before i write on anything else, i want to give a round of applause to hitman: blood money's save system, that which may be the finest the stealth genre has seen and deserves to be seen again. depending on the chosen difficulty, hitman offers you a number of saves; normal is 7, hard is 3, and there's none at all waiting for you on professional. the magic of these saves is they absolutely can be used anywhere you like, just as you may with a quick save, but, because of their nature as an expendable commodity, you can't really... well, savescum. hitman takes the strength and safety of a save system that relies on player input but without cheesing the experience of allowing you to quick save after every small increment of progress (and i am completely guilty of this in other games). the player is thus encouraged to try various different angles to see what decision or string of decisions best deserve being executed and saved, and which ones are best... not. am i making sense? it just feels super impactful every time i specifically save because there's always something BIG i accomplished, and i take some comfort in pulling off all the right moves that mentally let me save and advance (unless i accidentally hit 'restart' and then lost my saves, lol. lol. lol).

anyway, yes, it is a stealth game, and it is completely unlike any other stealth series. there are those like thief and dishonored where sticking to the shadows is your best offense, deus ex and prey where revealing yourself to those perceived friendly is a deliberate choice, and alpha protocol or metal gear where the stealth sucks and i assume you're not playing for that. but anyway, it's hitman that handwaves all that and, instead, invites you to walk among others--to be IN sight and to BE seen--to blend in like a backstage chameleon. it's a system that does require discretion--cornering those you've decided to kill and ensuring their passing is seen by none but your own bald faced stare. and it frankly never gets old.

perhaps the worst thing about blood money is how disgustingly clunky it feels when first playing (and first returning for another replay). everything feels so goddamn stiff and sticky and the controls feel like your keyboard's turned into a chinese fingertrap. you think it'll get better after the tutorial, but it sucks even harder for the followup mission because your options feel real limited. but a light switch is pulled with the following missions, everything coming together harmoniously, and suddenly you're effortlessly navigating complex buildings stabbing and choking and piano wiring every sorry son of a bitch who foolishly came into work well dressed. seriously, i've gone through this whole thing three times and this same experience always happens, and i think it'll happen to you, too.

i'm still gushing, sorry. whenever you successfully finish a mission, you're presented with... a newspaper, acting as your stats screen. how you executed the victim to how many rounds you fired to what witnesses saw what and how close of a profile they can draft of you--all this information and more gets covered in a cute, typed up report surely striking fear into whoever still reads newspapers. it's ridiculously immersive, and it even ends up influencing my decision to replay a level over and over with different play styles just to see what they'll write. now, you do end up wishing the range of what's covered could be even wider and have more fluff text associated with it (and maybe less ridiculous lines like "police found bullet casings belonging to Customized Hitman Classic Silverballer That He Painted White"), but it's still pretty cool. and it's moreso just unfortunate the concept wasn't expanded on in the tm trilogy.

what else... you remember how i mentioned that hitman's a game that turns away from other stealth games to do its own thing? well, you totally can do that, but you can also play things out like garret or jc denton (except with a lot more coin throwing), or you can try going full psychopath no russian (and the newspapers will certainly note it). you can execute targets in a number of ways, and it never has to be part of a path intended by the devs, either. sometimes you really do just stuff a mine inside a briefcase suspiciously placed just enough for a guard to grab it and bring it back to the station where you've conveniently lured the target to right on time to hit the detonation and make it look as if you weren't involved at all.

music by jesper kyd's an amazing touch, too. it's all these sorts of themes bordering on tension, suspension, danger... from the npcs' point of view. for you, these suites are your theme songs, and they fit the job perfectly as you meticulously garrote one target after another with your clown suited hands. visuals are honestly pretty cool: there's a range of environments that 47 visits necessitating a lot of new and unique textures/models, and that comes with a distinct feeling in each new mission. my favorites ended up being a drug rehabilitation center nestled up on a foggy hill and a fancy ferry navigating the mississippi, and it's both just because... i dunno. those are just really cool environments for a video game.

the clunkiness i mentioned that happens in the beginning of the game isn't quite limited to that part, though. there's other weird, stupid things that can occur during gameplay, like whether or not you'll actually pull of a successful fiber wire because you'll feel like you really should've but it didn't happen. sometimes guards really, really let you get away with some shit but other times they'll be completely on you with little warning. i don't want to make it seem like this is always the case, and you do generally have a good feeling of whether you're blending in or not, but weird things can happen.

the upgrade system kind of sucks, too. general weapon variety is already a bit samey--i ended up just exclusively using the silverballer and w4000 sniper this run because i wasn't looking to get into big fights and that made the rest useless. the upgrades are basically a two way straight where you're either making your weapons super effective silently or super effective loud and disastrous, so it could've been nice to have a bit more flavor and variety there. you also are able to earn the real good stuff... real early. and it doesn't feel like you really worked up to them yet. also there's a hideout/gunrange and i'm not really sure why anyone would go to it

but there's a reason why i keep coming back to hitman blood money, and small clunkiness nor boring upgrades is going to stop me from revisiting the same locales and targets with different ideas and approaches every time. also, the reason i really come back is the killer ending, which, despite closing off kind of a dry story, ends up being crazy satisfying somehow. you'll just have to play it to understand how that's possible.

ohhhhhh i get it now. "git gud" means grind souls for leveling or just stop fighting a boss and do something else so you can come back a few hours later and mindlessly wallop it without competition. story telling is nice and, bonus, thematically on point with the gameplay considering they're both as obtuse as possibly allowed. art direction's nice, especially when i have to turn off every light in the house just to see where i'm going in certain areas since miyazaki and co. believe eye strain to be a worthy opponent for gamers everywhere. music's gre--actually, is there music in this game? i wouldn't know considering my seven hours were spent in near silence and i'm pretty sure i didn't accidentally mute the thing. anyway, i'm sure dark souls, like many open world rpgs, is just amazing if you literally have no other funnel for your time and you get a huge kick out of replaying entire drawn out sections repeatedly just for the chance, the mere opportunity, to maybe get a hit in on whatever boss you're totally not killing in the next two hours. it's kind of like "getting good" at an instrument or program but the only thing you have to show for it is steam play time and std signs beginners will ensnare themselves on that you laid in the beginning area.

asshurt aside, i am genuinely glad a game like this has resonated with so many people but it's absolutely never going to resonate with me. a stupid cooperative system, tedious death design, and a massive japanese hard-on for trial and error smothers the fun i initially had and renders this game less an interesting rpg and more a higher budget I Wanna Be The Guy.

bethesda is a lucky, lucky, lucky games company. like, insanely lucky, and i'm not even discussing the legal wins they've bagged against mohjang, human head, interplay, id--no, i mean they're lucky in that, twenty years ago, they developed a really impressive open world rpg engine. that was morrowind, and morrowind allowed for all sorts of unbelievably cool, innovative ways to maneuver its wide world: every building could be entered, every npc could be killed, every item could be picked up, and everyone could be talked to. not only that, but objects in the world had consistency--you could drop your armor right where you stood in the middle of balmora, leave for many moons, and come back to find it still very much there... exactly as you left it. and many of those npcs wouldn't ever respawn should you kill them--your actions had consequences. and all of this... absolutely all, was contained in a massive world that allowed you to walk from one end to the other without stopping.

and this is why the bethesda of today is lucky. see, on top of all those features morrowind bolstered was an excellent story with excellent, captivating, un-tolkein-like lore. but with every subsequent open world release came the same sort of open world mechanics birthed here with a regression of that writing, and a regression of the whole "rpg" aspect entirely. oblivion was embarrassing, lore wise--you could tell the devs saw lord of the rings in theaters together on a company wide trip, shit their pants, and thought "oh fuck yeah, let's just do that." and credit, many of oblivion's side quests and character writing is actually phenomenal... at the cost of its bland, grinded down lore. fallout 3 and skyrim follow, and they're written as intelligently as a cliff racer--they fly with style and take no more than one hit to fell. but all of this doesn't REALLY matter--i mean, it does if you appreciate good dialogue and engaging storytelling, but the majority of bethesda's players just want to goof off in a consistent open world, and THAT'S why this company's lucky. they can get away with it. they can write honest to god slop and as long as it feels good to yell at a dragon or lop off a raider's head, they'll keep going.

bethesda is insanely lucky.

anyway, that's why fallout 4 is so playable--it's easily the best feeling combat they've ever sharpened. calling on the talents of former destiny devs, bethesda put together guns that feel varied and unique from one another, that feel damned good to shoot and damned good to connect. the basic gameplay loop of wandering around the wasteland killing all sorts of whatever, looting the surroundings, and moving on... is fun. it is, or else i wouldn't have put as many hours into this as i did. that fun does come with the fattest asterisks you can imagine, however: the experience needs mods. not "improves" with mods, no--NEEDS.

~~

you have a game where enemies are almost always these ridiculous sponge tanks that absorb all your .308 rounds despite ostensibly defenseless--half these enemies don't wear proper helmets, and it feels stupid. this isn't a human enemy example, but soon after starting the game (with a mod that thankfully skips the default intro), i wandered over to a mirelurk assaulted town called salem. now, killing these things was somehow near impossible no matter what i did, but there was a sidequest there that involved starting up some stray turrets around the city, and i figured i'd knock it out. so, there i am bobbing and weaving through these infinite health lobsters to get all the sentries online, and.... nothing. they do near nothing. you know why? because, in the infinite wisdom of bethesda's developers, all of the turrets are placed high up, aiming down. why is this a problem? well, have you SEEN a mirelurk? let me refresh your memory: they wear giant fucking crab shells on their back, shielding them from damage. so, the turrets did nothing despite waiting around, trying to lead them in front of gunfire, etc, and i eventually get bored and just snuck off to tell the quest giver the job's done. i trek over, walk in--loading screen--and then every single goddamn mirelurk spawns in there. i did eventually wear them down after a reload and what felt like an hour, and--look, i get it. the game has tough creatures that, realistically, you're meant to come back and fight later, and that's fine, but following the mirelurks was a scuffle with some atom worshippers who wore rags around their head and ate ammunition like it was nothing. you can guess what they did to me. you can also guess why i then installed a mod that rebalances weapons.

and a mod to allow npcs to die, because there are dozens that can't. and a mod to increase the weight limit, because you are incentivized to pick up all sorts of bullshit necessitating trips to home base. and a mod to turn off enemy respawns considering any cleared out dungeon would be repopulated with the same threats just after three days. and a mod to remove harvey from the entire workshop and settlement elements of the game--surprising how less annoying it is to just clear out a camp and press a on the workshop. and that mod i mentioned that skips intro this game leads with and just lets you start with whatever ROLE you want? well i got that one, too, considering this game series used to be ROLE PLAYING. and on that note, there's one more mod i installed: it silences your sociopathic, unrelatable, insane protagonist.

he's bad. i haven't played as female either back in 2015 or now, six years later, but i have to imagine she's just as. the male is voiced by a snot nosed marvel movie zinger slinging psychopath, and this shows up in his very basic self narration, when you select a basic object, when you talk to basically anyone. his tone makes the player seem like he isn't processing anything happening like a real human being--all disjointed and awkward, and his sarcastic quips ripped straight from suicide squad scripts land real weird when you just spent the last twenty minutes banging physics based pots and pans against dead npcs to see if their heads would pop off. the generally agreed on problem is that the protagonist's voice has to fit all sorts of varied player personalities whether they be good samiratans or xbox players, and it ends up fitting neither and none. what's even more mindblowing is how dramatically improved fallout 4's immersion is when you gag yourself from any further one liners. you actually feel like it's you playing, almost. it still hurts to read what the player dialogue actually says and realize you're only ever getting three options that all mean the same thing.

also, this is just completely unrelated to that point, but i want to focus on this last gameplay element before i dive completely back into the writing: fallout 4 has some weird bugs and design decisions, doesn't it? have you ever gotten trapped trying to cook something or repair items? has your pip boy button ever just straight up been disabled? what's with npcs trying to ride elevators and then suddenly shooting up and falling from the sky like god almost let 'em into heaven but decided against it? back in fallout 3, clicking on a terminal just brings up the terminal prompt, but in fallout 4, clicking a terminal means your character performs this awkward intepretative dance as they draw up close to it, and the amount of time this takes seriously varies. i've sat there for a full minute watching my character dance around props and hazards, tin cans foiling my efforts to read the screen, and then watching myself die because an enemy just walked in in the middle of it and opened fire. there's also this door thing where npcs will enter a building ahead of you and, i don't know, hold the doorknob shut or something? seriously, you'll stand there like a dumbass for twenty seconds looking away from and back to the door until it finally highlights back to green. bizarre, but the very worst, most baffling, evil design decision i cannot understand is the fading out of black that follows loading in. like, i have died just quickloading because the time it took to completely fade in was the time it took for a raider to pincushion me. so, what this means is you have to just hit tab as soon as possible to pull up your pipboy until you can actually see the damn game.

okay, ooooone more point before we full on dive into the writing. let's talk graphics and aesthetics. because honestly... fallout 4 is a gorgeous looking game, i'm serious. the full range of an actual color palette paired with a brilliant dynamic lighting system both result in an aesthetic miles ahead of that ugly yellow, green mess that fallout 3 was. hell, i think there's a line some brotherhood member offers poking fun at that, something about how "you should see how the capital wasteland looks". and you should see it and compare, because they've come a long way: the commonwealth bolsters weather patterns filled with intrigue whether it be foggy, orange hued mornings or radiation storms, and when things clear up and the sun can poke out, god if the game isn't standing tall, hands on hips, going "goddamn would you look at my lighting engine". you ever seen people posting webms of f.e.a.r. to show off its lighting? fallout 4 does it too and with a grander scope--the fucking sun. it doesn't always work perfect downtown, but it's still pretty damn dope. now i'm gushing on these graphical points because, with a game doing so much wrong, you may as well praise what's done right. its these textures and carefully colored, carefully rendered environments that really sell the post apocalypse. if it had just happened recently--not two hundred years later.

yeah. back to talking about writing. worldbuilding, specifically, because the world fallout 4 takes place in does not make any sense at all and falls apart under any sort of scrutiny. and this? this is scrutiny. the game has received tons of criticism hammering in this point, but the reason poor worldbuilding strikes so many players wrong is because it ruins the believeability of anywhere you're exploring. you feel baffled entering a human settlement and there's just skeletons everywhere that scavengers seem to just step over like calcium decoration, among all the tin cans and trash as well. in certain untouched locations, this makes sense, while in others, it feels stupid. one infamous example of lore fuckery (in which pete hines made a tweet essentially saying "i don't give a shit and neither do my writers"), there's a pre-war vault full of drugs that emerged only after the apocalypse. dumb, but i'm here to describe that circumstances are even dumber than that. see, this vault is full of gunners, right? they've taken over the vault defenses and set up their own sentries and terminals, so they clearly have been here for awhile, okay? now, what's baffling is that, much of the vault is somehow still untouched, even with gunners themselves actually walking among the corpses and trash. and those very corpses all have drugs in their hands and scattered among them. and you're telling me there's not been a single gunner sweep to collect up all those jets and psychos and other valuables? are they under order to leave things exactly how they are? not likely since nearly every gunner i kill seems to have a drug on them. i get this comes across as nitpicking, but the fact that looking at this scenario with, again, any sort of scrutiny makes the entire dungeon fall apart in believability, kind of makes the whole dungeon exploring aspect suck. like, why even bother trying to piece together the story of what happened when bethesda's writers couldn't even be bothered. so, you just mindlessly clear out the vault of gunners, take your loot, and go.

there's more little things that bother me because they're baffling with no explanation, like how i found a farm of two children with a raider camp no more than twenty steps away. if there was a note there that said "i'm actually a good raider and keeping tabs on these poor kids while i sleep in the rain", i missed it. there's a house near vault 111 where a conspiracy nut locked himself away before the bombs dropped. what's in his vault? a fucking copy of the wasteland survival guide, something the fallout 3 player helped make. there's nuka cola machines all over filled with untouched sodas, every cash register seems to be full of both prewar money and bottlecaps, which is... strange, and unexplained. and vault 81 is accessed by making its owners a deal to give them three fusion cores. oh, you don't actually have to prove you have them or discretely dump em in a dropbox, no they just open right up. hey, don't question these things, just mindlessly clear out enemies, take your loot, and go.

but broadstrokes worldbuilding here, what makes the experience of traversing the wasteland most hollow and theme-park feeling is the actual placement of enemies. let me explain: take a look at fallout new vegas' map, and see how the different factions occupy spaces. you have ncr camps on a logical 'front', with caeser on the other side. for the role of raiders, you have a jail of escaped convicts contained to a circular area originating from their prison. for another role, you have 'fiends' who occupy a large strip of vegas ruins in the west originating from a vault they consider home base. even further west, you've got khans who occupy a very defendable canyon, and ghouls are always in areas that reasonably would be untouched or affected directly by the in-game conflict. what i'm trying to get at is that the enemies you fight, and where you fight them, always make sense. there are good explanations for why you're fighting what you're fighting where you're fighting them, and it makes the world feel... real. now let's look at fallout 4's map: enemy placements are shotgunned against map markers with zero cohesion. bethesda designs the dungeon placements first, and then goes "okay uhh how about raiders here and supermutants here and uhh maybe supermutants here too but uhhh maybe ghouls yeah let's do ghouls here and okay this looks like a good gunner place". it feels asinine, and you wonder how any of these fragmented groups are even able to survive, defend, connect with each other. there's this whole eastern part of the map that's mostly wildlands where you're likely to encounter deathclaws and yau gaoi. cool, and then like, in the middle of it is a raider camp. what the fuck? who are you even raiding, you're the only humans out there! no, what enemies occupy what camps is NOT decided by any sort of logical reasoning and instead, just "we don't want the player to kill raiders in one camp and then encounter more raiders in the next, so we chose the easiest solution" amusement park. this is why people describe these bethesda rpgs as amusement parks. but hey, don't question this, just mindlessly clear out enemies, take your loot, and go.

i keep saying that, and it's because that's the impression i got back in 2015 playing through the assortment of side quests fallout 4 offers with all of them feeling like "go here, shoot, leave" with fat-free window dressing because the substance is never there. this playthrough? i haven't even being doing any, i just go around mindlessly killing and looting like they want me to. hey though, i actually shacked up with a companion i "rescued" from an underground arena--could we have had an interesting sidequest where the player participates in that arena, perhaps forced to, or maybe one where the player searches out new talent to compete for them--no that'd be too interesting. anyway, her character is hilarious, like i can't imagine what whoever wrote her was thinking. she's this scottish tough girl who audibly adores that you don't boss her around (even though, yes i do, i make her open every door and walk infront of gunfire), and she eventually reveals her tragic backstory: for almost eighteen long years, her parents merely tolerated her existence until shipping the poor scot out into slavery on her 18th birthday (for probably, like, 40 caps). eventually, she makes it out and back to her parents' old home, and she kills them both. but the look in their eyes when she pulls the trigger... she feels guilt, and that's why she drinks, that's why she's game to slaughter diamond city villagers alongside me. harrowing. anyway, funniest thing about that story is that the parents waited eighteen years to ship off an extra mouth to feed and protect they ostensibly didn't care for, um... but whatever. this sort of character writing is what all of fallout 4's characters are like. no real depth, no actual thought, just funny wacky marvel personalities with fanfiction.net backstories.

just. nothing makes sense in this game, and bethesda clearly doesn't want you to think too hard about it, right? except, they do. no, they have to, have you seen the absurd amount of notes and terminals and audio diary logs the commonwealth is filled with? bethesda tries, and the best they can do is a skeleton next to a computer with three diary entries. diary one says "i'm so glad i'm not a skeleton", diary two says "uooohhh... i can feel myself becoming a skeleton", and diary three says "i am a skeleton now." bethesda tries, and the best they can do is a ghoul family who dearly miss their two hundred year old child you find no more than 40 feet away from their fucking house. they try. bethesda tries. pete hines doesn't get to hide behind "oooh not interested debating a world with talking mutants" because bethesda tried to flesh out that world of talking mutants--they just did a shitty job. and this'll be the most pretentious thing i say all review, but the reason they did a shitty job is because no one in that writing department has the right influences, and they all look up to the wrong people. you can tell they don't like fallout new vegas and they weren't inspired by fallout new vegas because they make no attempt to break down what made the writing and world of that game work, and i know this because, when bethesda was making fallout 3, they made no attempt to do that with the first two fallouts either.

i could go on, and on, and on but there's little point in hammering in the same points repeatedly as i basically say the same thing over and over again: the writing, worldbuilding, lore, and set design in this game is complete, incompetent ass. this doesn't hold fallout 4 back from being fun, or even good, or really good with the right fat asterisk mods. but it's half baked, it's unfulfilled potential. it could be SO much better. and there's absolutely no pressure at bethesda to address that... because they're lucky. they can write the most embarrassing slop of the entire games industry, and it won't matter, because in 2002 they built a fun open world rpg engine, and they're going to squeeze every last drop out of it--forever.

mark my words. without knowing even a single thing about starfield, two things are certain: it'll probably be fun, and it won't make any sense at all. that's a bethesda open world sized promise.

welcome, agent. you are america's most clandestine weapon, a secret kept even from the president because obama can't know all the crazy earth shattering work you're doing like bugging terrorist organizations or punching brown people. your mission is simple: shoot off a bunch of marvel movie one liners and spend hours crawling around in the same middle eastern environments every crouch high wall shooter was just obsessed with at the time. what, you thought a game about being a secret agent would be all tuxedos and dangling from the ceiling? well, if it is, none of that certainly happens in the game's first four hours (and believe me, there's a lot more sand world to go on my end). don't fret, though, because you want that james bond smooth talking, yeah? well there's definitely conversations--you get vague dialogue options set on a quick timer that make people like or dislike you based on your schizoid responses (if you play anything like me). you should have a good grasp of this by the way because you sit through, like, a twenty minute long lecture given by your boss who's concerned you haven't yet been briefed on what "talking" is.

well okay, so it's the desert. but is it fun to play? well, if you play stealth you get to face a threat that back and forth wavers between intellectually disabled and eagle eye replacement surgery, and any time you die (or get caught and don't want to spoil the ghost run), you have to load an arbitrary checkpoint (which happens before new dialogue, so you'll hear it every. single. time). and you'll get caught for an amazing amount of reasons--you'll use the cover system to hide behind a wall only for the wall to not actually fully shield you so you get spotted away. you'll walk on sand outside and a bad guy on the other side of an iron door will panic that the base is under attack. and sometimes the game will just decide they get to spawn in full alert, those bird eyes scanning right through walls with infrared.

well, what if you just roll with getting caught? yeah, ethan hunt's definitely killed a few, so you can too. and i say go for it and time how long before you realize you're just now playing a straightforward third person military shooter, 100% completely unchallenging. and let's run back to stealth for the topic of unchallenging because, again, that ai is just insanely stupid most of the time when they're not on alert. this is no doubt an accommodation for the game using a checkpoint system, given that really REALLY tough stealth would just be a nightmare with that. but this is a horrible trade off, what the hell? why not the opposite--smart ai and a manual save system? not like we don't have games like deus ex or thief out a decade earlier helping lay that sort of framework.

i like that the game's an rpg and has different areas to allot skill points and upgrade, even though most of the upgrades feel really, really useless to a morally acting agent. i like that the game has conversations, even though the commitment to having conversations realistically flow comes at the cost of saying really stupid, shitty things you never would've intended had you known what you're psycho of a character was actually going to say. i like... two of the hacking minigames, i guess. lockpicking one is total ass, but the other two are alright. i know--i'm scraping the bottom here trying to find anything positive to say, because it's clear that there are some interesting aspects to the game otherwise i wouldn't have bothered playing past the agonizingly boring first twenty minutes, but here we are.

if there is a better game hidden further in, i am very sorry they don't lead with it, and i am very sorry they hedge their bets on another fucking afghan sand-em-up aesthetic. apparently this game isn't even offered for sale on steam anymore, and you know what? consider sega doing you a favor.

the 'abandoned' status isn't quite accurate--i'm pretty sure i did absolutely everything possible in this hollow retreading of hoenn years ago when i was a child and, indeed, had it set to 'mastered' but i give up on this recent replay. pokemon diamond (and pearl, assumedly) is honest to god one of the most boring rpgs i've played. worse, i remember feeling this way as a kid after following the hypetrain for months on months before release, stalking serebii for scraps of information and discussing the impending release with my online friends at the time, only to end up with a game that felt like one i had already played before: pokemon ruby.

i mean, is it doing much else? it's got snow. that's about it. night time. uhh. a physical special split. the little things are indeed little because, overall, it is a mess of uninteresting environments pitting you against trainers with one type of mon and bad guys that use creatures from the same pool of, like, five. and you know what? i probably shouldn't replay pokemon ruby because i bet it's just like that, too. but then, it was novel, and i bet for people who play diamond first, it's novel here, too.

i don't know, these fucking games don't do much. you catch pokemon, you fight everyone you see, your creatures become too strong and unstoppable until the very end when suddenly the elite four is about twenty flights above you. and i just do not have the patience to grind my way through it. maybe if the writing was interesting or funny or curious or anything other than--i get it. this is designed to be a child's literal first jrpg. pokemon ruby was literally my first jrpg. but god is it bland. god, and isn't the dialga reveal bland, too. now that's one thing pokemon ruby performed better, i'd say.

music's good. pixel art as far as pokemon is concerned: very good! pixel art as far as tile sets are concerned: very bland! and samey, and whatever else. i don't know, i felt exhausted playing this and that goes double for writing.

you've turned to page 56 in our lovely gamedev cookbook--wanting to create a smash indie hit yourself? not to worry, i have you covered. first, you'll want some hyper friendly, super inoffensive art. really smooth those edges. "wait, i want a dark twist to it!" of course you do, because your indie darling isn't taking off without one. now what you're gonna do is contrast the inoffensiveness with, i don't know, edgy scribblings found on an eighth grade desk or somewhere in the 2008 archives of deviantart? obviously we can't have anything ACTUALLY visually disturbing or raw, because then you're going down the hylics path, and noooo one cares about hylics. no, it needs to be scary in the same way a hatsune miku vocaloid music video about a "serious" subject is scary--draw a circle a bunch over itself until it's got a tone of lines and looks super disoriented. creepy, right? yeah just do that for everything.

well, that's pretty much it! with the cutesy sparkle artstyle contrasting just the right tint of edge to unnerve slendermen veterans, you just need some basic, serviceable writing and to hire a musician better at music than you are at game dev, and you've got a real shot at things (but make sure it's real easy, too, or your players are gonezo)! what, don't believe me? just take a look at undertale, OFF, super paper mario, doki doki literature club: cute presentations, horror twists, easy to beat. except... you know... every single of these games (okay, maybe not doki) does omori's job better in just about every single way. see, these games have biting writing and make bold, aesthetic decisions, and they all do it in brevity. off, hylics, space funeral, and undertale may all be inspired by earthbound, but their developers each understood that aping its absurd, overly stretched out game length is a BAD idea. hoh, but not omocat!

no, in fact, omori is actually longer than earthbound.

and to what purpose? because after over eight hours, i'm completely checked out of this endurance tester designed to absolutely waste your time. and i'm not saying that in like a "every second of this game sucks" way, but a "no seriously, there is so much garbage and fluff in this game designed to waste your time". backtracking plagues omori like a virus as you juggle tasks and side quests that amount to a lot of holding one direction forward while running for five, six, twenty screens. worse, the game lacks the grace to let you run up and down ladders, so those to-and-fro journeys are best aided with a phone in your free hand. there's this minecart section where you slowly drift down a lane for two screens until coming to a missing piece that then... slowly sends you back another two screens. but perhaps the absolute most grating time and effort waste comes from trying to navigate absurdly inefficient menus.

no, seriously. here's how many actions i have to get through just to heal a party member with another member's heart spell.

1) b button for menu
2) 3 analog clicks to the right
3) a button to select "skills"
4) 3 analog clicks to the right
5) a button to bring up health character
6) a button to select healing spell
7) a button to select "use"
8) 1-3 analog clicks to the right to select character to heal
9) a button to heal
10) 4 b buttons to get out of all the menus and back into the game

holy fuck.

i'm being really hard on the game's pacing because it really, truly is miserable. it's annoying that nearly every object has a useless description attached--does pressing A on, what, a fire hydrant need to give me a text box that says "fire hydrant"? no shit. tell a joke or don't have the box at all. enemies respawn every new screen catching you in a battle with whatever variation of rabbit you're definitely sick of fighting by a certain point. the dialogue's the worst, though, and i'm not even yet discussing its actual quality: it's just so much. there's so much of it (like this review). there is so many words used and a fourth of them are to any actual merit. so much dialogue is wasteful, unfunny, flat, basic, and bloated, and you just sit through it hoping someone will say something interesting.

they never will. omori's a game that decides earthbound wasn't insufferably quirky enough and proceeds to ham it up to infinity but with little purpose, and it results in writing and a world that feels disingenuous. not always, of course--there's a very specific interesting contrast that occurs in the dialogue when you first go from real world back to dream world, and it feels poignant and interesting. this feeling also lasts a very limited amount of time as you realize, yes, you really HAVE been ripped from the curious part of the game and sent back to a creative wasteland, the game proceeding to hammer in a point you already got two hours ago.

let's talk more about that real world dream world contrast more but, first, the combat. it's actually pretty clever and i enjoy the synergy between your characters and how to manipulate that to take on even the biggest of challenges. but then, the game presents a different problem where MOST battle encounters will not actually involve using the system in any meaningful way, the simplest and most straightforward (and successful) way of fighting through your enemies being a mash A fest a la OFF. why? because nothing in this game has any fucking health. and you know what's really crazy about that? the people who play this game do NOT fucking care about the combat. oh, what, you think that's presumptious of me? at the time of writing this, only 29% of players bothered fighting and beating two optional minibosses early in the game. meanwhile, 60% of players finished the first dream world day (taking place post-minibosses)... which means another 40% didn't even bother to get that far.

what this tells me is that half of omori's actual playerbase don't understand the combat system and don't care enough to learn it, and they're just here for the very syrupy soft pastel story. oh, and i'm saying that with confidence because i'm among the only 10% that did not return a character's high five. it's telling.

additionally to combat, i really enjoy the effort put in to give several enemies different "mood" states that may reflect new animations and designs, and that's really cool. the battle ui is sharp, even, and its a great use of colors all around--easily beating out the utterly generic world design otherwise. but getting back to the real world/dream world contrast, what really bothers me about omori is that the game rips this system out of your hands and gives you something immeasurably boring to work with in the real world. but the thing about said real world is that it has the more "interesting" narrative going on and so, when you're sent back to the dream world, you've got the fun(er) combat back but are trapped with a half of the story that you don't care about or don't really need to hear. additionally, the real world shows just as much creative prowess as the dream world in its design--all a series of hallways. it's really flat.

there's moments of charm, like the sound effects similar to animal crossing on the gamecube, pushing over a cardboard dumptruck, and a character that holds a trophy for "most horse second place". and there are moments of complete reverse charm where the intention is inept, like a list of "whatchamacallit"s to collect, a character named smol, and that entire cheese rat segment that just goes on and on and on... like the game. like the game does. the game goes on and on.

i don't know, i've written SO much about this game i clearly don't enjoy, and a majority of where this is coming from really is in response to critical reception i can't understand whatsoever. and i didn't understand the reception undertale got six years ago and felt annoyed by its heavy presence on the internet, but then, well, i started playing it and the experience was instantly lovely, and there was no "oh dude just play thirty hours to get to the cuhrazey part!". it was fun from the start, like a video game should be, and half the length of omori, too. as is OFF, and hylics, and barkley, space funeral, ib, yume nikki--all of these brief indie rpgs i would recommend to anyone over playing ape inc's sloppy seconds.

when i look at omori, i certainly do see omocat in its design: bland, easily digestible, inoffensive, and round edged--just like those t-shirts. and then i realize what this game really is.

there definitely exists an ambient difference between portal and its sequel: while the first game demonstrated pitch black humor set against a haunting, sterile environment, portal 2 feels considerably lighter hearted and goofy--even feel good, for some reason? this approach no doubt helped jettison the game into absurd popularity and success, and i don't blame valve either for not wishing to retread the same ground twice but, regardless, it's just not quite as enjoyable to physically be in aperture science this time around.

of course the writing is hilarious, sure, and absolutely memorable, but it's also kind of... well, let's just call it the best written marvel movie.

gameplay's also running on the whole "let's not retread the same ground twice" design philosophy as well, with less emphasis on physically going in and out portals and more on using said portals to manipulate other things to go in and out, and around and throughout and etc etc. i don't think it was a bad idea to do this, but it's funny that the levels are designed to such a point that their testers literally forgot they could even just walk through the damn portals, as one developer commentary node recalls. so in a sense, there's a bit less... magic to the whole ingenious simplicity of portal's concept overall. but hey, it's also really, really cool to play around with the varying gels and light bridges and cubes with turret limbs sticking out.

i think my favorite aspect of portal 2 is the sound and music design, where seemingly every object and "tool" emits some wavelength of noise, and many manipulate their sounds in response to player actions and proximity. the gentle humming of the lasers, the bouncy synths of the bouncy gel, the underwater obfuscation of the... uh... blue wind tunnel things--it's all really mesmerizing. the technical side is cool, too, their approach to rooms next to rooms that don't actually exist next to each other (another node explains further), and the gel physics are cool as hell. yeah, a lot of the game is cool as hell.

oh, there's also that whole cooperative aspect. i've played through it a dozen times with a dozen different people at this point and, yet, it's still just REALLY fun to experience with others, especially when you're playing with newcomers to the whole experience. hell, i'll probably be playing this game for another decade just to tag along with those who have somehow lived under a moonrock all this time.

so yeah. portal 1's short, sweet, and perfect. portal 2's much longer and has some sacrifices made with an overall different design philosophy, but it's pretty damn sweet too.

yeah this isn't doing anything for me. it's tedious, repetitive, frustrating--similar reasons why i'm not remotely interested in speedrunning. at first, i thought i was just really rusty at prey so i went back and played through the base game again, loved it to death, came back to this, and i hate it. it's not as if i have too much trouble staying alive, either--my runs usually end with around 30,000 arkane fun bucks, but good lord do i not want to keep repeating these same objectives in these same areas with these same enemies. actually scratch what i said about staying alive, because dealing with moonsharks is a ball busting experience, running around with a brain hemorrhage is aggravating considering i'm not keen on listening to an audio loop of porn moans, and the time limit is just completely antithetical to what immersive sims are all about: slow, methodical exploration.

props to arkane for a ballsy ass move in that this dlc isn't even the same fucking genre as the base game, but all mooncrash does is affirm how much i hate rougeanythings and how much i probably won't buy deathloop

little game--big thoughts, though! i really like witcheye, this reworking of kirby's skeleton to create something more challenging and addictive (in short bursts). instead of both copying abilities and floating around, you're the latter except weaponized, and obstacles lie in navigating stage hazards detrimental to floaters like you and enemies who vary in ways to defeat. all of this is wrapped up in a package of absolutely gorgeous pixel art and a heaping of sickeningly sweet 16 bit groove (so much midi bass).

it's pretty fun to figure out how to defeat new enemies as they appear, soon mastering the ability to just wipe 'em out the moment they appear on screen, your forward momentum undeterred. sometimes it can feel very sloppy and you'll somehow effortlessly glide through a level despite not really knowing what's happening, but you learn. a particular highlight is the kirby styled locked miniboss fights, many really inventive. there's also this whole deal about collecting gems, but it's honestly horseshit: many, many times a gem will clip through the ground and disappear, and i'm having fun, sure, but i'm really not that interested to replay a level just to grab more bing bing jewels.

you know, probably the worst and weirdest thing about this game is the design of the main character and her alter eye ego. exceptionally bland: why? all of the enemies are charming even if many are reskinned waddle dees and gordos. the bosses are pretty cool, too... so why does the main character look so nothing? her name's mabel syrup but how could you even know that when all she sports is a dumb purple frock and matching hairbun? and the eye is just... an eye. i'd really like to draw some fanart for witcheye, but good lord it won't be the main character.
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over a decade later and portal still endures as the single best example of a perfect game--not flawless, but perfect. a short length complements a novel concept, and rich ambience and dialogue elevates an arcadey game concept into artistry. not flawless in that bugs happen, in that the beginning is filled with a lot of waiting around, in that valve has attempted to murder their own mood by placing radios in every room, but portal regardless is larger than its weaknesses.

it's been so long that i can't really gush about the actual portal gameplay or the thick, sterile atmosphere because i gushed about 'em ten years ago, but there's other details i really enjoy this time around. i like that there's several puzzles with multiple solutions. i like that waiting around in certain rooms begets more interesting glados lines. i like the mechanical whirr all the cameras make as they reorient themselves and the dark ambient music creeping out of the background. what i like most is the game handing you a very normal cube with only a decal's difference and putting you in situations where it protects or aids you to get you attached to a box.

it's a shame the whole cake bit really went through the wash. chalk it up to an easily accessible and captivatingly memorable experience, i guess.

shortly after prey released, raphaël colantonio (founder of arkane) left the studio, his words more or less "i want to make games but i feel like i'm just making products". i empathize. prey, a crown jewel of the immersive sim genre and a fascinating combination of player freedom with tight writing and attention to detail, was a commercial failure. prey was strangled by bethesda who refused to ship review copies and who stapled the completely unrelated 'prey' title onto what is ostensibly a something shock game all in order to hold onto their precious trademark, a spoil of war from human head studios. the game was rigged from the start.

immersive sims are tough to design. you've got to create level design that isn't some last of us cutscene hallway--you've got to allow for all sorts of playstyles, approaches, theories, and strategies... especially when you give the player some very, very interesting tools such as the gloo gun, that which is a metroidvania sequence breaker in handheld form. immersive sims generally have tight narratives (or, at least, strong worldbuilding). prey does both, of course--it's always interesting to discover every little story nestled in every little corner aboard talos 1, the stage for prey's play. but like i said, they're tough to design... so most studios don't bother. and who can blame them when gamers too seem to reject the genre, dishonored 2 a commercial failure, deus ex mankind divided a commercial failure (and square enix's meddling, like bethesda, sure didn't help). no, no, we want more slop. we want more movie games. etc, etc

despite me thinking this deserving of a near perfect score, i'm bothered that i don't feel enthusiastic writing this. i guess i'm down harder than i realized about the current state of the games industry, the current state of triple a. what is it about these games that just don't click with gamers? are they too hard? immersive sims are interesting in that, if you don't know what you're doing or don't make an effort to really understand the game, you're going to find yourself loading a save far too often. prey is merciless in this regard, and i speak to experience. my first playthrough found me desperately scrounging for ammunition and barely surviving encounters with anything. four years later, forgetting near everything, i was suddenly doing so. much. better.

why? well, i started actually scrounging all the trash i could, for one. i stopped breaking down weapons into spare parts--there's more than enough of those around the station. i started REALLY using the hell out of that wrench (don't underestimate it. i used it to the very, very end). but the most important thing i did was using the analyzing helmet tool that researches enemies and offers you advice, strengths, and weaknesses. holy hell, why did i never even bother with that before? enemies i remember giving my hell last time were cakewalks on this run. lord, over halfway through the game i felt like space jesus, undefeated.

awkward transition but there's definitely some negative aspects that hold prey back from being absolutely perfect. art aside, the bugs (when and rarely they appear) are rough. bodies disappearing or clipping through the ground, glitched objectives, flickering lighting, and invisible fire all add up to a laundry list of annoyances... but if you're not going for 100%, you probably won't stumble over many. prey's got an incredible introduction and charges full speed ahead with its first act, but loses steam around halfway when the environments start drying up in creativity and everything starts feeling samey and boring. it's like playing half life's residue processing but for ten hours. and without spoiling, the endings are suuuuper anticlimactic and sloppily rushed through. worse, there's no real good combat payoff before then, either. i was geared up for war, man.

i think my favorite part about the game is that, despite playing through massive runs, i could still definitely see myself going back for thirds in a few years and playing just a little differently. with as many options, styles, and tools the game hands you, it's a little impossible for anything but maybe the same story growing dull. that's the magic of an immersive sim.

good lord, did they fire their writer after the initial game's launch? i bring this up because i pulled up my old review for the seal the deal dlc and found that i held the exact same sentiment, and now i'm scared that the original game is actually just as bad in that department. what on earth? why is nearly every line that comes out of every npcs' mouth some boring, self aware comment? hilarious only to time travelers from 2014 who unfortunately did not set their calculations correctly landing in this dump of a decade. when it's not meta pun haha funny, it's just... nothing. they don't say anything funny or interesting; just nothing.

"it's a 3d platformer, are you playing for the dialogue?"

of course no one's playing a collecathon for enriching writing, but then this begs the question: why is it even there at all, then? how about just have them fucking gagged? the cat models certainly look visually appealing, at least.

and they and a select few posters (and some stickers--most won't age well at all. a few have already spoiled) are the only visually appealing aspects here in this clustered mess of saturated colors mixed with black. black and grey. for as vibrant and noisy as this dlc's stage is, you'd think you'd spend a lot less time staring at black corridors and black floors and black walls. that, and trains: you look at a lot of trains.

god, it's just not fun to navigate the city, either. call it "open world" but it's no more that than any fucking super mario sunshine level--except those are actually much more fun to play around in considering you generally have a better idea of where to go and what to even do there while a hat in time is content to rely on either its press-lb-to-find-next-objective hat or--frankly--the incredibly insulting help kiosk that offers the player an assist mode under the guise of accessibility. oh blow me, you designed a sandbox with windows xp era mspaint color palletes and, like, bear traps and you have the gall to--oh, nevermind.

what else? god, the dlc loves reusing parts of itself over and over and over again. there's all these merchants scattered around selling five things that have you just sitting there waiting for the purchase animation to finish--gets real old when you're just buying food for 10 hatkid bucks. there's this long tunnel where you have to bob and weave in between trains and i swear to god i think they make you trudge through there like four different times (and two of them failed to spawn any trains at all until i was halfway through when suddenly they'd all just burst out from the woodwork as if i triggered some tripwire).

anyway, it's a dlc about jumping on trains and staring at walls. very creative. i suppose when you stop hard crutching all of your level and character designs off of established gamecube games, you dry the well faster than you realize.

what an unfortunate release date hylics has: october 2nd 2015, just seventeen days after the release of undertale. it is an unfortunate competition they two unwittingly found themselves competing in, though only one even aware of it at all. the public can really only handle one type of hyper fixation on a release of its genre/medium at a time as far as discussions go, and undertale was a ridiculously long lasting one--hylics didn't stand a chance. yet it is interesting to see both in the context of what toby fox has previously said on his making of undertale: he thought of it simply being a Cool Little Indie RPG destined to obscurity to all but Cool Little Indie RPG Playing People. this didn't happen, and it was instead hylics' fate to sit on the same trophy shelf as barkley: gaiden and space funeral.

but none of this is a bad thing as long as every devs' bills were paid. as far as art goes, there's a space for both. hylics certainly wields a unique aesthetic unlike just about anything else bar the few other claymation focused video games. it's that clay aesthetic meshed with the mspaint binary brush that creates very interesting, captivating environments and designs. the world only gets weirder with those that inhabit it, both you, spontaneous bathtaker and couch sitter that you are, and the enemies, npcs, and companions scattered around. you look weird--they talk weird. the sort of incomprehensible waxing of incomprehensible poetry happens quite a lot throughout hylics, and it serves to complement the times in which the game loosens its shoulders a bit and plays a joke completely straight.

hylics has a good sense of humor, and it's got an even better combat system. just that it works, really, and is more mechanically stimulating than space-bar-to-win off or the forgettably standard system of aforementioned space funeral, or the complete absence of any system at all like a la ib. you've got an array of spells that can be expanded on the more and more you... watch television, and there's a number of strategies you can pursue to take on enemies (or i assume, anyway. there's a lot of spells. i just kind of used the sleep one a lot). the actual pacing from enemies beating you down to you beating them down to then a good middle ground of eventual but distinguished progress until finally becoming a beat down champion is... really, really good! so good that the game doesn't drag its heels even once, the moment to moment happening at just the pace you want it at.

that said, not all of my thoughts are glowing. while the writing is a balancing act of mostly gibberish and occasional surrealistic zings, it's also all not really too interesting. there's never any sense of stakes or even a "thing" that hooks you. the cast of hylics sort of do things arbitrarily until it's the end. maybe that fits the overall feel of the world, but it's also kind of boring in itself and leaves you feeling nothing much post ending. i don't know, it was just a general sort of "well, i guess that's it then." compare and contrast with, say, barkley and the absolutely insane buildup to its conclusion, and said conclusion being delivered via pure chaos. meanwhile, hylics is... again, just arbitrarily over. perhaps the most offensive part of the game is its real lack of character from the characters! as in, no one in your party says a damn thing once they join your crew. actually, there's one moment very early on in which a character DOES... and then never again. that sucks, man. paper mario: ttyd had this shit figured out. barkley had it figured out. final fantasy games older than any of these had it figured out, jesus. have them talk.

hylics is definitely captivating besides the missteps in writing. my eyes glazed over at the top steam review going "lololol drugs" because hylics is genuinely just bursting with creativity of its own right and really doesn't deserve to be dude weeded. it's smartly designed, appropriately paced, and you feel like you got something cool out of it even if the finish line only comes and goes.