, very fun. i wish we could do that on our main island, but i get the limitations with that.

the aesthetic island tours would be lit beyond belief tho

i made a whole-hearted attempt to revisit this for halloween '21. my first pass of this game was noteworthy for how quickly my opinion of it dropped; i cannot say that a second play through changed that. if anything, it solidified what a disappointment i found amnesia: rebirth to be.

it's worth noting that, i think, the biggest problems with rebirth are it's genre (cosmic horror) and the lack of, to be frank, scares. i have some personal gripes with it, but at it's heart, rebirth is a true gothic horror story. there's only one monster that poses any kind of threat to you through out the game: the ghost of grief. it's a somber walk through tasi's memories, unraveling her trauma and loss. after a while, it felt exploitative at best. i get it, something very sad happened to her and salim. this, combined with how the game shows it's cards early and disappoints on delivering it's scares, served me a slice of frustration pie very quickly. there's a few segments that feel like the dark descent, but twice as many that feel like imitators released on steam for $1.99.

it's a polished game with a lot of love in it. i admit that much. i appreciate the bold choices in it, too. i think the setting was a lovely, unique place to take survival horror. the pregnancy related mechanic was an interesting way to update the sanity meter. i just don't think this had any business being a mainline amnesia title. i have to wonder how it would have looked as a standalone title, allowed to breathe in it's own space.

a huge part of my upbringing was yu-gi-oh!, and i think it left a bigger mark on me than other media i consumed as a child. i watched digimon, and i liked sailor moon, but i just cannot disentangle ygo from my childhood and even teenhood. as such, i have a fondness for the macabre (yugi was very obviously Goth Lite by his school's standards), and easy card games (since the anime made the rules of the actual game much easier to watch and digest in 22 minute episodes) . inscryption, as such, scratches an itch i didn't know i had: my favorite gameboy advance game was yu-gi-oh!: the eternal duelist soul, which i played and beat multiple times over several years until my advance suffered a horrible water related accident.

inscryption has a way with atmosphere that is no shock to anyone who played any of daniel mullins' games. pony island in particular made a splash in the horror indie scene, so you may know of him through that. mullins, for the uninitiated, has a sort of on-going universe his games take place in. they are thick with atmosphere and fourth wall breaking, often to the point that the game can continue beyond the game file itself. so, it wasn't any surprise to me when there was more beyond the surface of this one. pony island established the lore, and the hex introduced the ARG element into it, and inscryption takes it, and runs with it— for better or worse.

i think that the atmosphere being so thick and engaging, with a surprisingly interesting story, makes the initial coat of paint you're shown almost too good. i found myself missing it when the Reveal happened. for obvious reasons, there was a palpable sense of nostalgia turning in my gut when the shift happened, but it overstayed it's welcome. i think it could be cut down significantly, and not much would be lost— truth be told, i wish mullins' had done what he did with the hex. progressing the story in hex meant you had to actually close the game and engage with the ARG which would lead you to another way to progress in the .exe file. i think this game had the better set up for that.

that said, the ending was worth the time spent, and i really did enjoy myself with this one. there's a few hiccups, and it's not at all a surprise to say that this enjoyed a small blip on the streaming sites with it's first few hours. it was deserved, the card game is simple and fun, so it's easy for people to enjoy even when they don't like card games.

i can't give this full marks, but it's very enjoyable and i appreciate what mullins is trying with his work. it's good at what it does, introduces it's mechanics and gives you everything you need in order to progress quickly while never being too easy. i think it's more for people who don't play card games, truthfully: it's a horror game at it's heart, and i think it does the horror well enough. mullins obviously has a fondness for the genre and haunted software stories, which helps the game carry a lot of heart.

i like it :)