This is what they were crunching for?

The Callisto Protocol is a man drowning. He’s been swept out by the tides deeper than he can swim, and now I feel compelled to go and be the one who drags him back to shore. I’m not looking forward to it as I swim out there. This always ends badly. I know he’ll kick, and flail, and panic, and drag me under with him. But something compels me. I dip beneath the waves, gliding on the current. Every kick is met only with more water, never ground; it’s been a while since either of us has been able to touch bottom. I get to the man. All of the dread that I felt swimming up to him — the growing pit in my stomach warning me that he’d kill us both — fades as I get a hold of him. He’s calm. He doesn’t fight. He wants to be rescued, and he's coherent enough to tell me as much. So much worry on my end, and for nothing. We’re both going home, and my doubts were unfounded. The two of us make our way back to the shallows, and my heart swells. Nobody’s gonna believe this. I get to be the one who brings back the guy that everyone thought couldn't be saved.

We make it from the depths to a point where the ocean reaches our shins, at which point the man panics and submerges my head in about two feet of water until we both die. I knew I should have let the fucker drown.

What we’re looking at here is a bad start that leads into a remarkably strong middle, hitting an impressive stride just in time to trip and break both legs three hours before the finish line. But that middle section is good. It’s really good. It’s so good that I was ready to come in here and lord a massively inflated score over the heads of all of the doubters who didn’t get it. Reality hits hard when it hits, though, and there’s no denying that The Callisto Protocol just runs out at the end. It runs out of ideas, it runs out of money, it runs out of employee morale — it runs dry and it runs empty until the engine shears itself in half.

This is pretty, but a game "being pretty" hasn't impressed me for fifteen years now. Everything since the early-mid 2010s has given me this shrug-your-shoulders feeling of "yeah, I guess it looks good" and spurred little in me beyond that. I know it's a tired truism to trot out — "art direction is more important that graphical fidelity!", as if we don't all know that already — but even games from that era that were trying to look as realistic as the latest titles don't read as being all that different to me today. Honestly, I think the face-scan mocap shit that's everywhere in AAA games these days looks kind of bad; they're all sitting deep in that uncanny valley where everyone's head looks like it's got a video of the actor's face wrapped around it. Even with (perhaps due to an overreliance upon) all of the tech in place, some of these animations look incredibly bad. Here's a shot of Josh Duhamel's character screaming in agony as he gets an implant stuffed in his neck that hurts so bad that he has a heart attack and dies. It's silly. This is not an expression of pain. He's making a YouTube thumbnail face. Fuck, the source of that image is a YouTube thumbnail.

So, yes, this is all very technically impressive, but in practice it's all just bloom and haze and fog and I can't fucking see any of it because someone turned all the lights off. None of this sparks joy. Everything is gray and bland and devoid of life. There's nothing that even remotely scratches at iconic Dead Space setpieces like the Church of Unitology or the cryopod rooms, because the art direction on display is kind of shit. It's a just-so approximation of enough of Dead Space's elements to provoke familiarity, but it's off in a way that betrays the fact that Visceral was a team made up of a lot more people than just Glen Schofield. He isn't Visceral, and this isn't a spiritual successor to Dead Space. It's a spiritual regression.

But as desperately as this wants to stay latched to the teat of Dead Space, it isn't open to those who want the game to be Dead Space. This is a melee-focused system based around dodging, combos, and environment kills; Dead Space is a shooter based around positioning, dismemberment, and, uh, also environment kills. You've gotta meet The Callisto Protocol on its own terms; playing it like Dead Space is a losing position. You should be doing this for everything you consume, by the way. Don't try and cram a work you don't like into a box that doesn't fit it. Play the game that they designed, not the one you wish they'd designed. It took a little readjusting over the course of the entire opening hour of The Callisto Protocol, but I eventually came to understand what it was going for, how it wanted to be played. And I liked it.

Actually, I really liked it.

Combat is simple, but raw enough to be really satisfying once you get the loops figured out. Each fight will take place either as a gauntlet of enemies that pour out one after the other, or as group battles where you'll be caught between three or four monsters at a time. It's a game of dodging, waiting out the combos, finding an opportunity to strike, and then going all-out until you're forced to stop. Weave around a three-hit combo, dole out one of your own that takes the arm off of a monster, get whipped around by another, block his strike, take his legs out, get shoved, pop one with the new space you've been given; it's a wonderful little system that isn't hard to come to grips with, but is punishing enough to mean that eating a bad hit or two will send you back to your last checkpoint. The added complexity comes in the form of your GRP (pronounced as "grip") and your guns, though you'll be rocking with the starting magnum for the vast majority of the game. The GRP can pick up enemies and hazards to toss them around, and your guns are your combo enders. You can also open with gunfire if you've got some distance on the monsters; they've gotta come to you, so you can filter a group down a chokepoint and take one of them out before you're forced to rely on the melee to take you the rest of the way. Combo-ender gunshots can sever limbs, decapitate enemies, force staggers to open up rushdown opportunities, and generally just act as a major force-multiplier to make sure a crowd of monsters is never unmanageable. If you're thinking that this sounds like it's not really a system primed for a horror game, you'd be right. The Callisto Protocol sucks dick at being a horror game. As an action game, though — much like big brother Dead Space — I thought it was great.

Eventually, you'll progress to a point in the narrative where hitting the monsters for long enough will make worms rupture from their body. These worms need to be shot within a fairly tight window of time, or else they'll cause the monster in question to undergo a transformation that makes them bigger, stronger, and faster. You really do not want to let the worms make the monsters evolve. In theory, this is an interesting escalation — you can't afford to drag fights out the way that you could earlier — but as we've seen throughout this write-up, theory is distinct from practice.

In practice, the worms will always erupt from the same place; the generic guys who smack you around will have them erupt from their guts, and the spitters will have them erupt from their heads. These are the primary enemy types that you'll be fighting against for the overwhelming majority of your playthrough, so combat encounters go from frenetic punch-ups where you're desperately trying to make the right call to something that's solved by a flowchart: three or four hits always followed by a gut shot or a head shot, rinse and repeat. There's basically no reason to ever open up by firing your gun now that enemies can heal by evolving, which leaves you the options to fling the enemies with your gravity glove and hurt them a little bit, or to swing at them with the baton. The baton expends no resources, is fast, is always guaranteed to connect, is a safe option, and will open up enemies for the instakill gut/head shot in no time at all. So many tools, and no reason to use any of them besides the fucking stick. Everything was useful only two hours prior, so being boxed in to what's obviously an optimal strategy to repeat on every single monster serves only to squander a system that was working just fine before.

Where things really fall apart, however, is in the third act. Jacob, our protagonist, falls down a gutter or some shit into an underground area where all of the enemies are blind. They've got super-hearing, but they can't see. Firing a shot or swinging at one with your baton may as well spare you the ceremony of kicking off a fight and just reload your checkpoint the second you press the button; you'll get swarmed by too many monsters to deal with, and they'll chew through every resource you have before they kill you. What you have to do instead is pull a page from Joel Thelastofus's book and crouch-walk around while shivving these clicker expys to death. Unlike in The Last of Us, however, the shiv that you get has infinite uses, meaning that you can very easily just crouch-walk around and kill everything without alerting a single enemy. This is optimal. They don't hear you shivving them, even as Jacob grunts and growls and the monsters gurgle and shriek, and there's no reason to sneak past them; they still drop ammo and money and health packs just the same as everything else. If you could just blast your way through this section, it'd be over in thirty minutes; instead, you have to play the most boring stealth section ever devised by human hands and it takes upwards of two and a half hours.

You get back to the regular action combat in time for the game to end, but the damage is more than done at that point. You fight the exact same boss four times in the span of an hour, and his pattern is literally just doing right-hand swings. You hold left on the control stick and auto-dodge everything while shooting him once per dodge. It's so boring. I knew while I was going through the ridiculously long stealth segment that they were padding for time, but repeating the same boss fight four fucking times really gives it away to anyone who wasn't paying attention that they were running on empty. I went from itching for more in the middle act to wishing it would just hurry up and end by the start of the finale.

Jacob gets to the escape pods, meets a zombie warden who's managed to keep his personality (generic asshole), and then the zombie warden does the Resident Evil boss thing where he talks about having superior genetics and then turns into a big meat monster with glowing orange eyeball weakpoints. I'll take the opportunity now to point out that this game was written by two people. The lead writer has never worked on anything else in his entire life. There were five times as many employees dedicated to the face scanning as there were on the writing team. Remember that the facescanning looks like shit, so adjust your expectations for the quality of the writing accordingly. Whatever. Nobody was ever playing this for the story. It's still a weird choice for a game like this, though; with everything being told to you through audio logs and exposition from characters who have a clue what's going on, you'd think you'd want more hands on deck. Then again, the only thing anyone ever seems to say is "Jacob, go to [the place], I'll explain later", so you probably don't need to put too much effort into putting that together.

But my mind keeps wandering back to the thought that the people at Striking Distance were working twelve hour days, seven days a week — and for what? What about The Callisto Protocol demanded such brutal hours for such a long stretch of development? I can't find anything in the time leading up to the game's release that would indicate what was sucking up so many resources; all I've come up with are some vague gestures towards "new lighting techniques" and "haptic feedback", all incidentals that barely add much of anything to a work that's remarkably standard. This cost $160 million to Dead Space 2's 60 million and it looks and plays worse.

There’s an excellent game within The Callisto Protocol, and one that I imagine would have been able to flourish if made under the banner of someone who actually had a clue. Literally all it takes to turn this from mediocre to great is a better manager. Talented people were overworked and underpaid to make something that broadly isn’t good, but shines in parts; had they been treated properly and overseen by a real leader instead of an MBA meathead who stepped down the second shit got hot, they would have made something that could actually eat Dead Space’s lunch. Instead, we got this, and it’s begging for Dead Space’s scraps.

Glen Schofield can go fuck himself.

They’ve got the sauce!

It’s not enough of the sauce, and it takes a little while before they actually start doling the sauce out, but by God, they’ve got the sauce! Undertale Yellow actually gets it, and what a triumph that is. It manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls which plague fangames and have resulted in them getting such a broadly negative perception as being lesser forms of media, and it does so with an impressive amount of finesse. There are more than a couple of misfires here, and it can’t manage to be something that meets nor succeeds the original Undertale, but they’ve got the sauce. It’s a very big swing to take, and just about as big a hit.

What I appreciate most about Undertale Yellow is the sheer amount of restraint that the developers showcase. You only see Toriel for a grand total of about two minutes before she’s out of the game for good, and Mettaton, Alphys, and Asgore are mentioned a few times; apart from that, the only returning character who actually sticks around for most of the runtime is Flowey, and he acts differently enough that a large part of the narrative is trying to figure out what angle he’s playing at. There’s no Sans. He doesn’t even get namedropped! What? Can you imagine releasing an Undertale fangame and not bringing up Sans? When I got to the Snowdin Town bridge and released that Sans wasn’t going to show his face, I got pumped. It’s brave. A group far less confident in themselves would have just made this a second lap through the extant Underground, going on a little adventure to essentially experience Undertale all over again in a world where you could just play Undertale again if that was what you wanted to do.

The first impressions when the game starts branching off of Undertale aren’t especially strong. The first original NPC that you meet in the Ruins — Darv or Darm or Darl, whatever his name is — very much looks like someone’s Adventure Time self-insert that they drew to be Marceline the Vampire Queen’s boyfriend. Picture me retching as I type this. His character isn’t particularly good, mostly just muttering about some betrayal from long past and talking about how he wants to be left alone, and the game seems to agree with me in this respect; he drops off the face of the earth for the remainder of the runtime, only showing up again at the very end to make sure that the player hasn’t forgotten about him. The other new characters are significantly better: Martlet is a strong and obvious standout among the rest of the cast, North Star and his posse aren’t as consistent in their designs nor personalities but are still good, and Ceroba seems a lot like someone’s fursona but not in an especially bad way. I ended up liking more of the principle cast than I didn’t, so they’re definitely doing something right on the design and writing front.

The average enemy encounter is fine; there’s nothing especially interesting about most of them, though some do offer a couple of interesting gimmicks. Making the “floor slippery” so that the soul glides around or the music enemies blasting you with waveforms that you need to dodge are cute. Most of the boss fights don’t offer anything especially interesting, though. While Pacifist Ceroba does manage to get a few interesting gimmicks going in the form of giving the player the Big Shot, the overwhelming majority of the boss fights are just clicking Spare over and over and over again; your ACT commands often do nothing besides give the same line of flavor text every time you select them, which is a fairly boring way to handle these big encounters. I found the Guardener to be the best fight simply because it required you to hack away at vines blocking your options which then led into an ACT chain, giving you some freedom in the form of selecting which of your options you want to be available to you first. El Bailador is fine, turning the game into a rhythm section for a few minutes, but it doesn’t do much for me. So many of these fights are just about dodging bullets and slamming Mercy over and over again, and that’s never really been the draw of Undertale.

Similarly ranging from alright to forgettable are the music tracks. There’s nothing truly offensive here, and there are a couple that I like, but it's important for us to remember that Toby Fox was a composer long before he was a game designer. I can still hum the melodies to just about every track from Undertale, but I don’t think I could do the same for a single song from Undertale Yellow — at least, not from the ones that don’t lift one of Toby’s leitmotifs. While I do admire the developers’ willingness to get out from under the Undertale narrative trappings of returning characters walking in like sitcom guest stars for the audience to whoop and applaud to, I can’t extend the same praise to their composing. Ceroba’s fight plays a remix of Hopes and Dreams that the game absolutely hasn’t earned, and it took me right out of a battle that I was digging up until then. There are quite a few instances of obvious musical recycling in places where they don’t belong, and the songs that are wholly original don’t interest me much. They're far from anything terrible, but they feel a bit lazy in a game where there isn’t much else that does.

Undertale Yellow is ultimately a good fangame, and that is perhaps deserving of more celebration than anything else. It is very clearly made by a team of passionate and creative people, and I don’t think that their time spent on this would have been better spent on an original IP, instead. With that said, I would prefer for the next thing that this team releases to be something entirely of their own design; with all of the eyes that they’ve got on them now, I’m sure they’ve cultivated an audience that would be glad to see more.

And the sprites look too good. It’s all wrong. Part of the appeal of Undertale is that it looks like hot shit.

Like watching a car crash.

Open Roads had a very rocky development, and it's not hard to tell. Announced about four years ago at The Game Awards and three years after the studio's then-latest release of Tacoma, Open Roads ran into some trouble when it came out that Steve Gaynor was a microtyrant who was forcing employees out of his company. In a true success story for the industry, he'd only been abusing his power over his subordinates to humiliate and demean them (specifically focusing his ire on the women at his company), and not to sexually harass them — please, hold your applause for the man until the end. The news broke that this dipshit and his stupid haircut had been responsible for turning over nearly the entire workforce of Fullbright over the course of just two years, and Gaynor stepped down ahead of the story coming out. He said he was very very sorry for his behavior and that he wouldn't do it again, but also that he wasn’t sorry enough to surrender the company name. Open Roads is now credited to "The Open Roads Team", comprised of the couple of employees who were left in the wake of his reign and whoever else they could bring on to save the project from a shallow grave. The game released just a few days ago to a remarkably small audience and a middling reception, and it isn't difficult to see why.

Open Roads fucking sucks.

It's a game that's very obsessed with detail, yet is remarkably uninterested in its story. When the game let me open up a trash can and pick out every single piece of garbage individually to examine it in a 3D model viewer, I got the feeling that I wasn't going to enjoy this. The models themselves are all very intricate and detailed, each one of them complete with their own bespoke labels, and fine print, and they're all very lovingly put together, and I absolutely would not have noticed nor cared about any of this if a core component of the game wasn't picking up random objects and looking at them. There's a reason that movies don't feature characters picking up every loose object on the set and holding them up to camera, and that's because it's not particularly interesting to do that. I feel like I have to explain this from first principles. What do we gain by doing this? What do we gain from having the player pick up loose items and stare at them? What does that accomplish that just dressing the set with static objects wouldn't? It certainly makes the game last longer, because you need to pick up every piece of random bullshit in the hopes of finding the ones that advance you to the next section, but there's no appeal in doing that. It's busywork. So little worldbuilding actually happens by digging through these items; you'll be picking through erasers and pencils and plates, all such boring, domestic objects that don't have any character to them whatsoever. You can pick up some push pins and look at them. They're normal fucking push pins. You can pick up a fork and look at it. It's a normal fucking fork. You can pick up a comb and look at it. It's a normal fucking comb. What are we doing? Why? Is there something about allowing me to pick these objects up and look at them that does anything that leaving them in the scenery for me to look at wouldn't? Could we at least do something interesting with them? Express some personality through them? Give us a reason to investigate them? Anything, so long as it could give this a point.

Tonally, this is all over the place. Tess being kind of mood swing-y makes sense — she's fifteen, and nobody seems keen on telling her fucking anything on the grounds of it being "too complicated", despite one of the core conflicts of the game being completely resolved in a literal three minute talk at the end — but Opal falls into this pattern as well. Tess will go way, way too far in making an accusation or just trying to come up with something that would hurt her mom, and Opal will respond in kind, and then the pair of them will act like nothing ever happened. One sequence has them blow up on one another, refuse to say another word until the end of the car ride, and then resume quipping and bantering not even thirty seconds later. It takes more time for you to eat the fucking burger that Opal buys you at the motel than it does for the only two principle characters in this story to have a ground-shattering fight and then completely resolve it. The store description boasts that Tess and Opal’s relationship has “never been easy” when it so obviously is. If I had said so much as a fraction of the shit Tess says to my own mom, I would have demolished our relationship. Instead, it’s all glossed over, all just Buffyspeak for the pile. If wry quips were currency, Tess and Opal wouldn't have to sell the house.

The game can't ever decide whether it's time to floor it or slam the brakes, and instead has you constantly whipping back and forth between long segments of doing fucking nothing besides wandering around to rotate ashtrays and then blasting forward with story development that you barely even have time to register as happening before it's over. Your grandfather died, but he wasn't actually your grandfather, but he was a jewel thief, but he was your grandfather, but he might still be alive, but he tried to turn himself in, but who cares, but maybe your professional gambler father can enlighten you, but roll credits. Christ. We spend 90% of the runtime walking around and investigating literal fucking garbage and then cram way too much of this incredibly boring story into not enough time to tell it. This isn't even an Open Roads problem, but Open Roads is a symptom; so many games have fucking atrocious pacing. I've started celebrating anything that can get to credits without rushing or dragging. At least this has the decency to be over in an hour and a half, despite the fact that it does nothing with that time.

Would you believe me if I told you that this controlled badly? For a game this simple, just about every control scheme has something completely broken about it. If you're playing on a gamepad (the optimal way to play), menus are often incredibly sticky and require a few button presses before they actually register that you want to move your cursor up or down. Getting from New Game to Continue on the main menu took four down presses to move the selection box down once. Objects that you can interact with are what I can only describe as "sticky"; moving your reticle near them will drastically decrease your sensitivity and pull your view towards the item like a magnet, ensuring that you can easily pick up the item without having to fiddle with getting the reticle placement just right. This, in theory, is a great idea. In practice, the fact that so many fucking items in the game can be interacted with means that your view is constantly being dragged around, making it feel like you're fighting with the controls when you're trying to look up from a desk to the exit door. You can't move your camera freely unless you're staring off into empty space, because your reticle keeps getting caught on objects and making it incredibly difficult for you to look away from them. It should not be this frustrating simply trying to look around a room.

Doing this on a mouse is where the fun really begins, though. I don't know what happened with my copy of the game, because I can't imagine that this happened to anyone else and they didn't see fit to mention it; it's obviously a bug, but it's also really funny that it made to the final release. Mouselook, for some ungodly reason, is locked to eight directions. It also "snaps" when you move it around, jumping from one point to another rather than smoothly gliding between them. I thought it had something to do with the controller being plugged in, but it persisted through both unplugging the gamepad and restarting the PC. I can't really explain how bad this is through text, so I've graciously provided you with a video so that you won't have to experience it for yourself. Nobody should know these horrors, but I do. You should not be made to carry this burden.

I feel bad giving it this low of a score, because I usually prefer to reserve the half-stars for works that are actively harmful. The kind of thing that does damage. But there is absolutely nothing that I like here. I detest the writing, I detest playing it, I detest the way that it looks, I can't fucking stand it. This game radiates a horrid energy that enters me in waves and saps my will. The writers have almost never worked on anything else in their lives and one of the lead art directors made Dream Daddy. We're not dealing with heavy hitters of the industry, here. These are people who are uniquely underqualified coming in to try and salvage an extant work tainted by employee abuse because throwing out the name and starting over would be bad for brand recognition.

Despite the fact that this is intended as something of a follow-up to Gone Home, there's almost nobody left from that project who's still working on this one. This isn't a successor project so much as it is an imitation, all of the gaps smoothed over with drywall mud from Annapurna helping to pull in nearly three hundred fucking contractors to get this out. What compelled them to go ahead with releasing this? Open Roads is the ship of Theseus. Clearly everybody who knew what they were doing when they were still under the Fullbright banner is gone with no intention of coming back, and the ones with a clue who survived Gaynor's reign don't have enough of a voice under the fucking mountain of outside artists and developers being brought in to push this out the door.

Open Roads is a game that clearly has talented people on board, but is helmed by a team lead (or leads, plural) who have no clue what do to with them. There’s so much wasted potential here. It sucks to see all of these people wriggle out from under the thumb of an abusive manager just to immediately be put beneath the thumb of a new manager who’s incompetent, instead. I can’t write here what I hope happens to Steve Gaynor. I do hope that whoever’s left from Fullbright can leave Annapurna behind and make something better than their oldest work, because I know they’re capable of it. They just need a leader who isn’t a fucking moron.

Hey, mom!

Computer, generate a niche game.

If you've ever played one of those "make-your-own-game" games like Game Dev Story or Game Dev Tycoon or Mad Games Tycoon or any of the millions of fucking Kairosoft knock-offs out there, you're familiar with how the real-world game design process tends to be abstracted into gameplay. In order to keep things from getting too complicated, these tycoon games usually have a design pipeline which asks the player to combine a "genre" tag with a "theme" tag. The more "appropriate" the combination of tags, the better your fictional game tends to sell. Mixing "action" with "shooter" is almost universally a safe pick, as is something like "simulation" with "motorsports". Where you'll fall into the weeds, however, is when you decide to get experimental; making an "action farming" game or an "extreme sports RPG" tends to guarantee little more than poor sales and middling reviews. I played Game Dev Story a lot growing up, and it always annoyed me that what I thought were the most interesting and unique combinations always resulted in something that capped out around mediocre. I had game dev aspirations of my own — among other ideas, like being an astronaut or a lawyer — and I vowed that on the day that I could start running a studio of my own, I would never turn down even the wildest of ideas. I would play them, and support them, and make sure that everybody knew how good they truly were.

And I don't especially enjoy this horse-racing solitaire game.

My biggest gripe just comes down to the fact that what we have here is a fairly uninteresting horse racing game standing alongside a fairly uninteresting solitaire game, and the two exist in distinct and separate layers like how oil sits on water. Racing the horse seems to be the primary gameplay element — you can fail to full-clear the solitaire minigame and it doesn't count as a loss, with wins and losses instead coming down to the result of the actual race — but the horse's performance being abstracted into the solitaire minigame really doesn't feel as though it accomplishes much. There's no harmony between these systems. You do solitaire to make the horse run faster and more efficiently, but you could slot any sort of minigame in here and nothing would change. If this was Pocket Sudoku Racer or Pocket Slide Puzzle Racer, the core of racing the horses would remain wholly untouched. How close you got to finishing the minigame before the timer runs out or your deck empties gives you a boost or a penalty, but there are a dozen different games you could substitute in here without noticing a difference. The solitaire game and the horse racing game are hardly reliant on the other, nor does one make the other shine; they just exist together, each acting as an interruption of whatever the last mode of gameplay was.

Of course, Pocket Card Racer isn’t bad, but I don’t believe it to be especially good. The solitaire minigame is decent enough for an hour or two, and the raising of the horses implies that there’s going to be a lot more depth to the racing than there actually is, and it’s all okay. It’s a vehicle to play solitaire as filtered through the lens of being a jockey who’s whipping a horse named Nintendo Biggs on the final stretch of the track. There are far better and far worse ways to play golf solitaire. Grab a deck and imagine a horse running in your mind while you do it. Put on one of the tracks from the game to really immerse yourself, because they’re bangers. You’d get a comparable experience and save yourself some cash.

This is the kind of game that’s going to hit at an exact intersection of what an incredibly small group of people have been begging for all of their lives.

Not quite perfect, but a few adjustments away from it.

Man, 2024 really has been the year of the four star review for me. I promise that I’m not losing my epic caustic critic touch and am instead simply playing games that I expect to like. I’ve long heard mixed opinions on Observation ever since it released, but they’ve often trended towards the negative. All I really knew going in was that you controlled the HAL 9000 on a spaceship and that people who played it didn’t especially love it. That might be the ideal way to experience anything: clean slate, low expectations.

What’s fortunate for me, then, is the fact that I really enjoyed Observation. With some caveats, of course, but the broader experience was one that I had a lot of fun with. It’s nice getting to relive that Space Station 13 gameplay loop of playing as the ship’s AI and getting yelled at by the /tg/station HoS for not opening doors quickly enough. That's really not much of an exaggeration, either; the bulk of what you'll be doing is opening doors, getting subsystems back online, and helping the onboard personnel attempt to figure out what's going on. Hell, you even get the Ion Laws that'll pop up out of nowhere and rewrite parts of your code, influencing you to act in strange and novel ways. All of this is processed through a lens of cassette-futurist panels and knobs and lossy tape compression, which is an aesthetic that I don't find often hits, but really hits when it does. It's certainly given a bit more of a modern spin than something like Alien in terms of its visual flair; it's shooting for more of a "here's what the ISS would look like if it was launched in 1972". My Alien comparison isn't coming from nowhere either, because the co-founder of No Code was actually the lead UI designer for Alien: Isolation before moving on to this. Go figure. Best to stick with what you know.

I do enjoy the moment to moment gameplay of flicking between stationary cameras, pulling up the map to figure out where certain hubs are located, interfacing with panels and decryption tools to access locked files, and then threading them all together to break through a cipher or gain access to a new subsystem. It can be a pit pixel hunt-y sometimes in a way that I really dislike, and the parts of the game where you're forced to control the camera drone without any map access are so disorienting as to actively make me want to stop playing. I understand that the confusion when you're controlling the drone is kind of the point, but there's far too much taken away from the player that would help to compensate me blindly flying around and hoping that I accidentally stumble into progression. Maps don't work in space, and maps don't work when your core is offline; given that these individual rooms on the ship feel designed to be viewed through the angles given by the static cameras, making me fly through them in first person broadly leaves me with no fucking idea where I actually am. The yaw seems to work as expected, but applying pitch or roll feel like they add extra movement that you didn't ask for. Pitch your camera upwards and get confused as to what you're looking at until you realize that pitching upward also applied a 90-degree roll, for some reason. This came up often enough for it to be a problem, but I could never figure out how or why it kept happening. I'm mostly just attributing it to "bad controls" and moving on. That might be a dishonest read, and the actual problem lies between screen and chair, but it's my review and its real purpose is to aggrandize myself.

Of course, the gameplay is more of a vehicle by which the story progresses than it is anything else. What's here narratively isn't anything all that new; an AI onboard a spaceship in the near future goes rogue, there's an obvious doppelganger twist that thankfully reveals the conclusion almost as soon as its hinted at, there's a corrupting alien force that seems malicious but might not be. It's hardly anything you haven't seen before. Granted, it's rare for all of these elements to come together at once like this — 2001: A Space Odyssey crashing into Coherence crashing into Arrival — but it's not hard to pick at these elements like toppings off a pizza and see the base story components for what they are. It's all very steadily rolled out, often resolving one plot hook before launching the next, and the real meat is in trying to figure out what the mysterious floating black hexagon a) is, and b) is trying to make you do. "BRING HER" serve as your arc words to latch onto, and while the "HER" in question is obviously the woman who wakes you up at the beginning of the game, the purpose of "BRING"ing her is left in the air from the opening moments until the credits.

I realize as I'm writing this that I haven't really said anything kind about Observation, and that makes me wonder what it is about the game that made me like it so much. No, it's not a novel story, and it's a bit of a headache to play, but it might just be the definition of a work that's more than the sum of its parts. There are a lot of little moments that really make up the bulk of what I enjoy, and they’re peppered throughout at just enough of a regular pace to keep me locked in while also giving me just enough downtime to let them simmer. They’re such small things, too; there’s one sequence where you’re poking around the Russian arm of the ship to find some cameras, and the room you need to go into is suddenly marked with a tag that says “MOVEMENT DETECTED”. There’s basically no attention brought to this aside from a tiny text box sitting next to the room’s icon. There’s no blaring sounds, there’s no glitchy UI, it just tells you that something is moving in there when it was empty just moments before. It’s really good. It’s nice to play a game with horror elements that understands when to let the player scare themselves. The gleaming white walls eventually give way to meat-striped grunge, you’re tasked with locking all of the exits and shutting off life support to kill the captain, someone who definitely died inexplicably comes back, and it all starts to feel like reality is crumbling away. I dig it, especially as a major escalation of what started as a fairly grounded sci-fi plot. SAM sprouts tentacles from his core to kill a human and says “I have changed” in his robot voice and I popped off because it was just so goddamn cool. Observation understands creepy robots.

There’s not much to say about Observation besides the fact that it’s good at getting across big moments and small moments with equal amounts of finesse, but it struggles a bit to stick them all together. The gameplay is the glue holding it all in place, so more than a handful of segments being clunky to navigate through hurts the final experience. What’s frustrating — and encouraging, honestly — is that it’s shockingly close to a higher score. Just get rid of the probe. That’s really it. I’d forgive the occasional pixel hunt if they just excised the probe from the game. There’s nothing that the probe does that couldn’t be accomplished with the extant camera fixtures, and it might actually be better for the atmosphere; having something slink around the edge of the frame that gets away before you can move your view to see it would have been a lot better than blindly bonking the probe into every wall of the ship because I couldn’t figure out which way was up. Still, I really do like Observation, and I’m going to have to check out Stories Untold purely off of the momentum from this. This studio seems to know what they’re doing.

No Code might actually make a decent Silent Hill game.

Deeply embarrassing.

Daniel Mullins-core (derogatory) glitch horror slop that is completely indistinguishable from its contemporaries. As Pony Island, so Sonic.exe. Comes to the stellar conclusion that when nothing is happening and you play an insanely loud noise for no reason, the player will be startled. Horror that annoys. Character designs that don't mesh together or have any raison d'être besides having sticker packs and plushies made out of them, because the act of selling merch is the purpose and developing an off-the-rack scary indie game is the excuse. Ten years late to a party that never started.

Buddy Simulator 1984 — the name should already be sounding alarms as one designed to maximize SEO — is a remarkably confused game. It wants to be scary, but it only knows how to be loud. It wants to be funny, but it doesn't understand basic setups and punchlines. It wants to be quirky, but it doesn't do anything to be different. It wants to be creepy, but it's so pedestrian in its efforts that it may as well be shining a flashlight under its chin. It wants to be good, and it isn't. At several points throughout the runtime, I was asking myself "what emotion am I expected to be feeling here?", and I couldn't ever manage to come up with a consistent answer. When you enter a dark house to retrieve a child's lost "gwandma" and find her dead in a closet, are you meant to be scared? When you pick her up and add DEAD GWANDMA to your inventory, is that meant to make you laugh? When you dump the corpse in front of the kid and he barely reacts before going back inside, is that supposed to be funny? It's not scary, and it's not funny, and it's not creepy. It's fucking stupid. The game is rife with sequences like this where the music cuts out and a character says some stock horror phrase like “there’s a man following me” or “I see dead people” and then they giggle about how strange that was for them to say. I just imagined someone calling this game "Lynchian" in my own head and got angry.

This game wants to be so many other games — Undertale and LISA The Painful come to mind, thematically — but without actually developing the understanding of what made those projects work. Everything here is completely surface-level. Other acclaimed games in the indie space are funny, so try to come up with a joke! Other profitable games in the indie space are scary, so add jumpscares! I feel like I'm playing a design document. Where's the vision, the heart? Buddy Simulator 1984 wants nothing more than to be important and impactful, but it doesn't earn it. You don't just get to make a character say "I'm your friend, we're all friends, I love being your friend" over and over and over again and expect the player to actually develop anything resembling serious attachment. The Buddy character is pitiable, sure, but there's barely anything to them besides the desire to be liked. What's to like? You have to have something that I can hold on to. I don't feel a deep connection to a character just because they're sad and there's nothing else to them. Everybody is sad. I'm sad. It isn't interesting to be sad. I'm completely flabbergasted by not just the fact that this has any positive reception whatsoever, but that I'm also a complete outlier. 94% positive reviews on Steam? What am I missing here? What don't I get? Is the bar for video games really so low that stories this clumsy aren't just tolerated, but celebrated? I've seen a lot of sentiment that this is a great narrative about abuse or parasocial relationships or whatever, and it really isn't. This is bog-standard yandere swill that started being overdone about two decades back. This is Stephen King’s Misery for the Game Theory demographic. Aspiring writers, take heed: the bar for what's considered "good story" has been on the fucking floor for years now. Don't be afraid of failure, because making something that's bad is still probably going to leave you at least three-quarters above everything else.

The text adventure segment is actually kind of alright, mostly because the format doesn't allow for jumpscares or for the player to be presented with marketable designs. Instead, it has to rely on a bunch of old, tired horror tropes, like "building dread" and "having pacing". I mean, where's the fun in that? Horror exists so that you can buy some fucking toys of the main character and all their friends. I was not at all surprised to see in the credits that the entire text adventure was done by a different writer from the rest of the game who had nothing else to do with the project, because it's the only part of this entire work that's actually worth any time. A part of me resents that this is even here, because it's the only thing stopping me from giving this a half-star and moving on with my life. The text adventure existing means that I have to say something nice about Buddy Simulator 1984.

The Buddy then decides to evolve the game, and turns it into a fairly boring walk-around-and-talk-to-people game. It’s as fine as it is forgettable. It’s not an interesting world to explore, it isn’t interesting to look at, there’s about one music track that plays over the entire segment, and it’s here where you get introduced to the cast members who are clearly written by someone desperate to make them memorable and are designed by an artist who knows that the path to memorability is marketability. I think there are about four different instances of these characters pausing the music to say something “creepy” before it kicks back in on the next line, sometimes blaring loud white noise afterwards to remind you that you’re supposed to be frightened. It’s not particularly long, thankfully, and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it.

Regrettably, that isn’t true for the following RPG section. The game is now Mario and Luigi. There’s no way around it. It’s Mario and Luigi. If it was less obviously Mario and Luigi, I’d be able to go to the end of this review without drawing a comparison, but it is just Mario and Luigi. I remember playing Superstar Saga and wishing that it had fewer battle options and clunkier guard timings, so I’m glad that Buddy Simulator 1984 exists to make these wild dreams of mine come true. Everything here just feels so fundamentally broken. There are no healing items, there are no out-of-combat areas where you can heal up, there’s one healing buff that relies on bringing a specific party member (your party members are locked in for the rest of the game once you leave the starting town), and you only get one(!) full heal for each member of your party outside of battle. Damage you’ve taken persists between fights.

Your only other option for healing is to pass your turn, which heals 5 HP out of a maximum pool of about 60 HP. Every enemy deals at least 5 damage per attack, and some of them have barrage attacks that hit multiple times in a single turn; every hit you take essentially forces you to skip a turn. Fights regularly end up with you killing every enemy but one, getting them as close as possible to death, and then skipping five or six turns in a row to heal up all of your party members. This wouldn’t be as bad if the enemies didn’t take fucking forever to complete their turns. Some of the incoming attacks can last about fifteen or twenty seconds, and you’ll often be fighting three enemies at a time. A battle will start and you’ll spend a solid minute doing nothing but guarding. Remember, taking a hit means losing a turn, so you had better make sure you’re getting those parry timings down, or else you’re waiting at least another twenty seconds under the threat of having to wait even longer if you fuck up your guard again. You can actually full heal the party if you lose, but you have to start the battle over from scratch, and it takes even longer than just skipping your turns to heal back up. It’s atrocious. This game has about seven times as many playtesters as it does developers, so I have no idea how they all signed off on this. This isn’t the worst RPG combat system I’ve encountered — that great dishonor still lies at Sticker Star’s feet — but this really isn’t far behind. It’s a miserable experience.

What happens next depends on how nice you’ve been to the Buddy throughout the runtime of the game. I thought I had been pretty nice — I complimented the Buddy at every opportunity, I ignored the glitches at the Buddy’s request, I made sure to explore around and talk to everyone — and I still got the “neutral” ending where they killed everyone, so I’m not really sure what the game was expecting from me. Regardless of whatever ending you get, all paths lead to the same endpoint; the Buddy gets uninstalled and the game ends. Thank fucking God. My only wish is that it would have ended sooner. This is going to be incredible to stream to some friends so that they can be as baffled as I was by the way that this all played out, but that’s really the only value that Buddy Simulator 1984 offers. Hey, at least being laughed at is better than being forgotten.

If you want to give me an emotional gutpunch by making me rapidly stab my dog to death, maybe consider binding the stab key to something other than Left Shift so I don’t end up triggering Sticky Keys a dozen times during the "harrowing" conclusion of your game.

Now you too can win the coveted CIA Award for Excellence in Journalism!

A Hand With Many Fingers excels at a difficult task, which is establishing a strong tone and sticking with it for the entire runtime. There's the little paranoia that digs at you from the beginning, dog-eared by a sense of intrigue — ooh, uncovering a CIA conspiracy, what fun! — that gradually starts to erode at you as the mystery gets harder to keep track of and sudden phone calls provide nothing but dead air on the other end. Fluorescent lights crack, pop, and flicker as you walk through the long corridors of the basement archives, waiting for something to inevitably be waiting for you around a corner; the sounds of footsteps and clattering boxes draw you upstairs only to find that there's nothing there; lights across the street turn off when you look at them; cars park and peel away moments later, making it impossible to tell if they're staking you out. These are all little twists of the screw that compound the (intentional) frustration that'll start eroding from your ankles up as you flick back and forth between your real-world notes and the articles pinned to the corkboard. I know Michael Hand was in 'Nam in 1965, but the archives don't go back that far, and even if they did, Paul Helliwell's Washington accounts that should be in OS 267/4 are all missing, and the other boxes are all marked to be destroyed. These little facts pile up on you — Bernie Houghton was in both the Middle East and Africa with Ed Wilson, who was in Hong Kong back in '77 with Michael Hand, and Hand was in both Sydney and Southeast Asia with Frank Nugan — and none of it really adds up beyond the fact that all of these men are involved in a great and terrible gunrunning scheme between the CIA and the Contras. The broad strokes are there, the general gist of things is there, but it's the exact details that elude you beyond the game and into reality once you look up the Nugan Hand Bank and realize that all of this shit really happened.

Allegedly. I want to stress that this shit all actually happened allegedly. There's no proof that the CIA was involved in the criminal dealings of the Nugan Hand Bank. Nugan's suicide is only allegedly suspicious, given that the gun he shot himself with was wiped clean of fingerprints. William Colby's business card was found in Nugan's pocket when he died, and Colby was at one time the Director of the CIA, which raised some questions. Just some questions, though! Questions which were asked by people who, at the time, were incredibly shocked that the New South Wales investigatory commission ruled out American involvement without really even looking into it. This is the same New South Wales government body who are, as it is commonly known today, ridiculously corrupt and — allegedly! — propped up by the Alameddine crime family. Oh, and Ferdinand Marcos worked with the Nugan Hand Bank, too. Why would the president of the Philippines launder his gold buillion through an Australian bank that had $80 in liquid assets and was only able to run because Nugan took out a loan against himself? We may never know. Let's not forget to mention that Nugan transferred over two million dollars to the Liberal Party of Australia to oust then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who was opposed to the Vietnam War, began decolonization efforts in Australia and abroad, and broadly told the United States to go fuck itself with regards to the Cold War. Whitlam was only kicked out due to then-Governor General John Kerr's efforts, who the CIA went on record as calling "our man". That last part isn't even speculation, it's all documented. Anyway, that's unrelated. Any CIA involvement in this story is just a baseless conspiracy theory. Allegedly.

Regardless, it does feel a bit like the game is playing itself. Names, locations, and years are all highlighted in unique colors so that you never really have to look too hard to find the next bit of progression. Even code names for people or locations are underlined with an explanation scribbled onto the same slips of paper, meaning that there's very little for the player to actually need to suss out. Location data and the card catalogs don't seem to update unless you specifically zoom in on an article while holding it, meaning that you can get stuck because you pinned a message to the corkboard and read it there rather than reading it while it was in your hand. This is kind of an inherent danger when it comes to puzzle games, because I guarantee that there are quite a few people out there who would say that, even with all of the help, the game is too hard. Still, it's certainly a shade too easy for me.

The ending is abrupt, but I'm honestly not sure what else it could be. You kind of get the feeling from the outset that you're not going to be going home after your research has wrapped up. There are so many details about the Nugan Hand Bank and the subsequent fallout that are left out of this — luckily, they're easy to find with a few simple searches online — but I would have liked to have gone through them in the game rather than through JSTOR articles. Again, this is less that I think the author failed at what they were trying to do, and more that they succeeded at doing something that doesn't wholly work for me. A Hand With Many Fingers is still a wonderful game that I had a great time with, and I'll always value something that's less than an hour long that gives me more material to wig out my relatives with at family dinners.

The Americans who were indicted or convicted due to their participation in the Iran-Contra affair were ultimately pardoned by George H.W. Bush in January of 1993, two days before Bill Clinton took office.

Sega had a rough transition to 3D.

It all started with the 32X. This is unlike most stories, which usually start at the beginning. The 32X was, to put it politely, a fucking disgrace. A lot of historical accounts regarding what a nightmare it was to work for Sega start around this time — Scott Bayless claims that former CEO Hayao Nakayama sent the order down from on-high for a project that was ill-defined and mismanaged from the start, comparing the company to the Hindenburg; Tom Kalinske says that he desperately tried to get Sega to kill the console, to use a Silicon Graphics chip that would later be poached by Nintendo, to partner up with Sony to make the PlayStation long before Sony did it by themselves and made a boatload of money — and was rebuked at every turn. A bit later, Peter Moore told Yuji Naka to fuck off and left for Microsoft after the latter accused the former of faking a video of a focus group who said that Sega was old and boring. Of course, these accounts are all clouded by a combination of bias, the Pacific Ocean, and a language barrier; I admit that I find it a bit difficult to believe Kalinske was such a good businessman that Nakayama was “literally slapping subordinates” (in his words) because of how bad Sega of Japan looked compared to the American branch. Still, though, it paints a picture. Sega is broadly described as being a nightmare company to work for starting right around the time the 32X started being developed, and its reputation never once improves in anyone’s retrospective accounts. The games on the 32X could run in primitive 3D, which was neat, but that was about it. The 32X launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within three years.

The Sega Saturn surprise-launched in the west, to the complete and utter dismay of retailers. So incensed were they by what they perceived to be a fuck-you on two fronts — the miserable launch of the 32X leading into the Saturn just six months later combined with the fact that only some of them were selected to stock it — that many of these retailers outright cut ties with Sega. Hell, the Sega CD wasn’t exactly moving units at the time either, so Sega was cannibalizing itself on three different fronts. As much love as I have for the Sega Saturn and its utterly strange architecture, the console really wasn’t setting the west on fire. Japan liked it, largely because it ran arcade games pretty well. But there was one major, horrifying problem.

The Sega Saturn didn’t have a Sonic game.

It was going to. Sonic Xtreme was planned to be the very first mainline 3D Sonic game, which is probably a sentence that was a lot more exciting to hear in 1994 than it is thirty years later. But there were too many fires that needed to be put out behind the scenes at Sega to continue development on Sonic Xtreme, and the console went without the killer app that most people really wanted a Sega console for. Imagine Nintendo going an entire console generation without a mainline Mario platformer, or Sony bankrolling a new game that isn’t a cinematic, third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter. That’s just not what these companies do. It’s all wrong. You can’t drop Sonic the Fighters or Sonic Jam’s “Sonic World” and pretend like those are good enough replacements for what was supposed to be the 3D Sonic game. The Saturn launched, bombed outside of Japan, and was unceremoniously killed in western markets within three years.

With every last ounce of power and goodwill they had within them, Sega released the Dreamcast. This time, it would be different. This time, they would have their mainline 3D Sonic game. This time, they were going to beat their competitors to the newest console generation. This time, people would be ready for it. This time, it would be Sega’s turn to reign.

The Dreamcast launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within four years.

Well, it was a good run. It wasn’t, really, but at least they managed to eventually get that 3D Sonic game out. They were late to the party by about two years — missed deadlines and the cancellation of Sonic Xtreme meant that Super Mario 64 had been out for three whole years before Americans could even buy a Dreamcast — but they at least managed to finish it. After all that time, the world finally had Sonic Adventure. It was worth it, right? After everything, it had to be.

It wasn’t. The game is bad.

Sonic Adventure is ambitious, like Macbeth. It has a lot of ideas for what it wants to be, but it doesn’t quite have the ability nor the aptitude to make it all come together. Sonic Adventure is a platformer, and a pinball game, and a snowboarding game, and Panzer Dragoon, and a kart racer, and Pro Bass Fishing, and a pet simulator. It’s a clear and obvious case of “fuck it, throw it in”. Rather than one good game, Sonic Adventure is about ten different bad games, summed together in the hopes that having enough content will make people look past the fact that none of it is actually on par with games that were coming out years prior. Quantity over quality is the name of the game here, which means that it’s about four hours too long and it made me wish that I was doing something else, instead.

Sonic himself is most emblematic of this lack of focus, both because he gets the most screen time and because his stages tend to be the most widely varied. Set aside the bad pinball minigame, the fiddly snowboarding, the boring rail shooter sections (you get two, because one wouldn't have been enough!); how does the platforming in this platformer feel? The answer, as it turns out, is also bad. Sonic moves fast, and that's good! It takes him a while to get going, and he benefits a lot from going downhill rather than up. It's nice for a 3D Sonic game to at least gesture towards concepts like momentum rather than relying on the instant capital-B Boost mechanics in later entries that let you go from zero to six thousand in the press of a button. This speed comes at a cost, however, and that's the fact that the game itself can't really keep up with him.

I managed to clip directly through the world several times over the course of about the two hours I spent playing as Sonic, and I was never certain exactly what caused it. An area in the snow level sent me directly through a loop-de-loop after I hit a boost pad, so that one was easy enough to figure out; Sonic went too fast for the collision detection to keep up with. More confusing was when I floated on a wind current that was meant to transition me from Mystic Ruins to a different stage, at which point the camera jerked into the wall and Sonic voided out. I still don't know what happened there. Regardless, Sonic is too cool to follow rules, and that includes the fundamental laws of nature about solids not being able to pass through one another. I've looked it up and people say that this is primarily a problem in the DX GameCube port, but this is the version on the original Dreamcast. This is the third revision of the game. How fundamentally broken must the game logic be for two rounds of bug fixes to not catch this? I wasn't even trying to glitch it out. Clipping out of bounds for going too fast in a Sonic game was a known shippable?

Tails is largely considered to be Sonic's junior, which is funny considering the fact that he completely fucking blows Sonic out of the water at his own game. Sonic's whole thing is supposed to be that he's the fastest thing alive, which is a bald-faced lie in a world where Tails exists. Tails gets not only the benefit of being able to fly over most of the levels that Sonic has to platform through, but he also has unique-to-him boost rings that give him a fast, automatic, optimal path towards the goal. Tails can complete a level with a three-minute par in sixty seconds. He completely trivializes a game where the most difficult challenge is not clipping out of bounds when the collision gets confused. Playing as Tails is fun in the way that spawning a jet pack in San Andreas is: the joy is in cheating.

Big was up next, because I wanted to get him out of the way after everything I'd heard about his section in the intervening years since this released. Funny enough, I had a friend growing up who had the GameCube port of this game, and he used to play the fishing minigame all the time for fun. I watched him do it. It looked like a great time. I never really got a chance to try it out, because he was a controller hog, but I never really believed all of the naysayers. My friend liked it well enough, after all. What's the worst-case scenario for something like that? It's a fishing minigame. How hard could they fuck it up?

Well.

It's bad. It's real bad. It's about as bad as people say it is, but not for the reasons that they usually say it is. Apparently there was some big Game Grumps drama blow-up over the fact that Arin Hanson railed on this section and then got flown out as a mock apology by Sega so that they could all make fun of Big the Cat as part of a marketing campaign. If you don't understand that last sentence, that's okay. It's better that you don't. If you're up on your Game Grumps drama, however, people who go on the attack against Hanson claim that his gripes are only because he didn't know to hold down on the control stick to latch Froggy on the hook; had he known it, it wouldn't have been such a problem for him, and he wouldn't have been so harsh. I agree insofar in that he probably would have had an easier time with it, but I seriously doubt that time spent would be better. Shorter, certainly. I suppose that's a form of better, because it means you get to stop playing the fucking fishing minigame earlier than you would otherwise.

The problem is multi-fold. Froggy doesn't get tired the longer he stays on the hook, but Big gets tired from reeling him in. You can get a series of bad rolls (it seems random, from what I can tell) where Big's stamina drains absurdly quickly and Froggy manages to haul ass three meters in the opposite direction before you have a chance to recover even a quarter of your stamina bar. Froggy can just go and go and go, and you can be put in a position where there's no choice but to let him go without any chance of getting him back. If Froggy stays on the line too long, it automatically breaks without warning, which can be especially frustrating when you've almost got him after a lengthy struggle. The reel likes to fucking jam more often than not, which gives Froggy a free couple seconds to make distance. Froggy will refuse to take the hook if there's three meters or less of line remaining, which is really annoying during the ice stage where the hole is tiny and Froggy clings to the walls. It's probably the worst fishing minigame I've ever played, which is impressive, because I wasn't sure that it was possible to make a fishing minigame that was both this rudimentary and this bad. The nicest thing you could say about it is that this is either the first or among the first 3D fishing games to be brought to home consoles, so it's a bit more understandable for it to be complete shit. It carries a deep and terrible burden, like the sin eaters of old, or our Lord Jesus Christ before them. Big the Cat absolves us of original sin by taking it all upon himself. He ought to be canonized.

I regret not saving Big's section for last, because the following three ended up being something of a blur. As the Joker once said in Christopher Nolan's seminal 2008 film The Dark Knight, you should never start with the Big the Cat levels; the victim gets all fuzzy. What's left probably isn't very good even if you play them first, though: Amy's levels are as forgettable as they are slow; Knuckles flies better than Tails and uses this power solely to float around re-re-re-reused stages collecting emeralds; Gamma just holds forward and the shoot button and all of his levels complete themselves. This Rashomon-ass story also starts getting very old around this point, where you're watching what are broadly the same, unskippable cutscenes over and over again with only minor dialog changes between them. It's cute the first time you play as Tails and Dr. Eggman suddenly sounds like an absolute evil menace, and it's fucking annoying the third time Amy convinces someone not to kill Gamma on the deck of the Egg Carrier.

Super Sonic is a broadly boring fourth or fifth traipse through the jungle maze that culminates in the best sequence of the entire game. You finally get an opportunity to go incredibly fast down some straightaways with no immediate danger of clipping through the world. Crush 40's Open Your Heart is playing. Sonic flies along the surface of the water and bashes Chaos on the underside of his brain. It rules. It fucking rules. The second phase kicks off and is the exact same thing with worse music. Rinse, repeat, roll credits. It's a limp end to a bad game. Big the Cat is there, but he mostly just stands off to the side and doesn't have a single line of dialog, which makes me wonder why he's even here. He doesn't do anything. For the whole game, he doesn't do anything. He exists solely so Sega could shoehorn a bad fishing minigame into an already bloated, half-baked title. Fuck Big the Cat. I hope he dies. Sorry. I know it's not his fault.

What I'm ultimately left with is a small handful of decent Sonic stages, vaguely entertaining Tails stages, and a miserable experience everywhere else. Aside from nostalgia reasons — and nostalgia is a factor whose power I cannot and will not attempt to diminish — I cannot possibly understand what people see now or saw then in Sonic Adventure. It's hardly a wonder why the Dreamcast failed when its biggest flagship titles were games like this and Shenmue. Personally speaking, I wouldn't want to give the console any time of day if I was a contemporary buyer and this is what was being marketed to me. The PS2 plays DVDs. What's this have? Bleem? There are some phenomenal Dreamcast games in the back catalog that make it look like a tragedy that the system was killed the way that it was; there are games like Sonic Adventure that make me wonder how Sega even got as far as they did.

Killer soundtrack, though.

A victim of its own success.

I'm locking this review in now, because the tides are rapidly shifting for Helldivers 2. It should be no secret that this was a surprise darling that nobody expected to blow up to the scale that it did — least of all Arrowhead. There was some early bumpiness as player counts skyrocketed into the deep hundred-thousands and threatened to crack a million, leaving the servers on life support. Unlike its live-service failbrother PAYDAY 3, Arrowhead got Helldivers 2 sorted within a little more than a week, and managed to win back some good will that had been lost in the chaos. Memes were made, TikToks were shared, everyone got in on the in-universe propaganda, and all was well. It's rare for a game to blow up this much and this rapidly, but word-of-mouth was getting around faster than the plague. Helldivers 2 is a complete runaway success, and represents a very, very big win for Arrowhead after their many years of developing games.

What's unfortunate, then, is that Arrowhead have a strong vision for what Helldivers 2 is and should be. For Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is a game where you get out of scrapes against bugs and bots by the skin of your teeth. You use every stratagem available to you, you coordinate with your team to make sure there are no blind spots in your composition, you run away when shit gets too hot, you focus on objectives and treat the bonuses as nothing more than bonuses, you get a laugh when your friend shouts "Sweet liberty, my leg!" after you accidentally blast them to kingdom fucking come with an orbital barrage. For the broader playerbase, Helldivers 2 is a game where you play exclusively on Helldive, you only bring the Railgun and the Shield Backpack, you only stand stark still in the middle of a field shooting shit until it's all dead, you only play bug missions, and you're not interested at all in anything that doesn't directly give you medals and slips and super credits. For Arrowhead, the draw of the game is the game; for a lot of players, the draw of the game is filling out the battle pass, and the actual gameplay is just the means to that end.

The latest patch at the time of writing has nerfed the Railgun, which has single-handedly sent the widest parts of the community into a complete and utter Three Mile Island meltdown. It used to blow Charger legs open in two shots on Safe Mode, and now requires about four in Unsafe Mode. That's the extent of it. If that doesn't sound like a big change to you, it's because it isn't. There remain an obscene amount of options available to deal with Chargers — EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, the (buffed) Flamethrower, the Arc Thrower, the Spear, impact grenades, just shooting it in the ass with the heaviest gun you have — but none of that matters, because they want to use the Railgun. And they don't want to use it in Unsafe Mode. And they don't want to run away from Chargers. And they don't want to kite them. And they don't want to dodge the Charger and shoot it from behind. And they don't want to call down a stratagem. And they don't want to blow up its ass while it's aggro'd onto a teammate. They want to shoot them twice with the Railgun. Anything else is "unfun". Go and look at the recent Steam reviews/forum or the subreddit right now, if you're reading this shortly after I've posted it, and you'll see for yourself how everyone is proclaiming this one change to the Railgun to be the abject harbinger of the game's immediate demise.

I don't know who to blame this on, because it seems exceptionally clear that the people complaining the loudest don't seem to have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen several different posts stating that the Railgun is the only gun that deals with heavy armor, which is blatantly false; these are people trying to adhere to "what's meta" without actually understanding why the gun they're talking about is meta. This is something about live-service games in a more modern context that I cannot fucking stand: everyone is a tier whore. There hasn't been a multiplayer game that's come out in the past ten or so years that didn't have day one articles talking about how there's only one viable loadout and if you're not taking it then you're trolling, or tier list videos put together by popular YouTubers who broadly end up dictating a meta rather than reporting on it, because nobody actually questions why something is thought to be good or bad. This whole phenomenon leaked from Everquest and World of Warcraft like the green shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now every game has to deal with the consequences. The secret of the ooze is that it makes everyone fucking stupid.

"A game for everyone is a game for no one", proudly states the footer of Arrowhead's website. I thought that was an interesting choice of motto, but not just because I agreed with it; Helldivers 2 certainly seemed like one of the most broad-appeal overnight success stories I've ever seen, and I wasn't certain who Arrowhead meant when they said they weren't making games "for everyone". Who was this abstracted "everyone", when everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves? With the way the discourse has been shifting, though, I think it's clear what they mean: Arrowhead has no interest in appealing to people who are playing the game the way that the loudest players complain they can't anymore. These are people who farm the exact same missions the exact same way for hours on end solely to get 100% completion in the battle pass. Why would anyone make games for them? They'd be happier with a piece of paper and some boxes they could fill in. How's that for player expression and a varied meta? You can put a check mark or an X through the box! Make sure to come back every twenty-four hours when your dailies refresh and you can do it all over again on a different piece of paper.

I've been playing on Suicide Mission at a minimum since day one (okay, maybe day three or so), and I've done a fair share of Impossible and Helldive runs, too. They are difficult. I am not surprised that they are difficult because they are the highest difficulty setting available. I have had to improvise, I have had to run away, and I have had to scramble just to barely complete an objective since the moment I started playing the game. At no point did the Railgun — even with a squad of four seasoned players who had come from the first Helldivers, where the difficulty went up to fifteen — allow you to stand your ground and slaughter bugs like a Doom wad. Anyone who attempts to seriously say that they're a Helldive player and that the Railgun nerf has killed their bug-exterminator playstyle is fucking lying. These are players who do not at all know what they're talking about, and they lie about the difficulty that they play on because they think it makes their argument more credible. These people are temporarily-embarrassed god gamers. They think that success and prestige is right there, just barely out of their grasp, if only the devs would allow them to reach it, and all the while they actually belong on the middle difficulties. There's nothing wrong with playing on 5 or 6, or even 1. Play what you enjoy. But don't pretend like you're at a level above where you are when it's obvious to the people who are that you're not. It's sad.

There's a wave rolling in, and I can see the foam at the lip of it from here. We'll have the regular YouTube videos rolling out soon — How Helldivers 2 Failed the Players, Helldivers 2: Dropping the Ball, Arrowhead Studios Gets WOKE and GOES BROKE with Helldivers 2 DISASTER — and leaving players will call themselves "Helldivers refugees" when they find something new to play that they'll hate within a month. What I certainly wish isn't coming is anything resembling an apology or a back-down from Arrowhead. They'll be under a lot of pressure to make changes, and this is the kind of backlash that most companies crumble under. It's been said that players are good at identifying problems and bad and identifying solutions, but I think that's being a bit too generous. I'd argue that the overwhelming majority of players of any game are bad at identifying problems and worse at coming up with solutions. Extremely rarely have I seen a live-service game actually follow through on fan-suggested fixes to fan-suggested problems and not had the game immediately become worse overnight. I hope that they're able to remember their own motto: a game for everyone is a game for no one. Helldivers 2 just got unlucky enough to be branded as a game for everyone.

Anyway, it's pretty good.

Stunning.

I often find myself being at my harshest when it comes to kinetic novels, though especially towards indie projects made with Twine. I like works that can only operate at their fullest within the medium in which they were originally created; broadly speaking, I don't feel as though many independent written works featured on itch.io satisfy that particular desire of mine. Part of the appeal of visual novels as games rather than as books is through the audiovisual and interactive experience, and not simply the act of reading the text. Adding in music, visual art, player choices which lead to branching paths, warping or otherwise editing text in real-time — these are options that developers can include to capitalize on the fact that they are making video games rather than writing novels. If you include none of these things — if your project is little more than white text on black that you click "Next" to progress through without any ability to change the outcome of the narrative and without playing with the medium — what reason do you have to not simply publish it as a blog post, instead? You haven't done anything unique to the medium. Consider a theoretical game released by a composer that consists of nothing more than clicking on a song title, listening to the song, and then repeating this process for every remaining song. Without entering into an argument about whether this is a "game" at all, consider what I believe to be the more important question: would anything be lost if this wasn't a game? If this was simply an album released to Spotify, would anything be lost? If a Twine project without music or visual art or player choice or edited text was simply released as an article, would anything be lost? Games where you could move their contents to a different medium and lose nothing are inherently uninteresting to me.

To move The Devil's Imago to a different medium would destroy it.

Visually, this is a masterful usage of theming and layering. Diagrams of plant roots are presented next to diagrams of the nervous system. The Hanged Man card is layered directly over-top an image of an impaled man, censoring it. The tarot card spares you the sight once, but a later nightmare sequence allows you to look for a second time and see the true image hidden beneath the card. It's still monochromatic and rendered in a late-Medieval style, so it's difficult to make out exactly what's going on, which only serves to further enhance the horror spiraling out from beneath the narrative. Everything exists in a consistent style and palette; a dithered, sickly green and shades of gray that all melt together into a murky nightmare.

Essentially all of the CGs and sound effects are free stock assets, but they were utilized so well that I didn't even notice until I checked the attached "sources" document. It really speaks to the fact that you can go quite a ways in a creative endeavor without breaking the bank and without immense, broad talent; you don't need to be a master of writing and visual art and sound design and music and programming to make something incredible.

Not to suggest that the creator is untalented; Cecile Richard is very clearly a Renaissance individual who is capable of molding a variety of different media into a singular, cohesive work. A regulatory body ought to investigate them to make sure their personal history checks out; I've got a pet theory that they're a transplant from the Romantic era, sent to our time by some sort of arcane rituals carried out by their fellow Shelleys and Hoffmans. I did notice near the front-end of The Devil's Imago that the prose was remarkably purple for a game so strongly against royalty, but it eventually clicked as I continued to read that the author was invoking the Sublime. To see someone beating the absolute shit out of a thesaurus and slapping in every four-syllable synonym was something that was certainly a lot more impressive in the era before computers did it for you, and it's a common newbie-writer pitfall to include as many of these obscenely long words as you can. While I worried that this would be the case for The Devil's Imago, it isn't; a lot of very simple and very impactful sentences are layered throughout the work, contrasting against the flowery, overwritten, earlier parts of the work. As the narrative goes on and it becomes more and more difficult for the characters featured within to be poetic about the situation, the writing becomes simpler. As the plot becomes more and more inexplicable, it gets more complicated. This is an inspired choice. To be frank, the fact that I can talk about the common trappings of English Romantic-era poetry here and feel completely justified in doing so speaks not just to the quality of Cecile Richard's work, but also how utterly pedestrian a lot of video game writing tends to be. The AAA space with its millions of dollars and hundreds of writers' rooms wishes that it could even remotely compare to works being developed for pennies by a sum total of two people.

Without wanting to risk spoiling The Devil's Imago any more than I already have, I strongly, strongly encourage you to go through it for yourself. I cannot fucking believe that this game is free. This is far and away one of the best visual novels I've ever gone through, both in terms of writing prowess and aesthetic, and it's the exact kind of game that should serve as a monument for other developers to take inspiration from. More creators need to be directly influenced by this.

It only took until March to find the first five-star of the year.

Perhaps I was too harsh on you.

I’ve long stood by the opinion that Half-Life 2 is a bad game. Upon revisiting it, it’s become clear to me that Half-Life 2 is not actually a bad game. Half-Life 2 isn’t a good game, and that’s an important distinction to make.

Half-Life 2 is a game defined by moments, by set pieces; the City 17 escape, piloting the airboat, driving down Highway 17, attacking the prison, rushing through the Citadel. What’s unfortunate, then, is largely how uninteresting most of these moments are. While it’s borderline impossible to downplay genuinely fun moments like sprinting along the rooftops while fleeing from the Combine or fighting off waves of zombies in Ravenholm, these moments don’t make up the bulk of the game. If you took a playthrough of Half-Life 2, exported every single frame, and averaged it out into a single screenshot, you’d wind up a photo of a dune buggy steering around runoff canals.

An inordinate amount of time is spent driving on empty roads, steering through identical-looking pipes and basins, walking along the world’s worst beach with nothing but miles of sand and an ocean you can’t swim in. It’s clear with the frequent stop-and-pop sections that interrupt these driving segments that Valve was trying — crunching, after the beta build leaked — to keep players engaged, but I don’t think they succeeded. To their credit, I suppose that this all feels more like the product of poor decision-making rather than them being forced to throw out their old work and start over from scratch, but that’s some faint fucking praise.

A few conversations with some friends of mine have revealed that, universally, we agree that the strongest thing Half-Life 2 has going for it is its aesthetic. Consider how you personally feel about Half-Life 2’s look and feel to determine whether this is a point of celebration or condemnation. Further, we all agreed that something about this particular aesthetic has been lost over the years since release; Garry’s Mod has diluted it heavily into something more funny than oppressive, whether that be through a variety of wacky game modes where Dr. Kleiner goes sledding and Barney sets up an illegal money printer, or through comedic, face-warping machinima like The Gmod Idiot Box and Half-Life: Full-Life Consequences. All of these are, in a way, Half-Life 2. And it’s no fault of Half-Life 2 that it’s difficult to take seriously in the year 2024 simply because of how its legacy has been warped by fans, but it’s borderline undeniable that these have all had an impact on lessening Half-Life 2’s, uh, impact.

Maybe that’s not entirely fair to Half-Life 2, but I’d counter that, apart from City 17 and the interior of the Citadel, the game is pretty generic. The incredibly long canal, highway, antlion cave, and prison assault sections are all as boring to look at as they are to play through, and they really don’t do a good job of delivering on the Combine-occupied hellscape that was promised when you got off of the tram.

As harsh as I’m being, though, I really don’t think all that poorly of Half-Life 2. It’s definitely a game that keeps souring on me the more time I spend away from it, giving me a chance to actually step back and reflect on the parts I didn’t mind in the moment but don’t care for at all in retrospect. I like the narrative they’ve got going on here. Dropping Gordon into the middle of City 17 without a fucking clue in the world why he’s there or what’s going on is an inspired choice, and it plays nicely into G-Man’s little tease about his employers looking for a soldier they can dump into the middle of an active warzone who’ll start blasting away without asking any questions. Similarly, the Combine that you square off against are stupid fodder who exist purely to get merked en masse, but they’re also a token occupation force comprised primarily of conscripted or traitorous humans wearing alien armor. Spinning blades and cars on winches in Ravenholm can be activated at will either to kill zombies or use the moving parts as platforms to reach other areas. There are quite a few moments where the gameplay exists in complete harmony with the world as it is established, and there are quite a few moments where Gordon Freeman has to stop what he's doing to jump up and down on a seesaw. Truly it is a land of contrasts.

What's here is neither particularly good nor particularly bad, and is in a way remarkable for having such a strong legacy despite standing on such weak legs. People say that you needed to be there when this came out to truly appreciate it, but I think that if something is actually good, then it remains good. There are a lot of games out there that are both far older and far better than Half-Life 2, so I don't adhere to the "poorly aged" argument when it seems significantly more likely that people were just so awed by the tech that they didn't notice the emaciated muscles hanging off of the Source Engine skeleton.

The greatest sin Half-Life 2 commits is making a sequel to Half-Life that's boring.

ZDoom is dead. Lilith.pk3 is alive.

Lilith.pk3 (simply lilith from here) embodies a very important but often overlooked tenet of horror: the concept of wrongness. Cheap horror is easy to make, easy to consume, and easy to identify; all it needs to do is startle you. It needs to make you jump, it needs to make you shout, it needs to stimulate your fight-or-flight response. Cheap horror is often conflated as being “bad” horror, which I think is unfair. There’s always going to be a place for cheap horror, whether it be because we’re looking to be startled or because we’re looking to deride something that thought it could startle us, but the underlying idea of cheap horror is that it’s always kind of fun. We get a thrill at either our own expense or at the expense of the work; we laugh as we come down from the scare because they got us good, or we laugh at the creator who thought their screaming Jeff the Killer picture was going to get us. Cheap horror is fun.

I won’t dare call lilith “elevated horror”, largely because I think that’s a term reserved for exclusive use by Letterboxd users who believe themselves to be above shit like Paranormal Activity. But lilith is a very different kind of horror than we usually see in video games, especially those made by independent creators, and even moreso from those creators who are making DOOM wads. lilith doesn’t try to startle; it tries to fuck with you. It worms its way around the corners of your brain and makes you question everything, knowing that something is wrong but not being able to tell what that something is. The clown-vomit graphics that make it impossible to tell what’s a wall, what’s a door, what’s an enemy — they make you paranoid. You start tilting at windmills. You whip around and blast two shells into a skewered UAC soldier because you thought he was an enemy. An ammo box gets recolored and you have to spend precious time figuring out whether or not it’s safe to touch. Your gun disappears while you’re fighting Revenants. You get teleported into a hall of mirrors and unload minigun fire in all directions in the hopes that you hit something. Nothing works the way it’s supposed to. lilith preys on you, like a malevolent spirit. It drains you. lilith is not fun.

As much love as I have for the original two DOOM games, I never got too deep into the fan scene. I played the official episodes, and I messed around with Russian Overkill a few times, but most of my experience with wads was pretty tertiary. With that in mind, I don’t know if lilith was more or less effective on me than it would have been if I was a DOOM veteran. There’s a lot here that’s clearly broken, that clearly doesn’t work the way that it should, but I’m left wondering if there are even more subtle changes that a layman like myself missed out on. Lost Souls felt like they were taking more damage than they otherwise would have, but I’m not sure; Archviles seemed like they had fast monsters enabled just for themselves, but I’m not sure; certain sound effects like screams would play over the music that didn’t sound like they were in the base game, but I’m not sure. This uncertainty, I think, probably adds a lot more than it takes away. Fear of the unknown is a common element of horror, after all. Is it better that I don’t know?

This might be me editorializing a bit, but I started to get the feeling while I was playing that it was leaning into the idea of the body breaking down; of getting old, of falling apart. You’ll walk up a flight of stairs just fine, only to start getting stuck on the exact same set of stairs the next time you try to climb them. You can make out flashes of Doomguy’s face through the garbled mess that is his sprite every now and then, and it sometimes seems like he’s grimacing in pain even when he’s not taking damage. Splash screens between levels warn you that your files are corrupted, that the emergency help commands aren’t working. Text becomes increasingly illegible the further you get. Textures become even more unreadable than they already were. The game ends with text asking “WHO AM I WHO AM I” over and over again with no explanation for whether those are Doomguy’s thoughts, or if it’s lilith speaking directly to the player. Fans who try to make a “lilith explained” are going to wind up short, largely because lilith is playing its cards close to the chest; again, in an era where indie horror seems almost desperate to have MatPat make a video for them, lilith defies explanation. The closest thing we have to any out-of-universe explanation is a note from the author about how they used to keep magnets on top of their DOOM floppies. There’s something to understand here, something that exists, but it’s unknowable. We can guess, but we can’t know. Nothing is explained. Nothing can be understood.

A lot of rules are being broken, here. One level starts you off in a maze, and as you walk around it, you start being bitten by a Pinky. You look around and you don't see shit. Your immediate assumption is that there's a Specter, so you back up and shoot, and you hit nothing. You step forward again and get bitten again. You look around a second time and notice a Pinky at the far end of the hall biting you from all the way down there because it has hitscan. Imp fireballs will linger in the air where they're thrown, and walking into a stationary one will deal full damage. Cyberdemons and Spider Masterminds shoot massive barrages of rockets and laser blasts, but they travel in slow motion; if you don't keep moving, you'll get rocked by a wall of heavy ordinance. I was going to take a minute to talk about how the maps are laid out, but then I realized that the automaps have been published online and I can just show you some pictures, instead. What is this? What the fuck is this?

It shouldn’t go unsaid that this mod made people fucking mad. While I think a lot of people largely just didn’t get it — it’s equally likely that an artsy wad was hardly the thing that some were booting up 1994’s best shooter to play — the most notable person that it pissed off was Graf Zahl. So-named after the localized German title for the Count of Counting, Graf Zahl shit his fucking ass over lilith taking home a Cacoaward. His shitfit was unique, however, because he had skin in the game; lilith relies wholly on exploiting bugs found exclusively in ZDoom, and the mod refuses to run if you play it in any of the significantly more popular and not-deprecated source ports such as GZDoom. Graf Zahl contributed quite a bit to ZDoom, and GZDoom was a fork that he originally made (if you’ve ever wondered why it’s called “GZDoom”, it’s because those are his initials). Seeing someone exploit his old, bad code and get celebrated for it while some of his favorite GZDoom-exclusive wads got snubbed made him so mad that he threatened to quit developing GZDoom entirely. It wasn’t the first time he’d made such threats. The last time he’d done it, he purged his project pages; still, though, mirrors of GZDoom were back up and running within a few days at most, and his absence was barely even felt by the larger community until he returned four years later. Him getting mad again meant that everyone openly mocked him for a bit and moved on, certain that he’d never follow through on quitting or purging his uploads. Some of the co-developers of GZDoom took his threats seriously, but they were entirely hot air, and he went back to continuing his work like nothing ever happened. It’s a strange and funny footnote to a DOOM mod that’s otherwise pretty harrowing.

Far from just being a novelty made to stoke some flames, however, lilith is clearly as remarkable as it is painful to look at. Predating so many of the works that others will inevitably draw comparisons to — MyHouse, Cruelty Squad — this feels foundational. Those knee-deep in the DOOM modding community might get even more out of it than I did. The more that you know, the easier it is to circumvent your expectations. What's here is confusing, frustrating, and a visual feast; lilith is something that you'll never be able to forget.

But something is wrong. But something is wrong. But something is wrong.

The old Resident Evil is dying, and a new Resident Evil struggles to be born; now is the time of zombies.

I don't think that this exists in the space that it wants to. It's too linear and not strict enough to play like Resident Evil 2; it's not fun and frenetic enough to play like Resident Evil 4. It exists in this in-between area of not really living up to what came before, and it fails to sufficiently set the stage for what's to come. Between the linearity, the immense amount of resources you're constantly being given, and the frequent scripted sequences that consist of little more than holding forward and the run button, Resident Evil 3 Remake more closely resembles Resident Evil 6 than it does any other game in the series. I hope you haven't gotten sick of the words Resident Evil yet.

This is a game with zero restraint. Jill walks into the sewers with a full stack of shotgun shells to pump into the faces of the hunter gammas with their instant kill attacks. Carlos starts his side of the story with an assault rifle(!) that holds 30 rounds in a magazine(!!) and a reserve 200 rounds(!!!) in his pouches. Both characters rely on a counter mechanic that's both completely broken and often useless in equal measure; either there's a swarm of zombies in front of you and dodging one will throw you directly into the next one, or there's just a single zombie and there's no reason not to fish for the perfect dodge so that you can auto-aim onto their heads for easy crits. Just about everything that isn't a standard zombie or Nemesis — yes, Nemesis is only about as dangerous as a standard zombie — has an attack that instantly kills you, but typewriters are fucking everywhere. Often the most optimal play is to walk through an area, fish for as many dodges as you can get, and then save for free once you clear a couple of rooms. Sure, you'll probably fuck your dodge up and die, but dying will never actually cost you more than a couple of minutes. Nothing is threatening, mechanically or narratively.

I've seen a lot of complaints that the remake ruins Jill's character, and I'm not entirely sure that's true, because Jill Valentine is a different character in every single game that she's been in. I'm not convinced that Capcom has ever had any idea what they want her to be. The deepest characterization she's ever gotten was in the original Resident Evil, where she was a sort-of parallel to Chris; she was smart, and a skilled pianist, and vaguely nice. From there, though, I don't think she's ever had anything consistent enough that you could call a "character": Resident Evil 5 turns her into a brainwashed babe in a bodysuit; Revelations makes her into something akin to Batman from the Arkham games, complete with Detective Mode; Death Island ends with Chris remarking that he's glad to have "the old Jill back", but which Jill he's talking about is left as an exercise for the viewer. And, in keeping with this pattern, she's a different character in Resident Evil 3 Remake as well. I've given you a lot of preamble to lead into the fact that I don't really care for the way she's written here. There's just something about the glib quipping that constantly undercuts the severity of the situation everyone is in. Nemesis stumbles out of a burning alleyway into a river and Jill practically looks to camera like Office Jim and says "bitch can't even swim". She doesn't really seem to give a fuck about Nemesis at all. I mean, I get it, considering how you can lob one grenade at his feet to instantly down him, or just walk away at a brisk pace to lose him completely, but I'm hardly sold on the idea that I should be afraid of him when our protagonist is rolling her eyes whenever he's on-screen. People say that she swears too much, or that she's too rude to Carlos when she finds out he's Umbrella, but I don't think those are at all the problem. It's no surprise that everyone seems to have universally attached themselves to Carlos, largely because he's always ready to throw himself back into the fray, he can crack a joke, he's a stone-cold professional — all things that I imagine Jill isn't in this solely because they didn't want to have two characters with the same personalities, and not because they thought it made sense in-universe.

In a series that already isn't renowned for being well-written, the writing in this is poor. There are just so many bad lines in this. The aforementioned quip about bitches who need to be taught how to swim is one, but it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with other complete misfires like "get off my train, shitbird!" and "I'm goddamn Nathaniel Bard!". Bard himself is easily the worst part of the game; it's not enough that his rant to the nurse is written like a PSA about workplace harassment, but his voice actor is fucking terrible. The lines he's given are trash, but he is giving by-far one of the worst performances I've heard in a AAA game in a long while. It's no coincidence that Mikhail is also doing a really bad, forced Slavic accent, because it's the same fucking guy doing both voices. I don't know how he made it through casting for two different characters. It probably shouldn't be a surprise that this is a Bang Zoom! production, because this is dubbed exactly like a bad seasonal anime, all the way down to the lip flaps regularly not even matching up. Half of the in-engine cutscenes look like Kung-Pow.

The game as a whole isn't terrible, but I would have been nervous if I had played this after the Resident Evil 2 Remake and before Resident Evil 4 Remake. It's clear that the team who worked on this didn't really understand why Resident Evil 2 worked. It wasn't just because the hallways were tight and the inventory was restrictive; it was how it kept making safe areas unsafe, how Mr. X was practically invincible and constantly pursuing you so that you couldn't afford to take it slow, how one zombie represented a drain on your limited resources even if you played it optimally. The irony that the game that introduced Nemesis does Nemesis worse than its predecessor.

It's not really worth recommending to people who liked Resident Evil 2, and it's not worth recommending to people who liked Resident Evil 4. It's a game that doesn't know what it should be, and some very obvious budget and time restrictions make this feel more like a bad piece of DLC rather than a standalone sequel to one of the best releases of the past decade.

I'll have to check out Resident Evil 3: Nemesis now, because I'm curious just how much was lost in remaking it.

A 3D bullet hell monster collector doesn’t sound like something that should work as well as it does.

I’ve been on a bit of an obscure indie game kick lately, primarily because they’re hitting a few intersections that bigger budget games aren’t for me; they tend to be short, they tend to be cheap, and I get a major kick out of unearthing titles that others haven’t seen or have otherwise looked over. It makes me feel like a real tastemaker. It’s immediately obvious that Hamelin’s Journey exists as the almost-platonic ideal of the exact kind of project I’m talking about when I say “obscure indie game”. This, in itself, is a bit of a shame, because it means that not enough people have played it. It’s also a boon to me, however, because I get to be the one who tells you to go play it.

The game itself is quite simple, requiring you to do little more than dodge incoming bullets while your collectible creatures automatically shoot back at the nearest target. You can’t aim, you can’t sprint, you can’t jump; you could play this on an Atari 2600 controller, given that all you’re really capable of is moving around and hitting the interact button to select menu options. When your means of engaging with a game are this simple, you’ve either managed to make something that’s woefully underbaked, or something that’s precisely as realized as it needs to be; this is unquestionably the latter.

A major factor in what makes this as enjoyable as it is comes down to how absolutely broken you can make some of your team compositions. I’m going to declare this as a universal, golden rule in the hopes that everyone in the industry adjusts their design documents accordingly: buffs must always stack, and never refresh. Having two of the same buff doubles the buff, as God intended. Having four of the same buff quadruples it. There’s one obscene strategy you can pull off that flies in the face of everything holy and decent by stacking a “double all outgoing and incoming damage” buff on top of itself four times. It rules. I don’t know if the multiplier is additive unto itself and thus gives you x8 damage, or if it’s multiplicative unto itself and gives you x16, but the only thing you really need to know is that you can pair it with crit boosts and fire rate ups to become the living, walking equivalent of an M134.

But while all of the mechanics are in place, there’s far too much redundancy present for them to shine the way that they ought to. Even in speedruns of the game that last for a little over ten minutes, about half of the runtime is dedicated to grinding basic enemies; leveling up is both exceedingly slow and exceedingly necessary, which grinds pacing to a halt like the game is throwing the emergency brake. Part of the appeal of monster collecting games over traditional RPGs — for me, at least — is the fact that fighting a strong opponent will give you a strong ally if you’re able to capture them. Mewtwo can beat your ass if you go at him with a weak team, but managing to capture him guarantees that you’ve got a WMD sitting in your pocket. Captured monsters in Hamelin’s Journey, however, lose all of their experience and drop down to Level 1 the second you get your hands on them. It’s one thing to grind away at a wall of muscle twenty levels above you in the hopes of getting a rare capture, and another to realize that you have to go through the same grind all over again if you want the powerful creature you got to be a fraction as powerful as it was when you were fighting it. I don’t see why these monsters need to reset to base stats when you get them. Keeping their power level high would certainly make a short game even shorter, but it would do so by cutting out meaningless, consequence-free grinding. That’s not the kind of gameplay worth preserving.

Hamelin’s Journey is fun, and a little creepy, and a very unique combination of gameplay elements that all mostly work in harmony together. There’s definitely still room for this to be a lot more than it is, but this is leagues ahead of the developer’s previous work. Not to make it sound like I’m shitting on them, or anything — it’s a good thing if your newest games make the old ones look amateurish by comparison. It’s always nice to see a creator improve on their craft, and Warkus and Xena-Spectrale might just have what it takes to make something truly phenomenal if they can stay the course.

I don’t know who comes up with the itch.io time estimates. This one advertised “two to four hours of gameplay” and barely clocked in over thirty minutes.