The most fascist game I've ever played, and not at all in the way the writers wanted it to be. Our brave heroes of the resistance shove starving beggar children to the ground, throw their own to the wolves for the unforgivable crime of being visibly Asian in a sea of gruffly-voiced white people, and drop white phosphorous bombs on their own men by complete accident. Oops. These are our protagonists and ostensible heroes of this plot. No wonder America lost the war in this universe; I'd have defected to the North Koreans too if joining up with these guys was the alternative.

During a month-long marathon of streaming bad games to my friends, Battlefield Hardline wormed its way out from a dark, dark, neglected corner of my memory. We'd all collectively forgotten about it, and when I mentioned that it was next up on the docket, everyone was giddy. We knew we were going to be in for a middling, designed-by-committee piece of copaganda garbage; a game about rough cops doing whatever it takes to get their man, tastefully developed and advertised at the same time as the murder of Eric Garner and the subsequent go-nowhere trial of the man who murdered him under the guise of justice. It was a terrible idea from the outset, and it was going to be hilarious. And it was.

Two-thirds of the way through the game, something changes.

The game goes off the rails. Retelling the plot doesn't do the sudden, massive swerve any justice; after going through milquetoast cop procedural cases where people are being extra-judicially executed by our brave heroes on the force, your character is framed, arrested, and shipped to prison for several years. One timeskip later, while being transported to another prison, a drug dealer you busted earlier pulls up to the side of the bus you're in and blows it up with a backpack full of C4. You immediately go rogue, gun your way through a Korean mafia car shop, get kidnapped by trailer park preppers and kill them in a tank showdown, and then storm a Scarface-tier mansion seated in the Miami swamps to kill your corrupt ex-captain. There's a part where you swing on a rope through a penthouse window, faced with several armed goons on police payroll, and order them to freeze before being dragged back out by the ankles to the streets below. You fight an alligator in a quick time event. After you put a bullet in the police captain's head, the player character opens his personal vault and is rewarded with a mountain of gold bars. I want a development documentary on this game more than any other, because I have no idea how or why it was decided to try to make all of these pieces fit together like this. It...works? Kind of? The first two-thirds is complete garbage, but the prison bus exploding is a marked shift towards the game actually being fun, and interesting, and reminding you that this game was made by Visceral, not DICE.

I have a pet theory that everyone at Visceral who worked on this hated it. I don't have any concrete proof to back it up, but there are more than a few circumstances that line up a bit too neatly to discredit it entirely. This was the last thing that Visceral was given to work on before they were shuttered by EA for "under-performing" in sales, infamously being instructed under threat of studio dissolution to sell more copies of Dead Space 3 on launch than the previous two games combined. Studio morale had to have been low in 2015 with EA dangling a sword over their heads. When a character in Battlefield Hardline throws a house party, some henchmen with Xbox controllers in the living room are playing Dead Space 2. The second Dead Space game was four years old at this point, and the third entry had just released. If this was meant to be promotional, why not the newest game? If it was mandated that an ad for a real game needed to be included by the publisher, why not something like FIFA 2016? Dead Space 2, as my theory goes, is the last game that Visceral as a whole was actually proud to have worked on. Stick with me, I've got more.

Pressing continue from the title screen leads into a recap of earlier story events, introduced with the line "Previously, on Hardline". Note the lack of "Battlefield". The game never once calls itself "Battlefield". It seems ashamed of the franchise. The dirty cop strongman garbage with the casually racist supporting cast (three racial jokes at the Cuban-American protagonist's expense in the first minute of gameplay!) gets completely dropped by the third act in favor of the ridiculous 80's B-movie action schlock that happens in the final third of story. The longer the game goes on, the further into development it goes, the closer to Visceral's dissolution it gets — it feels less and less like EA was breathing down their necks. It feels like the publisher gave up, knowing that the studio wouldn't exist a few months after release, and then decided they didn't care enough to monitor everyone who was about to be out of work. And Visceral went all-out with it! It's complete chaos! Why is any of this happening? Who gives a shit? It's so far beyond the garbage that came hours before that it feels like your head is breaching up from beneath dark, cold water and into open air. It's your final reminder of what Visceral was capable of pulling off, right before they got cannibalized by their publisher. It's the last thing they were allowed to make, and it sucks that their legacy gets tarnished by blatant studio meddling on their final two games before they were killed.

Battlefield Hardline is not a good game, but it becomes enough of an oddity to earn a recommendation. It's hardly deserving of scorn. It feels more pitiable than anything else. It's an impotent, flailing narrative with stock FPS gameplay that finds its footing just in time for it to end two hours later. I would have loved to play an independent Visceral's Hardline, before it could be shoved through the filter of DICE's Battlefield and EA's interference; ultimately, the game's narrative that we're left with can only mirror the studio's history and abrupt end. Visceral deserved a swan song. We all got Battlefield Hardline.

I feel really, really good when I walk away from a game and I realize I can't think of a single thing that I disliked about it. Not one! Everything here, from top to bottom, is a complete delight. There was once a time where the Capcom logo at the start of a game was an immediate sign of quality, and then a time after that where it was the sign that you were in for something middling, and the pendulum has now firmly swung back towards the side of quality. It's been so long since I've seen something execute both the building and the relief of tension this well. Resident Evil 2 rules.

Where to even start? The design of this game is masterfully crafted around player expectations, both presupposed and taught. Zombies that tank enough bullets will collapse motionless to the floor, and it's impossible to tell if they'll get back up again without you spending/wasting a resource for peace of mind. Corpses that litter the ground will sometimes sit there for hours as you walk past them over and over again, and then leap at your ankles the very second you break into a sprint. Safe rooms are havens where you're completely protected from the walking dead around you, but only mostly; some safe rooms can be invaded by zombies and made unsafe, and it's never clear if or when this will happen until the exact moment that it does. Every scare, every moment of suspense, and every little victory over the undead felt so completely earned. There were countless times that it felt like I could have been the one behind the controller for the E3 teaser footage; I'd solve a puzzle, run down a hallway into a horde, uselessly empty a magazine into them, sprint the other way, and slam my face into Mr. X's chest. Some of the scripted moments were a lot more obvious than others — previously absent monsters will literally spawn in from nowhere solely for the sake of a scare — but it never feels cheap in the moment. Through some theoretical lens of objectivity, it might literally be cheap, but it helps to build the sense of dread and the catharsis of the inevitable scare so well that I couldn't possibly care.

The sound design is some of the best I've ever heard in a game, especially in recent memory. There's something primally satisfying about hearing a bullet casing clatter across the floor in time with the booming of your pistol echoing through tiny, cramped hallways, ending in the disgusting, wet squelch of a zombie's head exploding in a shower of gore. Footsteps over the police department's wooden floors come with such soft, warm clunks and creaks that it's easy to forget you're playing a horror game until you hear something shambling in the adjacent room. Water trickles and sloshes in the sewers in a way that makes it sound as if something is rising out from the muck to grab you. There's a sterile, fluorescent buzz lingering over every room in the laboratory. When this ambience gets broken by the reports of guns or the shrieks of zombies, you feel it. Your enemies do, too. Managing sound is such an important factor of gameplay; being too noisy will attract more and more foes to your position in a vicious cycle until you smarten up, save your ammo, and stop sprinting through every room. You're punished hard for being careless, and it forces you to soak in the atmosphere of these areas. Nothing has satisfied me nearly as much as the soundscape of flicking the lights of a safe room on and hearing the theme music swell.

Gunplay is tense and heavy, and you're robbed of even having a reliable melee attack to fall back on now that knives are breakable. Loot is both sparse and too plentiful; long droughts without any new items will eventually be met with more than you can carry, and something is going to need to be left behind or used up. The set-piece puzzles are often incredibly simple to solve, but there's a stronger metapuzzle (and please forgive me for using the term "metapuzzle" unironically) in here of inventory management, ammo economy, and enemy placement that persists throughout the entire game. Your solutions of bullets and grenades and combat knives get rid of the problem of zombies in front of you, but you're so limited in these supplies that it requires that you weigh up which enemies you're willing to leave alive, and which need to die right now. Obviously, this is the basis for most every survival horror game, but the way that all of these pieces fit together here is immaculate.

The story is schlock, who cares. It's the worst part of the game and entirely inconsequential. I do like Leon's character a lot, though. There's something endearing about how hard this baby-faced dumbass preaches about being a just man and how a good cop ought to help innocent people, and then is left completely disillusioned when he sees how hard everyone in a position of power willingly ruined the lives of every civilian in Raccoon City. It's hard to keep his character in a bubble here, knowing that he later goes on to be the Biggest Baddest Secret Service Super Soldier Ever™, but he's unambiguously a sweetheart if you limit your scope to this game.

There's so much to love here, and so little to hate. Resident Evil 2 is an incredibly easy recommendation to make, and it proudly screams that Capcom is back at the top of their game. Let's hope they stay there for longer than they did last time.

It's like everything was taken apart and put back together by something that didn't understand how it worked.

What a trite observation it's become to look at a piece of horror and say it's a story about love.

Signalis is a story about love.

What's here is deceptively deep. Loss and grief is rot, unfinished business is cancer. Those who can let go melt away into sludge; those who cannot are mutated and made to betray themselves. These themes curl through every facet of the game as the tendrils of the flesh heaps dotting the darkened corridors. Enemies you face embody the concept of clinging on in spite of everything around them — nothing in this place stays dead unless it's burnt to ash. Every corrupted Replika has been twisted into an ironic monster: the empathic Kolibri see their synthetic brains bulging from their skulls, spiraling themselves and the units around them into negative feedback loops; the gentle Mynah morph from explicitly not-for-combat mining units into hulking, bleeding, laser-wielding tanks; the socialite Eule are damned as cannon fodder beneath the banner of a fascist army in life and in death. Nobody can escape the inevitable end of their lives, but death here offers no escape. They will die. They will get back up. You will die, and you will do the same. Nothing in this place stays dead.

I have an immense appreciation for how willing the game is to overload your senses. Never has a photo-sensitivity warning been more needed; mechanical pounding and shrieking and groaning litter the soundscape, sharp and harsh, piercing your ears and rumbling your skull. Text and images flash by faster than they can be processed, leaving you with nothing but fragments to be pieced together. Pulsating, ever-growing meat contrasts against sterile, blocky CRT monitors and security cameras. The low-fidelity visual aesthetic of the gameplay doesn't gel flawlessly with the anime-esque cutscenes, but it's unique, and that's enough for me. There's been a bit of a resurgence among indie developers (especially in the horror space) of flocking to low-poly "PS1" styles en masse, and I think it's a good trend. Eight full years of development on Signalis have led to what's probably going to be to the retro PlayStation style what Wind Waker or Jet Set Radio were to cel shading. This will be the one to beat.

Combat is pretty simple, and mostly easy to avoid entirely. I finished the game with dozens of healing sprays, thermite charges, and ammo boxes still overflowing from my item storage. The hard six-item limit definitely feels too restrictive, and a more lenient inventory cap would have allowed for a bit more freedom of experimentation and less backtracking. As stated above, the fact that nothing dies unless you burn it can make the act of backtracking tense, but it's also a bit too effortless to carve a guaranteed enemy-free path towards the safe room once you know where it actually is. The Replikas don't follow you between rooms, and it's incredibly easy to just panic sprint from one door to another past them; Replikas won't spawn into cleared-out areas, nor will they wander through them, and this leads to a lot of rooms feeling static. There's probably a reason for this. There are hallways later in the game that are so tight that you can't feasibly get through them without gunning down the Replikas in your way, so the fact that combat is so easily ignored in earlier areas has to be intended. It's not a bad choice, but it's odd. Still, this is the kind of game that's begging to be broken wide open and speedran.

The game's influences are the most obvious thing about it, and are conversely the least interesting to discuss. Yes, the music is like Silent Hill. Yes, it has Resident Evil inventory management. Yes, it kind of looks like Metal Gear Solid. Yes, there are shots from End of Evangelion in it. These things are evident, and they're boring to talk about, because Signalis stands shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand with the pieces that inspire it. Where the game starts to lose me is in how clunkily it tries to incorporate some of these outside parallels directly into the universe of Signalis: Creative Commons photos of Böcklin's Isle of the Dead flash across the screen at several points of the story. The flags and propaganda posters are all rooted in the aesthetics of the GDR down to the colors and emblem of the flag, and the Rotfrontkämpferbund provide the namesake of a both a planet and a playable zone. The King in Yellow pops up several times, with Elster stating that the book physically "calls to [her]". H.P. Lovecraft makes it into the credits, as does Ambrose Bierce. These incorporations are sloppy. For a game that seems to pride itself on being cryptic (with a moment at the halfway point that will probably result in a lot of prematurely-ended playthroughs), all of these inclusions feel as if they were appended into this world after the fact. They stick out at unnatural angles. The moments where the game lets our history seep into its own feel awkward and lacking in substance against a narrative that can be genuinely alien, challenging, and ambiguous.

For all of my griping, though, this game is an achievement on the part of the two core members of rose-engine. It's easy to weaponize that — "don't complain, it was only a two-person dev team, it's their first try at a major release" — but you don't need to do that to defend Signalis. It stands on its own without needing the excuse. I want more games like this. Not ones that play like Signalis, but ones that are made like it. I want more producers to dump enough funding into the laps of creatives that they can pour a decade of their lives into making something they care about without needing to worry about the money running out. I want more developers to take the risks they want to take and have the freedom to make unorthodox choices. These are entirely uncontroversial statements, but this is a game that I want to see succeed. I want lessons to be taken from this, because there's a lot to be learned from. Signalis is excellent and flawed, beautiful and grotesque, and it deserves whatever moments in the spotlight that it can get. I'm very glad to see it finding an audience.

Prodeus is what would have happened if Brutal Doom started development after Doom 2016 came out. If you can read that sentence and think "that sounds good", then you'll like it. If you, like me, think "oh no", then you're going to be in for the video game equivalent of a kid wearing their dad's clothes and pretending to be a grown-up. Prodeus has no identity of its own, because it wants more than anything to be Doom. It is not Doom.

Drawing parallels from one work to another is almost always the easiest way to discuss something new, and it's also lazy; it's rhetoric better suited for advertising than for critical analysis. With this in mind, it's impossible not to draw unfavorable comparisons to Doom. Enemies from Doom are lifted and placed directly into Prodeus down to their very silhouettes and attack patterns: Zombiemen are now called "Zombies", Imps are now called "Fiends", Pinkies are now called "Lungers", and Pain Elementals and Lost Souls are "Void Reapers" and "Skull Fish", respectively. They're virtually identical, with the exception that Prodeus's enemies are simultaneously less colorful, less memorable, and less easy to differentiate from one another at a glance. They're all some flavor of orange (or blue) and black, melting into both themselves and the boring backgrounds. It's nearly impossible to judge the game on its own merits, because it's mechanically just Doom but worse. The guns feel worse to use than Doom's. Your movement is more sluggish than Doom's. The levels are less interesting than Doom's. The enemies are never utilized in interesting combinations the way that they are in Doom. There's nothing here that isn't done better in either the original Doom or Doom 2016, leaving Prodeus in a murky, bland in-between. If Doom was hell, then Prodeus is limbo.

This might have the ugliest UI I've seen in a long time. There's a glowing helmet visor bordering the screen, framing the garish, neon-blue icons of health, and ammo, and a cut-out of the protagonist's face (because Doom did it, so we'll put it in). It's mitigated somewhat by the fact that you can turn these HUD elements completely off, but it leaves you lacking so much critical information that it all has to stay on. Tooltip pop-ups in what appear to be a default system font won't stop taking up an entire third of the screen with useless information; "You can rebind your weapons in the Options menu!" Thank you, Prodeus. "Kill the Slayer!" I was planning to, Prodeus. "EXIT!" Yes, that is where the end of the level is, Prodeus. All three of these messages show up back-to-back in the span of about two minutes in a single level. The game is absolutely terrified that if you get stuck for so much as a second that you won't love it anymore. It's like a dog with separation anxiety.

The greatest shock of the game still lies in the soundtrack. It's some of the most boring, plodding, repetitive electro-industrial music I've heard in any game. It aspires towards some sort of dynamic gameplay integration (because Doom did it, so we'll put it in), but it awkwardly fades between "brutal" synth-y riffs and ambient beeping, because the only thing it's keeping track of is how many enemies you're in an active fight with. I couldn't believe that this was Andrew Hulshult's work. It's so incredibly phoned-in and flavorless that I was convinced it was someone poorly imitating him; fitting, given how poor of an imitation Prodeus is.

Map design is an unquestionably strong point in Prodeus's favor. I've read that most of the level design work was dumped into the lap of a seasoned Doom WAD designer — at this point I have to imagine that you're getting tired of seeing the word "Doom" so much — and it shows. The maps are flawlessly put together. Everything loops back into itself neatly, providing clear paths back towards previously-locked keycard doors and towards the next monster room. What hurts them is the bland visual presentation. While Prodeus's graphics are technically impressive, with lots of very shiny lighting effects and dozens upon dozens of unique sprites for every possible angle you could look at them from, it's artistically boring. Everything is either some flavor of the most basic blue-orange color contrast you've ever seen or lifted wholesale from a Doom Eternal set piece. The game proudly boasts that everything here was made using the in-game level editor, but who cares? The Prodeus mapping scene is already on life support, and Doom WADs have been going strong for nearly thirty years. Who's going to bother learning how to map for a game like Prodeus when Doom II is free, comes with better documentation, offers stronger community support, and is ultimately just more fun to play?

Prodeus is painfully mediocre. It feels like a game invented to be played by an actor on a TV show. The four-hour long, piss-easy campaign takes a backseat to the wholly neglected level editor, leaving Prodeus feeling more like a tech demo than a finished game. After two entire years in early access, the state that it's in now is kind of sad. I can't bring myself to hate it, but it hasn't earned nearly enough pity for me to recommend it. Just play Doom.

On a cold Saturday night ten years ago, I bought the midnight e-shop release of Paper Mario: Sticker Star. This event would later come to be known as The First Betrayal.

I say without hesitation or exaggeration that everyone with a credit on this — including those who did no wrong of their own, such as the art and sound teams — should have been barred from ever working in the field of video games again. While this may sound harsh, this act would be one of kindness, not cruelty; these people do not deserve to feel the shame of knowing that their names are attached to an industry that allows something this unforgivably bad to ever be put on the market. The name "Alan Smithee" appears zero times in the credits, which marks one of several missed opportunities present in Sticker Star.

This game has the worst battle mechanics of any RPG to have ever been released. I will not provide modifiers to this statement to lessen the blow. Any RPG. There is no experience or leveling up, your party members are gone, your attacks are now limited-use consumables, and getting more of them requires finding them in the overworld or buying them from shops. Enemies do not drop enough coins to pay back the cost of the stickers it takes to defeat them, making the only viable strategy to avoid every single random encounter and run from every battle that you're able to. Some bosses, such as Big Cheep Cheep, are immune to all attacks. The only thing that can defeat them is if you find a Thing (proper noun) hidden somewhere in the world, pick it up, backtrack to a shop to convert it into a sticker, and then use the Thing Sticker (proper noun) to insta-kill the previously-invincible boss. To say that this is bad design is an understatement. This should not have been allowed to be released.

Sticker Star may have some of the thinnest writing ever released by a major publisher, and this includes early NES RPGs that only had a maximum of 512kb of data to work with. How in the hell did this game have twelve writers? Without irony, there is more of a plot present in the instruction manual of the original Super Mario Bros. than there is in the entirety of Sticker Star. Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario — sixteen and twelve years Sticker Star's senior, respectively — do not suffer this problem. It cannot be claimed that this was a technical limitation. Shigeru Miyamoto is on the record stating that "It's fine without a story, so do we really need one?", and barring Intelligent Systems from making new characters or developing in any way on old ones; his insistence that the Paper Mario franchise be brought to heel — stripped of its gameplay mechanics, writing, and character design — should stand as a monument to the man's inability to lead. Sticker Star is the statue of Ozymandias, swallowed and weathered by the sands. Look upon this work and despair.

I find it hard to type out everything that is wrong with Sticker Star, because everything is wrong with Sticker Star. There is nothing that it does right. It is a complete, abject failure of a game. In a just world, it would have been dragged out from the Nintendo Kyoto Research Center by its heels and shot. Miyamoto should have been quietly shuffled away to a small, distant corner of the company where he could placidly collect his salary and not damage any further reputations by involving himself. This is a game for nobody. I have tried with everything I have to come up with reasons why someone might like this, and I have nothing. It is not often that this happens. I'm usually able to come up with some sort of redeeming factor, but there is nothing here. Sticker Star is a black hole from which no fun can escape. It's sad. It's just sad. May no meddling manager ever do to another game what Shigeru Miyamoto did to this.

One of many moments of out-and-out racism from the writer's room that I haven't seen mentioned much is the fact that the Fraternal Order of the Raven, a cult/KKK expy, are of the belief that Comstock has First Nations blood. They attempt to prove this in a slideshow by claiming that the shape of Comstock's skull proves that he could not possibly be a white man. Booker Dewitt has First Nations blood; Booker is Comstock. The Fraternal Order of the Raven are thus proven to be correct in their accusation.

Bioshock Infinite legitimizes phrenology.

Mind Control Delete is a bloated mess, and it's my fault for asking for more.

The original SUPERHOT was a unique and innovative shooter, as much as the writing desperately tried to turn you off from saying that out loud. It was a game that encouraged a lot of fun, stylish gun and swordplay; fire a magazine into someone until it clicks, lob the empty pistol at another guy's head, pull a katana off the wall to slice up an incoming bullet, and watch another foe's face explode into shards of red polygonal glass as they get hit by friendly fire. It was incredible, dumb action. The narrative of "wow video game addiction sure is a problem, huh" was so incongruous with the actual gameplay that it was impossible to take seriously. It's like if Arnold turned to camera during the final scene of Commando to ask the kids at home what they thought of American foreign policy.

Mind Control Delete looks at everything that SUPERHOT did right (the gameplay) and what it did wrong (the writing) and then decides to amplify the bad and dampen the good. There are maybe ten levels that constantly get reused over and over thanks to the new rogue-lite gameplay loop, forcing you through dozens of same-y combat encounters before stating that you finished the node and unceremoniously kicking you back to the level select. There's no sense of climax or payoff for endlessly going through these motions; your reward for beating fifteen boring fights with multiple level repeats is another fifteen boring fights with multiple level repeats. Once you've played ten minutes of Mind Control Delete, you've played the remaining seven or eight hours. The scant few characters you can unlock are just fragmented versions of the player character from the original SUPERHOT, with all of the abilities that you had in that game being split up amongst them. What you're left with are fewer tools to engage with the same combat on more repetitive maps with less intent behind their designs.

This is to say nothing of the writing, which is embarrassing. I hate, hate, hate using the word "pretentious" to describe a piece of media, because a work is a static, unfeeling thing. The game is not pretentious, because it cannot be. This does not stop it from trying. Asking your players to sit through an eight-hour long "recovering data" sequence before they're allowed to play the game again is silly. Backing down and compromising by shortening the length to two hours betrays all remaining artistic integrity. It screams of a creator who desires nothing more than praise, even if it means taking back whatever statement they tried to make; if all it takes for you to renege on something so blatantly intended to be a waste of player time are complaints on the Steam forums, then you shouldn't have even bothered including it in the first place. Have the spine to inconvenience your players, or don't try to inconvenience them. Flip-flopping between the two in the pursuit of some ethereal, happy middle ground is — and I don't state this lightly — pathetic.

The bones of SUPERHOT are still here, but Mind Control Delete is just a worse version of a game that already came out. Worse gameplay, worse writing, same price. Don't bother.

"Despair that comes after a moment of happiness is far more agonizing than despair alone."

The above quote is the sentiment that all of Fata Morgana is wrapped around. It is adhered to. It is challenged. It is subverted, deconstructed, and put back together again. Characters in the narrative will stab one another in the back if it means alleviating their despair; others will cast it off by finding truly, truly undying love. Some are redeemed, and some never find penance. Some wounds heal, and others remain eternally fresh. Yet through all of this, every thread returns to that same original root of despair, and how much harsher the sting when joy is stolen away.

Fata Morgana is one of the strongest pieces of queer fiction I have ever read. I've often said of stories such as Disco Elysium that many aspects within them are too personal, too raw for the author to have never struggled with themselves; Disco Elysium's many threads of substance abuse have retroactively been shown to stem from Robert Kurvitz's own alcoholism in a way that was open and pathetic, reflecting the struggles of many suffering (ex)alcoholics such as myself. I have no way of knowing if something similar is true of Hanada Keika, the writer of Fata Morgana — and it would be beyond gauche for me to make assumptions — but the struggles here are real. They are bitter and blistered, and in the same breath, beautiful.

What I do know of Hanada Keika, however, comes from a blog post he had written in July of 2021. In it, he both celebrated and lamented on the fact that the Nintendo Switch release of Fata Morgana had earned a 100 on Metacritic, drawing attention both negative and positive to the game. On the reception of the game, he wrote:

"I don't want to argue about whether visual novels are games or not, but I think there may be a point to be made. I think visual novels are a wonderful medium of expression, and I don't think we should look down on them just because they are visual novels, but it is true that there are fewer places to judge them as criticism than other games.

Fata Morgana has been highly praised as a doujin game in Japan, but it's not a successful market, and it's a game that only people in-the-know know of. The subject matter is very heavy, and it's not an erotic game, otome game, or gal game. It's a strange visual novel."

This societal and industrial adherence to genre, to being easily defined, to being able to be pitched and sold — had nearly caused me to miss out on this, for no more reason than my belief that "I don't really play visual novels". It's silly, in a way, that that's all it took for me to write off an entire segment of a medium; just my willingness to keep going as I've been without branching out. I was comfortable, and it was wrong. It's been too long since a piece of media has challenged my expectations not just of the art form in which it was released, but of my own understanding of myself. How often can that be said of anything?

Ultimately, there remains only one thing on which I can disagree with Hanada Keika: The House in Fata Morgana deserved to have that 100.